INTRODUCTION
Marx and Engels, the creators of a new theory of history, were active participants in the making of history. Marx was blacklisted from university employment and tangled with Prussian censorship as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843. In 1847 Marx and Engels joined the Communist League and wrote its famous Communist Manifesto. From June 1848 to May 1849, during the German revolution of those years, Marx was editor of, and Engels a leading contributor to, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a daily journal. From 1864 to 1872 they were the leading spirits of the International Working Men's Association (the First International). In later years, by correspondence and personal contact, they unceasingly counseled hundreds of labor and revolutionary leaders from all over Europe and America.
While participating in the making of history, Marx and Engels wrote copiously about the current events of their time. Part of this writing took the form of correspondence - to each other and to friends. Part of it was in speeches, pamphlets, and even books. But a very considerable part was in the form of journalism. During the 1850s Marx was forced to accept such employment in order to enable his family to live while he was working on Capital in the British Museum. From August 1851 to March 1862 he wrote regularly for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune at the behest of its managing editor, Charles A. Dana. By the eve of the American Civil War the Tribune had attained unrivaled national influence. Because of Marx's limitations in English, Engels at first wrote the articles (after a briefing) and Marx signed them. later Marx wrote most of them himself, with Engels doing the articles on military affairs. The materials in the articles ranged widely - China, India, Russia, the Crimean War, revolutionary events in Spain, political problems in Germany, France, England, Poland, Italy. The revolutionary struggles and national liberation movements of Europe and Asia received detailed analysis, as did the economic crisis of 1857. The analytical comments on the American Civil War in the Tribune and elsewhere are particularly pertinent, showing the profound and detailed grasp Marx had of American history and politics.
Frequently the articles of Marx (and Engels) in the Tribune were printed without Marx's signature - sometimes in the form of editorials. Naturally, their accounts of contemporary events - buried as they often were in anonymity - enhanced the prestige of the Times, but as to the authors themselves, it appears that very few knew that they were the same men who had written the Communist Manifesto.
Although the Tribune pieces form only a fraction of Marx and Engels' writings on contemporary history, they typify the whole. Many of them are not only penetrating expositions of historical events, but examples of journalist writing at it's best. A recent writer [Charles Blitzer] has said of them: "If a preoccupation with the sociological and economic background of politics and a determination to uncover the real motives that lie behind the words of politicians and governments are the hallmarks of modern political journalism, Karl Marx may properly be said to be it's father."
Perhaps the finest example of Marx's "political journalism" is the series of three works he wrote on France - The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (the July Revolution of 1848 and it s aftermath), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (the coup d'etat of 1851), and The Civil War in France (the Paris Commune of 1871). Writing in the white heat of contemporaneity, Marx cut through the slogans, the demagoguery, the confusions of parties and personalities, and revealed the underlying currents of French politics.
In dealing with the events of 1848 Marx analyzed the complex pattern of class forces in the first bourgeois-democratic revolution in which the working class appears as an independent force. He showed why the bourgeoisie was led to betray its own revolution, why the petty bourgeoisie supported the big bourgeoisie, and why at this stage it was impossible for the French working class to exercise decisive leadership. Marx thus gave the world an object lesson in explaining contemporary history in terms of classes, class forces and class issues.
The Eighteenth Brumaire continues the analysis through the tragical-farcical events of the Bonapartist seizure of power in 1851. Here we see how Louis Napoleon rose to power through the cynical manipulation of the landholding peasants, whose support enabled the wily charlatan to hold conflicting class forces in momentary equilibrium and carry through his coup. But Marx showed that Louis Bonaparte, in trying to play one class off against another, would end up by having them all turn against him (as indeed they did). Edmund Wilson comments on this analysis:
"Never, after we have read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, can the language, the conventions, the combinations, the pretensions, of parliamentary bodies, if we have had any illusion about them, seem the same to us again... Nowhere perhaps in the history of thought is the reader so made to feel the excitement of a new intellectual discovery. Marx is here at his most vivid and most vigorous - in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation; in the energy of the faculty that that combines, articulating at the same time that it compresses; in the wit and the metaphorical phantasmagoria that transfigure the prosaic phenomena of politics, and in the pulse of the tragic invective - we have heard its echo in Bernard Shaw - which can turn the collapse of an incompetent parliament, divided between contradictory tendencies, into the downfall of a damned soul of Shakespeare." (1)
The Civil War in France deals with the period after the fall of Louis Bonaparte and the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. It explains the class forces that led to the seizure of power by the Paris Commune, and the class nature of that power. While giving full support to the heroic and embattled Communards, Marx was acutely conscious of the narrow base on which their power rested and the deficiencies of their program. After the Commune fell, he wrote a masterly analysis of this first episode of working class seizure of power, using the experience of the Commune to formulate a new and revolutionary theory of the state.
The journalistic and historical writings of Marx and Engels exemplify historical materialism at work. Principles that may at first seem abstract are made vividly concrete when they are used to explain current events. They are not abstractions derived a priori from Hegel or some other philosopher. Rather, historical materialism emerges out of the interaction of broad philosophical ideas and concrete realities - in particular, the turbulent class struggles of the mid-19th century. Thus while the general theoretical statements on historical materialism provide the skeleton, these exercises in contemporary political analysis clothe the skeleton with flesh and sinew.
History lives in these pages. One follows Sherman on his march through Georgia; one lives in barns and gets drunk with the Irish immigrants in England; one sits in Parliament while Sepoys mutiny. It is a kaleidoscope that should forever lay to rest the notion that Marxism reduces to economics or anything else. It does not reduce it at all: it raises it to new and higher levels - to those of men in action ; of individuals, classes, nations, races. All are in motion, seeking the most varied goals and using the most varied means. In the center of the stage are the masses, the working people, who more than anyone else make history - and who more than anyone else are neglected by historians. One thing is clear throughout - these actors in the pageant of history are not puppets; neither are they exercising "free will," independent of the historical conditions of their lives. Nor are the end results of their struggles predetermined. These are the people we know and see around us, whether they be ghetto-dwellers, artists and intellectuals, or cabinet officers. Historical materialism is revealed as an art as well as a scientific approach to history. Were all the works of Marx and Engles except those on contemporary events forever lost, one could reconstruct the major framework of the materialist conception of history from these writings on history in the making.
Every term in the whole Marxist vocabulary is here. But the words now carry nuances they could not have had if the form were purely expository. There could be a sign for this historical writing, reading "Men Thinking." It would warn us that this is not finished history and that the principles employed are fluid, not fixed. Marx and Engels are certain of one thing: so long as there is class society, all political upheavals, social controversies, riots or rebellions, are in the last analysis expressions of class conflicts. But they are equally certain that the path of class struggle is no simple one-way street: rather it is a complex of crossroads in which, from time to time, things start moving in opposite directions. Anyone reading these passages will see how foolish is the charge that Marxism is a narrow, rigid, mechanical "economic determinist" theory of history. On the contrary, it recognizes, illuminates and clarifies the complexities of historical movement.
Much otherwise valuable material has had to be eliminated from this section simply because the events and names referred to are today known only to specialists. The notes necessary to explain the references would take up more space than the original texts themselves.
In the historical writings of Marx and Engels are to be found many of the sources of Lenin's thinking on the tactics and strategy of the revolutionary movement. Theoretical ideas associated with Lenin - such as the alliance between the working class and the peasantry, the growing over of the bourgeois-democratic into the socialist revolution, the working class state as the dictatorship of the proletariat, and others - are indicated, at least in germinal form, in the 19th century analyses of Marx and Engels.
Lenin, like Marx and Engels, was a penetrating analyst of contemporary events. Living as he did in the period of great upheavals in the imperialist world, playing a leading role in the international socialist movement, and participating in the unsuccessful Russian revolution of 1905 as well as the successful one of October 1917, he had occasion to write about some of the most epoch-making events of modern history. His comments and analyses, in the form of reports, speeches, articles and books, represent a rich and original extension of living historical materialism. From the voluminous body of this material we present a few typical passages on the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
[1]
FRANCE: 1848-1851
Thanks to the economic and political development of France since 1789, for 50 years the position in Paris has been such that no revolution could break out there without assuming a proletarian character, that is to say, without the proletariat, which had brought victory with its blood, advancing its own demands after victory. These demands were more or less unclear and even confused, corresponding to the state of evolution reached by the workers of Paris at the particular period, but in the last resort they all amounted to the abolition of the class antagonism between capitalists and workers. It is true that no one knew how this was to be brought about. But the demand itself, however indefinite it still was in its formulation, contained a threat to the existing order of society; the workers who put it forward were still armed; therefore the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois at the helm of the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers.
This happened for the first time in 1848. The liberal bourgeoisie of the parliamentary opposition held banquets for securing reform of the franchise, which was to ensure supremacy for their party. Forced more and more, in their struggle with the government, to appeal to the people, they had to allow the radical and republican strata of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie gradually to take the lead. But behind these stood the revolutionary workers, and since 1830 these had acquired far more political independence than the bourgeoisie, and even the republicans, suspected. At the moment of the crisis between the government and the opposition, the workers opened battle on the streets; Louis Philippe vanished, and with him the franchise reform; and in its place arose the republic, and indeed one which the victorious workers themselves designated as a "social" republic. No one, however, was clear as to what this social republic was to imply; not even the workers themselves. But they now had arms in their hands, and were a power in the state. Therefore, as soon as the bourgeois republicans in control felt something like firm ground under their feet, their first aim was to disarm the workers. This took place by driving them into the insurrection of June 1848 by direct breach of faith, by open defiance and the attempt to banish the unemployed to a distant province. The government had taken care to have an overwhelming superiority of force. After five days' heroic struggle, the workers were defeated. And then followed a blood-bath of the defenseless prisoners, the like of which has not been seen since the days of the civil war which ushered in the downfall of the Roman republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie showed to what insane cruelties of revenge they will be goaded the moment the proletariat dares to takes its stand against them as a separate class, with its own interests and demands. And yet 1848 was only child's play compared with their frenzy in 1871.
Punishment followed hard at heel. If the proletariat was not yet able to rule France, the bourgeoisie could no longer do so. At least not at that period, when the greater part of it was still monarchically inclined, and it was divided into three dynastic parties and a fourth republican party. Its internal dissensions allowed the adventure Louis Bonaparte to take possession of all commanding points - army, police, administrative machinery - and, on December 2, 1851, to explode the last stronghold of the bourgeoisie, the National Assembly. The Second Empire opened the exploitation of France by a gang of political and financial adventurers, but at the same time also an industrial development such as had never been possible under the narrow-minded and timorous system of Louis Philippe, with its exclusive domination by only a small section of the big bourgeoisie. Louis Bonaparte took the political power from the capitalists under the pretext of protecting them, the bourgeoisie, from the workers, and on the other hand the workers from them; but in return his rule encouraged speculation and industrial activity - in a word the rise and enrichment of the whole bourgeoisie to an extent hitherto unknown. To an even greater extent, it is true, corruption and mass robbery developed, clustering around the imperial court, and drawing their heavy percentages from this enrichment.
- ENGELS, "Introduction," Marx's The Civil War in France (1891)
The Parisian workers have been overwhelmed by superior force; they have not been subjugated. They have been defeated but their opponents have been conquered. The temporary triumph of brutal force was bought at a price - the destruction of all illusions and imaginings of the February Revolution; the dissolution of the entire old republican party, the cleavage of the French nation into two nations, the nation of the possessors and the nation of the workers. The tricolor republic no carries one more color, the color of the defeated, the color of blood. It has become the red republic.
No republican notable - either from the National or from the Reforme - on the side of the people! Without any leaders, without any means of struggle other than the uprising itself, the people resisted the united bourgeoisie and its soldiery longer than any French dynasty disposing of a vast military apparatus had been able to resist a section of the bourgeoisie united with the people. But to do away with their last illusion, to break completely with the past, the people had to see the accustomed poetic trimmings of the French revolt, the enthusiastic bourgeois youth, the students at the ècole polytechnique, the three-cornered hats (dreikrampige Hüte) ranged on the side of the oppressors. They had to see the students at the medical faculties refuse the help of science to the wounded plebeians.
Science does not exist for the plebeians who committed the unspeakable, the immense crime of having thrown themselves into battle for their own existence instead of for that of Louis Philippe or M. Marrast.
The last official residue of the February revolution, the executive commission, faded away like a misty apparition, through the seriousness of the events. Lamartine's fireballs were transformed into Cavaignac's fire rockets. (2)
The fraternité, the brotherhood of the opposed classes, one of which exploits the other, this fraternité, proclaimed in February, and written in capital letters on the forehead of Paris, on every prison, on all barracks, has its true, unadulterated, prosaic expression - civil war, civil war in its most frightful aspect, the war of labor and capital. This brotherliness flamed in all the windows of Paris on the evening of June 25 when the Paris of the bourgeoisie was illuminated while the Paris of the proletariat was burning, running with blood, groaning.
The brotherliness lasted only so long as the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with the interests of the proletariat. Pedants of the old revolutionary tradition of 1793; socialist system-makers who begged the bourgeoisie for alms for the people and were allowed to deliver long speeches and to compromise themselves as long as the proletarian lion had to lulled to sleep; Republicans who demanded the entire old bourgeois regime Republicans who demanded the entire old bourgeoisie regime without the crowned head; dynastic oppositionists for whom chance had substituted the fall for a dynasty for a ministerial shift; Legitimists who did no discard their liver but merely wanted to change its cut - these were the allies with whom the people had made their February. What the people instinctively hated in Louis Philippe was not Louis Philippe, but the crowned rule of a class, Capital on the throne. but the people - as always, magnanimous - thought they had destroyed their enemy by destroying the enemy of their enemy, that is the common enemy.
The February Revolution was the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because the oppositions which were hurled against the kingdom were undeveloped, slumbering peaceably side by side, because the social struggle which constituted its background had only won a airy existence, the existence of the Phrase, of the Word. The June Revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution because in the Phrase, the Fact has stepped in, because the Republic uncovered the head of the monster as it struck off its protecting and concealing crown.
Order! was the battle cry of Guizot. Order! cried Sebastiani, the Guizotine, as Warsaw became Russian. Order! cries Cavaignac, the brutal echo of the French National Assembly and the republican bourgeoisie.
Order! thundered his grapeshot as it tore through the body of the proletariat.
None of the countless revolutions of the French bourgeoisie since 1789 was an attack on Order; all of them left intact the rule of the class, the slavery of the workers, the bourgeois order however often the political form of this rule and of this slavery may have changed. but June had attacked this order. Woe then to June!
Under the provisional government it was proper, indeed it was necessary to preach to the generous-hearted workers in thousands of official posters that they should be ready to place three months of misery at the disposal of the Republic; it was politics and at the same time romantic enthusiasm to preach to the workers that the February Revolution was carried out into their own interest and that the overriding issue in the February Revolution was the interests of the workers. but with the opening of the National Assembly one became prosaic. The issue now became only this, in the worlds of Minister Trélat, to reduce labor to its previous conditions. That is, the workers had fought in February in order to be plunged into an industrial crisis.
The business of the National Assembly consists in this, to make of February an unhappening, at least for the workers, and to plunge them back into the old relationships. But even this did not take place, for an assembly no more than asking has the power to proclaim to a crisis of universal character: So far and no farther ! The National Assembly, in its brutal zeal to do away once and for all with the vexations February modes of speech, did not even resort to the measures that were possible on the basis of the old relationships. The Parisian worker of 18 to 25 were either drafted into the army or were fired; the foreign workers were banished from Paris to the marsh Sologne region without even getting the money that their passports entitled them to the more mature Parisians were provisionally given relief in workshops organized on military lines, under the condition that they cease to be Republicans. Did your riff-raff make the February Revolution for you or
Nevertheless, as a people's representative declared on June 25, a stupor has seized hold of the entire National Assembly. It is bewildered as both question and answer are drowned in blood on the pavement of Paris. Some representatives are bewildered because their illusion have gone up in the smoke of powder, others because they cannot comprehend how the people can dare to represent their most specific interests in an independent way. Russian gold, English gold, the Bonaparte eagle, the fleur de lis - amulets of all kinds were used to reconcile their thinking with this peculiar event. Both sides in the Assembly however feel that an immeasurable gulf separates them from the people. No one dares raise his voice for the people.
As soon as the stupor ceases, rage breaks out. And the majority is right in hissing down those miserable utopians and hypocrites who commit the anachronism of still mouthing the phrase, fraternitié, brotherliness. Now must one get rid of this phrase and of the illusions that ambiguously lie in its bosom. As Laroche-jaquelin, the Legitimist, the knightly enthusiast, declaimed passionately against the infamy with which one called out "Vae victis!" Woe to the conquered! the majority of the assembly feel into a St. Vitus dance as if they had been pricked by a tarantula. They cried "Woe" over the workers in order to hide the fact that the "conquered" were none others than themselves. Either they had to go down to defeat, or the Republic. And thus they howled convulsively, Long live the Republic!
Should the deep abyss that has opened before us confuse the democrats, should it make us believe that the struggles for a state form are without content, illusory, nothing?
Only weak, cowardly minds can put the question thus. The collisions that spring out of the conditions of bourgeois society itself must be fought out; they cannot be fantasied out of existence. The best state form is one in which the social oppositions are not wiped away violently, that is, only artificially, only seemingly held in check. The best state form is one in which the opposing forces can do battle freely and thus arrive at solutions.
One may as us, do we have no tears, no sigh, no word for the victims who fell before the rage of the people, for the National Guard, the Mobile Guard, the Republican Guard?
The state will take care of its widows and orphans; decrees will honor them, ceremonial funeral processions will lay their remains in the earth; the official press will hail them as immortal; European reaction from east to west will praise them.
But the plebeians, lacerated by hunger, insulted by the press, left in the lurch by the doctors, labeled by "honest society" as thieves, arsonists, galley slaves; their wives and children hurled into boundless misery; their best survivors deported overseas - to place a laurel crown on their menacing dark forehead is the privilege, the right of the democratic press.
- MARX, "The June Revolution", Neue Rheinishe Zeitung (1848)
C. THE WORKING CLASS AND THE UPRISING OF 1848
The workers were left no choice: they had to starve or start to fight. They answered on June 22, with the tremendous insurrection in which the first great battle was joined between the two classes that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order. The veil that shrouded the republic was torn to pieces.
It is well known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and talent, without chiefs, without a common plan, without means and, for the most part, lacking weapons, held in check for five days the army, the Mobile Guard, the Parisian National Guard, and the National Guard that streamed in from the provinces. It is well known how the bourgeoisie compensated itself for the mortal anguish it underwent by unheard-of brutality, and massacred over 3000 prisoners.
The official representatives of French democracy were steeped in republican ideology to such an extent that it was only some weeks later that they began to have an inkling of the meaning of the June fight. They were stupefied by the gunpowder smoke in which their fantastic republic dissolved...
The Paris proletariat was forced into the June insurrection by the bourgeoisie. In this lay its doom. Neither its immediate, admitted needs drove it to want to win the forcible overthrow of the bourgeoisie, nor was it equal to this task. The Moniteur had to inform it officially that the tie was past when the republic saw any occasion to do honor to its illusions, and its defeat first convinced it of the truth that the slightest improvement in its position remains a utopia within the bourgeoisie republic, a utopia that becomes a crime as soon as it wants to realize it. in place of its demands, exuberant in form, but petty and even still bourgeois in content, the concession of which it wanted to wring from the February republic, there appeared the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle; Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!
By making its burial place the birthplace of the bourgeois republic the proletariat compelled the latter to come out forthwith in its pure form as the state whose admitted object is to perpetuate the rule of capital, the slavery of labor. With constant regard to the scared, irreconcilable, unconquerable enemy - unconquerable because its existence is the condition of its own life - bourgeois rule, freed from all fetters, was bound to turn immediately into bourgeois terrorism. With the proletariat removed for the time being from the stage and bourgeois dictatorship recognized officially, the middle sections, in the mass, had more and more to side with the proletariat as their positions became more unbearable and their antagonism to the bourgeoisie became more acute. Just as earlier in its upsurge, so now they had to find in its defeat the cause of their misery.
- MARX, The Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850 (1850)
D. PHASES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: 1848-1851
Let us recapitulate in general outline the phases that the French Revolution went through from February 24, 1848, to December 1851.
Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; May 4, 1848 to May 28, 1849: the period of the constitution of the republic, or of the Constituent National Assembly; May 28, 1849 to December 2, 1851; the period of the constitutional republic or of the Legislative National Assembly.
The first period, from February 24th, or the overthrow of Louis Phillipe, to May 4th, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, the February period proper, may be describe as the prologue to the revolution. Its character was officially expressed in the fact that the government improvised by it itself declared that it was provisional and, like the government, everything that was mooted, attempted or enunciated during that period proclaimed itself to be only provisional. Nothing and nobody ventured to lay claim to the right of existence and of real action. All the elements that had prepared or determined the revolution, the dynastic opposition, the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie and the social-democratic workers, provisionally found their place in the February government.
It could not be otherwise. The February days originally intended an electoral reform, by which the circle of the politically privileged among the possessing class itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the aristocracy of finance overthrown. When it came to the actual conflict, however, when the people mounted the barricades, the National Guard maintained a passive attitude, the army offered no serious resistance and the monarchy ran away, the republic appeared to be a matter of course. Every party construed it in its own way. Having secured its arms in hand, the proletariat impressed its stamp upon it and and proclaimed it to be a social republic. There was thus indicate the general content of the modern revolution, a content which was in most singular contradiction to every thing that, with the material available, with the degree of education attained by the masses, under the given circumstances and relations, could be immediately realized in practice. On the other hand , the claims of all the remaining elements that had collaborated in the February Revolution were recognize by the lion's share that they obtained in the government. In no period do we, therefore, find a more confused mixture of high-flown phrases and actual uncertainty and clumsiness, of more enthusiastic striving for innovation and more deeply rooted domination of the old routine, of more apparent harmony of the whole for society and more profound estrangement of its elements. While the Paris proletariat still revelled in the vision of the wide prospects that opened before it and indulged in seriously meant discussions on social problems, the old power of society had grouped themselves, assembled, reflected and found unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at once stormed on to the political stage, after the barriers of the July monarch had fallen.
The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May 1849, is the period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic. Directly after the February days not only had the dynastic opposition been surprised by the republicans and the republicans by the Socialists, but all France by Paris. The National Assembly, which met on May 4, 1848, had emerged from the national elections and represented the nation. It was a living protest against the pretensions of the February days and was to reduce the results of the revolution to the bourgeois scale. In vain the Paris proletariat, which immediately grasped the character of this National Assembly, attempted on May 15 a few days after it met, forcibly to negate its existence, to dissolve it, to disintegrate again into its constituent parts the organic form in which the proletariat was threatened by the reacting spirit of the nation. As is known, May 15 had no other result save that of removing Blanqui and his comrades, that is, the real leaders of the proletarian party, from the public stage for the entire duration of the cycle we are considering.
The bourgeois monarch of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic, that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule on behalf of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June Insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, the army, the lumpenproletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than 3,000 insurgents were butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were transported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat passes into the background of the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata situated above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victims to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers' associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter's own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society's back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck. It seems to be unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the connections newly entered into, until all classes with which it contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it. But at least it succumbs with the honors of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they require barefaced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more ignominious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletarian party.
The defeat of the June insurgents, to be sure, had now prepared, had levelled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built up, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of "republic or monarchy." It had revealed that here bourgeois republic signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life, as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world.
During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of Anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had "saved" society from "the enemies of society." The had given out the watchwords of the old society, "property,family, religion, order," to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: "In this sign thou shalt conquer!" From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which had gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: "Property, family, religion, order. " Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an "attempt on society" and stigmatized as "socialism." And, finally, the high priests of "the religion of order" themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement - in the name of property, of the family, of religion and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski (3) installs himself in the Tuileries as the "saviour of society".
- MARX, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
E. THE FRENCH PEASANT AND THE WINE TAX
The French peasant, when he paints the devil on the wall, paints him in the guise of the tax collector. From the moment when Montalembert elevated taxation to a god, the peasant became godless, atheist, and threw himself into the arms of the devil, socialism. The religion of order had lost him; the Jesuits had lost him; Bonaparte had lost him. December 20, 1849, had irrevocably compromised December 20, 1848. The "nephew of his uncle" was not the first of his family whom the wine tax defeated, this tax which, in the expression of Montalembert, heralds the revolutionary storm. The real, the great Napoleon declared at St. Helena that the reintroduction of the wine tax had contributed more to his downfall than all else, since it had alienated from him the peasants of southern France. Already the favorite object of the people's hate under Louis XIV, abolished by the first revolution, it was reintroduced by Napoleon in a modified form in 1808. When the restoration entered France, there trotted before it not only the Cossacks, but also the promises to abolish the wine tax. The gentilhommerie [nobility] naturally did not need to keep its word to the gens taillable à merci et misèricorde [people deprived of rights]. The year 1830 promised the abolition of the wine tax. It was not its way to do what it said or say what it did. 1848 promised the abolition of the wine tax as it promised everything. Finally, the Constituent Assembly, which promised nothing, made, as mentioned, a testamentary provision whereby the wine tax was to disappear on January 1 , 1850. And just ten days before January 1, 1850, the Legislative Assembly introduced it once more, so that the French people perpetually pursued it and when it had thrown it out the door, saw it come in again through the window.
The popular hatred of the wine tax is explained by the fact that it unites in itself all the hatefulness of the French system of taxation. The mode of its collection is hateful, the mode of its distribution aristocratic, for the rates of taxation are the same for the most common as for the costliest wines; it increases therefore, in geometrical progression as the wealth of the consumers decreases, an inverted progressive tax. It is accordingly a direct provocation to the poisoning of the working classes as a premium on adulterated and spurious wines. It lessens consumption, since it sets up octrois [customs offices] before the gates of all towns of over 4,000 inhabitants and transforms each town into a foreign country with protective duties against French wine. The big wine merchants, but still more the small ones, the marchands de vins, the keepers of wine shops, whose living directly depends on the consumption of wine, are so many declared enemies of the wine tax. And finally by lessening the consumption the wine tax cuts away the market from production. While it renders the urban workers incapable of paying for wines, it renders the wine growers incapable of selling it. And France has a wine-growing population of about 12 million. One can therefore, understand the hate of the people in general, one can, in particular, understand the fanaticism of the peasants against the wine tax. And, in addition, they saw in its restoration no isolated, more or less accidental event. The peasants have a kind of historical tradition of their own, which is handed down from father to son, and in this historical school it is muttered that every government, as long as it wants to dupe the peasants, promises the abolition of the wine tax, and as soon as it has duped the peasants, retains or reintroduces the wine tax. In the wine tax the peasant tests the bouquet of the government, its tendency. The restoration of the wine tax on December 20 meant: Louis Bonaparte is like the others; but he was not like the others; he was a peasant discovery, and in the petitions carrying millions of signatures against the wine tax they took back the votes that they had given a year before to the "nephew of his uncle."
- MARX, The Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850 (1850)
F. LOUIS NAPOLEON AND THE PEASANTRY
The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is increased by France's bad means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, admits of no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a department. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local inter-connection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.
Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them. And an individual turned up who gives himself out as the man because he bears the name of Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon which lays down that la recherche de la paternité est interdite [inquiry into paternity is forbidden]. After a vagabondage of 20 years and after a series of grotesque adventures, the legend finds fulfillment and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the Nephew was realized, because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.
But, it may be objected, what about the peasant risings in half of France, the raids on the peasants by the army, the mass incarceration and transportation of peasants?
Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of the peasants "on account of demagogic practices."
But let there be no misunderstanding. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate this holding, not the country folk who, linked up with the towns, want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost or the empire. It represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment, but his prejudice; not his future, but his past...
- MARX, The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852)
G. LANDED PROPERTY AND IDEOLOGY
Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with it priests and lackeys; under the Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds or property, it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While Orleanists and Legitimists, while each faction sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to their two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the uniting of the two royal houses. And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves, from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split- landed property and capital -sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.
- MARX, The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852)
[2]
FRANCE: 1870-1871 - THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE PARIS COMMUNE
A. THE PARIS REVOLUTION OF SEPTEMBER 4, 1870
The Second Empire was the appeal to French chauvinism, the demand for the restoration of the frontiers of the First Empire, which had been lost in 1814, or at least those of the First Republic. A French empire within the frontiers of the old monarchy and, in fact, within the even more amputated frontiers of 1815 - such a thing was impossible for any long duration of time. Hence the necessity for brief wars and extension of frontiers. But no extension of frontiers was so dazzling to the imagination of the French chauvinists as the extension to the German left bank of the Rhine. One square mile on the Rhine was more to them than ten in the Alps or anywhere else. Given the Second Empire, the demand for the restoration to France of the left bank of the Rhine, either all at once or piecemeal, was merely a question of time. The time came with the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; cheated of the anticipated "territorial compensation" by Bismarck and by his own over-cunning, hesitating policy, there was now nothing left for Napoleon but war, which broke out in 1870 and drove him first to Sedan, and thence to Wilhelmshöhe.
The inevitable result was the Paris Revolution of September 4, 1870. The empire collapsed like a house of cards, and the republic was again proclaimed. But the enemy was standing at the gates; the armies of the empire were either hopelessly beleaguered in Metz or held captive in Germany. In this emergency the people allowed the Paris deputies to the former legislative body to constitute themselves into a "Government of National Defense." This was the more readily conceded, since, for the purposes of defense, all Parisians capable of bearing arms had enrolled in the National Guard and were armed, so that now the workers constituted a great majority. But almost at once the antagonism between the almost completely bourgeois government and the armed proletariat broke into open conflict. On October 31, workers' battalions stormed the town hall, and captured some members of the government. Treachery, the government's direct breach of its undertakings, and the intervention of some petty-bourgeois battalions set them free again, and in order not to occasion the outbreak of civil war inside a city which was already beleaguered by a foreign power, the former government was left in office.
At last, on January 8, 187l , Paris, almost starving, capitulated but with honors unprecedented in the history of war. The forts were surrendered, the outer wall disarmed, the weapons of the regiments of the line and of the Mobile Guard were handed over, and they themselves considered prisoners of war. But the National Guard kept its weapons and guns, and only entered into an armistice with the victors, who themselves did not dare enter Paris in triumph. They only dared to occupy a tiny corner of Paris, which, into the bargain, consisted partly of public parks, and even this they only occupied for a few days! And during this time they, who had maintained their encirclement of Paris for 131 days, were themselves encircled by the armed workers of Paris, who kept a sharp watch that no "Prussian" should overstep the narrow bounds of the corner ceded to the foreign conquerors. Such was the respect which the Paris workers inspired in the army before which all the armies of the empire had laid down their arms; and the Prussian Junkers, who had come to take revenge at the very center of the revolution, were compelled to stand by respectfully, and salute just precisely this armed revolution!
During the war the Paris workers had confined themselves to demanding the vigorous prosecution of the fight. But now, when peace had come after the capitulation of Paris, now, Thiers, the new head of the government, was compelled to realize that the supremacy of the propertied classes - large landowners and capitalists - was in constant danger so long as the workers of Paris had arms in their hands. His first action was to attempt to disarm them. On March 18, he sent troops of the line with orders to rob the National Guard of the artillery belonging to it, which had been constructed during the siege of Paris and had been paid for by subscription. The attempt failed; Paris mobilized as one man in defense of the guns, and war between Paris and the French government sitting at Versailles was declared. On March 26 the Paris Commune was elected and on March 28, it was proclaimed. The Central Committee of the National Guard, which up to then had carried on the government, handed in its resignation to the National Guard, after it had first decreed the abolition of the scandalous Paris "Morality Police." On March 30, the Commune abolished conscription and the standing army, and declared that the National Guard, in which all citizens capable of bearing arms were to be enrolled, was to be the sole armed force. It remitted all payments of rent for dwelling houses from October 1870 until April, the amounts already paid to be reckoned to a future rental period, and stopped all sales of articles pledged in the municipal pawnshops. On the same day the foreigners elected to the Commune were confirmed in office, because "the flag of the Commune is the flag of the World Republic."
On April 1, it was decided that the highest salary received by any employee of the Commune, and therefore also by its members themselves, might not exceed 6,000 francs. On the following day the Commune decreed the separation of the Church from the State, and the abolition of all state payments for religious purposes as well as the transformation of all Church property into national property; as a result of which, on April 8, a decree excluding from the schools all religious symbols, pictures, dogmas, prayers - in a word, "all that belongs to the sphere of the individual's conscience" -was ordered to be excluded from the schools, and this decree was gradually applied. On the 5th, in reply to the shooting, day after day, of the Commune's fighters captured by the Versailles troops, a decree was issued for imprisonment of hostages, but it was never carried into effect. On the 6th, the guillotine was brought out by the 137th battalion of the National Guard, and publicly burnt, amid great popular rejoicing. On the 12th, the Commune decided that the Victory Column on the Place Vendôme, which had been cast from guns captured by Napoleon after the war of 1809, should be demolished as a symbol of chauvinism and incitement to national hatred. This decree was carried out on May 16. On April 16, the Commune ordered a statistical tabulation of factories which had been closed down by the manufacturers, and the working out of plans for the carrying on of these factories by workers formerly employed in them, who were to be organized in cooperative societies, and also plans for the organization of these cooperatives in one great union. On the 20th, the Commune abolished night work for bakers, and also the workers' registration cards, which since the Second Empire had been run as a monopoly by police nominees-exploiters of the first rank; the issuing of these registration cards was transferred to the mayors of the 20 arrondissements [administrative districts] of Paris. On April 30, the Commune ordered the closing of the pawnshops, on the ground that they were a private exploitation of labor, and were in contradiction with the right of the workers to their instruments of labor and to credit. On May 5, it ordered the demolition of the Chapel of Atonement, which had been built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI.
Thus, from March 18 onwards the class character of the Paris movement, which had previously been pushed into the background by the fight against the foreign invaders, emerged sharply and clearly. As almost without exception, workers, or recognized representatives of the workers, sat in the Commune, its decisions bore a decidedly proletarian character. Either they decreed reforms which the republican bourgeoisie had failed to pass solely out of cowardice, but which provided a necessary basis for the free activity of the working class - such as the realization of the principle that in relation to the state, religion is a purely private matter - or they promulgated decrees which were in the direct interests of the working class and to some extent cut deeply into the old order of society. In a beleaguered city, however, it was possible at most to make a start in the realization of all these measures. And from the beginning of May onwards all their energies were taken up by the fight against the ever-growing armies assembled by the Versailles government.
On April 7, the Versailles troops had captured the Seine crossing at Neuilly, on the western front of Paris; on the other hand, in an attack on the southern front on the 11th they were repulsed with heavy losses by General Eudes. Paris was continually bombarded and, moreover, by the very people who had stigmatized as a sacrilege the bombardment of the same city by the Prussians. These same people now begged the Prussian government for the hasty return of the French soldiers taken prisoner at Sedan and Metz, in order that they might recapture Paris for them. From the beginning of May the gradual arrival of these troops gave the Versailles forces a decided ascendancy. This already became evident when, on April 23, Thiers broke off the negotiations for the exchange, proposed by the Commune, of the Archbishop of Paris and a whole number of other priests held as hostages in Paris, for only one man, Blanqui, who had twice been elected to the Commune but was a prisoner in Clairvaux. And even more in the changed language of Thiers; previously procrastinating and equivocal, he now suddenly became insolent, threatening, brutal. The Versailles forces took the redoubt of Moulin Saquet on the southern front, on May 3; on the 9th, Fort Issy, which had been completely reduced to ruins by gunfire; and on the 14th, Fort Vanves. On the western front they advanced gradually, capturing the numerous villages and buildings which extended up to the city wall, until they reached the main wall itself; on the 21st, thanks to treachery and the carelessness of the National Guards stationed there, they succeeded in forcing their way into the city. The Prussians who held the northern and eastern forts allowed the Versailles troops to advance across the land north of the city, which was forbidden ground to them under the armistice, and thus to march forward and attack on a long front, which the Parisians naturally thought covered by the armistice, and therefore held only with weak forces. As a result of this, only a weak resistance was put up in the western half of Paris, in the luxury city proper; it grew stronger and more tenacious the nearer the incoming troops approached the eastern half, the real working-class city.
It was only after eight days' fighting that the last defenders of the Commune were overwhelmed on the heights of Belleville and Menilmontant; and then the massacre of defenseless men, women and children, which had been raging all through the week on an increasing scale, reached its zenith. The breechloaders could no longer kill fast enough; the vanquished workers were shot down in hundreds by mitrailleuse fire. The "Wall of the Federals" at the Père Lachaise cemetery, where the final mass murder was consummated, is still standing today, a mute but eloquent testimony to the savagery of which the ruling class is capable as soon as the working class dares to come out for its rights. Then came the mass arrests; when the slaughter of them proved to be impossible, the shooting of victims arbitrarily selected from the prisoners' ranks, and the removal of the rest to great camps where they awaited trial by courts-martial. The Prussian troops surrounding the northern half of Paris had orders not to allow any fugitives to pass; but the officers often shut their eyes when the soldiers paid more obedience to the dictates of humanity than to those of the General Staff; particularly, honor is due to the Saxon army corps, which behaved very humanely and let through many workers who were obviously fighters for the Commune.
- ENGELS, "Introduction," Marx's The Civil War in France (1891)
B. NATURE OF THE PARIS COMMUNE: ITS DISTINCTION FROM OLDER FORMS
It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the modern state power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the medieval communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of, that very state power. The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into a federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins, that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production. - The antagonism of the Commune against the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classical development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in England, to complete the great central state organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties. The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of France. The provincial French middle class saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, was supplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests. The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the now superseded state power. It could only enter into the head of a Bismarck, who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his old trade, so befitting his mental caliber, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch), it could only enter into such a head to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after that caricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitution which degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police machinery of the Prussian state. The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure - the standing army and state functionarism.
Its very existence presupposed the nonexistence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the normal incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class rule. It supplied the republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the "true republic" was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.
Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, every man becomes a workingman, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.
It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the workingmen anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wage slavery (the landlord now is the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, "impossible" communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system - and they are many - have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of cooperative production. If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production - what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, "possible" communism?
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple [by decree of the people]. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain workingmen for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their "natural superiors", and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently - performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one-fifth of what according to high scientific authority is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school board - the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, floating over the Hôtel de Ville.
And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants - the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dispute among the middle class themselves - the debtor and creditor accounts. The same portion of the middle class, after they had assisted in putting down the workingmen's insurrection of June 1 848, had been at once unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was not their only motive for rallying round the working class. They felt there was but one alternative - the Commune, or the empire - under whatever name it might reappear. The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the frères Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made - the disappearance of the empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist bôhème, the true middle class Party of Order came out in the shape of the "Union Républicaine", enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending it against the wilful misconstruction of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the middle class will stand the present severe trial, time must show.
The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that "its victory was their only hope". Of all the lies hatched at Versailles and reechoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of the most tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love of the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard of indemnity! In the eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an encroachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his but then he did so in the name of the revolution; while now he had fomented a civil war against the revolution, to shift on to the peasants shoulders the chief load of the five milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on the other hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be made to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax would have given him a cheap government - transformed his present bloodsuckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champêtre, the gendarme, and the prefect; would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place of stultification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the taxgatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners' religious instincts. Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune - and that rule alone - held out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the more complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same time compelled to solve in favor of the peasant, viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus upon his parcel of soil, the prolétariat foncier (the rural proletariat), daily growing upon it, and his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development of modern agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming.
- MARX, The Civil War in France (1871)
C. POLITICAL MAKEUP OF THE PARIS COMMUNE
The members of the Commune were divided into a majority, the Blanquists, who had also been predominant in the Central Committee of the National Guard; and a minority; members of the International Working Men's Association, chiefly consisting of adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism. The great majority of the Blanquists at that time were socialists only by revolutionary and proletarian instinct; only a few had attained greater clarity on the essential principles, through Vaillant, who was familiar with German scientific socialism. It is therefore comprehensible that in the economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our view today, the Commune ought to have done. The hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remained standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the Commune - this would have been worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favor of peace with the Commune. But what is still more wonderful is the correctness of so much that was actually done by the Commune, composed as it was of Blanquists and Proudhonists. Naturally, the Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, both for their praiseworthy and their unpraiseworthy aspects; as the Blanquists were for its political actions and omissions. And in both cases the irony of history willed - as is usual when doctrinaires come to the helm - that both did the opposite of what the doctrines of their school prescribed.
Proudhon, the Socialist of the small peasant and master craftsman, regarded association with positive hatred. He said of it that there was more bad than good in it; that it was by nature sterile, even harmful, because it was a fetter on the freedom of the workers; that it was a pure dogma, unproductive and burdensome, in conflict as much with the freedom of the workers as with economy of labor; that its disadvantages multiplied more swiftly than its advantages; that, as compared with it, competition, division of labor, and private property were economic forces. Only for the exceptional cases - as Proudhon called them - of large-scale industry and large industrial units, such as railways was there any place for the association of workers.
By 1871, even in Paris, the center of handicrafts, large-scale industry had already so much ceased to be an exceptional case that by far the most important decree of the Commune instituted an organization of large-scale industry and even of manufacture which was not based only on the association of workers in each factory, but also aimed at combining all these associations in one great union; in short an organization which, as Marx quite rightly says in The Civil War, must necessarily have led in the end to communism, that is to say, the direct antithesis of the Proudhon doctrine. And, therefore, the Commune was also the grave of the Proudhon school of socialism. Today this school has vanished from French working-class circles; among them now, among the Possibilists no less than among the "Marxists", Marx's theory rules unchallenged. Only among the "radical" bourgeoisie are there still Proudhonists. The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organized men would be able, at a given favorable moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by energetic and relentless action, to keep power until they succeeded in drawing the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This conception involved, above all, the strictest dictatorship, and centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government. And what did the Commune, with its majority of these same Blanquists, actually do? In all its proclamations to the French in the provinces, it proposed to them a free federation of all French Communes with Paris, a national organization, which for the first time was really to be created by the nation itself. It was precisely the oppressing power of the former centralized government, army, political police and bureaucracy, which Napoleon had created in 1798 and since then had been taken over by every new government as a welcome instrument and used against its opponents, it was precisely this power which was to fall everywhere, just as it had already fallen in Paris.
- ENGELS, "Introduction", Marx's The Civil War In France (1891)
D. ON "SMASHING" THE STATE MACHINERY
...If you look at the last chapter of my 18th Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people's revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting. What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians! After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy, the rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not at the gates of Paris. History has no like examples of a like greatness. If they are defeated only their "good nature" will be to blame. They should have marched at once on Versailles, after first Vinoy and then the reactionary section of the Paris National Guard had themselves retreated. The right moment was missed because of conscientious scruples. They did not want to start the civil war, as if that mischievous abortion Thiers had not already started the civil war with his attempt to disarm Paris. Second mistake: The Central Committee surrendered its power too soon, to make way for the Commune. Again from a too "honorable" scrupulosity! However that may be the present rising in Paris - even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris. Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the slaves to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades reeking of the barracks, the Church, cabbage-junkerdom and above all, of the philistine.
- MARX, Letter to Dr. Kugelmann, (1871)
[3]
GERMANY
A. PETTY BOURGEOIS CHARACTER OF GERMAN DEVELOPMENT
In general, from the time of the Reformation, German development has borne a completely petty-bourgeois character. The old feudal aristocracy was, for the most part, annihilated in the peasant wars; what remained of it were either imperial petty princes who gradually achieved a certain independence for themselves and aped the absolute monarchy on a minute, smalltown scale, or lesser landowners who, after squandering their little bit of property at the tiny courts, gained their livelihood from petty positions in the toy armies and government offices - or, finally, Junkers from the backwoods, who lived a life of which even the most modest English squire or French gentilhomme de province would have been ashamed. Agriculture was carried on by a method which was neither parcellation nor large-scale production, and which, despite the preservation of feudal dependence and corvees, never drove the peasants to seek emancipation, both because this very method of farming did not allow the emergence of any active revolutionary class and because of the absence of the revolutionary bourgeoisie corresponding to such a peasant class.
As regards the burghers, we can only emphasize here a few characteristic factors. It is characteristic that linen manufacture, an industry based on handspinning and the handweaving loom, came to be of some importance in Germany at the very time when in England those cumbersome tools were already being ousted by machines. Most characteristic of all is the position of the German burghers in relation to Holland. Holland, the only part of the Hanseatic League that became of commercial importance, tore itself free, cut Germany off from world trade except for two ports (Hamburg and Bremen) and since then dominated the whole of German trade. The German burghers were too impotent to set limits to exploitation by the Dutch. The bourgeoisie of little Holland, with its well-developed class interests, was more powerful than the numerically far greater German burghers with their indifference and their divided petty interests. Corresponding to the splitting up of interests, political organization was also split up into the small principalities and the free imperial cities. How could political concentration arise in a country which lacked all the economic conditions for it? The impotence of each separate sphere of life (one cannot speak here of estates or classes, but at most only of former estates and classes not yet born) did not allow any one of them to gain exclusive domination. The inevitable consequence was that during the epoch of absolute monarchy, which was seen here in its most stunted, semi-patriarchal form, the special sphere which, owing to division of labor, was responsible for the work of administration of public interests acquired an abnormal independence, which became still greater in the bureaucracy of modern times. Thus, the state built itself up into an apparently independent force, and this position, which in other countries was only transitory - a transition stage - it has maintained in Germany until the present day. It is this position of the state which explains both the honest character of the civil servant that is found nowhere else, and all the illusions about the state which are current in Germany, as well as the apparent independence of German theoreticians in relation to the burghers - the seeming contradiction between the form in which these theoreticians express the interests of the burghers and these interests themselves. We find in Kant the characteristic form which French liberalism, based on real class interests, assumed in Germany. Neither he, nor the German burghers, whose whitewashing spokesman he was, noticed that these theoretical ideas of the bourgeoisie had as their basis material interests and a will that was conditioned and determined by the material relations of production. Kant, therefore, separated this theoretical expression from the interests which it expressed; he made the materially motivated determinations of the will of the French bourgeois into pure self-determinations of "free will", of the will in and for itself, of the human will, and so converted it into purely ideological conceptual determinations and moral postulates. Hence the German petty bourgeois recoiled in horror from the practice of this energetic bourgeois liberalism as soon as this practice showed itself, both in the Reign of Terror and in shameless bourgeois profit-making.
Under the rule of Napoleon, the German burghers pursued to an even greater degree their petty trade and their great illusions... The German burghers, who cursed Napoleon for compelling them to drink chicory and for disturbing their peace with military billeting and recruiting of conscripts, reserved all their moral indignation for Napoleon and all their admiration for England; yet Napoleon rendered them the greatest services by cleaning out Germany's Augean stables and establishing civilized means of communication, whereas England only waited for the opportunity to exploit them à tort et à travers [at random, recklessly]. In the same petty-bourgeois spirit the German princes imagined they were fighting for the principle of legitimism and against revolution, whereas they were only the paid mercenaries of the English bourgeoisie. In the atmosphere of these universal illusions it was quite in the order of things that the estates privileged to cherish illusions - ideologists, schoolmasters students, members of the Tugendbund (4) - should talk big and give a suitable high-flown expression to the universal mood of fantasy and indifference.
The July revolution - we mention only a few main points and therefore omit the intermediary stage - imposed on the Germans from outside the political forms corresponding to a developed bourgeoisie. Since German economic relations had by no means reached the level of development to which these political forms corresponded, the burghers accepted them merely as abstract ideas, principles valid in and for themselves, pious wishes and phrases, Kantian self-determinations of the will and of the people, such as they ought to be. Their attitude, therefore, to these forms was far more moral and disinterested than that of other nations, i.e., they exhibited a highly peculiar narrow-mindedness and remained unsuccessful in all their endeavors.
Finally the ever more powerful development of foreign competition and world intercourse- from which it became less and less possible for Germany to stand aside - forced the scattered local interests of the Germans to unite into some sort of harmony. Particularly since 1840, the German burghers began to think about safeguarding these common interests; their attitude became national and liberal and they demanded protective tariffs and constitutions. Thus they have now got almost as far as the French bourgeoisie in 1789.
- MARX & ENGELS, The German Ideology (1846)
B. WHY THE GERMAN BOURGEOISIE IS REACTIONARY
In the social conditions of Germany, the year 1866 has changed almost nothing. A few bourgeois reforms: uniform measures and weights, freedom of movement, freedom of trade, etc., - all within limits befitting bureaucracy, do not even come up to that of which other western European countries have been in possession for a long while, and leaves the main evil, the system of bureaucratic concessions, unshaken. As to the proletariat, the freedom of movement, and of citizenship, the abolition of passports, and other such legislation is made illusory by the current police practice.
What is much more important than the grand maneuvers of the State in 1866 is the growth of German industry and commerce, of the railways, the telegraph, and ocean steamship navigation since 1848. This progress may be lagging behind that of England or even France, but it is unheard-of for Germany, and has done more in twenty years than would have been previously possible in a century. Germany has been drawn, earnestly and irrevocably, into world commerce. Capital invested in industry has multiplied rapidly. The position of the bourgeoisie has improved accordingly. The surest sign of industrial prosperity - speculation - has blossomed richly, princes and dukes being chained to its triumphal chariot. German capital is now constructing Russian and Rumanian railways, whereas, only fifteen years ago, the German railways went a-begging to English entrepreneurs. How, then, is it possible that the bourgeoisie has not conquered political power, that it behaves in so cowardly a manner toward the government?
It is the misfortune of the German bourgeoisie to have come too late, - quite in accordance with the beloved German tradition. The period of its ascendancy coincides with the time when the bourgeoisie of the other western European countries is politically on the downward path. In England, the bourgeoisie could place its real representative, Bright, into the government only by extending the franchise which in the long run is bound to put an end to its very domination. In France, the bourgeoisie, which for two years only, 1849-50, had held power as a class under the republican regime, was able to continue its social existence only by transferring its power to Louis Bonaparte and the army. Under present conditions of enormously increased interdependence of the three most progressive European countries, it is no longer possible for the German bourgeoisie extensively to utilize its political power while the same class has outlived itself in England and France. It is a peculiarity of the bourgeoisie, distinguishing it from all other classes, that a point is being reached in its development after which every increase in its power, that is, every enlargement of its capital only tends to make it more and more incapable of retaining political dominance. "Behind the big bourgeoisie stand the proletarians". In the degree as the bourgeoisie develops its industry, its commerce, and its means of communication, it also produces the proletariat. At a certain point, which must not necessarily appear simultaneously and on the same stage of development everywhere, it begins to note that this, its second self, has outgrown it. From then on, it loses the power for exclusive political dominance. It looks for allies with whom to share its authority, or to whom to cede all power, as circumstances may demand.
In Germany, this turning point came for the bourgeoisie as early as 1848. The bourgeois became frightened, not so much by the German, as by the French proletariat. The battle of June 1848, in Paris, showed the bourgeoisie what could be expected. The German proletariat was restless enough to prove to the bourgeoisie that the seed of revolution had been sown also in German soil. From that day, the edge of bourgeois political action was broken. The bourgeoisie looked around for allies. It sold itself to them regardless of price, and there it remains.
These allies are all of a reactionary turn. It is the king's power, with his army and his bureaucracy; it is the big feudal nobility; it is the smaller Junker; it is even the clergy. The bourgeoisie has made so many compacts and unions with all of them to save its dear skin, that now it has nothing more to barter. And the more the proletariat developed, the more it began to feel as a class and to act as one, the feebler became the bourgeoisie. When the astonishingly bad strategy of the Prussians triumphed over the astonishingly worse strategy of the Austrians at Sadowa, it was difficult to say who gave a deeper sigh of relief, the Prussian bourgeois who was a partner to the defeat at Sadowa, or his Austrian colleague.
Our upper middle class of 1870 acted in the same fashion as did the moderate middle class of 1525. As to the small bourgeoisie, the master artisans and merchants, they remain unchanged. They hope to climb up to the big bourgeoisie, and they are fearful lest they be pushed down into the ranks of the proletariat. Between fear and hope, they will in times of struggle seek to save their precious skin and to join the victors when the struggle is over. Such is their nature.
- ENGELS, "Preface to 2nd Edition", The Peasant War in Germany (1874)
Bismarck is Louis Napoleon translated from the French adventurist Pretender to the Throne into the Prussian Junker Squire (Krautjunker) and German officer-cadet. Like Louis Napoleon, Bismarck was a man of great practical understanding and immense cunning, a born, crafty businessman, who in other circumstances would have rivaled the Vanderbilts and Jay Goulds on the New York Stock Exchange, and indeed he most effectively steered his private ship into port. But this heightened grasp of practical affairs is often linked with a corresponding limitation of vision, and it was in this respect that Bismarck was "superior" to his French predecessor. For the latter, after all, had his "Napoleonic ideas" which he had worked out for himself during his days of vagabondage (they looked like it), while, as we shall see, Bismarck never exhibited even the ghost of an original political idea and was only good at picking up and using for his own purposes other people's finished ideas. But this narrowness was his good fortune. Without it he would never have been able to view the whole of history from an exclusively Prussian standpoint, and had there been any chink in his Prussian outlook, through which the light of day might have penetrated, he would have failed in his whole mission and there would have been an end to his glory. To be sure, once he had fulfilled in his own way the special mission prescribed for him by forces outside himself, he was at his wits' end. We shall see what somersaults he was driven to perform as a result of his absolute lack of rational ideas and his inability to grasp the historical situation which he himself had created.
If Louis Napoleon had learned from his own shady past not to be too scrupulous in his choice of means, Bismarck learned to be less scrupulous from the history of Prussian policy, especially from the history of the so-called Great Elector (Frederick William) and of Frederick II, and could be so with the reassuring consciousness that he was being true to the tradition of the fatherland. His business acumen taught him to keep his Junker inclinations in check when necessary. When it seemed necessary no longer, they came crudely to the fore again; this was, of course, evidence of decline. His political methods were those of a young member of the Officer Corps. In his attacks on the Prussian Constitution in the Chamber, he did not hesitate to use the phrases and methods by means of which one extricates oneself' from awkward scrapes in the officers' mess. All the innovations he introduced into diplomacy were borrowed from officer-cadet conventions. But whereas Louis Napoleon often became unsure of himself' in decisive moments, as for example, at the time of the coup d'etat in 1851, when Morny had literally to use force in order to get him to go through with what had been begun, or on the eve of the war in 1870, when his uncertainty undermined his whole position, it must be said for Bismarck that nothing of that kind ever happened to him. His willpower never deserted him. Rather was it the case that it was often suddenly transformed into open brutality. And it is this above all which was the secret of his successes. All the ruling classes in Germany, Junkers and bourgeois alike, had so lost all traces of energy, spinelessness had become so much the custom in "educated" Germany, that the one man amongst them who still had willpower thereby became their greatest personality and a tyrant over them, so that they were ready to dance to his tune even against their better nature and judgment. "Uneducated" Germany has not yet reached that stage. The working people have shown that they have willpower which even Bismarck's strong will cannot break.
- ENGELS, The Role of Force in History (1887-88)
[4]
ENGLAND: POLITICS AND THE WORKING CLASS
A. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS
Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but proportionally large agricultural population. Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those days. This industrial revolution is of the same importance for England as the political revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany; and the difference between England in 1760 and in 1844 is at least as great as that between France under the ancien régime [old regime] and during the revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this industrial transformation is the English proletariat.
We have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence by the introduction of machinery. The rapid extension of manufacture demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural districts to the towns. Population multiplied enormously, and nearly all the increase took place in the proletariat. Further, Ireland had entered upon an orderly development only since the beginning of the 18th century. There, too, the population, more than decimated by English cruelty in earlier disturbances, now rapidly multiplied, especially after the advance in manufacture began to draw masses of Irishmen towards England. Thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong to the working class, while the lower middle class consists only of small shopkeepers, and very few handicraftsmen. For, though the rising manufacture first attained importance by transforming tools into machines, workrooms into factories, and consequently, the toiling lower middle class into the toiling proletariat, and the former large merchants into manufacturers, though the lower middle class was thus early crushed out, and the population reduced to the two opposing elements, workers and capitalists, this happened outside of the domain of manufacture proper, in the province of handicraft and retail trade as well. In the place of the former masters and apprentices, came great capitalists and workingmen who had no prospect of rising above their class. Handwork was carried on after the fashion of factory work, the division of labor was strictly applied, and small employers who could not compete with great establishments were forced down into the proletariat. At the same time the destruction of the former organization of handwork, and the disappearance of the lower middle class deprived the workingman of all possibility of rising into the middle class himself. Hitherto he had always had the prospect of establishing himself somewhere as master artificer, perhaps employing journeymen and apprentices; but now, when master artificers were crowded out by manufacturers, when large capital had become necessary for carrying on work independently, the working class became, for the first time, an integral, permanent class of the population, whereas it had formerly often been merely a transition leading to the bourgeoisie. Now, he who was born to toil had no other prospect than that of remaining a toiler all his life. Now, for the first time, therefore, the proletariat was in a position to undertake an independent movement.
In this way were brought together those vast masses of workingmen who now fill the whole British Empire, whose social condition forces itself every day more and more upon the attention of the civilized world. The condition of the working class is the condition of the vast majority of the English people. The question: What is to become of those destitute millions, who consume today what they earned yesterday; who have created the greatness of England by their inventions and their toil; who become with every passing day more conscious of their might, and demand, with daily increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society? - This, since the Reform Bill, has become the national question. All Parliamentary debates, of any importance, may be reduced to this; and, though the English middle class will not as yet admit it, though they try to evade this great question, and to represent their own particular interests as the truly national ones, their action is utterly useless. With every session of Parliament the· working class gains ground, the interests of the middle class diminish in importance; and, in spite of the fact that the middle class is the chief, in fact, the only power in Parliament, the last session of 1844 was a continuous debate upon subjects affecting the working class, the Poor Relief Bill, the Factory Act, the Masters' and Servants' Act; and Thomas Duncombe, the representative of the working men in the House of Commons, was the great man of the session; while the Liberal middle class with its motion of repealing the Corn Laws, and the Radical middle class with its resolution for refusing the taxes, played pitiable roles. Even the debates about Ireland were at bottom debates about the Irish proletariat, and the means of coming to its assistance. It is high time, too, for the English middle class to make some concessions to the workingmen who no longer plead but threaten; for in a short time it may be too late.
In spite of all this, the English. middle class, especially the manufacturing class, which is enriched directly by means of the poverty of the workers, persists in ignoring this poverty. This class, feeling itself the mighty representative class of the nation, is ashamed to lay the sore spot of England bare before the eyes of the world; will not confess, even to itself, that the workers are in distress, because it, the property-holding, manufacturing class, must bear the moral responsibility for this distress. Hence the scornful smile which intelligent Englishmen (and they, the middle class, alone are known on the Continent) assume when any one begins to speak of the condition of the working class; hence the utter ignorance on the part of the whole middle class of' everything which concerns the workers; hence the ridiculous blunders which men of this class, in and out of Parliament, make when the position of the proletariat comes under discussion; hence the absurd freedom from anxiety, with which the middle class dwells upon a soil that is honeycombed, and may any day collapse, the speedy collapse of which is as certain as a mathematical or mechanical demonstration; hence the miracle that the English have as yet no single book upon the condition of their workers, although they have been examining and mending the old state of things no one knows how many years. Hence also the deep wrath of the whole working class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long a time goes by, a time almost within the power of man to predict, must break out into a Revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child's play.
- ENGELS, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
B. MISERY OF THE WORKING MASSES
It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivaled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce. In 1850, a moderate organ of the British middle class, of more than average information, predicted that if the exports and imports of England were to rise 50 per cent, English pauperism would sink to zero. Alas! On April 7, 1864, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delighted his parliamentary audience by the statement that the total import and export trade of England had grown in 1863 "to £443,955,000! that astonishing sum about three times the trade of the comparatively recent epoch of 1843!" With all that, he was eloquent upon "poverty". "Think," he exclaimed, "of those who are on the border of that region," upon "wages... not increased"; upon "human life... in nine cases out of ten but a struggle of existence!" He did not speak of the people of Ireland, gradually replaced by machinery in the north, and by sheepwalks in the south, though even the sheep in that unhappy country are decreasing, it is true, not at so rapid a rate as the men. He did not repeat what then had been just betrayed by the highest representatives of the upper ten thousand in a sudden fit of terror...
After a 30-year struggle, fought with most admirable perseverance, the English working classes, improving a momentaneous split between the landlords and moneylords, succeeded in carrying the Ten Hours' Bill. The immense physical, moral and intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, half-yearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, are now acknowledged on all sides. Most of the Continental governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action. But besides its practical import, there was something else to exalt the marvelous success of the workingmen's measure. Through their most notorious organs of science, such as Dr. Ure, Professor Senior, and other sages of that stamp, the middle class had predicted, and to their heart's content proved, that any legal restriction of the hours of labor must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampire-like, could but live by sucking blood, and children's blood, too. In ancient times, child murder was a mysterious rite of the religion of Moloch, but it was practised on some very solemn occasions only, once a year perhaps, and then Moloch had no exclusive bias for the children of the poor. This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours' Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.
But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the cooperative movement, especially the cooperative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold "hands". The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the cooperative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen's experiments, tried on the Continent, were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.
At the same time, the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however excellent in principle, and however useful in practice, cooperative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic middle-class spouters, and even keen political economists, have all at once turned nauseously complimentary to the very cooperative labor system they had vainly tried to nip in the bud by deriding it as the Utopia of the dreamer, or stigmatizing it as the sacrilege of the Socialist. To save the industrious masses, cooperative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet, the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor.
- MARX, Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association (1864)
[5]
ENGLAND'S COLONIAL EMPIRE
A. IRELAND: BULWARK OF THE LANDED ARISTOCRACY
Ireland is the bulwark of the English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of this country is not only one of the main sources of that aristocracy's material welfare; it is its greatest moral strength. It, in fact, represents the domination of England over Ireland. Ireland is therefore the great means by which the English aristocracy maintains its domination in England itself.
If, on the other hand, the English army and police were to withdraw from Ireland tomorrow, you would at once have an agrarian revolution there. But the overthrow of the English aristocracy in Ireland involves and has as a necessary consequence its overthrow in England. And this would fulfill the prerequisite for the proletarian revolution in England. The destruction of the English landed aristocracy in Ireland is an infinitely easier operation than in England itself, because in Ireland the land question has hitherto been the exclusive form of the social question, because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of the Irish people, and because it is at the same time inseparable from the national question. Quite apart from the Iris4 being more passionate and revolutionary in character than the English.
As for the English bourgeoisie it has in the first place a common interest with the English aristocracy in turning Ireland into mere pastureland which provides the English market with meat and wool at the cheapest possible prices. It is equally interested in reducing, by eviction and forcible emigration, the Irish population to such a small number that English capital (capital invested in land leased for farming) can function there with "security". It has the same interest in clearing the estate of Ireland as it had in the clearing of the agricultural districts of England and Scotland. The £6,000-10,000 absentee and other Irish revenues which at present flow annually to London have also to be taken into account.
But the English bourgeoisie has also much more important interests in Ireland's present-day economy. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of farming, Ireland steadily supplies its own surplus to the English labor market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the moral and material condition of the English working class.
And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divident into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English domination in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.
But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between English and Irish is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes any honest and serious cooperation between the working classes of the two countries impossible. It enables the governments of both countries, whenever they think fit, to break the edge of the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war with one another.
England, being the metropolis of capital, the power which has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important country for the workers' revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have developed up to a certain degree of maturity. Therefore to hasten the social revolution in England is the most important object of the International Working-Men's Association. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. And it is the special task of the Central Council in London to awaken a consciousness in the English workers that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.
- MARX, Letter to Meyer and Vogt (1870)
B. IRELAND AND THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS
I have become more and more convinced - and it is only a matter of bringing this conviction home to the English working class - that it can never do anything decisive here in England until it separates its policy with regard to Ireland in the most definite way from the policy of the ruling classes, until it not only makes common cause with the Irish, but even takes the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 180 I and replacing it by a free federal relationship. And, indeed, this must be done not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland, but as a demand made in the interests of the· English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain in the leading strings of the ruling classes, because it must join with them in a common front against Ireland. Every one of its movements in England itself is crippled by the quarrel with the Irish, who even in England form a very important section of the working class. The primary condition of emancipation here - the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy - remains impossible because its position here cannot be stormed so long as it maintains its strongly entrenched outpost in Ireland. But there, once affairs are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition of the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the same persons as the English landlords) will be infinitely easier than here, because in Ireland it is not only a simple economic question, but at the same time a national question, since the landlords there, unlike those in England, are not the traditional dignitaries and representatives, but the mortally hated oppressors of the nation. And not only does England's internal social development remain crippled by her present relation with Ireland; her foreign policy, and particularly her policy with regard to Russia and the United States of America, suffers likewise.
But since the English working class undoubtedly throws the decisive weight into the scale of social emancipation generally, the lever has to be applied here. As a matter of fact, the English republic under Cromwell came to grief over Ireland. The Irish have played a capital joke on the English government by electing the "convict felon" O'Donovan Rossa to Parliament. The government papers are already threatening a renewed suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, a renewed system of terror! In fact, England never had and never can - so long as the present relationship lasts - rule Ireland otherwise than by the most abominable reign of terror and the most reprehensible corruption.
- MARX, Letter to Dr. Kugelmann (1869)
C. THE FUTURE RESULTS OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA
How came it that English supremacy was established in India? The paramount power of the Great Mogul was broken by the Mogul Viceroys. The power of the Viceroys was broken by the Mahrattas. The power of the Mahrattas was broken by the Afghans, and while all were struggling against all, the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all. A country not only divided between the Mohammedan and Hindu, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste; a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest? If we knew nothing of the past history of Hindustan, would there not be the one great and incontestible fact, that even at this moment India is held in English thraldom by an Indian army maintained at the cost of India? India, then, could not escape the fate of being conquered, and the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.
England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, and the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.
Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hinduized, the barbarian conquerers being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects. The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore inaccessible to Hindu civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by leveling all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless it has begun.
The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending farther than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British drill sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder. The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindus and Europeans, is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction... From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe, has connected its chief ports with those of the whole southeastern ocean, and has revindicated it from the isolated position which was the prime law of its stagnation. The day is not far distant when, by a combination of railways and steam vessels, the distance between England and India measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world.
The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them, and that, to that end, it is necessary above all to gift her with means of irrigation and of internal communication. They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India. And they will do it. The results must be inappreciable.
It is notorious that the productive powers of India are paralyzed by the utter want of means for conveying and exchanging its various produce. Nowhere, more than in India, do we meet with social destitution in the midst of natural plenty, for want of the means of exchange. It was proved before a Committee of the British House of Commons, which sat in 1848 that "when grain was selling from 6s. to Ss. a quarter at Kandeish, it was sold at 64s. to 70s. at Poonah, where the people were dying in the streets of famine, without the possibility of gaining supplies from Kandeish, because the clay roads were impracticable".
We know that the municipal organization and the economical basis of the village communities has been broken up, but their worst feature, the dissolution of society into stereotype and disconnected atoms, has survived their vitality.
The village isolation produced the absence of roads in India, and the absence of roads perpetuated the village isolation. On this plan a community existed with a given scale of low conveniences, almost without intercourse with other villages, without the desires and efforts indispensable to social advance. The British having broken up this self-sufficient inertia of the villages, railways will provide the new want of communication and intercourse...
I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindus are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labor, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery. Ample proof of this fact is afforded by the capacities and expertness of the native engineers in the Calcutta mint, where they have been for years employed in working the steam machinery, by the natives attached to the several steam engines in the Hurdwar coal districts, and by other instances. Mr. Campbell himself, greatly influenced as he is by the prejudices of the East India Company (5), is obliged to avow "that the great mass of the Indian people possesses a great industrial energy, is well fitted to accumulate capital, and remarkable for a mathematical clearness of head, and talent for figures and exact sciences". "Their intellects," he says, "are excellent". Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the heredity divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.
All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive power, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?
The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country, whose gentle natives are, to use the expression of Prince Saltykov, even in the most inferior classes, "plus fins et plus adroits que les Italiens" [thinner and smarter than the Italians], whose submission even is counterbalanced by a certain calm nobility, who, notwithstanding their natural languor, have astonished the British officers by their bravery, whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat (6) and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin.
I cannot part with the subject of India without some concluding remarks.
The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked...
The devastating effects of English industry, when contemplated with regard to India, a country as vast as Europe and containing 150 million acres, are palpable and confounding. But we must not forget that they are only the organic results of the whole system of production as it is now constituted. That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world - on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.
- MARX, New York Tribune (1853)
The present state of affairs in Asia suggests the inquiry, What is the real value of their Indian dominion to the British nation and people? Directly, that is in the shape of tribute, or surplus of Indian receipts over Indian expenditures, nothing whatever reaches the British Treasury. On the contrary, the annual outgo is very large. From the moment that the East India Company entered extensively on the career of conquest - now just about a century ago - their finances fell into an embarrassed condition, and they were repeatedly compelled to apply to Parliament, not only for military aid to assist them in holding the conquered territories, but for financial aid to save them from bankruptcy. And so things have continued down to the present moment, at which so large a call is made for troops on the British nation, to be followed, no doubt, by corresponding calls for money. In prosecuting its conquests hitherto, and building up its establishments, the East India Company has contracted a debt of upward of £50,000,000 sterling, while the British Government has been at the expense, for years past, of transporting to and from and keeping up in India, in addition to the forces, native and European, of the East India Company, a standing army of 30 thousand men. Such being the case, it is evident that the advantage to Great Britain from her Indian Empire must be limited to the profits and benefits which accrue to individual British subjects. These profits and benefits, it must be confessed, are very considerable.
First, we have the stockholders in the East India Company, to the number of about 3,000 persons, to whom under the recent Charter there is guaranteed, upon a paid-up capital of six million pounds sterling, an annual dividend of I 0.5 per cent, amounting to £630,000 annually. As the East India stock is held in transferable shares, anybody may become a stockholder who has money enough to buy the stock, which, under the existing Charter, commands a premium of from 125 to 150 per cent. Stock to the amount of £500, costing, say $6,000, entitles the holder to speak at the proprietors' meetings, but to vote he must have £1,000 of stock. Holders of £3,000 have two votes, of £6,000 three votes, and of £10,000 or upward four votes. The proprietors, however have but little voice, except in the election of the Board of Directors, of whom they choose 12, while the Crown appoints six; but these appointees of the Crown must be qualified by having resided for ten years or more in India. One-third of the Directors go out of office each year, but may be reelected or reappointed. To be a Director, one must be a proprietor of £2,000 of stock. The Directors have a salary of £500 each, and their Chairman and Deputy Chairman twice as much; but the chief inducement to accept the office is the great patronage attached to it in the appointment of all Indian officers, civil and military-a patronage, however, largely shared, and, as to the most important offices, engrossed substantially, by the Board of Control. This Board consists of six members, all Privy Councillors, and in general two or three of them Cabinet Ministers -the President of the Board being always so, in fact a Secretary of State for India...
Here are about 10,000 British subjects holding lucrative situations in India, and drawing their pay from the Indian service. To these must be added a considerable number living in England, whither they have retired upon pensions, which in all the services are payable after serving a certain number of years. These pensions, with the dividends and interest on debts due in England, consume some 15 to 20 million dollars drawn annually from India, and which may in fact be regarded as so much tribute paid to the English Government indirectly through its subjects. Those who annually retire from the several services carry with them very considerable amounts of savings from their salaries, which is so much more added to the annual drain on India.
Besides those Europeans actually employed in the service of the Government, there are other European residents in India to the number of 6,000 or more, employed in trade or private speculation. Except a few indigo, sugar and coffee planters in the rural districts, they are principally merchants, agents and manufacturers, who reside in the cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, or their immediate vicinity. The foreign trade of India, including imports and exports to the amount of about 50 million dollars of each, is almost entirely in their hands, and their profits are no doubt very considerable.
It is thus evident that individuals gain largely by the English connection with India, and of course their gain goes to increase the sum of English national wealth. But against all this a very large offset is to be made. The military and naval expenses paid out of the pockets of the people of England on Indian account have been constantly increasing with the extent of the Indian dominion. To this must be added the expense of Burmese, Afghan, Chinese and Persian wars. In fact, the whole cost of the late Russian war may fairly be charged to the Indian account, since the fear and dread of Russia, which led to that war, grew entirely out of jealousy as to her designs on India. Add to this the career of endless conquest and perpetual aggression in which the English are involved by the possession of India, and it may well be doubted whether, on the whole, this dominion does not threaten to cost quite as much as it can ever be expected to come to.
- MARX, New York Tribune (1857)
[6]
REVOLUTIONARY SPAIN
The revolution in Spain has now so far taken on the appearance of a permanent condition that, as our correspondent at London has informed us, the wealthy and conservative classes have begun to emigrate and to seek security in France. This is not surprising; Spain has never adopted the modern French fashion, so generally in vogue in 1848, of beginning and accomplishing a revolution in three days. Her efforts in that line are complex and more prolonged. Three years seems to be the shortest limit to which she restricts herself, while her revolutionary cycle sometimes expands to nine. Thus her first revolution in the present century extended from 1808 to 1814; the second from 1820 to 1823; and the third from 1834 to 1843. How long the present one will continue, or in what it will result, it is impossible for the keenest politician to foretell; but it is not too much to say that there is no other part of Europe, not even Turkey and the Russian war, which offers so profound an interest to the thoughtful observer, as does Spain at this instant...
But how are we to account for the singular phenomenon that, after almost three centuries of a Hapsburg dynasty, followed by a Bourbon dynasty - either of them quite sufficient to crush a people - the municipal liberties of Spain more or less survive? that in the very country, where of all the feudal states absolute monarchy first arose in its most unmitigated form, centralization has never succeeded in taking root? The answer is not difficult. It was in the 16th century that were formed the great monarchies which established themselves everywhere on the downfall of the conflicting feudal classes- the aristocracy and the towns. But in the other great States of Europe absolute monarchy presents itself as a civilizing center, as the initiator of social unity. There it was the laboratory, in which the various elements of society were so mixed and worked, as to allow the towns to change the local independence and sovereignty of the Middle Ages for the general rule of the middle classes, and the common sway of civil society. In Spain, on the contrary, while the aristocracy sunk into degradation without losing their worst privilege, the towns lost their medieval power without gaining modern importance.
Since the establishment of absolute monarchy they have vegetated in a state of continuous decay. We have not here to state the circumstances, political or economical, which destroyed Spanish commerce, industry, navigation and agriculture. For the present purpose it is sufficient to simply recall the fact. As the commercial and industrial life of the towns declined, internal exchanges became rare, the mingling of the inhabitants of different provinces less frequent, the means of communication neglected, and the great roads gradually deserted. Thus the local life of Spain, the independence of its provinces and communes, the diversified state of society originally based on the physical configuration of the country, and historically developed by the detached manner in which the several provinces emancipated themselves from the Moorish rule, and formed little independent commonwealths - was now finally strengthened and confirmed by the economical revolution which dried up the sources of national activity. And while the absolute monarchy found in Spain material in its very nature repulsive to centralization, it did all in its power to prevent the growth of common interests arising out of a national division of labor and the multiplicity of internal exchanges - the very basis on which alone a uniform system of administration and the rule of general laws can be created. Thus the absolute monarchy in Spain, bearing but a superficial resemblance to the absolute monarchies of Europe in general, is rather to be ranged in a class with Asiatic forms of government. Spain, like Turkey, remained an agglomeration of mismanaged republics with a nominal sovereign at their head. Despotism changed character in the different provinces with the arbitrary interpretation of the general laws by viceroys and governors; but despotic as was the government it did not prevent the provinces from subsisting with different laws and customs, different coins, military banners of different colors, and with their respective systems of taxation. The oriental despotism attacks municipal self-government only when opposed to its direct interests, but is very glad to allow those institutions to continue so long as they take off its shoulders the duty of doing something and spare it the trouble of regular administration.
Thus it happened that Napoleon, who, like all his contemporaries, considered Spain as an inanimate corpse, was fatally surprised at the discovery that when the Spanish State was dead, Spanish society was full of life, and every part of it overflowing with powers of resistance. By the treaty of Fontainebleau he had got his troops to Madrid; by alluring the royal family into an interview at Bayonne he had forced Carlos IV to retract his abdication, and then to make over to him his dominions; and he had intimidated Ferdinand VII into a similar declaration. Carlos IV, his Queen and the Prince of Peace conveyed to Compiègne, Ferdinand VII and his brothers imprisoned in the castle of Valençay, Bonaparte conferred the throne of Spain on his brother Joseph, assembled a Spanish junta at Bayonne, and provided them with one of his ready-made constitutions. Seeing nothing alive in the Spanish monarchy except the miserable dynasty which he had safely locked up, he felt quite sure of this confiscation of Spain. But, only a few days after his coup de main, he received the news of an insurrection at Madrid. Murat, it is true, quelled that tumult by killing about 1 ,000 people; but when this massacre became known, an insurrection broke out in Asturias, and soon afterward embraced the whole monarchy. It is to be remarked that this first spontaneous rising originated with the people, while the "better" classes had quietly submitted to the foreign yoke.
Thus it is that Spain was prepared for her more recent revolutionary career, and launched into the struggles which have marked her development in the present century. The facts and influences we have thus succinctly detailed still act in forming her destinies and directing the impulses of her people. We have presented them as necessary not only to an appreciation of the present crisis, but of all she has done and suffered since the Napoleonic usurpation - a period now of nearly 50 years - not without tragic episodes and heroic efforts - indeed, one of the most touching and instructive chapters in all modern history.
- MARX, New York Tribune (1854)
[7]
THE UNITED STATES: THE CIVIL WAR
A. JOHN BROWN: AMERICAN SLAVES AND RUSSIAN SERFS
In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia...
I have just seen in the Tribune that there has been a fresh rising of slaves in Missouri, naturally suppressed. But the signal has now been given. If things get serious by and by, what will then become of Manchester?
- MARX, Letter to Engels (1860)
Your opinion of the significance of the slave movement in America and Russia is now confirmed. The Harpers Ferry affair with its aftermath in Missouri bears its fruit; the free Negroes in the South are everywhere hunted out of the states, and I have just read in the first New York cotton report (W.P. Wright and Co., January 10, 1860) that the planters have hurried their cotton on to the ports in order to guard against any probable consequences arising out of the Harpers Ferry affair.
- ENGELS, Letter to Marx (1860)
C. CONTROL OF WASHINGTON: THE MILITARY OBJECTIVE
Unfortunately, I have not collected any newspapers on the American War, and many places, likewise, are not to be found on the map. The main thing is this:
The South had prepared in secret for years, but particularly since the excitement of the presidential election; through the treason of Buchanan's ministers it had obtained money and arms en masse at the last moment. Till March 4, therefore, the North was completely paralyzed. Even up to the fall of Sumter Lincoln did nothing or could do nothing but concentrate somewhat more and put in somewhat better trim the few troops of the line (18,000 men in all, mostly dispersed in the West against the Indians). Now, after the attack on Sumter, the North was at length sufficiently aroused to reduce all opposition outbursts to silence and thereby to make possible a powerful military action. Seventy-five thousand men were raised, who may now be on the move, but ten times this number seem to have offered themselves, and there may now be as many as 100,000 men on the move, though not yet concentrated by a long way. A further levy by Lincoln is daily expected and will require less time, since everything is now better prepared. The 75,000 men, or rather that part of them which is stationed in the neighborhood of Washington, on the Ohio opposite Kentucky and at St. Louis in Missouri (not counting, therefore, the reserves in Ohio and Pennsylvania), have been sufficient to restore for the present the equilibrium between the forces of the North and South on the line of the Potomac and even to permit for the moment the offensive of the North over a short distance.
The first objective of both the South and the North was Washington. The offensive of the South against it was far too weak; beyond Richmond the main force appears to have been no longer strong enough for a timely blow. The only thing that was achieved was the dispatch of a mobile column to Harpers Ferry on the Potomac, above Washington. This position is eminently suitable for an offensive against the North (Maryland and Pennsylvania); it lies at the confluence of the Shenandoah, an important river, and the Potomac, is tactically of great strength and completely dominates both streams. The Federal arsenal seems to have been placed there not unintentionally by a government that foresaw and favored a future secession. The occupation of Harpers Ferry interrupts the domination of the Potomac line by the Union troops at a sensitive spot and gives the Southern troops, in the event of their advancing in numbers as far as this line, complete command of both banks forthwith.
On the holding of Washington by the North hung the fate of Maryland and Delaware; cut off from the South, occupied by Union troops, they fell at once to the Union. Second success of the Union.
The reconquest of Missouri by the Germans of St. Louis was the third success, and is of enormous importance, since the possession of St. Louis bars the Mississippi. How far the neutrality of Kentucky is favorable to the North or South will presumably depend on circumstances and events. At any rate, it restricts the theater of war for the present to the territory lying to the west.
Result: After all the preparations of the South, then, it has accomplished nothing more than that the North, with only one month's preparation, has already conquered from it the capital of the country and three slave states, and a fourth slave state does not dare to secede; that the Southern offensive has come to a halt at the Potomac, and the North has already moved across this river, so far without meeting resistance. For every additional man that the South can now put in the field, the North will put three to four. The states that have seceded have about 7,500,000 inhabitants, of whom more than 3,000,000 are slaves; 1,000,000 whites, at least, must be deducted for watching over the slaves, so that barely two and a half million remain to form the mass of the population available for war. If ten per cent of these are raised - the strongest force, I should say, that has ever been raised for defense - that gives, at most, 250,000 men. But so many will not be got together. Switzerland, with nearly the same population - rather more than two million - has about 160,000 militiamen on paper. The North, on the other hand, counting the free states only, numbers 20,000,000, who are all available, with the exception, perhaps, of California, U tab and the remotest Western territories. Let us say there is an available population of 17,000,000, and let us take not ten per cent of these, but only its third part, 3.3 per cent, as available for a war of offense, then that gives over 500,000 men, more than sufficient to overwhelm the South, despite its utmost efforts. As far as the relationship, man to man, is concerned, there is no question that physically and morally the people of the North are considerably superior to those of the South. The combativeness of the Southerner is combined to an appreciable extent with the cowardice of the assassin. Every man goes about armed, but only to be able to down his adversary in a quarrel before the latter expects the attack. That is on the average... [The remainder of the letter is missing].
- ENGELS, Letter to Marx (1861)
D. HOW THE ENGLISH PRESS DISTORTS THE SLAVERY ISSUE
For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have reiterated the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathizing with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North. Qui s'excuse s'accuse [he who excuses himself accuses himself].
In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between The North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North, does it not remain a vain endeavor to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not the separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and assure to it, with its 20 million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development? Accordingly must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to put it down by a bloody and futile civil war?
Point by point we will probe the plaidoyer [defense counsel's pleas] of the English press.
The war between North and South - so runs the first excuse is a mere tariff war, a war between a protection system and a free trade system, and England naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labor in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war...
But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the maintenance of the Union by force. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike 15 stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different, if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as, among others, The Saturday Review categorically declares, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.
It is above all to be remembered that the war did not emanate from the North, but from the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on, while the secessionists appropriated to themselves the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a sensational act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11, 1861, their General Beauregard had learnt in a parley with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the place in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: "No man can say where the war opened today will end". At the same time he prophesied "that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy would wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston". Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln summoned 75,000 men to the protection of the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out, namely, the summoning of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.
The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress, that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of the Washingtons and Jeffersons was that now for the first time slavery was recognized as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the 18th century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time...
Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1 860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, it was telegraphed from South Carolina: "Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact"; on November I O the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 15 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was fixed to take secession into consideration...
The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Frémont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes that were cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the Northwest. I n their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans repeated their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatized. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonization.
The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all confined to the limits of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual extension of slavery beyond their old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.
The cultivation of the Southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, that requires only simple labor. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labor, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raised slaves in order to export these slaves into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has for years been almost completely stationary in consequence of the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina is already transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the states of the extreme South and Southwest for four million dollars yearly. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, in order that one section of the slave-holders may equip new, fertile landed estates with slaves and in order that by this means a new market for slave-raising, therefore, for the sale of slaves, may be created for the section left behind it. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would long ago p.ave been wiped out. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, has strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In fifteen years more," said he, "without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves".
As is known, the representation of the individual states in Congress depends, for the House of Representatives, on the number of persons constituting their respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of the Northern Representatives was bound very rapidly to overtake that of the Southern. The real seat of the political power of the South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, be its population great or small, is represented by two Senators. In order to maintain its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave. states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slave-holders admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone put a balance of power into the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly justified.
Finally, the number of actual slave-holders in she South of the Union does not amount to more than 300,000, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers constantly grow through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these "poor whites" with those of the slave-holders, to give their turbulent longings for deeds a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slave-holders themselves.
A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slave-holding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the side of the "poor whites". With the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slave-holders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to the open struggle between North and South. Meanwhile, this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp...
The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question: Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated or not, but whether the 20 million free men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slave-holders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be planting-places for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed propaganda of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device. In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the North must sanction secession as the most favorable and only possible solution of the conflict.
- MARX, Die Presse (1861)
E. PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND GENERAL McCLELLAN
President Lincoln never ventures a step forward before the tide of circumstances and the call of general public opinion forbids further delay. But once "old Abe" has convinced himself that such a turning point has been reached, he then surprises friend and foe alike by a sudden operation executed as noiselessly as possible. Thus, in the most unassuming manner, he has quite recently carried out a coup that half a year earlier would possibly have cost him his presidential office and even a few months ago would have called forth a storm of debate. We mean the removal of McClellan from his post of Commander-in-Chief of all the Union armies.
- MARX, The Civil War in the United States (1861)
F. "THE SECESSIONIST CONSPIRACY", A WAR WITHOUT PARALLEL
From whatever standpoint one regards it, the American Civil War presents a spectacle without parallel in the annals of military history. The vast extent of the disputed territory; the far-flung front of the lines of operation; the numerical strength of the hostile armies, the creation of which drew barely any support from a prior organizational basis; the fabulous costs of these armies; the manner of leading them and the general tactical and strategical principles in accordance with which the war is waged, are all new in the eyes of the European onlooker.
The secessionist conspiracy, organized, patronized and supported long before its outbreak by Buchanan's administration, gave the South an advantage, by which alone it could hope to achieve its aim. Endangered by its slave population and by a strong Unionist element among the whites themselves, with a number of free men two-thirds smaller than the North, but readier to attack, thanks to the multitude of adventurous idlers that it harbors - for the South everything depended on a swift, bold, almost foolhardy offensive. If the Southerners succeeded in taking St. Louis, Cincinnati, Washington, Baltimore and perhaps Philadelphia, they might then count on a panic, during which diplomacy and bribery could secure recognition of the independence of all the slave states. If this first onslaught failed, at least at the decisive points, their position must then become daily worse, simultaneously with the development of the strength of the North. This point was rightly understood by the men who in truly Bonapanist spirit had organized the secessionist conspiracy. They opened the campaign in corresponding manner. Their bands of adventurers overran Missouri and Tennessee, while their more regular troops invaded east Virginia and prepared a coup de main against Washington. With the miscarriage of this coup, the Southern campaign was, from the military standpoint, lost.
The North came to the theater of war reluctantly, sleepily, as was to be expected with its higher industrial and commercial development. The social machinery was here far more complicated than in the South, and it required far more time to give its motion this unwanted direction. The enlistment of the volunteers for three months was a great, but perhaps unavoidable mistake. It was the policy of the North to remain on the defensive in the beginning at all decisive points, to organize its forces, to train them through operations on a small scale and without the risk of decisive battles, and as soon as the organization was sufficiently strengthened and the traitorous element simultaneously more or less removed from the army, to pass finally to an energetic, unflagging offensive and, above all, to reconquer Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina. The transformation of the civilians into soldiers was bound to take more time in the North than in the South. Once effected, one could count on the individual superiority of the Northern man...
The six months' respite that followed the defeat of Manassas was utilized by the North better than by the South. Not only were the Northern ranks recruited in greater measure than the Southern. Their officers received better instructions; the discipline and training of the troops did not encounter the same obstacles as in the South. Traitors and incompetent interlopers were more and more removed, and the period of the Bull Run panic already belongs to the past. The armies on both sides are naturally not to be measured by the standard of great European armies or even of the former regular army of the United States. Napoleon could in fact drill battalions of raw recruits in the depots during the first month, have them on the march during the second and during the third lead them against the foe; but then every battalion received a sufficient stiffening of officers and non-commissioned officers, every company some old soldiers and on the day of the battle the new troops were brigaded together with veterans and, so to speak, framed by the latter. All these conditions were lacking in America. Without the considerable mass of military experience that emigrated to America in consequence of the European revolutionary commotions of 1848-1849, the organization of the Union Army would have required a much longer time still.
- MARX, Die Presse (1862)
G. FROM "CONSTITUTIONAL", TO "REVOLUTIONARY" WAR
At the present moment, when secession's stocks are rising, the spokesmen of the border states increase their claims. However, Lincoln's appeal to them shows, where it threatens them with inundation by the Abolition party, that things are taking a revolutionary turn. Lincoln knows what Europe does not know, that it is by no means apathy or giving way under pressure of defeat that causes his demand for 300,000 recruits to meet with such a cold response. New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to enforce a revolutionary waging of war on the government and to inscribe the battle slogan of "Abolition of Slavery!" on the star-spangled banner. Lincoln yields only hesitantly and uneasily to this pressure from without, but knows that he is incapable of offering resistance to it for long. Hence his fervent appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under the conditions of a favorable contract. He knows that it is only the continuance of slavery in the border states that has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the "loyal" slave-holders are to be moved by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.
So far we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War - the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.
Meanwhile, during its first session the Congress, which has now adjourned, has decreed a series of important measures that we will briefly summarize here.
Apart from its financial legislation, it has passed the Homestead Bill that the Northern popular masses had long striven for in vain; by this a part of the state lands is given gratis for cultivation to the colonists, whether American born or immigrants. It has abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and the national capital, with monetary compensation for the former slave-holders. Slavery has been declared "forever impossible" in all the Territories of the United States. The Act under which the new State of West Virginia is taken into the Union prescribes abolition of slavery by stages and declares all Negro children born after July 4, 1863, to be born free. The conditions of this emancipation by stages are on the whole borrowed from the law that was enacted 70 years ago in Pennsylvania for the same purpose. By a fourth Act all slaves of rebels are to be emancipated as soon as they fall into the hands of the republican army. Another law, which is now being put into effect for the first time, provides that these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organized and sent into the field against the South. The independence of the Negro republics of Liberia and Haiti has been recognized and, finally, a treaty for the abolition of the slave trade has been conducted with England.
Thus, however the dice may fall in the fortunes of battle, it can now safely be said that Negro slavery will not long outlive the Civil War.
- MARX, Die Presse (1862)
Your war over there is one of the most imposing experiences one can ever live through. Despite the numerous blunders committed by the Northern armies (and the South has committed its share), the conquering wave is slowly but surely rolling on, and the time must come in 1865 when the organized resistance of the South will suddenly fold up like a pocketknife, and the war will degenerate into banditry, as was the case in the Carlist War in Spain and, more recently in Naples. A people's war of this sort, on both sides, is unprecedented ever since the establishment of powerful states; its outcome will doubtless determine the future of America for hundreds of years to come. As soon as slavery - the greatest of obstacles to the political and social development of the United States - has been smashed, the country will experience a boom that will very soon assure it an altogether different place in the history of the world, and the army and navy created during the war will then soon find employment.
Moreover, it is easy to see why the North found it hard to create an army and generals. From the start the Southern oligarchy placed the country's small armed forces under its own control- it supplied the officers and also robbed the arsenals. The North was left without any military cadres, except for the militia, while the South had been preparing over the course of several years. From the outset the South had available a population accustomed to the saddle for use as light cavalry, while the North lagged behind in this respect. The North adopted the method, introduced by the South, of allotting posts to adherents of a certain party; the South, engulfed in a revolution and under the rule of a military dictatorship, was able to disregard this. Hence all the blunders. I do not deny that Lee is better than all the generals of the North and that his latest campaigns around the fortified Richmond encampment are masterpieces, from which the glorious Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia could learn a great deal. But the resolute attacks of Grant and Sherman finally rendered all this strategy useless.
It is obvious that Grant is sacrificing an enormous number of men - but could he have acted otherwise? I haven't the slightest idea of the state of discipline of your army, its steadfastness under fire, its capacity and readiness to endure hardships, and in particular, its morale, i.e., what can be demanded of it without risking demoralization. One must know all that before venturing a judgment, especially if one is on the other side of the ocean, without adequate information, and without any decent maps. But it seems to me certain that the army now commanded by Sherman is the best of your armies, as superior to Hood's army as Lee's army is to Grant's.
- ENGELS, Letter to Weydemeyer (1864)
I. LETTER TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN
Address of the International Working-Men's Association
to Abraham Lincoln (7)
To Abraham Lincoln,
President of the United States of America.
Sir: - We congratulate the American people upon your reelection by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your reelection is, Death to Slavery.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave-holders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the Rights of Man issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the 18th century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old Constitution", and maintained "slavery to be a beneficent institution, indeed the only solution of the great problem of the relation of labor to capital", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice"; then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slave-holders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention, importunities of their "betters", and from most parts of Europe contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the workingmen, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come, that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
- MARX, Die Presse (1865)
J. MARX AND ENGELS ON PRESIDENT JOHNSON
Johnson's policy disquiets me. Ridiculous affectation of severity against single persons; up to the present extremely vacillating and weak in substance. The reaction has already begun in America and will soon be greatly strengthened, if the hitherto prevailing slackness does not quickly cease.
- MARX
I, too, like Mr. Johnson's policy less and less. His hatred of Negroes comes out more and more violently, while as against the old lords of the South he lets all power go out of his hands. If things go on like this, in six months all the old villains of secession will be sitting in Congress at Washington. Without colored suffrage nothing whatever can be done there, and J[ohnson] leaves it to the vanquished, the ex-slaveholders, to decide upon this matter. It is too absurd. However, one must certainly reckon with things developing differently from what Messrs. the Barons imagine. The majority of them are surely totally ruined and will be glad to sell land to migrants and speculators from the North. These will come soon enough and change many things. The poor whites, I think, will gradually die out. With this stock there is nothing more to be done; what is left after two generations will merge with the migrants into a stock entirely different. The Negroes will probably become small squatters as in Jamaica. So that finally, indeed, the oligarchy goes down, but the process could now be brought to a speedy conclusion on the spot at one time, whilst, as it is, it becomes long drawn out.
- ENGELS
- MARX, Letter To Engels, ENGELS, Letter To Marx (1865)
[8]
THE UNITED STATES: POLITICS AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
A. CLOSE OF THE CIVIL WAR BRINGS A NEW ERA
Fellow Workmen:
In the inaugural address of our association we said: "It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England that saved the West of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic". It is now your turn to prevent a war whose direct result would be to throw back, for an indefinite period, the rising labor movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
We need hardly tell you that there are European powers anxiously engaged in fomenting a war between the United States and England. A glance at the statistics of commerce shows that the Russian export of raw products - and Russia has nothing else to export - was giving way to American competition when the Civil War tipped the scales. To turn the American ploughshare into a sword would at this time save from impending bankruptcy a power whom your republican statesmen in their wisdom had chosen for their confidential adviser. But disregarding the particular interests of this or that government, is it not in the general interest of our oppressors to disturb by a war the movement of rapidly extending international cooperation?
In our congratulatory address to Mr. Lincoln on the occasion of his re-election to the Presidency we expressed it as our conviction that the Civil War would prove to be as important to the progress of the working class as the War of Independence has been to the elevation of the middle class. And the successful close of the war against slavery has indeed inaugurated a new era in the annals of the working class. In the United States itself an independent labor movement has since arisen which the old parties and the professional politicians view with distrust. But to bear fruit it needs years of peace. To suppress it, a war between the United States and England would be the sure means.
The immediate tangible result of the Civil War was of course a deterioration of the condition of the American workingmen. Both in the United States and in Europe the colossal burden of a public debt was shifted from hand to hand in order to settle it upon the shoulders of the working class. The prices of necessaries, remarks one of your statesmen, have risen 78 per cent since 1860, while the wages of simple manual labor have risen 50 and those of skilled labor 60 per cent. "Pauperism", he complains, "is increasing in America more rapidly than population". Moreover the sufferings of the working class are in glaring contrast to the newfangled luxury of financial aristocrats, shoddy aristocrats, and other vermin bred by war. Still the Civil War offered a compensation in the liberation of the slaves and the impulse which it thereby gave to your own class movement. Another war, not sanctified by a sublime aim or a social necessity but like the wars of the Old World, would forge chains for the free workingmen instead of sundering those of the slave. The accumulated misery which it would leave in its wake would furnish your capitalists at once with the motive and the means of separating the working class from their courageous and just aspirations by the soulless sword of a standing army. Yours, then, is the glorious task of seeing to it that at last the working class shall enter upon the scene of history, no longer as a servile following, but as an independent power, as a power imbued with a sense of its responsibility and capable of commanding peace where their would-be masters cry war.
- MARX, Address of the International Working Men's Association to the National Labor Union (1869) (8)
B. POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES
Nowhere do "politicians" form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.
It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends - and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.
- ENGELS, "Introduction", Marx's The Civil War in France (1891)
C. PRIVILEGED POSITION OF THE NATIVE-BORN WORKING CLASS
Your great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native-born workers. Up to 1848 one could speak of a permanent native-born working class only as an exception. The small beginnings of one in the cities in the East still could always hope to become farmers or bourgeois. Now such a class has developed and has also organized itself on trade union lines to a great extent. But it still occupies an aristocratic position and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants, only a small portion of whom enter the aristocratic trade unions. But these immigrants are divided into different nationalities, which understand neither one another nor, for the most part, the language of the country. And your bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian government how to play off one nationality against the other: Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and each one against the other, so that differences in workers' standards of living exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard of elsewhere. And added to this is the complete indifference of a society that has grown up on a purely capitalist basis, without any easygoing feudal background, toward the human lives that perish in the competitive struggle...
In such a country continually renewed waves of advance, followed by equally certain setbacks, are inevitable. Only the advances always become more powerful, the setbacks less paralyzing, and on the whole the cause does move forward. But this I consider certain: the purely bourgeois foundation, with no pre-bourgeois swindle back of it, the corresponding colossal energy of development, which is displayed even in the mad exaggeration of the present protective tariff system, will one day bring about a change that will astound the whole world. Once the Americans get started, it will be with an energy and impetuousness compared with which we in Europe shall be mere children.
- ENGELS, Letter to Schlüter (1892)
D. "THE AMERICANS CANNOT DISCOUNT THEIR FUTURE"
Here in old Europe things are somewhat livelier than in your "youthful" country, which still doesn't quite want to get out of its hobbledehoy stage. It is remarkable, but quite natural, how firmly rooted are bourgeois prejudices even in the working class in such a young country, which has never known feudalism and has grown up on a bourgeois basis from the beginning. Out of his very opposition to the mother country - which is still clothed in its feudal disguise - the American worker also imagines that the traditionally inherited bourgeois regime is something progressive and superior by nature and for all time, a non plus ultra [not to be surpassed]. Just as in New England, Puritanism, the reason for the whole colony's existence, has become for this very reason a traditional heirloom and almost inseparable from local patriotism. The Americans may strain and struggle as much as they like, but they cannot discount their future - colossally great as it is - all at once like a bill of exchange; they must wait for the date on which it falls due; and just because their future is so great, their present must occupy itself mainly with preparatory work for the future, and this work, as in every young country, is of a predominantly material nature and involves a certain backwardness of thought, a clinging to the traditions connected with the foundation of the new nationality...
Only great events can be of assistance here, and if, added to the more or less completed transfer of the public lands to private ownership, there now comes the expansion of industry under a less insane tariff policy and the conquest of foreign markets, it may go well with you, too. The class struggles here in England, too, were more turbulent during the period of development of large-scale industry and died down just in the period of England's undisputed industrial domination of the world. In Germany, too, the development of large-scale industry since 1850 coincides with the rise of the Socialist movement, and it will be no different, probably, in America. It is the revolutionizing of all established conditions by industry as it develops that also revolutionizes people's minds.
Moreover, the Americans have for a long time been providing the European world with the proof that the bourgeois republic is the republic of capitalist businessmen, in which politics are a business deal like any other...
- ENGELS, Letter to Sorge (1892)
E. DOGMATIC MARXISM AND THE HENRY GEORGE BOOM
The Henry George boom has of course brought to light a colossal mass of fraud, and I am glad I was not there. But in spite of it all it was an epoch-making day. The Germans [living in America] have not understood how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses in motion; they do not understand the theory themselves for the most part and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic way as something that has to be learned by heart, which then will satisfy all requirements forthwith. To them it is a credo and not a guide to action. What is more, they learn no English on principle. Hence the American masses had to seek out their own path and seem to have found it for the time being in the K[nights] of L[abor], whose confused principles and ludicrous organization seem to correspond to their own confusion. But from all I hear, the K. of L. are a real power, especially in New England and the West, and are becoming more so every day owing to the brutal opposition of the capitalists. I think it is necessary to work inside them, to form within this still quite plastic mass a core of people who understand the movement and its aims and will therefore take over the leadership, at least of a section, when the inevitably impending breakup of the present "order" takes place. The rottenest side of the K. of L. was their political neutrality, which has resulted in sheer trickery on the part of the Powderlys, etc.; but the edge of this has been taken off by the behavior of the masses in the November elections, especially in New York. The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, much more rapidly than we had a right to expect, and that is the main thing. That the first program of this party is still confused and extremely deficient, that it has raised the banner of Henry George, these are unavoidable evils but also merely transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can have the opportunity only when they have a movement of their own - no matter in what form so long as it is their own movement - in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn through their mistakes. The movement in America is at the same stage as it was with us before 1848, the really intelligent people there will first have to play the part played by the Communist League among the workers' associations before 1 848. Except that in America now things will proceed infinitely faster; for the movement to have gained such election successes after scarcely eight months of existence is wholly unprecedented. And what is still lacking will be set going by the bourgeoisie; nowhere in the whole world do they come out so shamelessly and tyrannically as over there, and your judges brilliantly outshine Bismarck's pettifoggers in the Reich. Where the bourgeoisie wages the struggle by such methods, the struggle comes to a decision rapidly, and if we in Europe do not hurry up the Americans will soon outdistance us. But just now it is doubly necessary to have a few people on our side there who are thoroughly versed in theory and well-tested tactics and can also speak and write English; because, for good historical reasons, the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical questions, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe, they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short, every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for stupefying the masses. If there are people at hand there whose minds are theoretically clear, who can tell them the consequences of their own mistakes beforehand and make clear to them that every movement which does not keep the destruction of the wage system constantly in view as the final goal is bound to go astray and fail-then much nonsense can be avoided and the process considerably shortened. But it must be done in English; the specific German character must be laid aside, and for that the gentlemen of the Sozialist hardly have the qualifications, while those of the Volkszeitung are cleverer only where business is involved.
In Europe the effect of the American elections in November was tremendous. That England, and America in particular, had no labor movement up to now was the big trump card of the radical republicans everywhere, especially in France. Now these gentlemen have been utterly contradicted; on November 2nd the whole foundation, especially of Mr. Clemenceau's policy, collapsed. "Look at America", was his eternal motto; "where there is a real republic, there is no poverty and no labor movement!" And the same thing is happening to the liberals and "democrats" in Germany and here - where they are also witnessing the beginning of their own movement. The very fact that the movement is so sharply accentuated as a labor movement and has sprung up so suddenly and forcefully has stunned the people completely.
- ENGELS, Letter to Sorge (1886)
F. DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORKING CLASS
There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to "retire" in early manhood from wage labor and to become farmers, dealers, or employers of labor, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are faster and faster passing from the hands of the nation and the states into those of private owners. The great safety valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary proletarians exists at this hour in America. A nation of 60 millions striving hard to become - and with every chance of success, too - the leading manufacturing nation of the world - such a nation cannot permanently import its own wage working class; not even if immigrants pour in at the rate of half a million a year. The tendency of the capitalist system toward the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage workers on the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native American wage workers, who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage working class as compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation of life-long wage toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level.
- ENGELS, "Appendix", The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
G. "THE AMERICAN WORKING-CLASS IS MOVING"
Whatever the mistakes and the Borniertheit [narrow-mindedness] of the leaders of the movement, and partly of the newly awakening masses too, one thing is certain: the American working class is moving, and no mistake. And after a few false starts, they will get into the right track soon enough. This appearance of the Americans upon the scene I consider one of the greatest events of the year.
What the downbreak of Russian Tsarism would be for the great military monarchies of Europe - the snapping of their mainstay - that is for the bourgeois of the whole world the breaking out of class war in America. For America after all is the ideal of all bourgeois: a country rich, vast, expanding, with purely bourgeois institutions unleavened by feudal remnants of monarchical traditions, and without a permanent and hereditary proletariat. Here every one could become, if not a capitalist, at all events an independent man, producing or trading, with his own means, for his own account. And because there were not, as yet, classes with opposing interests, our - and your - bourgeois thought that America stood above class antagonisms and struggles. That delusion has now broken down, the last Bourgeois Paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatorio, and can only be prevented from becoming, like Europe, an Inferno by the go-ahead pace at which the development of the newly fledged proletariat of America will take place. The way in which they have made their appearance on the scene is quite extraordinary: six months ago nobody suspected anything and now they appear all of a sudden in such organized masses as to strike terror into the whole capitalist class. I only wish Marx could have lived to see it!
- ENGELS, Letter to Mrs. Wischnewetsky (1886)
[9]
RUSSIA
A. ON MATURING REVOLUTIONARY CONDITIONS IN RUSSIA
This crisis [the Russo-Turkish war and Near Eastern crisis] is a new turning point in European history. Russia has long been standing on the threshold of an upheaval, all the elements of it are prepared - I have studied conditions there from the original Russian sources, unofficial and official (the latter only available to a few people but got for me through friends in Petersburg). The gallant Turks have hastened the explosion by years with the thrashing they have inflicted, not only upon the Russian army and Russian finances, but in a highly personal and individual manner on the dynasty commanding the army (the Tsar, the heir to the throne and six other Romanovs). The upheaval will begin secundum artem [according to the rules of the art] with some playing at constitutionalism and then there will be a fine row. If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavorable towards us we shall still live to see the fun! The stupid nonsense which the Russian students are perpetrating is only a symptom, worthless in itself. But it is a symptom. All sections of Russian society are in complete disintegration economically, morally and intellectually.
This time the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of counterrevolution.
- MARX, Letter to Sorge (1877)
B. RUSSIA ON THE EVE OF REVOLUTION
There is no doubt Russia is on the eve of a revolution. Her finances are in extreme disorder. Increasing taxation proves of no avail, the interest on old state loans is paid by means of new loans, and every new loan meets with greater difficulties; money can now only be raised under the pretext of building railways! The administration, as of old, corrupt from top to bottom, the officials living more from theft, bribery and extortion than from their salaries. The entire agricultural production - by far the most essential for Russia - thrown into complete disorder by the redemption settlement of 1861; the big landowners without sufficient labor, the peasants without sufficient land, oppressed by taxation and sucked dry by usurers, the yield from agriculture declining from year to year. The whole held together with great difficulty and only outwardly by an oriental despotism whose arbitrariness we in the West simply cannot imagine; a despotism which not only from day to day comes into more glaring contradiction with the views of the enlightened classes and in particular with those of the rapidly developing bourgeoisie of the capital cities, but which, under its present bearer, has lost faith in itself, one day making concessions to liberalism and the next canceling them again in terror, and thus bringing itself more and more into disrepute. With all that, a growing recognition among the enlightened strata of the nation concentrated in the capital that this position is untenable, that a revolution is imminent, and the illusion that it will be possible to guide this revolution into a smooth, constitutional channel. Here we have united all the conditions of a revolution, of a revolution which, possibly started by the upper classes of the capital, even perhaps by the government itself, must be rapidly carried further, beyond the first constitutional phase, by the peasants; of a revolution, which will be of the greatest importance for the whole of Europe if only because it will destroy at one blow the last, so far intact, reserve of the entire European reaction. This revolution is surely approaching. Only two events can delay it: a successful war against Turkey or Austria, for which money and firm alliances are necessary, or a premature attempt at insurrection which would drive the property-owning classes back into the arms of the government.
- ENGELS, On Social Conditions in Russia (1875)
C. THE DEVELOPING REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION IN RUSSIA
What I know or believe about the situation in Russia impels me to the opinion that the Russians are approaching their "1789". The revolution must break out there in a given time; it may break out there any day. In these circumstances the country is like a charged mine which only needs a fuse to be laid to it. Especially since March 13th (9). This is one of the exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful of people to make a revolution, i.e., with one small push to cause a whole system, which (to use a metaphor of Plekhanov's) is in more than labile equilibrium, to come crashing down, and thus by one action, in itself insignificant, to release uncontrollable explosive forces. Well now, if ever Blanquism - the fantasy of overturning an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy - had a certain justification for its existence, that is certainly in Petersburg. Once the spark has been put to the powder, once the forces have been released and national energy has been transformed from potential into kinetic energy (another favorite image of Plekhanov's and a very good one) - the people who laid the spark to the mine will be swept away by the explosion, which will be a thousand times as strong as themselves and which will seek its vent where it can, according as the economic forces and resistances determine.
Supposing these people imagine they can seize power, what does it matter? Provided they make the hole which will shatter the dyke, the flood itself will soon rob them of their illusions. But if by chance these illusions resulted in giving them a superior force of will, why complain of that? People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make. That is what Hegel calls the irony of history, an irony which few historic personalities escape. Look at Bismarck, the revolutionary against his will, and Gladstone who has ended in quarreling with his adored Tsar.
To me the most important thing is that the impulse should be given in Russia, that the revolution should break out. Whether this fraction or that fraction gives the signal, whether it happens under this flag or that flag matters little to me. If it were. a palace conspiracy it would b e swept away tomorrow. There where the position is so strained, where the revolutionary elements are accumulated to such a degree, where the economic situation of the enormous mass of the people becomes daily more impossible, where every stage of social development is represented, from the primitive commune to modern large-scale industry and high finance, and where all these contradictions are violently held together by an unexampled despotism, a despotism which is becoming more and more unbearable to the youth in whom the national worth and intelligence are united - there, when 1789 has once been launched, 1793 will not be long in following.
- ENGELS, Letter to Zasulich (1885)
D. RUSSIA, GERMANY AND WORLD WAR
A war, on the other hand, would throw us back for years. Chauvinism would swamp everything, for it would be a fight for existence. Germany would put about five million armed men into the field, or ten per cent of the population, the others about four to five per cent, Russia relatively less. But there would be from ten to 15 million combatants. I should like to see how they are to be fed; it would be a devastation like the Thirty Years' War. And no quick decision could be arrived at, despite the colossal fighting forces. For France is protected on the north-eastern and south-eastern frontiers by very extensive fortifications and the new constructions in Paris are a model. So it will last a long time, and Russia cannot be taken by storm either. If, therefore, everything goes according to Bismarck's desires, more will be demanded of the nation than ever before and it is possible enough that partial defeats and the dragging out of the decisive war would produce an internal upheaval. But if the Germans were defeated from the first or forced into a prolonged defensive, then the thing would certainly start.
If the war was fought out to the end without internal disturbances a state of exhaustion would supervene such as Europe has not experienced for 200 years. American industry would then conquer all along the line and would force us all up against the alternatives: either retrogression to nothing but agriculture for home consumption (American corn forbids anything else) or - social transformation. I imagine, therefore, that the plan is not to push things to extremities, to more than a sham war. But once the first shot is fired, control ceases, the horse can take the bit between its teeth.
- ENGELS, Letter to Sorge (1888)
E. CONSEQUENCES OF A WORLD WAR
And finally no war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extension and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will mutually massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done. The devastations of the Thirty Years' War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent; famine, pestilence, general demoralization both of the armies and of the mass of the people produced by acute distress; hopeless confusion of our artificial machinery in trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional state wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class. This is the prospect when the system of mutual outbidding in armaments, driven to extremities, at last bears its inevitable fruits. This, my lords, princes and statesmen, is where in your wisdom you have brought old Europe. And when nothing more remains to you but to open the last great war dance - that will suit us all right. The war may perhaps push us temporarily into the background, may wrench from us many a position already conquered. But when you have unfettered forces which you will then no longer be able again to control, things may go as they will: at the end of the tragedy you will be ruined and the victory of the proletariat will either be already achieved or at any rate inevitable.
- ENGELS, "Preface", S. Borkheim's In Memory of the Supreme German Patriots 1806-1807 (1889)
F. THE "MISSION" OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
We still have, in conclusion, to sum up on the question which in literature has come to be known as that of the "mission" of capitalism, i.e., of its historical role in the economic development of Russia. Recognition of the progressiveness of this role is quite compatible (as we have tried to show in detail at every stage in our exposition of the facts) with the full recognition of the negative and dark sides of capitalism, with the full recognition of the profound and all-sided social contradictions which are inevitably inherent in capitalism, and which reveal the historically transient character of this economic regime. It is the Narodniks - who exert every effort to make it appear that to admit that capitalism is historically progressive means to be an apologist of capitalism - who are at fault in underrating (and sometimes in even ignoring) the most profound contradictions of Russian capitalism, by glossing over the disintegration of the peasantry, the capitalist character of the evolution of our agriculture, and the rise of a class of rural and industrial allotment holding wage laborers, by glossing over the complete predominance of the lowest and worst forms of capitalism in the celebrated "kustar" industries.
The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labor, and the socialization of that labor. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy.
The development of the productive forces of social labor is to be observed in full relief only in the epoch of large-scale machine industry. Until that highest stage of capitalism was reached, there still remained hand production and primitive technique, which developed quite spontaneously and exceedingly slowly. The post-Reform epoch differs radically in this respect from previous epochs in Russian history. The Russia of the wooden plough and the flail, of the watermill and the handloom, began rapidly to be transformed into the Russia of the iron plough and the threshing machine, of the steam mill and the power loom. There is not a single branch of the national economy subordinate to capitalist production where an equally thorough transformation of technique is not to be observed. The process of this transformation cannot, by the very nature of capitalism, proceed except amid a series of unevennesses and disproportions: periods of prosperity alternate with periods of crisis; the development of one industry leads to the decline of another, the progress of agriculture covers one aspect of agriculture in one area, and another in another, the growth of trade and industry outstrips the growth of agriculture, etc. A whole number of the errors of Narodnik authors spring from their efforts to prove that this disproportionate, spasmodic, feverish development is not development.
Another feature of the development by capitalism of the social productive forces is that the growth of the means of production (productive consumption) outstrips by far the growth of personal consumption: we have indicated on more than one occasion how this is manifested in agriculture and in industry. This feature springs from the general laws of the realization of the product in capitalist society, and fully conforms to the antagonistic nature of this society.
The socialization of labor by capitalism is manifested in the following processes. Firstly, the very growth of commodity production destroys the scatteredness of small economic units, that is characteristic of natural economy, and draws together the small local markets into an enormous national (and then world) market. Production for oneself is transformed into production for the whole of society; and the higher capitalism is developed, the stronger becomes the contradiction between this collective character of production and the individual character of appropriation. Secondly, in place of the former scatteredness of production, capitalism creates an unprecedented concentration of it, both in agriculture and in industry. That is the most striking and outstanding, but not the only, manifestation of the feature of capitalism under review. Thirdly, capitalism ousts the forms of personal dependence that constituted an inalienable component of preceding systems of economy. In Russia, the progressive character of capitalism in this respect is particularly marked, since the personal dependence of the producer existed in our country (and partly continues to exist to this day) not only in agriculture but also in manufacturing industry ("factories" employing serf labor), in the mining and metallurgical industries, in the fishing industry, etc.
Compared with the labor of the dependent or bonded peasant, the labor of the freely hired worker is progressive in all branches of the national economy. Fourthly, capitalism necessarily creates mobility of the population, something not required by previous systems of social economy and impossible under them on anything like a large scale. Fifthly, capitalism constantly reduces the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture (where the most backward forms of social and economic relationships always prevail), and increases the number of large industrial centers. Sixthly, capitalist society increases the populations's need for association, for organization, and lends these organizations a character distinct from those of former times. While breaking down the narrow, local, social-estate associations of medieval society and creating fierce competition, capitalism at the same time splits the whole of society into large groups of persons occupying different positions in production, and gives a tremendous impetus to organization within each group. Seventhly, all the above-mentioned changes effected in the old economic system by capitalism inevitably lead also to a change in the mentality of the population. The spasmodic character of economic development, the rapid transformation of the methods of production and the enormous concentration of production, the disappearance of all forms of personal dependence and patriarchalism in relationships, the mobility of the population, the influence of the big industrial centers, etc. - all this cannot but lead to a profound change in the very character of the producers...
- LENIN, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899)
Today is the twelfth anniversary of "Bloody Sunday", which is rightly regarded as the beginning of the Russian revolution. Thousands of workers - not Social Democrats, but loyal god-fearing subjects -led by the priest Gapon, streamed from all parts of the capital to its center, to the square in front of the Winter Palace, to submit a petition to the tsar. The workers carried icons. In a letter to the tsar, their then leader, Gapon, had guaranteed his personal safety and asked him to appear before the people.
Troops were called out. Uhlans and Cossacks attacked the crowd with drawn swords. They fired on the unarmed workers, who on their bended knees implored the Cossacks to allow them to go to the tsar. Over 1,000 were killed and over 2,000 wounded on that day, according to police reports. The indignation of the workers was indescribable.
Such is the general picture of January 22, 1905 - "Bloody Sunday".
That you may understand more clearly the historic significance of this event, I shall quote a few passages from the workers' petition. It begins with the following words:
"We workers, inhabitants of St. Petersburg, have come to Thee. We are unfortunate, reviled slaves, weighed down by despotism and tyranny. Our patience exhausted, we ceased work and begged our masters to give us only that without which life is a torment. But this was refused; to the employers everything seemed unlawful. We are here,. many thousands of us. Like the whole of the Russian people, we have no human rights whatever. Owing to the deeds of Thy officials we have become slaves".
The petition contains the following demands: amnesty, civil liberties, fair wages, gradual transfer of the land to the people, convocation of a constituent assembly on the basis of universal and equal suffrage. It ends with the following words:
"Sire, do not refuse aid to Thy people! Demolish the wall that separates Thee from Thy people. Order and promise that our requests will be granted, and Thou wilt make Russia happy; if not, we are ready to die on this very spot. We have only two roads: freedom and happiness, or the grave".
Reading it now, this petition of uneducated, illiterate workers, led by a patriarchal priest, creates a strange impression. Involuntarily one compares this naive petition with the present peace resolutions of the social-pacifists, the would-be socialists who in reality are bourgeois phrase-mongers. The unenlightened workers of pre-revolutionary Russia did not know that the tsar was the head of the ruling class, the class, namely of big landowners, already bound by a thousand ties with the big bourgeoisie and prepared to defend their monopoly, privileges and profits by every means of violence. The social-pacifists of today, who pretend to be "highly educated" people - no joking - do not realize that it is just as foolish to expect a "democratic" peace from bourgeois governments that are waging an imperialist predatory war, as it was to believe that peaceful petitions would induce the bloody tsar to grant democratic reforms.
Nevertheless, there is a great difference between the two - the present-day social-pacifists are, to a large extent, hypocrites, who strive by gentle admonitions to divert the people from the revolutionary struggle, whereas the uneducated workers in pre-revolutionary Russia proved by their deeds that they were straightforward people awakened to political consciousness for the first time.
It is in this awakening of tremendous masses of the people to political consciousness and revolutionary struggle that the historic significance of January 22, 1905 lies.
"There is not yet a revolutionary people in Russia," wrote Mr. Pyotr Struve, then leader of the Russian liberals and publisher abroad of an illegal, uncensored organ, two days before "Bloody Sunday". The idea that an illiterate peasant country could produce a revolutionary people seemed utterly absurd to this "highly educated", supercilious and extremely stupid leader of the bourgeois reformists. So deep was the conviction of the reformists of those days - as of the reformists of today - that a real revolution was impossible!
Prior to January 22 (or January 9, old style), 1905, the revolutionary party of Russia consisted of a small group of people, and the reformists of those days (exactly like the reformists of today) derisively called us a "sect". Several hundred revolutionary organizers, several thousand members of local organizations, half a dozen revolutionary papers appearing not more frequently than once a month, published mainly abroad and smuggled into Russia with incredible difficulty and at the cost of many sacrifices - such were the revolutionary parties in Russia, and the revolutionary Social-Democracy in particular, prior to January 22, 1905. This circumstance gave the narrow-minded and overbearing reformists formal justification for their claim that there was not yet a revolutionary people in Russia.
Within a few months, however, the picture changed completely. The hundreds of revolutionary Social-Democrats "suddenly" grew into thousands; the thousands became the leaders of between two and three million proletarians. The proletarian struggle produced widespread ferment, often revolutionary movements among the peasant masses, 50 to 100 million strong; the peasant movement had its reverberations in the army and led to soldiers' revolts, to armed clashes between one section of the army and another. In this manner a colossal country, with a population of 130,000,000, went into the revolution; in this way, dormant Russia was transformed into a Russia of a revolutionary proletariat and a revolutionary people.
It is necessary to study this transformation, understand why it was possible, its methods and ways, so to speak.
The principal factor in this transformation was the mass strike. The peculiarity of the Russian revolution is that it was a bourgeois-democratic revolution in its social content, but a proletarian revolution in its methods of struggle. It was a bourgeois democratic revolution since its immediate aim, which it could achieve directly and with its own forces, was a democratic republic, the eight-hour day and confiscation of the immense estates of the nobility - all the measures the French bourgeois revolution in 1792-93 had almost completely achieved.
At the same time, the Russian revolution was also a proletarian revolution, not only in the sense that the proletariat was the leading force, the vanguard of the movement, but also in the sense that a specifically proletarian weapon of struggle - the strike - was the principal means of bringing the masses into motion and the most characteristic phenomenon in the wavelike rise of decisive events...
The history of the Russian revolution shows that it was the vanguard, the finest elements of the wage-workers, that fought with the greatest tenacity and the greatest devotion. The larger the mills and factories involved, the more stubborn were the strikes, and the more often did they recur during the year. The bigger the city, the more important was the part the proletariat played in the struggle. Three big cities, St. Petersburg, Riga and Warsaw, which have the largest and most class-conscious working- class element, show an immeasurably greater number of strikers, in relation to all workers, than any other city, and, of course, much greater than the rural districts...
A distinctive feature was the manner in which economic strikes were interwoven with political strikes during the revolution. There can be no doubt that only this very close link-up of the two forms of strike gave the movement its great power. The broad masses of the exploited could not have been drawn into the revolutionary movement had they not been given daily examples of how the wage-workers in the various industries were forcing the capitalists to grant immediate, direct improvements in their conditions. This struggle imbued the masses of the Russian people with a new spirit. Only then did the old serf-ridden, sluggish, patriarchal, pious and obedient Russia cast out the old Adam; only then did the Russian people obtain a really democratic and really revolutionary education.
When the bourgeois gentry and their uncritical echoers, the social-reformists, talk priggishly about the "education" of the masses, they usually mean something schoolmasterly, pedantic, something that demoralizes the masses and instils in them bourgeois prejudices.
The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will. That is why even reactionaries had to admit that the year 1905, the year of struggle, the "mad year", definitely buried patriarchal Russia...
The beginning of 1905 brought the first great wave of strikes that swept the entire country. As early as the spring of that year we see the rise of the first big, not only economic, but also political peasant movement in Russia. The importance of this historical turning-point will be appreciated if it is borne in mind that the Russian peasantry was liberated from the severest form of serfdom only in 1861, that the majority of the peasants are illiterate, that they live in indescribable poverty, oppressed by the landlords, deluded by the priests and isolated from each other by vast distances and an almost complete absence of roads.
Russia witnessed the first revolutionary movement against tsarism in 1825, a movement represented almost exclusively by noblemen. Thereafter and up to 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated by the terrorists, the movement was led by middle-class intellectuals. They displayed supreme self-sacrifice and astonished the whole world by the heroism of their terrorist methods of struggle. Their sacrifices were certainly not in vain. They doubtlessly contributed- directly or indirectly - to the subsequent revolutionary education of the Russian people. But they did not, and could not, achieve their immediate aim of generating a people's revolution.
That was achieved only by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Only the waves of mass strikes that swept over the whole country, strikes connected with the severe lessons of the imperialist Russo-Japanese War, roused the broad masses of peasants from their lethargy. The word "striker" acquired an entirely new meaning among the peasants: it signified a rebel, a revolutionary, a term previously expressed by the word "student". But the "student" belonged to the middle class, to the "learned", to the "gentry", and was therefore alien to the people. The "striker", on the other hand, was of the people; he belonged to the exploited class. Deported from St. Petersburg, he often returned to the village where he told his fellow-villagers of the conflagration which was spreading to all the cities and would destroy both the capitalists and the nobility. A new type appeared in the Russian village - the class-conscious young peasant. He associated with "strikers", he read newspapers, he told the peasants about events in the cities, explained to his fellow villagers the meaning of political demands, and urged them to fight the landowning nobility, the priests and the government officials.
The peasants would gather in groups to discuss their conditions, and gradually they were drawn into the struggle. Large crowds attacked the big estates, set fire to the manor-houses and appropriated supplies, seized grain and other foodstuffs, killed policemen and demanded transfer to the people of the huge estates.
In the spring of 1905, the peasant movement was only just beginning, involving only a minority, approximately one-seventh, of the uyezds [districts].
But the combination of the proletarian mass strikes in the cities with the peasant movement in the rural areas was sufficient to shake the "firmest" and last prop of tsarism. I refer to the army.
There began a series of mutinies in the navy and the army. During the revolution, every fresh wave of strikes and of the peasant movement was accompanied by mutinies in all parts of Russia. The most well-known of these is the mutiny on the Black Sea cruiser Prince Potemkin, which was seized by the mutineers and took part in the revolution in Odessa. After the defeat of the revolution and unsuccessful attempts to seize other ports (Feodosia in the Crimea, for instance), it surrendered to the Rumanian authorities in Constanta...
A comparison of these 1905 mutinies with the Decembrist uprising of 1825 is particularly interesting. In 1825 the leaders of the political movement were almost exclusively officers, and officers drawn from the nobility. They had become infected, through contact, with the democratic ideas of Europe during the Napoleonic wars. The mass of the soldiers, who at that time were still serfs, remained passive.
The history of 1905 presents a totally different picture. With few exceptions, the mood of the officers was either bourgeois liberal, reformist, or frankly counter-revolutionary. The workers and peasants in military uniform were the soul of the mutinies. The movement spread to all sections of the people, and for the first time in Russia's history involved the majority of the exploited. But what it lacked was, on the one hand, persistence and determination among the masses - they were too much afflicted with the malady of trustfulness - and, on the other, organization of revolutionary Social-Democratic workers in military uniform - they lacked the ability to take the leadership into their own hands, march at the head of the revolutionary army and launch an offensive against the government.
I might remark, incidentally, that these two shortcomings will - more slowly, perhaps, than we would like, but surely-be eliminated not only by the general development of capitalism, but also by the present war...
At any rate, the history of the Russian revolution, like the history of the Paris Commune of 1871, teaches us the incontrovertible lesson that militarism can never and under no circumstances be defeated and destroyed, except by a victorious struggle of one section of the national army against the other section. It is not sufficient simply to denounce, revile and "repudiate" militarism, to criticize and prove that it is harmful; it is foolish peacefully to refuse to perform military service. The task is to keep the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat tense and train its best elements, not only in a general way, but concretely, so that when popular ferment reaches the highest pitch, they will put themselves at the head of the revolutionary army.
The day-to-day experience of any capitalist country teaches us the same lesson. Every "minor" crisis that such a country experiences discloses to us in miniature the elements, the rudiments, of the battles that will inevitably take place on a large scale during a big crisis. What else, for instance, is a strike if not a minor crisis of capitalist society? Was not the Prussian Minister for Internal Affairs, Herr van Puttkammer, right when he coined the famous phrase: "In every strike there lurks the hydra of revolution"? Does not the calling out of troops during strikes in all, even the most peaceful, the most "democratic" - save the mark - capitalist countries show how things will shape out in a really big crisis?
But to return to the history of the Russian revolution. I have tried to show you how the workers' strikes stirred up up the whole country and the broadest, most backward strata of the exploited, how the peasant movement began, and how it was accompanied by mutiny in the armed forces.
The movement reached its zenith in the autumn of 1905. On August 19, the tsar issued a manifesto on the introduction of popular representation. The so-called Bulygin Duma was to be created on the basis of a suffrage embracing a ridiculously small number of voters, and this peculiar "parliament" was to have no legislative powers whatever, only advisory, consultative powers!
The bourgeoisie, the liberals, the opportunists were ready to grasp with both hands this "gift" of the frightened tsar. Like all reformists, our reformists of 1905 could not understand that historic situations arise when reforms, and particularly promises of reforms, pursue only one aim: to allay the unrest of the people, force the revolutionary class to cease, or at least slacken, its struggle.
The Russian revolutionary Social-Democracy was well aware of the real nature of this grant of an illusory constitution in August 1905. That is why, without a moment's hesitation, it issued the slogans: "Down with the advisory Duma! Boycott the Duma! Down with the tsarist government! Continue the revolutionary struggle to overthrow it! Not the tsar, but a provisional revolutionary government must convene Russia's first real, popular representative assembly!"
History proved that the revolutionary Social-Democrats were right, for the Bulygin Duma was never convened. It was swept away by the revolutionary storm before it could be convened. And this storm forced the tsar to promulgate a new electoral law, which provided for a considerable increase in the number of voters, and to recognize the legislative character of the Duma.
October and December 1905 marked the highest point in the rising tide of the Russian revolution. All the wellsprings of the people's revolutionary strength flowed in a wider stream than ever before. The number of strikers - which in January 1905, as I have already told you, was 440,000 - reached over half a million in October 1905 (in a single month!). To this number, which applies only to factory workers, must be added several hundred thousand railway workers, postal and telegraph employees, etc.
The general railway strike stopped all rail traffic and paralyzed the power of the government in the most effective manner. The doors of the universities were flung wide open, and the lecture halls, which in peacetime were used solely to befuddle youthful minds with pedantic professorial wisdom and to turn the students into docile servants of the bourgeoisie and tsarism, now became the scene of public meetings at which thousands of workers, artisans and office workers openly and freely discussed political issues.
Freedom of the press was won. The censorship was simply ignored. No publisher dared send the obligatory censor-copy to the authorities, and the authorities did not dare take any measure against this. For the first time in Russian history, revolutionary newspapers appeared freely in St. Petersburg and other towns. In St. Petersburg alone, three Social-Democratic daily papers were published, with circulations ranging from 50,000 to 100,000.
The proletariat marched at the head of the movement. It set out to win the eight-hour day by revolutionary action. "An Eight-Hour Day and Arms!" was the fighting slogan of the St. Petersburg proletariat. That the fate of the revolution could, and would, be decided only by armed struggle was becoming obvious to an ever-increasing mass of workers.
In the fire of battle, a peculiar mass organization was formed, the famous Soviets of Workers' Deputies, comprising delegates from all factories. In several cities these Soviets of Workers' Deputies began more and more to play the part of a provisional revolutionary government, the part of organs and leaders of the uprising. Attempts were made to organize Soviets of Soldiers' and Sailors' Deputies and to combine them with the Soviets of Workers' Deputies.
For a time several cities in Russia became something in the nature of small local "republics". The government authorities were deposed and the Soviet of Workers' Deputies actually functioned as the new government. Unfortunately, these periods were all too brief, the "victories" were too weak, too isolated.
The peasant movement in the autumn of 1905 reached still greater dimensions. Over one-third of all the uyezds were affected by the so-called "peasant disorders" and regular peasant uprisings. The peasants burned down no less than two thousand estates and distributed among themselves the food stocks of which the predatory nobility had robbed the people.
Unfortunately, this work was not thorough enough! Unfortunately, the peasants destroyed only one-fifteenth of the total number of landed estates, only one-fifteenth part of what they should have destroyed in order to wipe the shame of large feudal landownership from the face of Russian earth. Unfortunately, the peasants were too scattered, too isolated from each other in their actions; they were not organized enough, not aggressive enough, and therein lies one of the fundamental reasons for the defeat of the revolution.
A movement for national liberation flared up among the oppressed peoples of Russia. Over one-half, almost three-fifths (to be exact, 57 per cent) of the population of Russia is subject to national oppression; they are not even free to use their native language, they are forcibly Russified. The Moslems, for instance, who number tens of millions, were quick to organize a Moslem League - this was a time of rapid growth of all manner of organizations.
The following instance will give the audience, particularly the youth, an example of how at that time the movement for national liberation in Russia rose in conjunction with the labor movement.
In December 1905, Polish children in hundreds of schools burned all Russian books, pictures and portraits of the tsar, and attacked and drove out the Russian teachers and their Russian schoolfellows, shouting: "Get out! Go back to Russia!" The Polish secondary school pupils put forward, among others, the following demands: (1) all secondary schools must be under the control of a Soviet of Workers' Deputies; (2) joint pupils' and workers' meetings to be held in school premises; (3) secondary school pupils to be allowed to wear red blouses as a token of adherence to the future proletarian republic.
The higher the tide of the movement rose, the more vigorously and decisively did the reaction arm itself to fight the revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1905 confirmed the truth of what Karl Kautsky wrote in 1902 in his book Social Revolution (he was still, incidentally, a revolutionary Marxist and not, as at present, a champion of social-patriotism and opportunism). This is what he wrote:
"...The impending revolution... will be less like a spontaneous uprising against the government and more like a protracted civil war".
That is how it was, and undoubtedly that is how it will be in the coming European revolution!
Tsarism vented its hatred particularly upon the Jews. On the one hand, the Jews furnished a particularly high percentage (compared with the total Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement. And now, too, it should be noted to the credit of the Jews, they furnish a relatively high percentage of internationalists, compared with other nations. On the other hand, tsarism adroitly exploited the basest anti-Jewish prejudices of the most ignorant strata of the population in order to organize, if not to lead directly, pogroms - over 4,000 were killed and more than 10,000 mutilated in 100 towns. These atrocious massacres of peaceful Jews, their wives and children, roused disgust throughout the civilized world. I have in mind, of course, the disgust of the truly democratic elements of the civilized world, and these are exclusively the socialist workers, the proletarians.
Even in the freest, even in the republican countries of Western Europe, the bourgeoisie manages very well to combine its hypocritical phrases about "Russian atrocities" with financial support of tsarism and imperialist exploitation of Russia through export of capital, etc.
The climax of the 1905 Revolution came in the December uprising in Moscow. For nine days a small number of rebels, of organized and armed workers- there were not more than eight thousand - fought against the tsar's government, which dared not trust the Moscow garrison. In fact, it had to keep it locked up, and was able to quell the rebellion only by bringing in the Semenovsky Regiment from St. Petersburg.
The bourgeoisie likes to describe the Moscow uprising as something artificial, and to treat it with ridicule. For instance, in German so-called "scientific" literature, Herr Professor Max Weber, in his lengthy survey of Russia's political development, refers to the Moscow uprising as a "putsch". "The Lenin group," says this "highly learned" Herr Professor, "and a section of the Socialist-Revolutionaries had long prepared for this senseless uprising".
To properly assess this piece of professorial wisdom of the cowardly bourgeoisie, one need only recall the strike statistics. In January 1905, only 123,000 were involved in purely political strikes, in October the figure was 330,000, and in December the maximum was reached - 370,000 taking part in purely political strikes in a single month! Let us recall, too, the progress of the revolution, the peasant and soldier uprisings, and we shall see that the bourgeois "scientific" view of the December uprising is not only absurd. It is a subterfuge resorted to by the representatives of the cowardly bourgeoisie, which sees in the proletariat its most dangerous class enemy.
In reality, the inexorable trend of the Russian revolution was towards an armed, decisive battle between the tsarist government and the vanguard of the class-conscious proletariat. I have already pointed out, in my previous remarks, wherein lay the weakness of the Russian revolution that led to its temporary defeat.
The suppression of the December uprising marked the beginning of the ebb of the revolution. But in this period, too, extremely interesting moments are to be observed. Suffice it to recall that twice the foremost militant elements of the working class tried to check the retreat of the revolution and to prepare a new offensive.
But my time has nearly expired, and I do not want to abuse the patience· of my audience. I think, however, that I have outlined the most important aspects of the revolution - its class character, its driving forces and its methods of struggle - as fully as so big a subject can be dealt with in a brief lecture. A few brief remarks concerning the world significance of the Russian revolution.
Geographically, economically and historically, Russia belongs not only to Europe, but also to Asia. That is why the Russian revolution succeeded not only in finally awakening Europe's biggest and most backward country and in creating a revolutionary people led by a revolutionary proletariat.
It achieved more than that. The Russian revolution engendered a movement throughout the whole of Asia. The revolutions in Turkey, Persia and China prove that the mighty uprising of 1905 left a deep imprint, and that its influence, expressed in the forward movement of hundreds and hundreds of millions, is ineradicable.
In an indirect way, the Russian revolution influenced also the countries of the West. One must not forget that news of the tsar's constitutional manifesto, on reaching Vienna on October 30, 1905, played a decisive part in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria...
The forms and occasions for the impending battles in the coming European revolution will doubtlessly differ in many respects from the forms of the Russian revolution.
Nevertheless, the Russian revolution-precisely because of its proletarian character, in that particular sense of which I have spoken - is the prologue to the coming European revolution. Undoubtedly, this coming revolution can only be a proletarian revolution, and in an even more profound sense of the word: a proletarian, socialist revolution also in its content. This coming revolution will show to an even greater degree, on the one hand, that only stern battles, only civil wars, can free humanity from the yoke of capital, and, on the other hand, that only class conscious proletarians can and will give leadership to the vast majority of the exploited.
We must not be deceived by the present grave-like stillness in Europe. Europe is pregnant with revolution. The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war, the suffering caused by the high cost of living everywhere engender a revolutionary mood; and the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie, and its servitors, the governments, are more and more moving into a blind alley from which they can never extricate themselves without tremendous upheavals.
Just as in Russia in 1905, a popular uprising against the tsarist government began under the leadership of the proletariat with the aim of achieving a democratic republic, so, in Europe, the coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular uprisings under the leadership of the proletariat against the power of finance capital, against the big banks, against the capitalists; and these upheavals cannot end otherwise than with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, with the victory of socialism.
We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution. But I can, I believe, express the confident hope that the youth which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement of Switzerland, and of the whole world, will be fortunate enough not only to fight, but also to win, in the coming proletarian revolution.
- LENIN, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution (1917)
H. BETWEEN THE FEBRUARY AND OCTOBER REVOLUTIONS
The moment of history through which Russia is now passing is marked by the following main characteristics:
The Class Character of the Revolution That Has Taken Place
(1) The old tsarist power, which represented only a handful of feudalist landowners who commanded the entire state machinery (the army, the police and the bureaucracy), has been overthrown and removed, but not completely destroyed. The monarchy has not been formally abolished; the Romanov gang continues to hatch monarchist intrigues. The vast landed possessions of the feudalist squirearchy have not been abolished.
(2) State power in Russia has passed into the hands of a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie and landowners who had become bourgeois. To this extent the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia is completed.
Having come to power, the bourgeoisie has formed a bloc (an alliance) with the overt monarchists, who are notorious for their exceptionally ardent support of Nicholas the Bloody and Stolypin the Hangman in 1906-14 (Guchkov and other politicians to the right of the Cadets). The new bourgeois government of Lvov and Co. has attempted and has begun to negotiate with the Romanovs for the restoration of the monarchy in Russia. Behind a screen of revolutionary phrases, this government is appointing partisans of the old regime to key positions. It is striving to reform the whole machinery of state (the army, the police and the bureaucracy) as little as possible, and has turned it over to the bourgeoisie. The new government has already begun to hinder in every way the revolutionary initiative of mass action and the seizure of power by the people from below, which is the sole guarantee of the real success of the revolution.
Up to now this government has not even fixed a date for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It is now laying a finger on the landed estates, which form the material foundation of feudal tsarism. This government does not even contemplate starting an investigation into, and making public, the activities of the monopolist financial organizations, the big banks, the syndicates and cartels of the capitalists, etc., or instituting control over them.
The key positions, the decisive ministerial posts in the new government (the Ministry of the Interior and the War Ministry, i.e., the command over the army, the police, the bureaucracy the entire apparatus for oppressing the people) are held by outright monarchists and supporters of the system of big landed estates. The Cadets, these day-old republicans, republicans against their own will, have been assigned minor posts, having no direct relation to the command over the people or to the apparatus of state power. A. Kerensky, a Trudovik and "would-be socialist", has no function whatsoever, except to lull the vigilance and attention of the people with sonorous phrases. For all these reasons, the new bourgeois government does not deserve the confidence of the proletariat even in the sphere of internal policy, and no support of this government by the proletariat is admissible.
The Foreign Policy of the New Government
(3) In the field or foreign policy, which has now been brought to the forefront by objective circumstances, the new government is a government for the continuation of the imperialist war, a war that is being waged in alliance with the imperialist powers - Britain, France and others - for division of the capitalist spoils and for subjugating small and weak nations.
Subordinated to the interests of Russian capitalism and its powerful protector and master- Anglo-French imperialist capitalism, the wealthiest in the world- the new government, notwithstanding the wishes expressed in no uncertain fashion on behalf of the obvious majority of the peoples of Russia through the Soviet of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies, has taken no real steps to put an end to the slaughter of peoples for the interests of the capitalists. It has not even published the secret treaties of an obviously predatory character (for the partition of Persia, the plunder of China, the plunder of Turkey, the partition of Austria, the annexation of Eastern Prussia, the annexation of the German colonies, etc.), which, as everybody knows, bind Russia to Anglo-French predatory imperialist capital. It has confirmed these treaties concluded by tsarism, which for centuries robbed and oppressed more nations than other tyrants and despots, and which not only oppressed, but also disgraced and demoralized the great Russian nation by making it an executioner of other nations.
The new government has confirmed these shameful depredatory treaties and has not proposed an immediate armistice to all the belligerent nations, in spite of the clearly expressed demand of the majority of the peoples of Russia, voiced through the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. It has evaded the issue with the help of solemn, sonorous, bombastic, but absolutely empty declarations and phrases, which, in the mouths of bourgeois diplomats, have always served, and still serve, to deceive the trustful and naive masses of the oppressed people.
(4) Not only, therefore, is the new government unworthy of the slightest confidence in the field of foreign policy, but to go on demanding that it should proclaim the will of the peoples of Russia for peace, that it should renounce annexations, and so on and so forth, is in practice merely to deceive the people, to inspire them with false hopes and to retard the clarification of their minds. It is indirectly to reconcile them to the continuation of a war the true social character of which is determined not by pious wishes, but by the class character of the government that wages the war, by the connection between the class represented by this government and the imperialist finance capital of Russia, Britain, France, etc., by the real and actual policy which that class is pursuing.
The Peculiar Nature of the Dual Power and its Class Significance
(5) The main feature of our revolution, a feature that most imperatively demands thoughtful consideration, is the dual power which arose in the very first days after the triumph of the revolution.
This dual power is evident in the existence of two governments: one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the "Provisional Government" of Lvov and Co., which holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a supplementary and parallel government, a "controlling" government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers.
The class origin and the class significance of this dual power is the following: the Russian revolution of March 1917 not only swept away the whole tsarist monarchy, not only transferred the entire power to the bourgeoisie, but also moved close towards a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The Petrograd and the other, the local, Soviets constitute precisely such a dictatorship (that is, a power resting not on the law but directly on the force of armed masses of the population), a dictatorship precisely of the above-mentioned classes.
(6) The second highly important feature of the Russian revolution is the fact that the Petrograd Soviet of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies, which, as everything goes to show, enjoys the confidence of most of the local Soviets, is voluntarily transferring state power to the bourgeoisie and its Provisional Government, is voluntarily ceding supremacy to the latter, having entered into an agreement to support it, and is limiting its own role to that of an observer, a supervisor of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly (the date for which has not even been announced as yet by the Provisional Government).
This remarkable feature, unparalleled in history in such a form, has led to the interlocking of two dictatorships: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (for the government of Lvov and Co. is a dictatorship, i.e., a power based not on the law, not on the previously expressed will of the people, but on seizure by force, accomplished by a definite class, namely, the bourgeoisie) and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry (the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies).
There is not the slightest doubt that such an "interlocking" cannot last long. Two powers cannot exist in a state. One of them is bound to pass away; and the entire Russian bourgeoisie is already trying its hardest everywhere and in every way to keep out and weaken the Soviets, to reduce them to nought, and to establish the undivided power of the bourgeoisie.
The dual power merely expresses a transitional phase in the revolution's development, when it has gone farther than the ordinary bourgeois-democratic revolution, but has not yet reached a "pure" dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
The class significance (and the class explanation) of this transitional and unstable situation is this: like all revolutions, our revolution required the greatest heroism and self-sacrifice on the part of the people for the struggle against tsarism; it also immediately drew unprecedented numbers of ordinary citizens into the movement.
From the point of view of science and practical politics, one of the chief symptoms of every real revolution is the unusually rapid, sudden, and abrupt increase in the number of "ordinary citizens" who begin to participate actively, independently and effectively in political life and in the organization of the state.
Such is the case in Russia. Russia at present is seething. Millions and tens of millions of people, who had been politically dormant for ten years and politically crushed by the terrible oppression of tsarism and by inhuman toil for the landowners and capitalists, have awakened and taken eagerly to politics. And who are these millions and tens of millions? For the most part small proprietors, petty bourgeois, people standing midway between the capitalists and the wage workers. Russia is the most petty-bourgeois of all European countries.
A gigantic petty-bourgeois wave has swept over everything and overwhelmed the class-conscious proletariat, not only by force of numbers but also ideologically; that is, it has infected and imbued very wide circles of workers with the petty-bourgeois political outlook.
The petty bourgeoisie are in real life dependent upon the bourgeoisie, for they live like masters and not like proletarians (from the point of view of their place in social production) and follow the bourgeoisie in their outlook.
An attitude of unreasoning trust in the capitalists - the worst foes of peace and socialism -characterizes the politics of the popular masses in Russia at the present moment; this is the fruit that has grown with revolutionary rapidity on the social and economic soil of the most petty-bourgeois of all European countries. This is the class basis for the "agreement" between the Provisional Government and the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (I emphasize that I am referring not so much to the formal agreement as to actual support, a tacit agreement, the surrender of power inspired by unreasoning trust), an agreement which has given the Guchkovs a fat piece - real power - and the Soviet merely promises and honors (for the time being), flattery, phrases, assurances and the bowings and scrapings of the Kerenskys.
On the other side we have the inadequate numerical strength of the proletariat in Russia and its insufficient class-consciousness and organization.
All the Narodnik parties, including the Socialist-Revolutionaries, have always been petty-bourgeois. This is also true of the party of the Organizing Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.). The non-party revolutionaries (Steklov and others) have similarly yielded to the tide, or have not been able to stand up to it, have not had the time to do it.
The Peculiar Nature of the Tactics Which Fallow From the Above
(7) For the Marxist, who must reckon with objective facts, with the masses and classes, and not with individuals and so on, the peculiar nature of the actual situation as described above must determine the peculiar nature of the tactics for the present moment.
This peculiarity of the situation calls, in the first place, for the "pouring of vinegar and bile into the sweet water of revolutionary- democratic phraseology" (as my fellow member on the Central Committee of our Party, Teodorovich, so aptly put it at yesterday's session of the All-Russia Congress of Railwaymen in Petrograd). Our work must be one of criticism, of explaining the mistakes of the petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionary and Social-Democratic parties, of preparing and welding the elements of a consciously proletarian, Communist party, and of curing the proletariat of "general" petty-bourgeois intoxication.
This seems to be "nothing more" than propaganda work, but in reality it is most practical revolutionary work; for there is no advancing a revolution that has come to a standstill, that has choked itself with phrases, and that keeps "marking time", not because of external obstacles, not because of the violence of the bourgeoisie (Guchkov is still only threatening to employ violence against the soldier mass), but because of the unreasoning trust of the people.
Only by overcoming this unreasoning trust (and we can and should overcome it only ideologically, by comradely persuasion, by pointing to the lessons of experience) can we set ourselves free from the prevailing orgy of revolutionary phrasemongering and really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the mass in general, as well as their bold and determined initiative in the localities - the independent realization, development and consolidation of liberties, democracy, and the principle of people's ownership of all the land.
(8) The worldwide experience of bourgeois and landowner governments has evolved two methods of keeping the people in subjection. The first is violence. Nicholas Romanov I, nicknamed Nicholas of the Big Stick, and Nicholas II, the Bloody, demonstrated to the Russian people the maximum of what can and cannot be done in the way of these hangmen's practices. But there is another method, best developed by the British and French bourgeoisie, who "learned their lesson" in a series of great revolutions and revolutionary movements of the masses. It is the method of deception, flattery, fine phrases, promises by the million, petty sops and concessions of the unessential while retaining the essential.
The peculiar feature of the present situation in Russia is the transition at a dizzy speed from the first method to the second, from violent oppression of the people to flattering and deceiving the people by promises. Vaska the Cat listens, but goes on eating. Milyukov and Guchkov are holding power, they are protecting the profits of the capitalists, conducting an imperialist war in the interests of Russian and Anglo-French capital, and trying to get away with promises, declamation and bombastic statements in reply to the speeches of "cooks" like Chkheidze, Tsereteli and Steklov, who threaten, exhort, conjure, beseech, demand and proclaim... Vaska the Cat listens, but goes on eating.
But from day to day trustful lack of reasoning and unreasoning trust will be falling away, especially among the proletarians and poor peasants, who are being taught by experience (by their social and economic position) to distrust the capitalists.
The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie "must" teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie.
- LENIN, The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution (1917)
I. OBJECTIVE CONDITIONS FOR THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
To show that it is precisely the present moment that the Party must recognize as the one in which the entire course of events has objectively placed insurrection on the order of the day and that insurrection must be treated as an art, it will perhaps be best to use the method of comparison, and to draw a parallel between.July 3-4 and the September days.
On July 3-4 it could have been argued, without violating the truth, that the correct thing to do was to take power, for our enemies would in any case have accused us of insurrection and ruthlessly treated us as rebels. However, to have decided on this account in favor of taking power at that time would have been wrong, because the objective conditions for the victory of the insurrection did not exist.
(1) We still lacked the support of the class which is the vanguard of the revolution.
We still did not have a majority among the workers and soldiers of Petrograd and Moscow. Now we have a majority in both Soviets. It was created solely by the history of July and August, by the experience of the "ruthless treatment" meted out to the Bolsheviks, and by the experience of the Kornilov revolt.
(2) There was no countrywide revolutionary upsurge at that time. There is now, after the Kornilov revolt; the situation in the provinces and assumption of power by the Soviets in many localities prove this.
(3) At that time there was no vacillation on any serious political scale among our enemies and among the irresolute petty bourgeoisie. Now the vacillation is enormous. Our main enemy, Allied and world imperialism (for world imperialism is headed by the "Allies"), has begun to waver between a war to a victorious finish and a separate peace directed against Russia. Our petty-bourgeois democrats, having clearly lost their majority among the people, have begun to vacillate enormously, and have rejected a bloc, i.e., a coalition, with the Cadets.
(4) Therefore, an insurrection on July 3-4 would have been a mistake; we could not have retained power either physically or politically. We could not have retained it physically even though Petrograd was at times in our hands, because at that time our workers and soldiers would not have fought and died for Petrograd. There was not at the time that "savageness", or fierce hatred both of the Kerenskys and of the Tseretelis and Chernovs. Our people had still not been tempered by the experience of the persecution of the Bolsheviks in which the SocialistRevolutionaries and Mensheviks participated.
We could not have retained power politically on July 3-4 because, before the Kornilov revolt, the army and the provinces could and would have marched against Petrograd.
Now the picture is entirely different.
We have the following of the majority of a class, the vanguard of the revolution, the vanguard of the people, which is capable of carrying the masses with it.
We have the following of the majority of the people, because Chernov's resignation, while by no means the only symptom, is the most striking and obvious symptom that the peasants will not receive land from the Socialist-Revolutionaries' bloc (or from the Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves). And that is the chief reason for the popular character of the revolution.
We are in the advantageous position of a party that knows for certain which way to go at a time when imperialism as a whole and the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary bloc as a whole are vacillating in an incredible fashion.
Our victory is assured, for the people are close to desperation, and we are showing the entire people a sure way out; we demonstrated to the entire people during the "Kornilov days" the value of our leadership, and then proposed to the politicians of the bloc a compromise, which they rejected, although there is no letup in their vacillations.
It would be a great mistake to think that our offer of a compromise had not yet been rejected, and that the Democratic Conference may still accept it. The compromise was proposed by a party to parties; it could not have been proposed in any other way. It was rejected by parties. The Democratic Conference is a conference, and nothing more. One thing must not be forgotten, namely, that the majority of the revolutionary people, the poor, embittered peasants, are not represented in it. It is a conference of a minority of the people - this obvious truth must not be forgotten. It would be a big mistake, sheer parliamentary cretinism on our part, if we were to regard the Democratic Conference as a parliament; for even if it were to proclaim itself a permanent and sovereign parliament of the revolution, it would nevertheless decide nothing. The power of decision lies outside it in the working-class quarters of Petrograd and Moscow.
All the objective conditions exist for a successful insurrection. We have the exceptional advantage of a situation in which only our victory in the insurrection can put an end to that most painful thing on earth, vacillation, which has worn the people out; in which only our victory in the insurrection will give the peasants land immediately; a situation in which only our victory in the insurrection can foil the game of a separate peace directed against the revolution - foil it by publicly proposing a fuller, juster and earlier peace, a peace that will benefit the revolution.
- LENIN, Marxism and Insurrection (1917)
(1) Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1953)
(2) The administration of the French Republic, which existed from May 10, 1848 to June 24, 1848 (the beginning of the military dictatorship of Cavaignac).
(3) The hero of Heine's poem "Two Knights". In this character, Heine ridicules the spendthrift Polish nobleman ("Crapulinski" comes from the French word "crapule" [base scoundrel]). Here Marx alludes to Louis Bonaparte.
(4) League of Virtue, a patriotic secret society, 1808-1815
(5) The British East India Company was formed in 1599 for monopoly trade with India. Under the pretext of "trade" operations, the company conquered India for British capitalism and ruled it for many years. After the Indian rising of 1857, the company was dissolved and the British government took over directly the administration and exploitation of India. -Ed.
(6) Jat: A race of peasants in Northwest India, supposed to be of lndo-Aryan origin.
(7) This address was signed by all the members of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association (the First International) and was forwarded to President Lincoln through Charles Francis Adams, the Minister of the United States in London. It was published in The Bee-Hive, London, January 7, 1865.
(8) Written in English by Marx and adopted by the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association on May 11, 1869.
(9) March 1, 1881 (Old Style), the day on which Tsar Alexander II was assassinated.