Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (10)

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Volume 10 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels covers the period from the autumn of 1849 to the summer of 1851.

The bourgeois-democratic revolutions which swept across the European continent in 1848-49 had ended in defeat. The last centres of insurrection in Germany, Hungary and Italy had been suppressed in the summer of 1849. In France, the victory of the counterrevolution was already clearing the way for the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte on December 2, 1851. Everywhere workers’ and democratic organisations were being destroyed and revolutionaries severely persecuted. Yet the events of the preceding years had left their mark. They had struck at the remnants of feudalism in the European countries, given an impulse to the further growth of capitalism and aggravated its contradictions.

Marx and Engels had already embarked upon their scientific analysis of the European revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century, in which the revolutionary energies of the whole of society had become concentrated in the proletariat—the most active and determined force of the revolution. And now they set out to deepen this analysis by defining the general and specific features of the 1848-49 revolutions and drawing the practical lessons for the consolidation of the proletariat as a class. During the immediately ensuing years they concentrated most of their attention on the theoretical summing up and generalisation of the experience of the revolutionary battles, determining the objective laws of class struggle and of revolution, and working out the strategy and tactics of the proletariat in the new conditions. As Lenin was later to point out, “Here as everywhere else, his [Marx’s] theory is a summing up of experience, illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of history” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 412).

In this period Marx and Engels were not, however, solely concerned with theoretical work but with practical tasks of rallying the working-class organisations. They did not at first expect the break in revolutionary battles to last long. And they considered it essential to gather together the dispersed proletarian forces as quickly as possible, and to prepare them for new struggles. By the summer of 1850, however, they had realised that hopes of an early renewal of the revolution were groundless—but they continued to work for the unity of the most conscious elements of the working class and of its supporters, seeing this as a long-term task.

Marx moved to London at the end of August 1849—and there Engels joined him in November. Straight away, they did their utmost to revive and reorganise the Communist League. They tried to stimulate the work of the London German Workers’ Educational Society, whose nucleus consisted of the Communist League’s local communities, and joined the Society’s Committee of Support for German Refugees, seeking to rally the proletarian revolutionary émigrés around the League. At the same time, they established close contacts with revolutionary leaders—with the Blanquist French émigrés in London and the Left-wing Chartists—joining with them in forming the Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists in the spring of 1850 (see this volume, pp. 614-15). Especially important were their contacts with the revolutionary wing of the Chartist movement under G. Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, and their use of the Chartist journal The Democratic Review to propagate scientific communism and explain events on the Continent to British workers.

The “Letters from Germany” and “Letters from France” — published in The Democratic Review, and which associates of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have recently shown to have been written by Engels—are initial sketches, as it were, for Marx’s major political and historical works summing up the results of the 1848-49 revolutions ( The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), and likewise for Engels’ “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany”. Engels’ articles contain the initial formulations of certain important ideas elaborated in these works—the tendency of the bourgeoisie to turn to counterrevolution, the leading revolutionary role of the proletariat, the worker-peasant alliance, and the permanent revolution. In the “Letters from France”, for example, Engels expressed the hope that in the next round of revolutions the working class would have the support of the broad mass of peasants. The peasants, he wrote, were “beginning to see that no government, except one acting in the interest of the working men of the towns, will free them from the misery and starvation into which ... they are falling deeper and deeper every day” (see this volume, p. 21).

Marx and Engels were convinced that to build and strengthen a proletarian party it was essential to have a publication which would continue the traditions of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. And in March 1850 they launched the journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politischökonomische Revue—the theoretical journal of the Communist League, with Marx as editor. Its inaugural announcement defined the purpose of the journal: “A time of apparent calm such as the present must be employed precisely for the purpose of elucidating the period of revolution just experienced, the character of the conflicting parties, and the social conditions which determine the existence and the struggle of these parties” (see this volume, p. 5).

In its six modest-sized issues, the Revue published Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 and Engels’ The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution and The Peasant War in Germany, which contain a wealth of important ideas. Marx and Engels also contributed book reviews, international reviews, and other articles, all of which appear in the present volume.

In The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (the title given by Engels to its 1895 edition) Marx for the first time applied to a whole period of history the method of analysis and explanation of historical materialism. And it was to contemporary history that he applied it. In his Preface to the 1895 edition Engels described this as “a development as critical, for the whole of Europe, as it was typical”. Marx, he wrote, had set out “to demonstrate the inner causal connection” and so “to trace the political events back to effects of what were, in the final analysis, economic causes”. (This Preface will appear in its chronological place in Volume 28 of the Collected Works.)

It was by analysing and drawing conclusions from the practical experience of revolutionary struggle that Marx was able to demonstrate the objective necessity of social revolutions, and to enrich the whole theory of revolution by the idea that revolutions are the “locomotives of history”, accelerating historical progress and stimulating the constructive energy of the masses. He showed how in revolutionary periods history is speeded up—as was the case in France when the different classes of society “had to count their epochs of development in weeks where they had previously counted them in half centuries” (see this volume, p. 97). Examining the course of events in France, where the class struggle had been especially acute, Marx found that the bourgeoisie as a class was losing its revolutionary qualities and that the working class had become the principal driving force of revolution and thereby also of historical progress. In the June uprising in 1848 the proletariat of Paris had acted as an independent force and displayed immense energy and heroism. This, he pointed out in The Class Struggles in France, was the first great battle between the two classes whose division split modern society in two, serving notice that, despite the defeat of the proletariat, former bourgeois demands had given place to “the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!” (see this volume, p. 69).

This is the first time Marx used the phrase “dictatorship of the working class” (Diktatur der Arbeiterklasse) in print. And its appearance meant more than simply the use of a single phrase to express the idea of the proletariat winning political power, which Marx and Engels had already formulated in works written before the 1848 revolution. It marked a step forward in the whole conception of proletarian revolution, the “proletarian” or “working-class” dictatorship being envisaged as a genuinely democratic political organisation of society in which political power would represent and express the interests of the vast majority, the working people, as opposed to the dictatorship of the exploiting classes. Revolutionary socialism, Marx maintained, meant establishing the dictatorship of the working class as the effective power to bring about the socialist reconstruction of society.

“This Socialism,” he wrote (see this volume, p. 127), “is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionising of all the ideas that result from these social relations.”

The Class Struggles in France contains Marx’s classical definition of the tasks of the working-class dictatorship in the decisive field—the economic reconstruction of society, that is to say: “The appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class and, therefore, the abolition of wage labour, of capital and of their mutual relations” (see this volume, p. 78). This definition separates off scientific communism from the vague demands for “community of property” characteristic of all varieties of Utopian socialism and Utopian communism.

In The Class Struggles in France Marx also went deeper in his criticism of non-proletarian socialist currents, showing their theoretical weaknesses and their untenability in practice. In particular, he exposed the fallacy in Louis Blanc’s idea of class collaboration and state assistance to workers’ associations as the means to achieving socialism. In his petty-bourgeois version of socialism,which Marx so exhaustively examined, Blanc had also assured the workers that the rulers of the bourgeois Second Republic were willing to resolve social problems by adopting his plan for the “organisation of labour”. Blanc’s unreal ideas and conciliatory tactics came to nothing, and Marx saw in their collapse the positive gain that the proletariat was liberated from such harmful illusions.

Other works written by Marx and Engels during this period likewise referred to how bitterly the workers were let down by the various systems of Utopian socialism and the empty verbosity of petty-bourgeois democratic leaders. In the “Letters from France”, for example, Engels described the gradual liberation of the working class from the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas: “The people ... will soon find socialist and revolutionary formulas which shall express their wants and interests far more clearly than anything invented for them, by authors of systems and by declaiming leaders” (see this volume, p. 35).

Finally, in The Class Struggles in France, Marx put forward, expounded and justified one of the key principles of the strategy and tactics of workers’ revolutionary struggle—that the peasantry and urban petty-bourgeois strata were allies of the proletariat against the bourgeois system. Nothing but the victory of the proletariat, he showed, could deliver the non-proletarian sections of the working people from the economic oppression and degradation brought upon them by capitalism. He demonstrated the necessity for close alliance between the proletariat, the peasantry and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, and at the same time the necessity for the leading political role of the proletariat as the most revolutionary class. And he exposed the limited ideas and impotent politics of the pettybourgeois democratic leaders, using the failure of the pettybourgeois Montagne party on June 13, 1849, to prove how incapable was such a party to conduct any revolutionary struggle on its own.

The Class Struggles in France is, indeed, a major work in which, following the experience of the revolutions of 1848-49, Marx achieved a new stage in developing the theory of scientific communism. A popular summary of the main conclusions was provided in Engels’ article “Two Years of a Revolution” (see this volume, pp. 353-69). Published in The Democratic Review, this article by Engels is a model of revolutionary propaganda in the British workers’ press.

The key problems of the theory of revolution and working-class strategy and tactics posed in The Class Struggles in France were also examined in the “Address of the Central Authority to the League” (March 1850). written jointly bv Marx and Engels. This document summed up the experience of the revolution in Germany, and marked an important step forward in the elaboration of the programme and tactics of the revolutionary proletariat.

The Address contains a comprehensive and classical definition of the idea of permanent revolution which had been variously formulated in preceding writings by Marx and Engels. Their exhaustive analysis of the 1848-49 revolution showed that the revolutionary reconstruction of society was by nature a long and complex process which would pass through several stages. The objective laws of this process, they found, made feasible an uninterrupted development from the bourgeois-democratic through to the proletarian stage of the revolution. And they concluded that it was in the interests of the working class and its allies that no long period of calm should intervene. The proletarian party should therefore work for the continuous (“permanent”) development of the revolution until the working class established its political power—and such a strategy was the most favourable one for the mass of the people and for social-historical progress. “It is our interest and our task,” the Address declared, “to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, [and] the proletariat has conquered state power...” (see this volume, p. 281).

The Address indicates some of the practical measures for effecting the transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the proletarian revolution. The workers had, it says, to create their own centres of working-class power, alongside the official government, in the form of local self-governing bodies, workers’ clubs and committees, by means of which the apparatus of government in the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution could be brought under effective control by the proletarian masses. And to carry the revolution further, Marx and Engels concluded, the workers had to arm themselves and set up an armed proletarian guard.

Later, in the new context of imperialism, Lenin was to draw on the conclusions about permanent revolution, formulated by Marx and Engels in the Address, in his teachings on the passage from bourgeois-democratic to socialist revolution, which carried further the Marxist conception of the strategy and tactics of the proletariat and of the revolutionary Marxist party.

In March 1850, when they wrote the “Address of the Central Authority to the League”, Marx and Engels were still expecting an early new revolutionary outburst, with the petty-bourgeois democrats coming to power in Germany. This made them consider it doubly urgent to liberate the working class from the political and ideological influence of the petty-bourgeois democrats. The most effective means of doing so was to form an independent workers’ party, with both clandestine and legal organisations, and with the underground communities of the Communist League serving as the nucleus of the non-clandestine workers’ associations. While urging that the workers’ party must dissociate itself both ideologically and in its organisation from the petty-bourgeois democrats, Marx and Engels did not deny the importance of agreements for joint struggle against the counter-revolution. But they insisted that in all circumstances the working class must conduct and consolidate its own independent policy.

A second “Address of the Central Authority to the League”, in June 1850, lays especial emphasis on creating a strong proletarian party in Germany, and in other European countries, adapted to clandestine activity and yet using all legal opportunities for propaganda and for organising the masses.

Two works by Engels, dealing mainly with events in Germany but summarising, directly or indirectly, the experience of the 1848-49 revolutions, were published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politischökonomische Revue. The series of essays entitled The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution were written by Engels in the wake of the Baden-Palatinate insurrection of the spring and summer of 1849, in which he had taken part. On Marx’s advice, he wrote these essays as a pamphlet condemning the leaders of the German petty-bourgeois democrats for their chronic indecision and wordmongering. First-hand reports by a participant were blended with a historical study of the last phase of the revolution in Germany. Engels examined the nature of the revolutionary movement itself, the attitudes of the classes and parties involved in it, and the causes of its failure. And he drew his conclusions on the tactics of a revolutionary party in armed uprising or civil war.

Another of Engels’ historical works, and one which has long occupied a prominent place in the legacy of Marxist historiography, was written for the Revue—The Peasant War in Germany. Though this dealt with events of a long past epoch, Engels wrote it with the contemporary scene in mind. For the defeat of the 1848-49 revolutions was bringing its inevitable aftermath of fatigue and disenchantment, and Engels sought to renew contemporary revolutionary convictions by reviving past revolutionary traditions of the people and by drawing attention, in particular, to the dormant revolutionary energy of the peasants, since their alliance with the working class would be decisive for any future success of the revolution. He sought to inspire his contemporary readers by his vivid portraits of sixteenth-century revolutionary leaders—Thomas Münzer, the plebeian revolutionary who was herald of the plebeian Reformation, the brilliant peasant general Michael Geismaier, and other indomitable fighters against feudal oppression.

The Peasant War in Germany, like Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, is a model of how to apply the method of historical materialism to the elucidation of historical events. Throwing new light on a period of world history which was a crucial turning point in the history of Germany, Engels’ study combines profound theoretical generalisations with precise political conclusions. He analyses the central problems of German sixteenth-century history, the part played by the anti-feudal peasant and plebeian movements, the specific features of the era when feudalism had already disintegrated, and the transition to capitalism had begun, and the consequences in Germany of the failure of the Peasant War. In most cases, German bourgeois historians had seen nothing but “violent theological bickering” behind the events of 1525 (see this volume, p. 411). But Engels was the first to make clear the profound social and economic causes of both the Reformation and the Peasant War, and to make clear that the political and ideological struggle of that time was, essentially, a class struggle.

The Peasant War in Germany is, indeed, organically related to the problems of the working-class and democratic movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. As Engels wrote in a preface to the second edition, in 1870, “the parallel between the German revolution of 1525 and the 1848-49 revolution was much too striking to be entirely renounced at the time”. (The Preface of 1870 will appear in its chronological place in Volume 21 of the Collected Works.)

Engels described the Reformation and the Peasant War as the earliest of the bourgeois revolutions, and saw the main reason for the failure of the Peasant War in the vacillation and treachery of the German burghers, whom he regarded as the historical predecessors of the bourgeoisie. The main force in the Peasant War was the peasants themselves along with the urban plebeians. But provincial limitations and the fact that “neither burghers, peasants nor plebeians could unite for concerted national action” were, Engels held, among the reasons for its defeat (see this volume, p. 481). The dispersed state of the revolutionary forces, and their parochial and particularist tendencies, he stressed, had likewise had a distinctly negative effect in the 1848-49 revolution.

The present volume contains a number of book reviews and critical articles examining the ideological impact of the revolutionary events of 1848-49, and attacking bourgeois and petty-bourgeois interpretations of the revolution. The revolutionary upheavals had meant a turning point in the evolution of the views of bourgeois ideologists. In face of the militant independent activity of the working class even previously progressive bourgeois historians and political theorists had lost their capacity for scientific evaluation of the process of history. This shift to the right is remarked upon, for example, in the review of Guizot’s pamphlet Pourquoi la révolution d’Angleterre a-t-elle réussi? Guizot had previously acknowledged the necessity for revolutions and, in particular, the role of the class struggle of the third estate against the feudal aristocracy in the making of bourgeois society. But now he belittled the significance of revolutionary action. He set up as a model the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England, and made out that the English seventeenth-century revolution (1640-60) had been successful when it had followed the ways of compromise and had, by virtue of its religious character, secured England’s further constitutional development without revolutionary explosions and upheavals. Criticising Guizot’s reading of history, Marx and Engels produced a classical description of the English seventeenth-century revolution, its peculiarities and significance, and its difference from the French revolution of the eighteenth century.

A similar shift to the right among ideologists of the ruling class is illustrated by the case of Thomas Carlyle—the British Sage of Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In a review of Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets Marx and Engels demolished his subjective idealist concept of history, the “hero cult”, and his counterposing of the “hero” to the masses. By exalting these “heroes”, said Marx and Engels, Carlyle was only “justifying and exaggerating the infamies of the bourgeoisie” (see this volume, p. 310).

The glorification of personalities was typical of petty-bourgeois democrats as well—of their historians and writers, and also of police-sponsored champions who exaggerated the deeds of the petty-bourgeois opposition movement and thereby inflated their own individual merits as “saviours of society” from dangerous red revolutionaries. Marx and Engels denounced this decking up in false colours of members of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opposition in a caustic review of two books by the French police agents Chenu and de la Hodde. Having made it clear that the two authors were nothing but agents provocateurs, Marx and Engels voiced strong objections to the adventurist and conspiratorial tactics which opened the way for provocateurs to penetrate the revolutionary movement. They described the exponents of such tactics as “alchemists of the revolution” who sought only “to bring it artificially to crisis-point, to launch a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution” (see this volume, p. 318). This criticism of conspiracy and sectarianism could not have been more timely, since adventurism and adventurist illusions were widespread among the members of the Communist League and the petty-bourgeois emigrants.

In their review of Girardin’s Le socialisme et l’impôt Marx and Engels continued their criticism of “bourgeois socialism”, begun in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, and also made a critical examination of anarchist ideas. The latter were fairly widespread at the time in France—notably in the works and utterances of Proudhon—and in Germany too. This review of Girardin’s pamphlet concurs with Engels’ unfinished manuscript “On the Slogan of the Abolition of the State and the German ‘Friends of Anarchy’ “, which condemns the anarchist proposals for “abolishing the state”, examines their origin in Germany, and presents a relevant account of Stirner’s anarcho-individualist ideas.

The international reviews included in this volume are of much interest, too. They contain a scientific analysis of the more important current economic and political events in Europe and North America, and several predictions which were confirmed by subsequent development.

Until the summer of 1850, Marx and Engels were convinced that the economic crisis which began in 1847 would continue to get worse, and would generate a new surge of revolution. This view was reflected in The Class Struggles in France, the March “Address of the Central Authority to the League”, and in their first and second international reviews. Marx and Engels in fact overestimated the maturity of capitalism — or underestimated its potential of recovery from economic crisis and of further development—and likewise overestimated the revolutionary potential of the working class at that time. It was this, in part, which had led to their over-optimistic predictions of early revolution. “History,” wrote Engels in his introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France in 1895 (to be included in Volume 28 of the Collected Works), “has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development of the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production.” In the summer of 1850, on resuming his economic researches and making a thorough examination of the economic situation, Marx found that the 1847 economic slump had run its course and that a new period of boom had begun. His study of the processes at work in the economy gave him a clearer and more accurate idea of the prospects of revolution. In their third international review Marx and Engels wrote: “With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution.... A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this crisis” (see this volume, p. 510).

In his subsequent economic research and analysis of social development Marx found that the influence of economic processes on society was not necessarily direct and that economic crisis would not always, or indeed usually, immediately precipitate an outbreak of revolution. Nonetheless, the thought that economic crises exercise a revolutionising influence on society and that, by aggravating the contradictions of capitalism, crises may stimulate the revolutionary movement, is an abiding part of Marxist theory. Lenin drew special attention to the theoretical importance of these propositions (see V. I. Lenin, Precis of the Correspondence between Marx and Engels, 1844-1883, second Russ. ed., 1968, p. 30).

In their third international review, Marx and Engels described yet another essential feature of the revolutionary process. Though Britain was, as they put it, “the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos”, the revolution had occurred on the Continent and a new revolutionary explosion should likewise be expected first of all in the continental countries. “Violent outbreaks must naturally occur rather in the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, since the possibility of adjustment is greater here than there” (see this volume, p. 509). So probabilities favoured the beginning of the revolutionary transformation of society not in the centre but on the outskirts of the bourgeois world, in countries with a less developed capitalist economy than in Britain.

Apart from certain major theoretical works on history, and current book reviews and international reviews, this volume contains articles on current social problems, such as “The Ten Hours’ Question” by Engels, “The Constitution of the French Republic” by Marx, and a few others, with their letters and statements to the press exposing the slander and persecution of revolutionary leaders by absolutist and bourgeois governments. “The Constitution of the French Republic”, for example, which appeared in the Chartist Notes to the People, shows up the limited nature and class essence of bourgeois democracy and the flagrant difference between the proclamations of democratic rights and liberties in bourgeois written constitutions and the anti-democratic practices of bourgeois states, along with constitutional reservations which effectively reduced these rights and liberties to nothing.

Engels’ manuscript “Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance against France in 1852” opened a new stage in his elaboration of a Marxist military theory—to which he and Marx attached great importance in the light of the lessons of the 1848-49 revolution. The manuscript examines the material basis of military science, the dependence of the art of war and the military establishment itself on the economy and the social system, the influence of revolutions on the development of warfare, and also the military potentials of the European states in the mid-nineteenth century. Engels wrote, too, about the army of the future socialist state, born in the flames of proletarian revolution—and his ideas about it have proved prophetic. He predicted that it would be unusually strong in combat, highly manoeuvrable, and possess a high degiee of striking power since its development would be backed by the rapidly developing productive forces of the new society, its flourishing technology and culture.

Marx’s and Engels’ entire elaboration of the theory of scientific communism in the light of the experience of the 1848-49 revolution precipitated sharp ideological clashes inside the Communist League between them and their followers, on the one hand, and the sectarian faction of Willich-Schapper, on the other. The controversy focussed on the prospects of revolution and the related questions of proletarian strategy and tactics. The Willich-Schapper faction was for premature actions, including attempts to seize power, which would have been especially dangerous in that period of revolutionary low tide. The minutes of the September 15, 1850, sitting of the Central Authority of the Communist League (published in the Appendices to this volume) mirror clearly enough the issues involved. Speaking at the sitting, Marx insisted on the great harm which would result for the revolutionary movement from any voluntarist adventurist “playing at revolution” which ignored the real situation and state of the proletarian movement. The tactical errors of the Willich-Schapper faction, he observed, stemmed from the poor theoretical and philosophical equipment of its members. “A German national standpoint,” he said, “was substituted for the universal outlook of the Manifesto, and the national feelings of the German artisans were pandered to. The materialist standpoint of the Manifesto has given way to idealism” (see this volume, p. 626).

Despite Marx’s proposals, which would have dissociated proletarian revolutionaries from the Willich-Schapper group and preserved the unity of the proletarian organisation, the sectarians managed to split the Communist League. They joined forces with other adventurist elements inside the League, and with petty-bourgeois émigrés, to attack Marx and Engels and their followers. In the end, Marx, Engels and their friends decided to resign from the London German Workers’ Educational Society and from the SocialDemocratic Refugee Committee, and to break off relations with the Blanquist French émigrés, who had sided with Willich and Schapper. The documents included in this volume and its Appendices portray the struggle of Marx and Engels and the proletarian revolutionaries who rallied to their side against adventurers and splitters in the working-class movement of that time.

The section in the volume headed “From the Preparatory Materials” contains rough manuscripts concerning, in the main, Marx’s study of political economy.

The 1848-49 revolution and their reflections on it had impressed on Marx and Engels the urgency of working out the economic basis of the theory of scientific communism. And from 1850 onwards this became the principal strand in the development of Marxist thought. In 1850-53 Marx filled twenty-four notebooks with transcriptions of passages from various, mainly economic, works. Only one of this large collection of manuscripts illustrating Marx’s understanding of economics at that time and his methods of research has been included in this volume.

The section contains Marx’s manuscript entitled “Reflections”, which sets out some of his own ideas, evidently related to his study of Tooke’s An Inquiry into the Currency Principle. Taking as point of departure some of Tooke’s and Adam Smith’s principles on the circulation of commodities and money between different groups of producers and consumers in a bourgeois society (capitalists and ordinary individual consumers), Marx goes on to examine a number of economic problems: the nature of money and its outwardly levelling role which disguises the class character of production relations in capitalist society; the futility of trying to transform capitalist society by reforming the circulation of money; the real causes of economic crises, which stem from the intrinsically contradictory nature of the capitalist mode of production; the superficial and false interpretation of these causes by bourgeois economists, who reduce them to mere swindling in monetary and commercial transactions, speculative fever, and the like. Many of the ideas contained in this manuscript were later developed in Marx’s published economic works.

The Appendices to this volume contain documents illustrating the practical revolutionary activities of Marx and Engels in the period covered. Apart from the already mentioned agreements on the establishment of the Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists, and materials related to the struggle in the Communist League against the Willich-Schapper group, the Appendices also contain appeals and reports by the Social-Democratic Committee of Support for German Refugees, newspaper accounts of Engels’ speeches at various meetings, and documents concerning the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue. They also contain the Rules of the Communist League drawn up by its new Central Authority in Cologne (the Central Authority was transferred there after the League split in the autumn of 1850), with Marx’s marginal notes, other materials of the League, and some papers of a biographical nature.

Some of the works published in this volume have never before been translated into English. This applies to the second and third international reviews, the article “Gottfried Kinkel”, the June Address of the Central Authority to the Communist League, the Statement against Arnold Ruge, a few of the book reviews and some of the statements and letters to editors of various newspapers, all of which were written jointly by Marx and Engels. Works translated into English for the first time also include Marx’s article “Louis Napoleon and Fould”, and Engels’ The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution, “On the Slogan of the Abolition of the State and the German ‘Friends of Anarchy’”, “Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance against France in 1852”, and others.

The materials in the section “From the Preparatory Materials” are also appearing in English for the first time. So are the materials in the Appendices (save for the minutes of the sitting of the Central Authority of the Communist League of September 15, 1850, and the 1850 Rules of the Communist League). And in this volume the documents “Permit to Leave Switzerland Issued to Frederick Engels”, “From the Indictment of the Participants in the Uprising in Elberfeld”, and some of the transcripts of Engels’ speeches, are being published for the first time in any edition of the Works of Marx and Engels.

Those works that have been previously published in English are given either in new or in carefully revised translations. Particulars about their earlier publications in English are given in the notes. Also described in the notes are peculiarities in the arrangement of the text of certain works, in particular the manuscripts.

Most of the works appearing in this volume have been translated from the German. Translations from other languages are indicated at the end of the texts, as are reproductions of texts written by the authors in English.

The volume was compiled and the preface and notes written by Tatyana Yeremeyeva (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism). The name index together with the indexes of quoted and mentioned literature and of periodicals were prepared by Valentina Kholopova, and the subject index by Marien Arzumanov (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

The publishers express their gratitude to the editors of Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe—MEGA, Bd. 10, erste Abteilung (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC, Socialist Unity Party of Germany), for the loan of materials used in preparing the volume.

The translations were made by Gregor Benton, Clemens Dutt, Frida Knight, Rodney Livingstone, Hugh Rodwell, Peter and Betty Ross, Barbara Ruhemann, Christopher Upward, and Joan and Trevor Walmslev (Lawrence & Wishart), Richard Dixon and Salo Ryazanskàya (Progress Publishers), and edited by Richard Abraham, Clemens Dutt, Sheila Lynd, Margaret Mynatt, Barbara Ruhemann and Alick West (Lawrence & Wishart), Richard Dixon, Salo Ryazanskaya, Yelena Chistyakova, Natalia Karmanova and Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishers), and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor, for the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow.

The volume was prepared for the press by Anna Vladimirova and Lyudgarda Zubrilova (Progress Publishers).