1 This article deals with a meeting held in London on September 22. 1845 at which an international society of Fraternal Democrats was formed. The society embraced representatives of Left Chartists, German workers and craftsmen — members of the League of the Just — and revolutionary emigrants of other nationalities. During their stay in England in the summer of 1845, Marx and Engels helped in preparing for the meeting but did not attend it as they had by then left London. Later they kept in constant touch with the Fraternal Democrats trying to influence the proletarian core of the society, which joined the Communist League in 1847, and through it the Chartist movement. The society ceased its activities in 1853.
Engels’ article, written to show the significance of international unity of the proletarian and revolutionary democratic forces, was directed at the same time against “true socialism” — the petty-bourgeois socialist trend current among German intellectuals and craftsmen from the end of 1844 onwards. This was Engels’ second printed article against “true socialism”, the first being “A Fragment of Fourier’s On Trade” (see present edition, Vol. 4).
Engels describes the meeting of September 22, 1845 and cites speeches delivered at it according to the report published in The Northern Star No. 411, September 27, 1845. Excerpts from the article were published in English in The Plebs Magazine No. 2, March 1922.
2 Carmagnole — a song popular at the time of the French Revolution. Subsequent changes made in the words reflected mass sentiments at various stages of the popular movement.
The maximum laws and the law against buying up food supplies (June 26, 1793) were adopted by the Convention at the time of deepening food crisis under mass pressures and the campaign for fixed prices conducted by the so called rabid, representatives of the most radical plebeian trend in the revolutionary camp. The first maximum adopted on May 4, 1793, despite opposition on the part of the Girondists introduced fixed prices on grain; the decree of September 11, 1793, fixed a single price for grain, flour and fodder; fixed prices on other staple goods (second maximum) were introduced on September 29.
3 The Jacobin revolutionary government headed by Robespierre fell as a result of the coup of 9-10 Thermidor (July 27-28), 1794.
The conspiracy of equality organised by Babeuf and his followers aimed at provoking an armed uprising of the plebeian masses against the bourgeois regime of the Directory and establishing a revolutionary dictatorship as a transitional stage to “pure democracy” and “egalitarian communism”. The conspiracy was disclosed in May 1796. At the end of May 1797 its leaders were executed.
4 The period from May 31, 1793 to July 26, 1794 was one of the Jacobin revolutionary democratic dictatorship in France.
5 The reference is to associations for improving the conditions of the working classes set up in a number of Prussian towns in 1844-45 on the initiative of the liberal bourgeoisie who were frightened by the uprising of the Silesian weavers in the summer of 1844. The aim of their founders was to divert the German workers’ attention from the struggle for their class interests.
6 At Jemappes (November 6, 1792) and Fleurus (June 26, 1794) the French revolutionary army defeated the forces of the first coalition of the European counter-revolutionary monarchies.
7 Democratic Association — a workers’ organisation founded in London by the most revolutionary elements among the Chartists (George Julian Harney and others) in 1838; it advocated the revolutionary implementation of the Chartist programme. Many of its members were republicans and supported Babeuf’s trend of utopian communism.
8 Cosmopolitan — here and below is to be understood as meaning: free from all national limitations and national prejudices.
9 The reference is to the meeting of Chartists and heads of the London communities of the League of the Just with the leading figures of the democratic and revolutionary movements in a number of countries; the meeting took place in London in August 1845. Marx and Engels who were in London at the time took an active part in it. According to a report published in The Northern Star No. 406, August 23, 1845, the participants adopted the following resolution proposed by Thomas Cooper and supported by Engels: “That a public meeting of the democrats of all nations, residing in London, he called to consider the propriety of forming an Association for the purpose of meeting each other at certain times, and getting by this means a better knowledge of the movements for the common cause going on in their respective countries.”
This event marked an important step towards organising the international meeting held on September 22, 1845 and described by Engels in this article.
10 The reference is to revolutionary events of August 1842 in England when in conditions of economic crisis and increasing poverty violent working-class disturbances broke out in the industrial regions. In Lancashire and a large part of Cheshire and Yorkshire strikes became general, in some places growing into spontaneous insurrections. The government retaliated with massive arrests of Chartist leaders, who afterwards received severe sentences.
11 The reference is to the July revolution of 1830 in France which resulted in the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty. Decisive events took place on July 27-29 in Paris.
12 August 10, 1792 — the day when the monarchy in France was overthrown as a result of a popular insurrection.
13 Julian Harney refers to calls for war against England raised in the French Chamber of Deputies and the French bourgeois press due to strained Anglo-French relations in the mid-forties caused by the colonial rivalry between the two powers in West Indies after the establishment of the French protectorate over Tahiti, the annoyance of the English bourgeoisie at French expansion in North Africa (war against Morocco) and the sharp British reaction against the projected Franco-Belgian-Luxembourg customs union. The planned marriage of the son of Louis Philippe to the Spanish Infanta, opening up the prospects for union of the two monarchies under the Orleans crown, added to the tension.
14 The trial of April 1834 — trial of 167 participants in the French workers’ and republican movement, accused of high treason in connection with the uprising in Lyons and revolutionary actions in Paris and other towns in April 1834. Among the accused were the leaders of the secret republican Société des droits de 1'homme.
15 The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was founded in 962 and lasted till 1806. At different periods it included the German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and Bohemian lands, Switzerland and the Netherlands, forming a motley conglomeration of feudal kingdoms and principalities, church lands and free towns with different political structures, legal standards and customs.
16 Imperial Court Chamber (Reichskammergericht) was the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire. It was established in 1495 and abolished in 1806; initially it had no fixed seat, but from 1693 to 1806 was permanently located in Wetzlar.
17 Here the word “metaphysics” is used to denote philosophy as a speculative science transcending practical experience.
18 Constitution of 1791, approved by the Constituent Assembly, established a constitutional monarchy in France, giving the king full executive powers and the right of veto. This constitution was annulled as a result of the popular uprising of August 10, 1792, which brought about the fall of the monarchy. After the Girondist government (Girondists — the party of the big bourgeoisie) had been overthrown by the uprising of May 31-June 2, 1793 and the revolutionary dictatorship of the Jacobins established, the National Convention adopted a new democratic constitution of the French Republic.
19 The reference is to the Constituent Assembly’s decision to repeal feudal services, passed on the night of August 4, 1789 under the impact of peasant uprisings all over the country.
20 See Note 3.
21 ‘After the defeat of Austria in 1805 and of Prussia in 1806 by Napoleon and the establishment of the French protectorate over the German states the latter were obliged to declare war on Britain and join the continental blockade proclaimed by the French Emperor in November I806, which prohibited all trade with Britain.
22 In his articles “The State of Germany” Engels tried to refute the reactionary nationalistic interpretation of German history and, in particular, the glorification of the role played by the German ruling classes in the wars of 1813-14 and 1815 against Napoleonic France. But he gave a somewhat one-sided appraisal of the war itself. The war to liberate Germany from French domination following the defeat of Napoleon’s army in Russia in 1812 was, indeed, of a contradictory nature. Its character was affected by the counter-revolutionary and expansionist aims and policy of the ruling circles in the feudal monarchical states. But especially in 1813, when the struggle was aimed at liberating German territory front French occupation, it assumed the character of a genuinely popular national liberation war against foreign oppression. Later, when he once again considered that period in the history of Germany, Engels in a series of articles entitled “Notes on the War” (1870) stressed the progressive nature of the people’s resistance to Napoleon’s rule and in his work The Role of Force in History (1888) he wrote: “The peoples’ war against Napoleon was the reaction of the national feeling of all the peoples, which Napoleon had trampled on.”
23 The reference is to the Spanish Constitution of 1812 adopted at the time of the national liberation war against Napoleonic rule. Expressing the interests of the liberal nobility and liberal bourgeoisie the constitution limited the king’s power by the Cortes, proclaimed the supreme power of the nation and did away with certain survivals of feudalism. The overwhelming power of the feudal and clerical reactionary forces after Napoleon’s defeat in 18 14 led to the repeal of the constitution, which then became the banner of the liberal-constitutional movement in Spain and other European countries.
24 The Holy Alliance — an association of European monarchs founded on September 26, 1815 on the initiative of the Russian tsar Alexander I and the Austrian Chancellor Metternich to suppress revolutionary movements and preserve feudal monarchies in European countries.
25 Peterloo was the name given at the time (by analogy with the battle of Waterloo) to the massacre by the troops of unarmed participants in a mass meeting for electoral reform at St. Peter’s Field near Manchester, on August 16, 1819.
26 The Fundamental Federative Act (Bundesakte) — a part of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna held by European monarchs and their ministers in 1814-15, which established the political organisation of Europe after the Napoleonic wars. This Act was signed on June 8, 1815 and proclaimed a German Confederation consisting initially of 34 independent states and four free cities. The Act virtually sanctioned the political dismemberment of Germany and the maintenance of the monarchical-estate system in the German states. From 1815 to 1866 the central organ of the German Confederation was the Federal Diet consisting of representatives of the German states.
The promise to introduce constitutions in all the states of the German Confederation, which was stated in Article 13 of the Bundesakte, was never fulfilled. Article 18 of the Act, which vaguely mentioned a forthcoming drafting of uniform instructions providing for “freedom of the press” in the states of the German Confederation, also remained on paper.
27 Vendée — a department in Western France; during the French Revolution a centre of largely peasant-based royalist uprising. The word “Vendée” came to denote counter-revolutionary actions.
28 The Corn Laws (first introduced in the 15th century) imposed high tariffs on agricultural imports in order to maintain high prices on agricultural products on the home market. By the Act of 1815 imports of grain were prohibited as long as grain prices in England remained lower than 80 sh. per quarter. Later further Acts were adopted (1822, 1828 and others) changing the terms for grain imports.
The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in their repeal in June 1846.
29 The reference is to the revolution in Spain which began in January 1820, and also to revolutionary actions in Naples and Palermo in July 1820, in Portugal in August 1820 and Piedmont in March 1821 under the slogan of a constitution and bourgeois reforms. The revolutionary movements were suppressed by the Holy Alliance powers which sanctioned the Austrian intervention in Italy and the French intervention in Spain, and by domestic reaction.
The first secret society of carbonari in France was founded in late 1820-early 1821 after the pattern of the Italian societies of the same name. The society included representatives of diverse political trends and sought to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy. It was smashed by the police in 1822. Some carbonari organisations existed till the early 1830s, participated in the July revolution of 1830, and soon afterwards merged with republican societies.
In 1816-19 an upsurge of the democratic movement for an electoral reform took place in England. However, no reform was accomplished until 1832.
30 At the first stage of the national liberation uprising of the Greek people in 1821 the European governments were hostile to the insurgents. However, under pressure from public opinion and as a result of rivalries in the Balkans and the Middle East their attitudes changed. In 1827 Britain, France and Russia signed an agreement undertaking to demand jointly that the Turkish government should stop war in Greece and grant the country autonomy. The refusal of the Sultan to meet these demands led to a military conflict between the European powers and Turkey. The defeat of the Turks in the battle of Navarino (1827) was of great importance for the liberation of Greece. Finally the issue was decided by the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29. The Sultan was compelled to recognise the autonomy of Greece, and soon afterwards its independence. However, the European powers imposed a monarchical form of government on the newly liberated country.
31 See Note 11.
32 The Polish national liberation uprising of November 1830-October 1831, whose participants belonged mostly to the revolutionary gentry and whose leaders were mainly from aristocratic circles, was crushed by tsarist Russia aided by Prussia and Austria — the states which had taken part in the partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. Despite the defeat the uprising was of a major international significance as it diverted the forces of the counter-revolutionary powers and frustrated their plans to intervene against the bourgeois revolutions of 1830 in France and of 1830-31 in Belgium. As a result of the revolution, Belgium, which had been incorporated into Holland in 1815 by the decision of the Congress of Vienna, became an independent kingdom. For Marx’s and Engels’ appraisal of the Polish uprising of 1830-31 see pp. 545-52 of this volume.
33 The 1832 Reform Act in England granted the franchise, to property owners and leaseholders with no less than £ 10 annual income. The proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, who were the main force in the struggle for the reform, remained unenfranchised.
34 The conference of the representatives of German states held in June 1834 in Vienna passed a decision which obliged the sovereigns to render mutual support in their struggle against liberal and democratic movements. This decision was recorded in the final protocol of the conference of June 12, 1834, the contents of which were long kept secret.
35 In 1844 the British Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, to please the Austrian government ordered the post office to let the police inspect the correspondence of Italian revolutionary immigrants.
36 The editorial board of The Northern Star altered the date from “February 20” to “March 20”. Harney gave this explanation to Engels in a letter of March 30, 1846: “On Saturday I received a long letter from you through We[e]rth, or rather two letters. The one for the Star I like very much, it will appear this week. I have altered the date from Febr. 20th, to March 20th, it will thereby not look so stale.”
37 This is a circular of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee founded by Marx and Engels early in 1846 for the propaganda of communist ideas and correspondence with advanced workers and revolutionary intellectuals in various countries of Europe (similar committees were founded shortly afterwards in London, Paris, Cologne and some other cities). The Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee made use of such circulars, as Engels stated later, “on particular occasions, when it was a question of internal affairs of the Communist Party in process of formation” (F. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League”, 1885).
The “Circular Against Kriege” was directed against “true socialism”, a trend followed by the German journalist Hermann Kriege who had emigrated to New York in the autumn of 1845. It was also to a considerable extent directed against the egalitarian communism of Weitling, which had found a number of advocates among the supporters of Kriege and the staff of Der Volks-Tribun of which he was editor.
It seems likely that the principal part of the “Circular Against Kriege”, which was written by Marx and Engels when they were completing the main part of the work on the manuscript of The German Ideology (see present edition, Vol. 5), was originally intended for inclusion in Vol. II of that work.
The document against Kriege was circulated in lithographic copies (in Wilhelm Wolff’s hand without title).
A copy was sent to New York with a covering letter written by Edgar von Westphalen: “To Herr Hermann Kriege, Editor of Der Volks-Tribun. — On behalf of the local communist society and as chairman of the meeting which took place on May 11, I am forwarding to you the decision in which our opinion of Der Volks-Tribun is expressed. In case you do not publish the decision together with its motivation in your paper it will nevertheless be published in the press of Europe and America. We, however, expect that in the nearest future you will send us the issue of Der Volks-Tribun containing our resolution to: M. Gigot, rue de Bodenbroek, No. 8, Brussels, May 16, 1846. Edgar van Westphalen.” Kriege was compelled to comply with this demand and publish the “Circular” in Der Volks-Tribun Nos. 23 and 24 of June 6 and 13, 1846, adding his own insinuations against the authors and the ironical title Eine Bannbulle. It was also published in the July issue of Das Westphälische Dampfboot under the title of “Der Volks-Tribun, redigirt von Hermann Kriege in New York” without the authors’ name. However, the editor of the journal, the “true socialists’ Otto Lüning subjected the document to biased re-editing, adding his own introduction and conclusion, in contradiction to the ideas and spirit of the original document and in some cases changing the text arbitrarily. The original text was for a long time unavailable to scholars; in the book Aus dem literarischen Nachlass van Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, published by Franz Mehring, the document was printed according to the text in Das Westphälische Dampfboot. The authentic version was for the first time reproduced according to the lithographic copy of the “Circular” in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Bd. 6, Berlin, 1932.
In October 1846, the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee issued a second circular against Kriege written by Marx, the text of which has not yet been found.
38 Young America — an organisation of American craftsmen and workers; it formed the nucleus of the mass National Reform Association founded in 1845. In the second half of the 1840s the Association agitated for land reform, proclaiming as its aim free allotment of a plot of 160 acres to every working man; it came out against slave-owning planters and land profiteers. It also put forward demands for a ten-hour working day, abolition of slavery, of the standing army, etc. Many German emigrant craftsmen, including members of the League of the Just, took part in the movement headed by the National Reform Association. By 1846 the movement among the German workers began to subside. One of the reasons for this was the activity of Kriege’s group whose “true socialism” diverted the German emigrants from the struggle for democratic aims.
39 The reference is to the following passage from Emmanuel Sieyès’ Quest-ceque le tiers-état? published in Paris in 1789 on the eve of the French Revolution: “1. What is the third estate? Everything. 2. What was it until now in the political respect? Nothing. 3. What is it striving for? To be something.”
40 Essenes — a religious sect in ancient Judea (2nd century B. C. — 3rd century A. D.).
41 The article was published with an introduction by The Northern Star editors informing readers of the supposedly forthcoming publication of the Prussian constitution (the interpretation given in the press to the intention of the King of Prussia to institute a state representative organ on the basis of the united provincial diets) and giving a brief account of the situation in Prussia. The introduction, in particular, stated: “Silesia is in a disordered state, the unhappy people showing every inclination to imitate the Polish peasantry in engaging in an agrarian revolt. Last, not least, financial difficulties add to the embarrassments of the Government and have given rise to a measure involving a further departure from the solemn pledges given by the Crown to the people. On this subject we have been favoured with the following communication from our German correspondent.”
42 According to Verordnung wegen der künftigen Behandlung des gesammten Staatsschulden-Wesens (Decree on the future handling of all state debts) issued in Prussia on January . 17, 1820, new loans and state debts had to be guaranteed by the forthcoming Prussian assembly of the estates as well as by the government.
43 The reference is to the Preussische Seehandlungsgesellschaft (Prussian sea trade society) — a trade credit society founded in Prussia in 1772 which enjoyed a number of important state privileges. It offered large credits to the government and actually played the part of banker and broker. In 1904 it was officially made the Prussian State Bank.
44 This letter was written by Marx and Engels on behalf of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee in reply to a statement by the Elberfeld socialist G. A. Köttgen, who tried to unite the supporters of socialist and communist views in Wuppertal (the joint name of Barmen and Elberfeld, in the Rhine province, which subsequently merged). Köttgen’s statement, written on May 24, 1846 was sent to Brussels only on June 10 with a covering letter to Engels.
Their internal dissension prevented the socialists and Communists of Wuppertal from following Marx’s and Engels’ advice concerning, in particular, the organisation of a communist correspondence committee.
45 The article was supplied with an editorial introduction beginning with the following words: “Again, rumours are rife in Germany, that the long projected Prussian Constitution is at last framed, and will be immediately published. For ourselves, we will believe when we see. The King of Prussia is such a liar that none but asses would repose faith in his most solemn promises. One thing is certain that, if a Constitution is granted, it will be so worthless as to be utterly inadequate to satisfy the popular demands. From our ‘German correspondent’ we have received the following brief but interesting communication which exhibits his Prussian kingship in a new but not very respectable character. He is about to turn swindler on a large scale. He will borrow, and then ‘repudiate’.”
46 The address of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee to the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor was written in connection with his victory at the Nottingham election meeting early in July 1846, when he stood for erection to the House of Commons. Voting at such meetings (up to 1872) was by show of hands, and all present took part in it. However, only “legitimate” electors (those having property and other qualifications) could take part in subsequent ballot — in which, consequently, candidates who had been outvoted by show of hands could be declared elected. Despite this anti-democratic system, O'Connor was duly elected to Parliament at the August 1847 ballot.
The address of the Brussels Communists was read at a regular meeting of the Fraternal Democrats held on July 20, 1846 and was warmly received there (see The Northern Star No. 454, July 25, 1846).
47 The reference is to the Repeal of the Corn Laws passed in June 1846. (On the Corn Laws see Note 28.) The movement for the repeal of the Corn Laws was led by the Anti-Corn Law League founded in 1838 by the Manchester manufacturers Cobden and Bright. Acting under the slogan of unrestricted free trade the League fought to weaken the economic and political position of the landed aristocracy and at the same time to reduce workers’ wages.
48 The People’s Charter, which contained the demands of the Chartists, was published on May 8, 1838, in the form of a Bill to be submitted to Parliament. It consisted of six clauses: universal suffrage (for men of 21 years of age), annual elections to Parliament, secret ballot, equal constituencies, abolition of property qualifications for candidates to Parliament, and salaries for M.P.s. In 1839 and 1842 petitions for the Charter were rejected by Parliament. In 1847-48 the Chartists renewed a mass campaign for the Charter.
49 Early in June 1846 Thomas Cooper started a campaign against O'Connor. In particular he accused him of misusing the funds of the Chartist Cooperative Land Society (later called the National Land Company) founded by the Chartist leader in 1845 (see Note 162).
Cooper set forth his accusations in an open letter “To the London Chartists” (published in June 1846 in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper) and in other statements. In answer to this, O'Connor wrote two letters: “To the Members of the Chartist Cooperative Land Society” and “To the Fustian jackets, the Blistered Hands, and Unshorn Chins”, published in The Northern Star Nos. 448 and 449, of June 13 and 20, 1846. The latter issue carried also numerous statements by Chartist organisations expressing confidence in O'Connor.
50 The Tuileries Palace in Paris was the residence of the French monarchs.
51 The reference is to the rescripts by Frederick William IV of February 3, 1847 convening the United Diet — a united assembly of the eight provincial diets instituted in 1823. The United Diet as well as the provincial diets consisted of representatives of the estates: the curia of gentry (high aristocracy) and the curia of the other three estates (nobility, representatives of the towns and the peasantry). Its powers were limited to authorising new taxes and loans, to voice without vote during the discussion of Bills, and to the right to present petitions to the King. The dates of its sessions were fixed by the King.
The United Diet opened on April 11, 1847, but it was dissolved as early as June because the majority refused to vote a new loan.
52 See Note 28.
53 The Customs Union (Zollverein) of the German states (initially including 18 states), which established a common customs frontier, was founded in 1834 and headed by Prussia. By the 1840s the Union embraced most of the German states with the exception of Austria, the Hanseatic towns (Bremen, Lübeck, Hamburg) and some small states. Brought into being by the necessity for an all-German market the Customs Union subsequently promoted Germany’s political unification.
54 States-general — a body representing the estates in medieval France. It consisted of representatives of the clergy, nobles and burghers. They met in May 1789 — after a 175-year interval — at the time of maturing bourgeois revolution and on June 17 were transformed by the decision of the deputies of the third estate into the National Assembly which proclaimed itself the Constituent Assembly on July 9 and became the supreme organ of revolutionary France.
55 The reference is to the national liberation uprising in the Cracow republic which by the decision of the Congress of Vienna was controlled jointly by Austria, Russia and Prussia — who had partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. The seizure of power in Cracow by the insurgents on February 22, 1846 and the establishment of a National Government of the Polish republic, which issued a manifesto abolishing feudal services, were part of the plan for a general uprising in the Polish lands whose main inspirers were the revolutionary democrats (Dembowski and others). In March the Cracow uprising, lacking active support in other parts of Poland, was crushed by the forces of Austria and tsarist Russia; in November 1846, Austria, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty incorporating the “free town of Cracow “ into the Austrian Empire.
56 Karl Grün translated into German Proudhon’s work Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère. The book was published in Darmstadt in 1847 under the title Philosophie der Staatsökonomie oder Nothwendigkeit des Elends.
57 The reference is to Proudhon’s letter to Marx of May 17, 1846 (published in Correspondance de P. J. Proudhon précédée d'une notice sur P. J. Proudhon par J. A. Langlois, T. II, Paris, 1875), which was an answer to Marx’s letter to him of May 5, suggesting that he correspond with the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee in the capacity of a representative of the French proletariat. While in fact rejecting this proposal, Proudhon nevertheless wrote to Marx that he was eager to know Marx’s opinion of his latest work.
58 The review of Marx’s work in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher quoted here has been taken from Karl Grün’s article “Meine Stellung zur Judenfrage” published in the Neue Anekdota.
Neue Anekdota — a collection which appeared in Darmstadt late in May 1845 under the editorship of Karl Grün. It contained newspaper articles by Moses Hess, Karl Grün, Otto Lüning and others, written mainly in the first half of 1844 and banned by the censors. Soon after the publication of the collection Marx and Engels, as can be judged front Grün’s letters to Hess, made a number of severe critical remarks about its content.
59 Engels intended to publish this work in 1847 as a pamphlet. In the spring of 1847 he sent the manuscript from Paris (where he arrived in August 1846 to organise communist propaganda) to Marx in Brussels to be forwarded to the publisher C. G. Vogler, who had connections with communist circles. Vogler, however, had meantime been arrested (see Marx’s letter to Engels of May 15, 1847). Marx gave a high appraisal of this pamphlet, especially of its first part, but was of the opinion that the other two parts were lacking in precision. The extant manuscript is incomplete. Only seven sheets, each folded in four (28 pages altogether), with the author’s paging on the first page of each sheet (1, 5, 9, etc.) have been preserved. Pages 21-24 and the last sheets are missing. There is no title to the manuscript. The extant part was first published in the USSR in 1929 in the first edition of Marx’s and Engels’ Works in Russian under the title “The Constitutional Question in German Socialist Literature” and in 1932 in German in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe under the title “Der Status quo in Deutschland”.
The present title is given according to Engels’ letter to Marx of March 9, 1847, in which this work was called “a pamphlet on the constitutional question”.
60 Réformistes — a political party grouped round the Paris newspaper La Réforme, which included radical opponents of the July monarchy-republican democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists. The leaders of the Réforme party, which also called itself “social-democratic”, were Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc and others (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, this volume, p. 518).
61 Some of the French legitimists, advocates of the Bourbon dynasty overthrown in 1830, who upheld the interests of the big hereditary landowners (Villeneuve-Bargemont and others), resorted to social demagogy in their struggle against the financial and industrial bourgeoisie, passing themselves off as defenders of the working people.
Young England was a group of conservative writers and politicians, including Disraeli and Ferrand, who were close to the Tory philanthropists and founded a separate group in the House of Commons in 1841. Voicing the discontent of the landed aristocracy at the growing economic and political power of the bourgeoisie, they criticised the capitalist system and supported half-hearted philanthropic measures for improving the conditions of the workers. Young England disintegrated as a political group in 1845 and ceased to exist as a literary circle in 1848.
In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels describe the views of Young England and the above-mentioned ideologists of legitimism as “feudal socialism” (see this volume, pp. 507-08).
62 See Note 21.
63 See Note 53.
64 Apparently, the condition of the working classes of Germany, and primarily the German proletariat, was described in the third, non-extant part of the work.
65 See Note 5 1.
66 See Note 53.
67 The name of the Spandau fortress near Berlin — a drill hall and a place of imprisonment for “state criminals” in Prussia — is used here as a symbol of the Prussian political system.
68 The reference is to the Prussian Government’s consent to the incorporation of Cracow into the Austrian Empire after the suppression of the Cracow uprising of 1846 (see Note 55). This act led to the inclusion of Cracow within the Austrian customs frontier and to high import duties there on Prussian goods.
69 This document is the draft programme discussed at the First Congress of the Communist League in London on June 2-9, 1847.
The Congress was a final stage in the reorganisation of the League of the Just — an organisation of German workers and craftsmen, which was founded in Paris in 1836-37 and soon acquired an international character, having communities in Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain and Sweden. The activity of Marx and Engels directed towards the ideological and organisational unity of the socialists and advanced workers prompted the leaders of the League (Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll, Heinrich Bauer), who resided in London front November 1846, to ask for their help in reorganising the League and drafting its new program me. When Marx and Engels were convinced that the leaders of the League of the Just were ready to accept the principles of scientific communism as its programme they accepted the offer to join the League made to them late in January 1847.
Engels’ active participation in the work of the Congress (Marx was unable to go to London) affected the course and the results of its proceedings. The League was renamed the Communist League, the old motto of the League of the Just “All men are brothers” was replaced by a new, Marxist one: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite! “ The draft programme and the draft Rules of the League were approved at the last sitting on June 9, 1847.
The full text of the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” (Credo) became known only in 1968. It was found by the Swiss scholar Bert Andréas together with the draft Rules and the circular of the First Congress to the members of the League (see this volume, pp. 585-600) in the archives of Joachim Friedrich Martens, an active member of the Communist League, which are kept in the State and University Library in Hamburg. This discovery made it possible to ascertain a number of important points in the history of the Communist League and the drafting of its programme documents. It had been previously assumed that the First Congress did no more than adopt a decision to draw up a programme and that the draft itself was made by the London Central Authority of the Communist League (Joseph Moll, Karl Schapper and Heinrich Bauer) after the Congress between June and August 1847. The new documents show that the draft was ready by June 9, 1847 and that its author was Engels (the manuscript found in Martens’ archives, with the exception of some inserted words, the concluding sentence and the signatures of the president and the secretary of the Congress, was written in Engels’ hand).
The document testifies to Engels’ great influence on the discussion of the programme at the Congress — the formulation of the answers to most of the questions is a Marxist one. Besides, while drafting the programme, Engels had to take into account that the members of the League had not yet freed themselves from the influence of utopian ideas and this was reflected in the formulation of the first six questions and answers. The form of a “revolutionary catechism” was also commonly used in the League of the Just and other organisations of workers and craftsmen at the time. It may he assumed that Engels intended to give greater precision to sonic of the formulations of the programme document in the course of further discussion and revision.
After the First Congress of the Communist League the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” was sent, together with the draft Rules, to the communities for discussion, the results of which were to be taken into account at the time of the final approval of the programme and the Rules at the Second Congress. When working on another, improved draft programme, the Principles of Communism, in late October 1847 (see this volume, pp. 341-57), Engels made direct use of the “Confession of Faith”, as can be seen from the coincidences of the texts, and also from references in the Principles to the earlier document when Engels had apparently decided to leave formulations of some of the answers as they were.
The “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” was published in English for the first time in the book: Birth of the Communist Manifesto, International Publishers, New York, 1971.
70 In their works of the 1840s and 1850s, prior to Marx having worked out the theory of surplus value, Marx and Engels used the terms “value of labour”, “price of labour”, “sale of labour” which, as Engels noted in 1891 in the introduction to Marx’s pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital, “from the point of view of the later works were inadequate and even wrong”. After he had proved that the worker sells to the capitalist not his labour but his labour power Marx used more precise terms. In later works Marx and Engels used the terms “value of labour power”, “price of labour power”, “sale of labour power”
71 The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the “Philosophy of Poverty” by M. Proudhon is one of the most important theoretical works of Marxism and Marx’s principal work directed against P.J. Proudhon, whom he regarded as an ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie. Marx decided that he must criticise Proudhon’s economic and philosophical views and at the same time clear up a number of questions relating to the theory and tactics of the revolutionary proletarian movement from the scientific materialist standpoint at the end of 1846, as a result of his reading Proudhon’s Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère, which had appeared a short time earlier. In his letter of December 28, 1846 to the Russian man of letters P. V. Annenkov Marx expounded a number of important ideas which later formed the core of his book against Proudhon. In January 1847, as can be judged from Engels’ letter of January 15, 1847 to Marx, the latter was already working on his reply to Proudhon. In writing this book Marx extensively used notes he had made in 1845-47 from works by various authors, primarily economists. (A description of Marx’s notebooks was published in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Bd. 6, Berlin, 1932.) By the beginning of April 1847 Marx’s work was completed in the main and had gone to press (see this volume, p. 72). On June 15, 1847 he wrote a short foreword.
The book was published in Brussels and Paris early in July 1847. Marx’s followers saw it as a theoretical substantiation of the platform of the proletarian party which was taking shape at the time. While establishing contact on behalf of this party in the autumn of 1847 with the French socialists and democrats grouped around the newspaper La Réforme, Engels, speaking to Louis Blanc, one of its editors, called Marx’s book against Proudhon “our programme” (see Engels’ letter to Marx of October 25-26. 1847). Ferdinand Wolff, a member of the Communist League, published a detailed review of The Poverty of Philosophy in Das Westphälische Dampfboot for January and February 1848.
The book was not republished in full during Marx’s lifetime. Excerpts from §5 (“Strikes and Combinations of Workers”) of Ch. If appeared in different years, mostly between 1872 and 1875, in workers’ and socialist publications such as La Emancipacion, Der Volksstaat, Social-Demokrat (New York) and others. In 1880 Marx attempted to publish his Poverty of Philosophy in the French socialist newspaper L'égalité, the organ of the French Workers’ Party, but only the foreword and §1 (“The Opposition Between Use Value and Exchange Value”) of Ch. 1 were published.
The first German edition was made in 1885. The translation was edited by Engels, who also wrote a special preface and a number of notes to it. He mentioned in the preface that while editing the translation he had taken into account corrections made in Marx’s hand in a copy of the 1847 French edition. (This copy, which contains also numerous underlinings and vertical lines in the margins, is kept in the library of the North-Eastern University at Sendai, Japan; and a photocopy was presented by Japanese scholars to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow.) It is still not known when Marx made these corrections and alterations. But it was certainly prior to 1876, as a copy presented by Marx to Natalia Utina, wife of N. I. Utin, a member of the Russian Section of the First International, on January 1, 1876 is extant in which almost all of these corrections and alterations are reproduced in an unknown hand.
In 1886, the Russian Marxist Emancipation of Labour group published the first Russian edition of The Poverty of Philosophy in a translation made by Vera Zasulich from the German edition of 1885. In 1892 a second German edition appeared. It was provided with a short preface by Engels, dealing with corrections of certain inaccuracies in the text (see Note 75). Engels planned a second French edition for the mid-eighties. With this aim in view he made a list of necessary corrections to be inserted (“Notes et changements”) using for this purpose the copy bearing the corrections in Marx’s hand. However, this plan was implemented only after Engels’ death by Marx’s daughter Laura Lafargue in 1896. The corrections were made in the text according to the list drawn up by Engels.
In the present edition all corrections and changes made by Marx in the copy of the 1847 edition and reproduced in the copy presented to Natalia Utina, as well as the relevant corrections in the German 1885 and 1892 editions and in the French 1896 edition, have been taken into account. The changes affecting meaning and the stylistic improvements made in these copies and editions are introduced in the text itself, the original version being given in a footnote. Where the author’s corrections and remarks are intended to revise or give greater precision to the original formulations and terminology, owing to the further development of Marxist economic theory, they are given in footnotes, the original text being left unaltered. This will enable readers to appreciate actual level attained by Marxist economic theory by 1847.
Italics in quotations are as a rule Marx’s. In some cases the editors have inserted periods to indicate an omission by Marx in quotations and give in square brackets page references which are not in the original. References in square brackets are made to pages in the following English editions of works of English authors quoted by Marx Iron) French translations: D. Ricardo. On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation. Third edition. London, 1821; A. Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Vol. I, London, 1835; Ch. Babbage. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. Second edition. London, 1832; A. Ferguson. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edinburgh, 1767; J. M. Lauderdale. An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth. Edinburgh, 1804; J. Steuart. An Inquiry into the Principles o f Political Economy... Vol. I, London, 1767; A. Ure. The Philosophy of Manufactures.., Second edition. London, 1835.
The first English edition of The Poverty of Philosophy was published in London in 1900 by the Twentieth Century press. The translation was made by Harry Quelch. Since then the work has been republished several times in English.
72 The reference is to the period which followed the termination of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France.
73 See present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 424-31, 440-43 and Vol. 4, pp. 375-88.
74 See Note 70.
75 The 1847 edition and the German 1885 edition mistakenly have the name of Hopkins, and lower an inexact date of publication of W. Thompson’s book (1827 instead of 1824). This served as a pretext for the Austrian economist Anton Menger to reproach Marx with wrong quoting (see A. Menger, Das Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag in geschichtlicher Darstellung, Stuttgart, 1886, S. 50). Engels corrected the mistakes by writing in the preface to the second German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy in 1892 the following: “For the second edition I have only to remark that the name wrongly written Hopkins in the French text has been replaced by the correct name Hodgskin and that in the same place the date of the work of William Thompson has been corrected to 1824. It is to he hoped that this will appease the bibliographical conscience of Professor Anton Menger. London, March 29, 1892. Frederick Engels.”
76 The Ten-Hours’ Bill was submitted to Parliament several times. In 1847 after a prolonged struggle the Bill was passed, and applied only to children and women. However, many factory owners ignored it.
77 Equitable-labour-exchange bazaars were organised by Owenites and Ricardian socialists (John Gray, William Thompson, John Bray) in various towns of England in the 1830s for fair exchange without a capitalist intermediary. The products were exchanged for labour notes, or labour money, certificates showing the cost of the products delivered, calculated on the basis of the amount of labour necessary for their production. The organisers considered these bazaars as a means for publicising the advantages of a non-capitalist form of exchange and a peaceful way — together with cooperatives — of transition to socialism. The subsequent and invariable bankruptcy of such enterprises proved their utopian character
78 The reference is to the following passage from Adam Smith’s work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: “In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get more cattle and venison, than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armourer.” (Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapter If.)
79 Marx refers to the first edition of Cooper’s book. In his notebook dating to July-August 1845, this passage is quoted from a second enlarged edition published in London in 1831.
80 The full text of the passage from Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik quoted here is as follows: “Die Methode ist deswegen als die ohne Einschränkung allgemeine, innerliche und äusserliche Weise, und als die schlechthin unendliche Kraft anzuerkennen, welcher kein Objekt, insofern es sich als ein Äusserliches, der Vernunft fernes und von ihr unabhängiges präsentiert — Widerstand leisten, gegen sie von einer besonderen Natur seyn und von ihr nicht durchdrungen werden könnte.... Sie ist darum die höchste Kraft oder vielmehr die einzige und absolute Kraft der Vernunft, nicht nur, sondern auch ihr höchster und einziger Trieb, durch sich selbst in Allem sich selbst zufinden und zu erkennen.” (Bd. III, Abschnitt 3, Kap. 3).
81 Marx refers to Chapter VIII “De la responsabilité de 1'homme et de dieu, sous la loi de contradiction, on solution du problème de la providence”.
82 Le Creusot (Burgundy) — since the 1830s a big centre of the French metallurgical, machine-building and war industry; at the time referred to, the Creusot works belonged to Schneider and Co. founded in 1836.
83 The reference is to the first cyclic crisis of overproduction which began in England in 1825. The crisis involved all branches of industry, textiles in particular. It was followed by stagnation in trade, reduction of exports by 16 per cent and imports by 15 per cent and the insolvency of several banks.
84 In partibus infidelium — beyond the realm of reality (literally “in the country of infidels”) — an addition to the title of Catholic priests appointed to a purely nominal diocese in non-Christian countries.
85 Quoting from the French edition of J. Steuart’s book published in 1789 (the first English edition: J. Steuart. An Inquiry into the Principles of Political OEconomy, being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations was published in two volumes in London in 1767), Marx made some explanatory additions and changes. Thus he added the words “impôt sur la production” (taxes on production), “impôts sur la consummation” (taxes on consumption) and the last sentence. “Chacun est imposé à raison de la dépense qu'il fait” (Everyone is taxed according to his expenditure). He changed the place of the sentence “Chacun est imposé à raison du profit qu'il est censé faire” (Everyone is taxed in proportion to the gain he is supposed to make), which Steuart has after “Ainsi le monarque met un impôt sur 1'industrie” (Thus the monarch imposes a tax upon industry). Instead of “le gouvernement limité” Marx used “le gouvernement constitutionnel”.
86 See notes 28 and 47.
87 In 1836-38 a new cyclic crisis of overproduction swept over Britain and other capitalist countries.
88 In 1824 under mass pressure Parliament repealed the ban on the trade unions. However, in 1825 it passed a Bill on workers’ combinations, which confirming the repeal of the ban on the trade unions at the same time greatly restricted their activity. In particular, mere agitation for workers to join unions and take part in strikes was regarded as “compulsion” and “violence” and punished as a crime.
89 The laws in operation at that time in France — the so-called Le Chapelier law adopted in 1791 during the bourgeois revolution by the Constituent Assembly, and the penal code elaborated under the Napoleonic empire in 1810 (Code pénal) — forbade workers to form labour unions or go on strike under pain of severe punishment. The prohibition of trade unions in France was abolished only in 1884.
90 The National Association of United Trades was established in England in 1845 by trade union delegates from London, Manchester, Sheffield, Norwich, Hull, Bristol, and other cities. Its activity was limited to the struggle for improved conditions of sale of labour power (“a fair wage for a fair day’s work”) and for improved factory legislation. The association existed until the early sixties, but it ceased to play any big part in the trade union movement after 1851.
91 The term “instruments of production” is still used by Marx in a broader sense here than in his later works. Subsequently he drew a more strict distinction between “forces of production” in general and “instruments of production” as a component part of the former.
92 Engels had in mind first of all Ferdinand Lassalle who widely used the term “workers’ estate” in his writings, in particular in his pamphlet Arbeiterprogramm (Workers’ Programme) published in 1862. The substitution of the terms “workers” or “fourth estate” for “working class’ was characteristic of a number of other representatives of petty-bourgeois socialism.
93 See Note 50.
94 The reference is to the conservative majority in the French Chamber of Deputies who supported Guizot.
Further on Engels used materials published in Le Moniteur Universel for June 4, 18, 23 and 26, 1847.
95 See Note 47.
96 This article was written by Marx in reply to the propaganda of feudal and Christian socialism carried on by the conservative Prussian newspaper Rheinischer Beobachter. This propaganda was aimed at diverting the popular masses from revolutionary struggle against the absolutist regime and at using them in the struggle against the bourgeois opposition. Such ideas permeated, in particular, the article criticised by Marx, which was published anonymously in the Rheinischer Beobachter No. 206, July 25, 1847 as the eighth part in the series Politische Gänge. On September 2, 1847 this article was reprinted in the Deutsche-Brüssseler-Zeitung without a title but with introductory words quoted by Marx. It is probable that the author of this article was Herr Wagener, a consistorial councillor in Magdeburg, subsequently a conservative leader, who enjoyed the protection of the Prussian Minister of Religious Worship, Education and Medicine, Eichhorn.
Later, in the mid-sixties, while exposing Lassalleans’ advances to Bismarck’s Government, Marx and Engels referred to this article by Marx as a document demonstrating the firm standpoint of the workers’ party in relation to “royal-Prussian government socialism” (see Statement by Marx and Engels to the editorial board of the newspaper Social-Demokrat, February 23, 1865).
The article “The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter” bore the sign = ‘instead of a signature. The publication of this article and also of the first part of Engels’ essays “German Socialism in Verse and Prose” (see this volume, pp. 220-49) marked the beginning of Marx’s and Engels’ regular contribution to the newspaper of the German emigrants, the Deutsche-Brüssseler-Zeitung. A special editorial note in the preceding issue of the newspaper of September 9, 1847 announced the forthcoming publication of these articles without mentioning, however, the authors’ names. Prior to this, Marx and Engels contributed only occasionally to the Deutsche-Brüssseler-Zeitung (see this volume, pp. 72-74, 92-95), though they approved their associates — Wilhelm Wolff and Georg Weerth and others — doing so. Prior to their regular contribution the paper followed mainly the
line of its editor-in-chief, the petty-bourgeois democrat Adalbert Bornstedt, who tried to combine eclectically various appositional ideological trends. But by the autumn of 1847 the influence of the proletarian revolutionaries in the paper gained momentum and soon it became a mouthpiece of the proletarian party which was being organised at the time, in fact the organ of the Communist League.
An excerpt from this article was published in English in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1957.
97 See Note 51.
98 In his speech from the throne at the opening of the United Diet in Prussia on April 11, 1847, Frederick William IV declared that he would never let the “natural relations between the monarch and the people” turn into “conditioned, constitutional” relations and a “written sheet of paper” be a substitute for a “genuine sacred loyalty”.
99 Under this common title two essays by Engels were published in the Deutsche-Brüssseler-Zeitung in which he analysed the poetry and literary-critical work and also the aesthetic views of representatives of “true socialism”. The first essay dealt with Karl Beck’s book, Lieder vom armen Mann (Songs of the Poor Man), published at the end of November 1845 as a sample of the poetry of “true socialism”. There are grounds for assuming that Engels’ essay on Beck may initially have been included as Chapter 3, the manuscript of which is not extant, in Volume II of The German Ideology (see present edition, Vol. 5). This work was most probably written in the first half of 1846 in Brussels.
The second essay analysed Karl Grün’s book, Über Göthe vom menschlichen Standpunkte (About Goethe from the Human Point of View), published at the end of April 1846, as a sample of the prose or literary critique of “true socialism”. Engels’ letter of January 15, 1847 to Marx shows that he intended to revise it for Volume II of The German Ideology (judging by its contents it was to follow Chapter 4 devoted to the analysis of Karl Grün’s book: Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien, Darmstadt, 1845 [The Social Movement in France and Belgium] as a sample of the historiography of “true socialism”). This essay was most probably written by Engels after he had moved from Brussels to Paris, i.e., between August 15, 1846 and January 15, 1847.
100 The words “Wahrheit und Recht, Freiheit und Gesetz” (Truth and Right, Freedom and Law) were used as an epigraph to the progressive German newspaper Leipziger Allgmeine Zeitung, banned in Prussia in l842, and in Saxony early in 1843.
101 Restoration — see Note 72.
Carbonari — see Note 29. The carbonari held their meetings under the guise of charcoal sales (Ventes).
102 Ventrus — representatives of the “belly” of the French Chamber (see Note 94).
103 An allusion to “Young Germany” — a literary group which appeared in Germany in the 1830s and was under the influence of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne. The group included such writers as Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Mundt, Laube and Jung, whose stories and articles voiced the opposition sentiments of petty-bourgeois and intellectual advocates of freedom of conscience and the press, the introduction of a constitution, emancipation of women, etc. Some of them advocated granting civil rights to Jews. Their political views were vague and inconsistent; most of them soon became ordinary liberals.
104 The reference is to a spontaneous rising of textile workers in Prague in the latter half of June 1844. The events in Prague led to workers’ uprisings in many other industrial centres of Bohemia. The workers’ movement, which was accompanied by factory and machine wrecking, was suppressed by government troops.
105 The Friends of Light — was a religious trend opposed to the pietism predominant in the official church and supported by Junker circles.
106 The first edition of P. H. Holbach’s Système de la nature, ou des loix du monde physique et du monde moral (London 1770) bore, for conspirational reasons, the name of the secretary of the French Academy J. B. Mirabaud, who died in 1760, as its author.
107 Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato was written in 1713; Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werthers in 1774.
108 The Federal Decrees of 1819 (the Karlsbad decisions) were drawn up on the insistence of the Austrian Chancellor Metternich at the conference of the German Confederation in Karlsbad in August 1819 and were endorsed by the Federal Diet on September 20, 1819. These decisions envisaged a number of strict measures against the liberal press, the introduction of preliminary censorship in all German states, strict surveillance over universities, prohibition of students’ societies, establishment of an investigation commission for the prosecution of participants in the oppositional movement (so-called demagogues).
109 9 Themidor — see Note 3. 18 Brumaire — the coup d'état of November 9, 1799 which completed the bourgeois counter-revolution and led to the personal rule of General Napoleon Bonaparte.
110 In one of the scenes in Goethe’s comedy Der Bürgergeneral a rural barber who pretended he was a Jacobin general drank a jug of milk and thus angered the master of the house.
111 See Note 53.
112 Ghibellines — a political party in Italy formed in the 12th century in the period of strife between the popes and the German emperors. It included mostly feudal lords who supported the emperors and furiously opposed the papal party of the Guelphs, which represented the upper trade and artisan strata of Italian towns. The parties existed till the 15th century. Dante, who hoped that the emperor’s rule would help to overcome the feudal dismemberment of Italy, joined the party of the Ghibellines in 1302.
113 The International Congress of Economists held in Brussels on September 16-18, 1847 discussed the attitude towards the movement for the repeal of trade restrictions between individual countries started by the British Anti-Corn Law League (see Note 47).
The Communist League members headed by Marx attended the congress, intending to use it for open criticism of bourgeois economics and for defence of working-class interests.
Marx’s name was put on the official list of the congress participants (see Journal des économistes, t. XVIII, October 1847, p. 275).
During the congress a sharp controversy arose between the bourgeois majority and a group of Brussels Communists, especially after Georg Weerth’s speech criticising the free traders’ statements about the benefits of free trade to the working class. The organisers of the congress did not let Marx make his speech and closed the discussion. In reply to this Marx and Engels and their followers carried on the polemic with bourgeois economists in the democratic and proletarian press.
114 An allusion to the fulfilment of Bentham’s will by John Bowring (Bentham bequeathed his body for use for scientific purposes).
115 The report on other sittings of the congress was not published in the Deutsche-Brüssseler-Zeitung. On these see Engels’ article “The Free Trade Congress at Brussels” (this volume, pp. 282-90).
116 This work is a part of a speech Marx intended to deliver at the International Congress of Economists in Brussels on September 18, 1847. Not being allowed to do so, Marx rewrote it for the press and sent it to a number of Belgian newspapers. It was published only in the Atelier Démocratique, September 29, 1847 in French. Announcing the publication of this article the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung wrote on October 7, 1847: “ Unfortunately, not a single big Belgian newspaper had the courage or intelligence to print the speech sent to it.” Extant are only a preliminary draft of the speech bearing the author’s heading “Protectionists” (see this volume, p. 573) and the German translation of its beginning published in Hamm in 1848 by J. Weydemeyer, a friend of Marx and Engels, together with another speech by Marx on the freedom of trade (see this volume, pp. 450-65). Weydemeyer omitted the end of the speech saying that it was repeated in the speech of January 9. Engels gives the content of Marx’s speech in his article “The Free Trade Congress at Brussels” (see this volume, pp. 282-90).
117 See Note 47.
118 The full text of Weerth’s speech (Engels quotes parts of it word for word, and gives a free account of others) was published in a number of newspapers, in particular, in French (the language in which it was delivered) in the Atelier Démocratique and in German in Die Ameise (Grimma) on October 15, 1847. The text published in Die Ameise is reproduced in the book: Georg Weerth, Sämtliche Werke, Zweiter Band, Berlin, 1956, S. 128-33. In some places the text differs from the passages cited by Engels. Apparently Engels recorded facts more exactly; in particular, in the first passage cited by him he corrected the number of the English proletariat (5 million instead of 3 million as in Weerth), and in the second passage the date on which the Chartists concluded an agreement with the free traders (1845 instead of 1843).
119 The reference is to provocations on the part of the Anti-Corn Law League which sought to use for its own ends the workers’ unrest in the industrial districts of England in August 1842. (On the general strike of 1842 see Note 10.) The free traders encouraged the workers’ action during the first stage of the strike hoping to direct their movement towards the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws. However, the independent class and political character which this strike assumed as it became general led to the direct and active participation of the free trade bourgeoisie. in suppressing the movement. p. 2 8,7)
120 See Note 46.
121 This refers to the movement for Parliamentary reform in England in 1830-31, to the July revolution of 1830 in France and the revolution of 1830-31 in Belgium which led to the separation of Belgium from Holland.
122 The reference is to the brutal suppression of workers’ risings in Lyons in 1831 and 1834 and to atrocities perpetrated by government troops against starving workers in Buzançais (Indre Department) who had looted corn shipments and storehouses belonging to profiteers early in 1847.
123 On the precision subsequently given by Marx and Engels to these terms which express the relations between the worker and the capitalist, see Note 70.
124 The two articles by Engels against Karl Heinzen were written in reply to this petty-bourgeois democrat’s slanderous attacks against the Communists and communism as a social trend. In particular, the Polemik column of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung No. 77 for September 26, 1847 contained Heinzen’s statement in which, among other things, he accused the Communists of seeking to split the German revolutionary movement. Heinzen used as a pretext an editorial note in No. 73 of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, September 12, 1847, in which, while refuting the allegation of a certain German newspaper that the article “Der deutsche Hunger und die deutschen Fürsten” published in Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung (No. 49, June 20, 1847) was of a communist character, the editors pointed out that the author of the said article was Heinzen who “as is known ... repeatedly attacked communism”. Publishing Heinzen’s reply to this note, Adalbert Bornstedt, the paper’s editor-in-chief, instead of refuting the insinuations it contained called for appeasement between “various shades of German revolutionaries abroad”; in particular he wrote on behalf of the editors: “We consider it our duty to advise both parties in case polemic arises in some other place to give it up.”
As is seen from Engels’ letter of September 30, 1847 to Marx the first article with a reply to Heinzen was submitted to the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on September 27. However, Bornstedt, despite his agreement with Marx an Engels on their regularly contributing to the paper, did not publish Engels’ article in the next issue (No. 78) on the pretext of lack of space. Compelled to publish it in No. 79 on October 3, 1847 in the Polemik column he again repeated in the editorial note his appeal to both parties to avoid mutual accusations.
125 Heinzen visualised the future Germany as a republican federation of autonomous lands, similar to the Swiss Confederation. This was the meaning given by many petty-bourgeois democrats to the slogan of German unity, the symbol of which was the black-red-and-gold banner. Marx and Engels considered such an interpretation of the slogan inconsistent with the struggle against the survivals of medieval seclusion and political disunity. To oppose this they put forward the demand of a single, centralised democratic republic of Germany.
126 Engels enumerates some major peasant rebellions of the Middle Ages: the rebellions of Wat Tyler (1381) and Jack Cade (1450) in England, the peasant revolt in France in 1358 (Jacqueric) and the peasant war in Germany (1524-25). In later years as a result of studying the history of the peasant struggle against feudalism and drawing on the experience of revolutionary actions of the peasantry during the revolution of 1848-49 Engels changed his estimate of the peasant movements’ character. In The Peasant War in Germany (1850) and other works he showed the revolutionary liberation character of peasant revolts and their role in shaking the foundations of feudalism.
127 The Illuminati (from the Latin illuminatus) — members of a secret society founded in Bavaria in 1776, a variety of Freemasonry. The society consisted of appositional elements from the bourgeoisie and nobility, who were dissatisfied with princely despotism At the same time a characteristic feature of this society was the fear of the democratic movement, reflected in the rules, which made rank-and-file members blind tools of their leaders. In 1785 the society was banned by the Bavarian authorities. Similar societies existed also in Spain and France.
128 With this article Engels began contributing to the newspaper of the French republican democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists La Réforme. Determined to use the French radical press to spread communist ideas and to promote international unity of revolutionary proletarian and democratic circles in the European countries, Engels established close contacts with the editors of La Réforme in the autumn of 1847. In his letter to Marx of October [25-126, 1847 he wrote that he had made arrangements with Ferdinand Flocon, one of the editors, for the weekly publication of an article on the situation in England. Engels intended to popularise in France the Chartist movement and the material from the Chartist press, primarily The Northern Star. The article Engels proposed to Flocon (at first it was intended for Flocon’s personal information) was published, as Engels himself stated, without any alterations.
After this the newspaper carried almost every week Engels’ articles or summaries of The Northern Star reports on the Chartist movement which he translated into French. These summaries, as a rule, bore no title. Sometimes they were published in the column “The Chartist Movement”, or “The Chartist Agitation”, and usually began with the words “They write from London...... Engels contributed to La Réforme up to January 1848. Despite differences in views with the editors (in particular Louis Blanc and Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin), Engels’ articles and his propaganda of Chartism helped to overcome to some extent this paper’s national exclusiveness and had a revolutionising influence on its readers — the French working class and radical-minded middle sections.
129 The intended publication of the Chartist daily newspaper Democrat did not materialise.
130 Only a narrow circle of persons with electoral qualifications took part in the ballot (see Note 46).
131 On the general strike in England in 1842, see Note 10.
132 The editors of L'Atelier prefaced Engels’ article with the following note: “A German worker who has been living in England for a long time has sent us a letter we are giving below concerning one of the articles which was published last month. We hasten to print this letter which deserves being printed for a number of reasons.”
On his contacts with L'Atelier editors who were under the influence of Christian socialism Engels wrote to Marx on October [25-]26, 1847 in connection with the publication of this article: “I was ... at L'Atelier. I brought a correction to my article on the English workers in the last issue.... These gentlemen were very cordial.... They kept on suggesting to me to contribute. However, I shall agree only in the last resort..
This article was published in English in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles on Britain, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.
133 The work is a continuation of the polemic with Karl Heinzen. The latter replied to Engels (see this volume, pp. 291-306) with a long article “Ein ‘Repräsentant’ der Kommunisten” full of rude abuse of his opponent and of the theory of scientific communism in general (Marx ironically called this article “Heinzen’s Manifesto Against the Communists”). After the publication of this article in full in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung (No. 84, October 21, 1847) Bornstedt, the editor of the newspaper, again appealed to the contending parties to take the polemic elsewhere as the newspaper could not afford to publish such long articles. However, the editorial board had to agree to publish Marx’s reply to Heinzen in full. When they began to publish the reply in No. 86 on October 28, 1847 the editors even censured Heinzen in an editorial note for the harsh tone of his attacks. On November 14, before the whole of Marx’s article had appeared, the editors published a special note in answer to Heinzen’s attempt to continue the polemic: “We refuse to publish in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung Heinzen’s letter of November 1 from Geneva in which he attacks the editorial board of this paper in an infamous way and tries to involve the paper and Karl Marx, for his first article in No. 86, without waiting for the continuation, in a vile private squabble. We declare that this is the way we shall deal with Heinzen’s subsequent letters, despite his philistine assertions that he has a right to use our paper to express his views. We shall reply to possible public accusations in the proper time and place if we deem it necessary.”
Marx’s work was published in the Polemik column in several issues. There were some editorial notes to the first part of it (to the expression “grobian literature”, literary personages “Solomon and Marcolph”, “goose preacher”). Subsequently, however, author’s notes were provided. Nos. 92 and 94 of November 18 and 25, 1847 contained errata. All the corrections, some of which are author’s improvements, have been taken into account in the present edition.
This work was published in English abridged in K. Marx, Selected Essays, Parsons, London, 1926.
134 This note (to the title of the second instalment of the article) published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung No. 87, October 31, 1847 was evidently written by Marx in reply to the editorial appeal to the contending parties (see Note 133) to abstain from private polemics.
135 Here and below Marx cites Shakespeare from August Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck’s edition: Shakespeare’s dramatics Werke, Th. 1-9), Berlin, 1825-33.
136 Communes — self-governing urban communities in medieval France and Italy. For their description see Engels’ note to the 1888 English edition and the 1890 German edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (this volume, p. 486).
137 By the German war of liberation is meant the struggle for liberation from Napoleonic rule in 1813-14 (for more details, see Note 22).In this war as well as in the campaign of 1815, after Napoleon’s short-lived restoration, the German states, including Austria and Prussia, which were members of the Holy Alliance (see Note 24), fought against Napoleonic France in the 6th anti-French coalition, the main organiser of which was Britain.
138 Marx refers to the “true Levellers” or “Diggers” who broke away from the democratic republican Levellers’ movement during the English bourgeois revolution of the mid-17th century. Representing the poorest sections of the population and suffering from feudal and capitalist exploitation in town and countryside, the Diggers, in contrast to the rest of the Levellers, who defended private property, carried on propaganda for community of property and other ideas of egalitarian communism, attempting to establish common ownership of the land through collective ploughing of commune] waste land.
139 On the struggle of the English bourgeoisie against the Corn Laws, see Note 47.
140 Marx cites the report of the commission under the chairmanship of William Morris Meredith to investigate the operation of the Poor Law. The report submitted to the Pennsylvania Congress on January 29, 1825 was published in The Register of Pennsylvania on August 16, 1828.
141 Apparently Marx is citing the following edition: Th. Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, London, 1831. (The first edition was published in Columbia in 1826.) This is proved by the coincidence of the pages referred to and the relevant passages in the above-mentioned edition, and also by the excerpts copied out by Marx (including the passage cited) in his preparatory notebooks (see MEGA, Abt. 1, Bd. 6, Berlin 1932, S. 604).
142 See Note 38.
143 The reference is to the failure of the Peasant War in Germany (1524-25)
144 Thirty Years’ War, 1618-48 — a European war, in which the Pope, the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs and the Catholic German princes rallied under the banner of Catholicism fought the Protestant countries: Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden, the Republic of the Netherlands and a number of German states which had become Protestant. The rulers of Catholic France — rivals of the Hapsburgs — supported the Protestant camp. Germany was the main arena of this struggle, the object of plunder and territorial claims. The Treaty of Westphalia concluded in 1648 scaled the dismemberment of Germany.
145 The September laws promulgated by the French government in September 1835, restricted the rights of jury courts and introduced severe measures against the press. They provided for increased money deposits for periodical publications and introduced imprisonment and large fines for publishing attacks on private property and the existing political system. The enactment of these laws in conditions of the constitutional July monarchy which had formally proclaimed freedom of the press, emphasised the anti-democratic nature of the bourgeois system.
146 Fontanel — an artificial ulcer practised in medieval medicine for the discharge of harmful tumours from the body.
147 The reference is to the uprising of the Silesian weavers on June 4-6, 1844 — the first big class battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Germany, which assumed the greatest scope in the Silesian villages of Langenbielau and Peterswaldau, and to the uprising of the Bohemian workers in the second half of June 1844. (On this see Note 104.)
148 The reference is to the appeals for unity of all Germans against the German monarchs in the name of bourgeois freedoms and constitutional reforms, which were advanced by the participants in the Hambach festival — a political event that took place near the castle of Hambach in the Bavarian Palatinate on May 27, 1832.
149 Movement for the repeal of the Corn Laws — see Note 47. On the election of the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor to Parliament — see Note 46.
150 The reference to Mably is not exact: the draft constitution for the Corsicans was drawn up by Rousseau and not by Mably. (J. J. Rousseau, Lettres sur la législation de la Corse, Paris, 1765). Mably, as well as Rousseau, drew up the draft constitution for the Poles. (G. Mably, “Du gouvernement et des lois de Pologne” in: Collection complète des oeuvres, t. 8, Paris, 1794 A 1795.)
151 An allusion to the conduct of the representatives of the party of the big bourgeoisie — the Girondists — after they had been removed from government and the Jacobins established their dictatorship in France following the popular uprising of May 31-June 2, 1793. In the summer of the same year the Girondists rose in revolt against the Jacobin government to defend the rights of the departments to autonomy and federation. After the revolt had been suppressed many Girondist leaders (Barbaroux among them) were sentenced by the revolutionary tribunal and executed.
152 Le Comité de salut public (The Committee of Public Safety) established by the Convention on April 6, 1793 during the Jacobin dictatorship (June 2, 1793-July 27, 1794) was the leading revolutionary government body in France. It lasted till October 26, 1795.
153 The reference is to the stories for children written by the German pedagogue J. H. Campe, in particular his book Die Entdeckung von Amerika, a section of which was devoted to the Peruvian Incas and the Spanish conquest of Peru.
154 An allusion to articles which appeared in the Allgemeine Zeitung, distorting the ideas of utopian communism and socialism and attempting to ascribe communist views to the radical organs of the German press. Marx exposed this attempt in his article “Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung” published in the Rheinische Zeitung of October 16, 1842 (see present edition, Vol. 1).
155 Engels’ work Principles of Communism reflects the next stage in the elaboration of the programme of the Communist League following the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith”. This new version of the programme was worked out by Engels on the instructions of the Paris circle authority of the Communist League. The decision was adopted after Engels’ sharp criticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft programme drawn up by the “true socialist” M. Hess, which was then rejected.
Comparison of the text of the Principles of Communism with that of the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” proves that the document written by Engels at the end of October 1847 is a revised version of the Draft discussed at the First Congress of the Communist League. The first six points of the Draft were completely revised. Engels had felt compelled at that time to make some concessions in them to the as yet immature views of the League of the Just leaders. Some of these points were omitted in the Principles, others substantially changed and put in a different order. In the rest the arrangement of both documents coincides, though there are several new questions in the Principles.
The Principles of Communism constituted the immediate basis for the preliminary version of the Communist Manifesto. In his letter of November 23-24, 1847 to Marx Engels wrote about the advisability of drafting the programme in the form of a communist manifesto, rejecting the old form of a catechism. In writing the Manifesto the founders of Marxism used some propositions formulated in the Principles of Communism.
The Principles of Communism were published for the first time in English in The Plebs Magazine, London, in July 1914-January 1915; a separate edition was put out in Chicago in 1925 (The Daily Workers Publishing Co), in subsequent years they were published several times together with the Communist Manifesto.
156 See Note 70.
157 The reference is to class-divided societies. Subsequently Engels thought it necessary to make special mention of the fact that in their works written in the 1840s, while touching upon the problem of class antagonisms and class struggle in history, Marx and he made no mention of the primitive classless stage of human development because the history of that stage had as yet been but little studied. (See Engels’ note to the English edition of the Communist Manifesto, 1888, this volume, p. 482).
158 In the Appendix to the 1887 American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (first published in 1845) and also in the Preface to the English edition and in the Preface to the Second German edition (1892), Engels wrote about the recurrence of crises: “The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in the text as five years. This was the period apparently indicated by the course of events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868 has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revulsions were secondary, and tended more and more to disappear.”
159 The conclusion that the victory of the proletarian revolution was possible only simultaneously in the advanced capitalist countries, and hence impossible in one country alone, first made by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology (see present edition, Vol. 5, Ch. 1, 2[51) and most definitely formulated in the Principles of Communism, was arrived at in the period of pre-monopoly capitalism. However, in their later works Marx and Engels found it necessary to give this proposition a more flexible form stressing the fact that a proletarian revolution should be understood as a considerably prolonged and complex process which could develop initially in several main capitalist countries. See, for example, K. Marx, “Revelations about the Cologne Trial” (1853), Marx’s letter of February 12, 1870 to Engels and Engels’ letter of September 12, 1882 to Kautsky. Under new historical conditions, Lenin, proceeding from the law of the uneven economic and political development of capitalism in the era of imperialism, came to the conclusion that the socialist revolution could first triumph either in only a few countries or even in a single country. This conclusion was first formulated by Lenin in his article “On the Slogan of the United States of Europe” (1915).
160 See Note 38.
161 This article, written by Engels for La Réforme was reprinted in The Northern Star No. 524, November 6, 1847 with the following editorial introduction: “The following article, translated from the Réforme, the most able of the French journals, and a consistent supporter of the rights of labour in all countries, will cheer the working classes of England with the proud consolation, that henceforth the battle of universal liberty is not to be confined within the limits of our Sea-bound dungeon”.
162 The reference is to the Chartist Land Cooperative Society founded on the initiative of O'Connor in 1845 (later the National Land Company, it lasted till 1848). The aim of the Society was to buy plots of land with the money collected and to lease them to worker shareholders on easy terms. Among the positive aspects of the Society’s activity were its petitions to Parliament and printed propaganda against the aristocracy’s monopoly on land. However, the idea of liberating the workers from exploitation, of reducing unemployment, etc., by returning them to the land proved utopian. The Society’s activity had no practical success.
Subsequently, in the “Third International Review” written in autumn 1850 Marx and Engels stressed that the failure of the Land Society was inevitable. They emphasised at the same time that for a while the workers could mistake O'Connor’s project for a revolutionary measure only because objectively it was directed against big landownership and thus accorded with the tendency of bourgeois revolutions to break up the big landed estates; only the demand for nationalisation of land put forward somewhat later by the Chartists ‘ revolutionary wing (O'Brien, Ernest Jones and others) corresponded to the true interests of the working class (it was included into the Chartist programme of 1851).
Engels thought of sending a detailed report on the activities of the Land Society to La Réforme as can be seen front the second part of the article; but apparently he never wrote it, though he reproduced the content of petitions adopted later by this Society in his report “Chartist Agitation” (see this volume, pp. 412-14).
163 The banquet in London on October 25, 1847 was to celebrate the election of the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor and a number of radicals to Parliament. The elections took place on August 5, 1847 in Nottingham. The account of the banquet used by Engels in this article was published in The Northern Star No. 523, October 30, 1847.
164 The demand for so-called complete suffrage, expressed vaguely in a way capable of varying interpretation, was proposed by the representatives of the English radical bourgeoisie in the early 1840s to counter the Chartist social and political programme laid down in the People’s Charter and the Chartist petitions. Early in 1842 the radical J. Sturge, who was close to the free traders, tried to found a universal suffrage league in Birmingham with the aim of diverting the workers front revolutionary struggle for the Charter. However, the efforts of Sturge and his adherents to influence the Chartist movement and use it for their own ends were resolutely rebuffed by the Chartist revolutionary wing.
Later, however, the radicals went on trying to replace the Chartists’ struggle for universal suffrage and fundamental reform of the parliamentary system with a movement for moderate parliamentary reforms.
165 The reference is to the July revolution of 1830 in France.
166 The National Chartist Association, founded in July 1840, was the first mass workers’ party in the history of the working-class movement. In the years of its upsurge it numbered up to 50,000 members. It was headed by an Executive Committee which was re-elected at congresses and conferences of delegates. The Association initiated many political campaigns and Chartists’ conventions. However, its work was hindered by lack of ideological and political unity and a certain organisational vagueness. After the defeat of the Chartists in 1848 and the ensuing split in their ranks the Association lost its mass character, but nevertheless under the Leader ship of the revolutionary Chartists waged a struggle for the revival of Chartism on a socialist basis. It ceased its activities in 1858.
167 On the parliamentary reform of 1831-32 in England see Note 33.
168 The reference is to the Constitution of the French Republic adopted by the Convention during the Jacobins’ revolutionary rule, the most democratic of bourgeois constitutions in the 18th and 19th centuries: it established the republican system, proclaimed freedom of the individual, of conscience, of the press, of petitioning, of legislative initiative, the right to education, social relief in case of inability, resistance to oppression.
169 The Northern Star No. 523, October 30, 1847, published excerpts from Alphonse Lamartine’s article “Déclaration de principes”, originally printed in the newspaper Le Bien Public in Mâcon.
170 See Note 18.
171 The reference is to comments of the Paris newspapers La Démocratie pacifique, October 25 and 26, 1847, La Presse, October 24, 1847 and others on Lamartine’s programme.
172 This article was occasioned by the civil war in Switzerland unleashed by the seven economically backward Catholic cantons which in 1843 formed a separatist union — the Sonderbund — to resist progressive bourgeois reforms and defend the privileges of the church and the Jesuits. The reactionary actions of the Sonderbund headed by the Catholics and the city patricians were opposed by bourgeois radicals and liberals who in the mid-40s were in the majority in most of the cantons and in the Swiss Diet, the supreme legislative body of the Swiss Confederation. In July 1847 the Diet decreed the dissolution of the Sonderbund, and this served as a pretext for the latter to start hostilities against other cantons early in November. On November 23 the Sonderbund army was defeated by the Federal forces. As a result of this victory and the adoption of a new constitution in 1848, Switzerland, formerly a union of states, became a federal state.
The struggle between radicals on the one side and reactionary patriarchal patricians and clericals on the other attracted Engels’ attention as early as 1844, when he described it in his article, “The Civil War in the Valais”, published in The Northern Star No. 344, June 15, 1844 (see present edition, Vol. 3).
In the present article Engels contrasted modern civilisation to patriarchal backwardness, exposing the Swiss reactionaries and their attempts to link counter-revolutionary separatist aims with the historical traditions of the Swiss people. Engels considered Switzerland’s past from this point of view. AS a result he presented a somewhat distorted picture of certain periods of its history, particularly the struggle against Austria and Burgundy in the Middle Ages which was anti-feudal on the whole. In his later works of 1856-59 on the history of warfare (“Mountain Warfare”, “Infantry”, etc.) Engels showed the great historical significance of Switzerland’s struggle for independence in the 14th and 15th centuries. Engels also changed his view of the peasants’ role in Norway (in the article the stress was laid on their patriarchal traditions). In “Reply to Herr Paul Ernest” (1890) Engels pointed out in particular that the existence of free peasants who had not experienced serfdom had a positive effect on Norway’s historical development though it was a backward country due to isolation and natural peculiarities.
173 In the battle of Sempach (Canton of Lucerne) on July 9, 1386 the Swiss defeated the Austrian troops of Prince Leopold III.
At Murten (Canton of Freiburg) on June 22. 1476 the Swiss defeated the troops of Carl the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
174 Engels uses this term in relation to the mountain cantons which in the 13th and 14th centuries formed the nucleus of the Swiss Confederation.
175 The battle of Teutobord Forest (9 AA.D.) ended in the rout of the Roman legions by the Germanic tribes who had risen against the Roman conquerors.
176 The battle of Morgarten between the Swiss volunteers and the troops of Leopold of Hapsburg on November 15, 1315 ended in victory for the volunteers.
Marathon, Plataea and Salamis — sites of important battles won by the Greeks during the wars between Greece and Persia (500-449 B.C.).
177 The Grütli oath — one of the legends woven round the foundation of the Swiss Confederation, the origin of which dates back to the agreement of the three mountain cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden in 1291. According to this legend representatives of the three cantons met in 1307 in the Grütli (Rütli) meadow and took an oath of loyalty in the joint struggle against Austrian rule.
178 At Granson (Canton of Vaud), on March 2, 1476, the Swiss infantry defeated Carl the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. At Nancy (Lorraine),on January 5, 1477, the troops of Carl the Bold were routed by the Swiss, the Lorrainians, the Alsatians and the Germans.
179 The account of the banquet at Château-Rouge was published in The Northern Star No. 508, July 17, 1847.
180 The quotation consists of extracts from the leading articles of the Journal des Débats, July 13, 15 ‘ 18, 19, and August 7, 1847.
181 See Note 90.
182 See Note 11.
183 The events described here took place in Paris at the end of August and the beginning of September 1847. They were provoked by a conflict between shoe-makers at a workshop in the Rue St. Honoré and their master, who tried to defraud one of the workers of part of his pay.
184 See Note 50.
185 This article was first published in English in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Britain, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953.
186 The session of Parliament opened on November 18, 1847. The democratic forces were represented by the Chartist leader, Feargus O'Connor.
187 See Note 166.
188 See Note 1.
189 The International League, or the People’s International League, was founded in 1847 by English radicals and free traders. Among its foundation and active members were Thomas Cooper, Sir William Fox, Sir John Bowring and the democratic publicist, poet and engraver William James Linton. The League was also joined by several Italian, Hungarian and Polish emigrants, Giuseppe Mazzini in particular, who was one of its initiators. Its activity was limited to organising meetings and lectures on international problems and distributing pamphlets, and ceased completely in 1848.
190 In this article Engels used material from La Réforme, November 9, 13. 14 and 16, 1847. The banquets of Lille, Avesnes and Valenciennes were held on November 7, 9 and 11, 1847 respectively.
191 In 1840, under the pretext of fortifying the capital against the external enemy, the French Government began to erect a number of separate forts around Paris. The July monarchy intended them to help safeguard itself against people’s revolts. The democratic circles strongly protested against new “Bastilles” being built in Paris. Most of the bourgeois opposition, however, including the followers of the National, supported the construction of the forts, justifying it by national defence interests.
192 Marx’s and Engels’ participation in the international meeting organised by the Fraternal Democrats to mark the anniversary of the Polish uprising of 1830 showed their eagerness to use their stay in London during the Second Congress of the Communist League (end of November-beginning of December 1847) to strengthen contacts with the democratic and workers’ organisations in England. As Vice-President of the Brussels Democratic Association Marx was empowered to establish correspondence between the Association and the Fraternal Democrats and to enter into negotiations on the organisation of an international democratic congress (for details see Note 206).
Concerning the Polish meeting and the reception accorded the German democrats, see this volume, pp. 391-92.
Apart from the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung No. 140, December 3, 1847 and The Northern Star No. 528, December 4, 1847 also gave an account of the speeches made by Marx and Engels at the meeting.
193 This item was in the form of a letter to the editor of La Réforme.
194 The Democratic Association (Association démocratique) was founded in Brussels in the autumn of 1847 and united proletarian revolutionaries, mainly German emigrants and advanced ‘bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats. Marx and Engels took an active part in setting up the Association. On November 15, 1847 Marx was elected its Vice-President (the President was Lucien Jottrand, a Belgian democrat), and under his influence it became a centre of the international democratic movement. During the February 1848 revolution in France, the proletarian wing of the Brussels Democratic Association sought to arm the Belgian workers and to intensify the struggle for a democratic republic. However, when Marx was banished from Brussels in March 1848 and the most revolutionary elements were repressed by the Belgian authorities its activity assumed a narrower, purely local character and in 1849 the Association ceased to exist.
Fraternal Democrats — see Note 1.
195 See Note 189.
196 See Note 145.
197 The banquet of Dijon, described by Engels, was held on November 21, 1847 and a report on it was given in La Réforme on November 24 and 25. Engels repeated his criticism of Louis Blanc’s banquet speech somewhat later in the Deutsche-Brüssseler-Zeitung (see this volume, pp. 409-11).
198 The reference is to the military alliance concluded in 1778 between Louis XVI and the United States of America during the American War of Independence (1775-83) and to the participation of the French expeditionary corps and navy in the hostilities against England — France’s trade and colonial rival.
199 The reference is to the entry of the French republican army into the Netherlands in January 1795 in support of a local uprising against the aristocratic regime of the Stadholder Wilhelm V. The latter was deposed and the Batavian Republic was established (1795-1806), which soon became dependent on Napoleonic France.
200 For the meaning in which Engels uses the word “cosmopolitism” see Note 8.
201 In his polemic with Blanc Engels made no attempt to disclose the real nature of the bourgeois “civilisation” the capitalist states were spreading in the economically backward countries. He concentrated here on exposing Louis Blanc’s nationalistic bombast about France’s so-called civilising role. In their later articles and letters devoted to India, Ireland, China and Iran, Marx and Engels showed that these countries were drawn into the orbit of capitalist relations through their colonial enslavement by capitalist states. They were turned into agrarian and raw material appendages of the metropolis, their natural resources were plundered and their peoples cruelly exploited by the colonialists. The disastrous consequences of English rule in India were described by Marx, in particular, in his “Speech on the Question of Free Trade” (see this volume, pp. 460-61 and 464).
202 In the latter half of the 16th century the struggle between England and Spain caused by colonial rivalry was closely interwoven with the Netherlands revolution of 1566-1609. The defeat of the Invincible Spanish Armada in 1588 and other victories scored by England over Spain made it easier for the Dutch republic (the United Provinces) to resist the attempts of Spanish absolutism to restore its domination in that region of the Netherlands. In the war against Spain at that period the English and the Dutch often acted as allies.
203 The reference is to the English revolution of the mid-17th century which led to the eventual establishment of the bourgeois system in the country.
204 This rhyme was popular among the peasant rebels led by Wat Tyler in 1381 in England. It was widely used by John Ball, one of the leaders of the rebel peasants, in his sermons. It is apparently a paraphrase of the verse by the 14th-century English poet, Richard Rolle de Hampole:
When Adam dalfe and Eve spanne
To spire of Hou may spede,
Where was then the pride of man,
That now marres his meed?
205 Covenanters — the Scottish Calvinists of the 16th and 17th centuries who concluded special agreements and alliances covenants) to defend their religion against encroachments on the part of the aristocratic circles tending to Catholicism. On the eve of the 17th-century English revolution the Covenant became for the Scots the political and ideological rallying point of struggle against the absolutism of the Stuarts, for their country’s independence.
206 From the autumn of 1847 onwards the Brussels Democratic Association (see Note 194) discussed the question of convening an international democratic congress to rally the European revolutionary forces in view of impending revolutionary events. Marx and Engels took an active part in preparing for that congress. When in London, at the Second Congress of the Communist League, Marx had talks on the subject with the Chartist leaders and representatives of the proletarian and democratic emigrants. Engels apparently had similar talks with French socialists and democrats. In the beginning of 1848 an agreement was reached to convene the congress in Brussels. It was scheduled for August 25, 1848, the 18th anniversary of the Belgian revolution (see this volume, p. 640). These plans did not materialise, however, because in February 1848 a revolution began in Europe.
207 This item is Marx’s reply to an article by a Belgian publicist, Adolph Bartels, published in the Journal de Charleroi on December 12, 1847. Bartels distorted the activity of the revolutionary emigrants resident in Belgium and attacked in particular the communist views of the proletarian German emigrants, their Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung and the international meeting which they helped to organise in London on November 29, 1847 to mark the 17th anniversary of the Polish uprising of 1830.
Bartels’ article reflected bourgeoisie’s dissatisfaction at the growing influence of the proletarian revolutionaries in the Belgian democratic movement, particularly in the Brussels Democratic Association (see Note 194; Bartels was a foundation member but soon broke away). The article coincided in time with a campaign of slander launched by the Belgian clerical and conservative press, and primarily by the Journal de Bruxelles, against the revolutionary German emigrants.
208 The German Workers’ Society was founded by Marx and Engels in Brussels at the end of August 1847, its aim being the political education of the German workers who lived in Belgium and dissemination of the ideas of scientific communism among them. With Marx, Engels and their followers at its head, the Society became the legal centre rallying the revolutionary proletarian forces in Belgium. Its best activists were members of the Communist League. The Society played an important part in founding the Brussels Democratic Association. It ceased to exist soon after the February 1848 revolution in France when the Belgian police arrested and banished many of its members.
209 The Journal de Bruxelles of December 14, 1847, gave a distorted account of Marx’s speech at the Polish meeting in London on November 29, 1847.
210 Congregatio de propaganda fide — a Catholic organisation founded by the Pope in 1622 with the aim of spreading Catholicism in all countries and fighting heresies.
211 Marx refers to the report published in The Northern Star of December 4, 1847 on the London meeting of November 29 in support of fighting Poland. Marx’s speech was abridged and inaccurately rendered.
212 Lamartine’s letter was published in a number of other papers besides Le Bien Public, in particular in La Presse, L'Union monarchique, and as a leaflet entitled Opinion du citoyen Lamartine sur le communisme. It was a reply to Etienne Cabet who through the newspaper Populaire requested Lamartine to give his opinion of Cabet’s communist views.
213 Engels’ articles in support of the newspaper La Réforme in its dispute with the moderate republicans of Le National drew the attention of the staff of La Réforme and met with their approval, especially that of Ferdinand Flocon, one of its editors. He praised Engels’ articles on this subject in The Northern Star (see this volume, pp. 375-82, 385-87, 438-44) and in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung (this article), as Engels informed Marx in a letter of January 14, 1848 from Paris.
214 The dynastic opposition — an oppositional group in the French Chamber of Deputies during the July monarchy (1830-48). The group headed by Odilon Barrot expressed the sentiments of the liberal industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, arid favoured a moderate electoral reform, which they regarded as a means to prevent revolution and preserve the Orleans dynasty.
215 Octrois — city tolls on imported consumer goods, existed in France from the 13th century up to 1949.
216 The conspiratorial Society of Materialistic Communists was founded by French workers in the 1840s. Its members were influenced by the ideas of Théodore Dézamy, a representative of the revolutionary and materialist trend in French utopian communism.
The trial mentioned by Engels took place in July 1847. The members of the Society were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
217 The article “Louis Blanc’s Speech at the Dijon Banquet” is a version of Engels’ report “Reform Movement in France. — Banquet of Dijon” published in The Northern Star No. 530, December 18, 1847 (see this volume, pp. 397-401). The Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung published its own version in the form of extracts from The Northern Star report. The introductory lines were written by Engels specially for this version, the rest of the text, including the quotation from Louis Blanc’s speech, was a translation into German of the part of the report where this speech was criticised. The translation was made almost word for word with but slight deviations which are reproduced here.
For comments on the text, see notes 197-203.
218 The translation of the National Petition was not published in La Réforme.
219 In the latter half of December 1847 Marx delivered several lectures on political economy in the German Workers’ Society in Brussels and intended to prepare them for publication in pamphlet form. However, as he later pointed out in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), he did not manage to publish his work Wage-Labour, written on the basis of these lectures, because of the February 1848 revolution and his subsequent expulsion from Belgium. Marx’s intention to publish these lectures in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung did not materialise either, though on January 6, 1848 the newspaper carried the following note: “At one of the previous meetings of the German Workers’ Society Karl Marx made a report on an important subject, ‘What Are Wages?’ in which the question was presented so clearly, pertinently and comprehensibly, the present situation so sharply criticised and practical arguments cited that we intend soon to make it known to our readers.”
Marx’s lectures appeared in their final form only in April 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the series of articles Wage-Labour and Capital (see present edition, Vol. 9). This series was not finished and did not embrace the whole content of Marx’s lectures.
Published below is a draft outline of the concluding lectures which Marx had no time to prepare for the press. The manuscript, whose cover bears the words: “Brussels, December 1847”, completes Wage-Labour and Capital.
The quotations cited in the original in German are either a free translation or paraphrase of writings by various economists and are taken by Marx, as a rule, from his notebooks of 1845-47.
For the use of terms “commodity labour”, “value of labour” and “price of labour”, see Note 70.
220 The first four points refer to those of Marx’s lectures which were published in the articles entitled Wage-Labour and Capital.
221 The data on the working hours and the number of weavers were taken by Marx from Th. Carlyle’s Chartism, London, 1840, p. 31, where we read: “Half-a-million handloom weavers, working fifteen hours a day, in perpetual inability to procure thereby enough of the coarsest food......
222 An excerpt from Bowring’s speech in the House of Commons was used by Marx in his “Speech on the Questio