Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (11)

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Volume 11 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels covers the period from August 1851 to March 1853, when the forces of reaction were consolidating their hold throughout Europe. The revolution in Germany and Italy had already been defeated in 1849. Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851 came as a climax to the development of the counter-revolution in France, putting an end to the Second Republic, which had still retained at least some democratic institutions, and creating the Bonapartist monarchy, another bulwark of reaction in E.urope and a hotbed of international conflict and military escapades. There was little prospect of a fresh revolutionary outbreak, such as had been possible during the first few months after the defeat of the German, Hungarian and Italian revolutionary movements. The counter-revolutionary order had now, at least for a time, become established.

Under these conditions, Marx and Engels found it essential to continue the theoretical generalisation of the experience of the 1848 revolution, which they had begun immediately after its rearguard battles. In particular, they set out to examine the reasons for the temporary triumph of the counter-revolutionary forces and to analyse the historical developments over the last few years. Marxist thinking rose to new heights in this analytical and generalising work, exemplified by many of the writings included in this volume, above all by such masterpieces as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx and Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany by Engels. Marx also intensified his economic researches, interrupted by the revolution of 1848-49. The present volume includes conclusions he drew in the course of these researches in his journalistic writings for the working-class and progressive bourgeois press. Engels, for his part, realising the importance of armed struggle in the forthcoming revolutionary battles, immersed himself in studying the art of war. Several pieces indicative of his military studies are included in this volume.

Particularly important among the practical activities of Marx and Engels were their efforts to preserve, and to educate and rally the proletarian revolutionary cadres, and to protect those among them who had become victims of police persecution. The Cologne trial of Communist League members in Germany was a very severe test for the Communists.

The volume opens with Engels’ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, which deals with the causes, nature and motive forces of the 1848-49 revolution in Germany and reaches a whole series of important political conclusions. Drawing on the assessments already arrived at by Marx and himself in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Engels developed them into a self-consistent account of the successive features characteristic of the key stages of the revolutionary process in the German states. He threw fresh light on the international significance of the revolution in Germany by disclosing its ties with events in other European countries, especially France, at the same time explaining the influence of the June 1848 uprising of the Paris proletariat on the situation in Germany. This laid the foundation for every subsequent Marxist analysis of the history of the German bourgeois-democratic revolution.

Engels examines the economic basis for the political events. He gives a vivid and accurate analysis of the level of Germany’s economic and social development at that time, the class relations and the deployment of political forces. He stresses the role of the class struggle in historical development, demonstrates the inevitability of revolutions and describes them as “a powerful agent of social and political progress” (see this volume, p. 32).

Engels shows that the German revolution was defeated because the liberal bourgeoisie, alarmed by the scale of the revolutionary movement, betrayed the people and the cause of democracy and rushed into a compromise with the forces of feudal-Junker reaction. The petty bourgeoisie, who then found themselves at the head of the revolutionary masses, fell prey to vacillation and indecision at crucial moments. Blindly trusting the power of parliamentary institutions, they were afraid to rely, instead, on the people and unleash its revolutionary energies. At this stage, the proletariat was not yet sufficiently developed and organised to take its place at the head of the movement. Nevertheless, in the course of the revolution, it “represented the real and well-understood interest of the nation at large” (p. 88).

Engels concludes that bold and resolute action is essential for the victory of revolution. “In revolution, as in war,” he wrote, “it is always necessary to show a strong front, and he who attacks is in the advantage; and in revolution, as in war, it is of the highest necessity to stake everything on the decisive moment, whatever the odds may be. There is not a single successful revolution in history that does not prove the truth of these axioms” (p. 68).

This work lays down basic principles of Marxist teaching on armed insurrection. Engels formulates for the first time the idea that “insurrection is an art quite as much as war” (p. 85). He gives a list of the basic rules by which insurgents should be guided. As Lenin was to stress, this text “summed up the lessons of all revolutions with respect to armed uprising” (Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 180).

A substantial part of the work is devoted to the national question, which Engels examines from a revolutionary and internationalist standpoint. He denounces the policy of national oppression pursued by the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs, and declares that to grant independence to the oppressed peoples—the Poles, the Hungarians, the Italians, and others—is one of the most important tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

In this work, as in a series of articles published during the revolutionary period in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (see present edition, Vols. 7-9), Engels examines the question of the national movement of the Slavs in the Austrian Empire. In the first stage of the 1848-49 revolution, when revolutionary-democratic trends were active in the national movement of the Czechs and other Slav peoples under the Habsburgs (the Prague uprising in June 1848, mass anti-feudal demonstrations in the countryside), Marx and Engels expressed great sympathy for the struggle of these peoples, since it coincided with the interests of the entire European revolutionary movement. In the movement of the Czechs and a number of

South-Slav peoples, however, the upper hand was later gained by Right-wing bourgeois and feudal-clerical elements who entered into a’compact with the ruling circles of the Habsburg monarchy, and this enabled the latter to use the military formations of the South Slavs against the Hungarian revolution and the revolutionary movement in Austria and Italy. The Czech and South-Slav deputies of the Austrian Imperial Diet came out in support of the Habsburg monarchy against revolutionary Hungary and the Vienna October uprising, and also against the abolition of feudal exactions without compensation. As a result of this, Marx and Engels, who had always seen the national question from the viewpoint of the interests of the revolution as a whole, changed their attitude to these national movements. “It was for this reason, and exclusively for this reason,” as Lenin later explained, “that Marx and Engels were opposed to the national movement of the Czechs and South Slavs” (Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 340).

But if this general assessment of the Slav national movements in the specific conditions of 1848-49 was justified, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany also contains certain inaccurate forecasts. Engels thought that some of the Slav peoples had lost their capacity for independent national existence and would inevitably be absorbed by their more powerful neighbours. And this idea was tied up with his general views on the role of small nations in history. Engels considered that the creation of large states, the main tendency under capitalism, leads to the absorption of small nations by big nations. He did not, however, make due allowance—and, indeed, the historical experience was still inadequate—for another fact: the irrepressible struggle of small nations against national oppression and for independence, their strivings to create their own states. It is this which led to the final result that, in the course of their independent development, the Slav peoples of the former Austrian Empire created their own independent states and then entered the front ranks in the fight for socialism.

This volume includes one of Marx’s most outstanding works, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. A profound analysis of the historical events and far-reaching theoretical conclusions are cast in unsurpassed literary form which, in the words of Wilhelm Liebknecht, “combines the indignant severity of a Tacitus with the deadly satire of a Juvenal and the holy wrath of a Dante” (Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, Moscow, 1957, p. 103).

In subject-matter and in conclusions alike, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a direct sequel to The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. It would however be wrong to assume that The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is merely a continuation of the narrative part of that work which takes up the analysis of events from November 1850 to December 1851. Those events, as Marx shows, were the climax to a whole period of French history, and they enabled him to characterise it in full and draw important conclusions about the results and prospects of the French revolutionary movement.

Although Marx’s contemporaries, and later historians too, wrote many articles and volumes about the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte, its true causes remained a closed book for all of them. They were content, for the most part, to attribute it simply and solely to the mistakes or evil intentions of various historical personages. Only Marx was able to understand what had happened in France, to uncover the real social relations in the historical facts, and to disclose the actual trends of social development manifest in them. He succeeded in doing so because, as Engels wrote in the Preface to the third German edition (1885): “It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it” (see present edition, Vol. 27).

In its brilliant analysis of what was then contemporary history, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte provides one of the classic expositions of the mature theory of historical materialism and of the dialectic of history. Marx made clear the whole complex interaction between the social-economic basis and the political superstructure, further developed the theory of the state in relation to its forms and executive organs, and demonstrated the role of political parties, the relationship between parties and classes, and the real link between classes and their ideological and political representatives.

Marx maintained that “in historical struggles one must ... distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality” (p. 128), and he showed that every party struggle is an expression of concealed class interests. He stressed the difference between objective social and political processes and relations and the subjective motives and impulses of the actual participants in events, and showed how the real relationships are reflected, though often in a distorted fashion, in their minds.

Marx attacks the simplistic view that ideologists, as the political and literary representatives of this or that class, must always occupy the same social position and lead the same manner of life as the rest of the class. Marx points out that a politician or writer becomes the ideologist of a certain class when he arrives, in a theoretical way, at the formulation of tasks and goals which the rank-and-file representatives of the class reach, in a practical way, under the influence of direct material needs and interests.

Marx explains the specific features of the 1848 revolution in France and thus rounds off the analysis he began in The Class Struggles in France. He stresses that, as distinct from its historical antecedent at the close of the eighteenth century, the 1848 revolution moved “in a descending line”. The cause of this was the counter-revolutionary resurgence of the French bourgeoisie as a result of the growing class antagonisms in capitalist society. Alarmed by the upsurge of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie was ready in part or wholly to renounce the democratic institutions and representative bodies for which, in its time, it had led the struggle against the reactionary forces of feudal society. To secure and consolidate the inviolability of its material and economic position and obstruct the deepening of the revolution, the French bourgeoisie sacrificed even the bourgeois republic itself, and helped to establish the reactionary Bonapartist regime in which power was transferred to a clique of political adventurers.

Marx saw the Bonapartist coup as the predictable result of the retrograde development of the revolutionary process in France, of the transfer of power at each new stage to increasingly Right-wing elements who were trying on an ever growing scale to eliminate the gains of the revolution, and of the relapse of wider and wider strata of the French bourgeoisie into overtly counter-revolutionary positions. Marx demonstrated that autocratic dictatorships like that of Louis Bonaparte emerge primarily as a result of the counterrevolutionary nature of the exploiting classes, that they are established when the balance of class forces is such that the bourgeoisie is no longer able, and is afraid, to rule by parliamentary methods, while the working class is not yet strong enough to put up a successful resistance.

Marx described Bonapartism as the dictatorship of the most counter-revolutionary elements of the bourgeoisie. Its distinguishing features were: a policy of manoeuvring between classes to create a state power seen to be ruling over all alike; crude demagogy camouflaging the defence of the interests of the exploiters, combined with political terrorism; the omnipotence of the military machine; venality and corruption; the employment of criminals, and the widespread use of blackmail and bribery. Marx showed up the profound inner contradictions of Bonapartism at the very outset of its existence and prophetically foretold its inevitable downfall.

Marx devotes much attention to the French peasantry and its attitude to the Bonapartist coup. He notes that to establish their dictatorship Louis Bonaparte and his clique made adroit use of the political backwardness of the downtrodden French peasantry, and of its remoteness from the social and political life of the cities. The bourgeois governments of the Second Republic, which treated the peasants merely as an object of taxation, had discredited the revolution in their eyes, and this stimulated their support for Bonaparte. Added to this motive was the attachment of the property-owning peasants to their smallholdings and the fact that they had always looked up to the representative of the Napoleonic dynasty as their own traditional patron. In this way, Bonaparte exploited the conservatism of the property-owning peasants. Marx, however, did not regard conservatism as the only and overriding feature of the peasantry. He stressed that there were peasant traditions of liberation struggle too, that the oppression and exploitation of the peasantry could not but foster a contrary tendency among them—a revolutionary one which, as the result of the further ruin of the small-holding economy, would drive them into irreconcilable contradiction with the bourgeoisie and a close alliance with the working class. “Hence the peasants find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order” (p. 191).

The proletarian revolution itself, he concluded, could only triumph provided that the working class was supported by the broad non-proletarian masses of working people, above all by the peasantry. It would obtain in the peasants “ that chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries” (p. 193).

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx made clear the fundamental difference between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Proletarian revolutions differ from bourgeois not only in their class aims, but, as Marx pointed out, in the permanence of their achievements, the considerably greater scope and volume of the transformations they bring about, and their greater force of impact on social development. As distinct from bourgeois revolutions, they effect a thoroughgoing break-up of the existing order, with revolutionary changes in all social relations. If bourgeois revolutions are short-lived and comparatively superficial, proletarian revolutions are characterised by depth, thoroughness, a critical approach to their own actions and the results achieved, and an urgent desire to surpass them by moving further ahead.

Of particular theoretical and practical importance is Marx’s development in this work of his teaching on the state and, in particular, on the attitude of the proletarian revolution to the bourgeois state. Investigating the history of the development of executive power in France and its essential element, the state machine, Marx comes to the conclusion that all previous revolutions had onlv perfected that machine with the aim of exploiting and suppressing the masses. But the proletarian revolution must “concentrate all its forces of destruction against it” (p. 185). Marx draws a brief but extremely important conclusion: “All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it” (p. 186).

“In this remarkable argument,” Lenin wrote, “Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with the Communist Manifesto.

In the latter, the question of the state is still treated in an extremely abstract manner, in the most general terms and expressions. In the above-quoted passage, the question is treated in a concrete manner, and the conclusion is extremely precise, definite, practical and palpable: all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.

“This conclusion is the chief and fundamental point in the Marxist theory of the state” (Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 406).

A short series of articles by Engels, “Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Comparatively Inactive in December Last”, is close in content to Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Engels shows how unfounded and dishonest were the attempts of the bourgeois writers and the press to lay the responsibility for the Bonapartist coup d’état on the French proletariat. Engels draws on irrefutable facts to show that it was, in fact, the French bourgeoisie, hypocritically reproaching the workers for not defending the bourgeois parliamentary republic from Louis Bonaparte’s attempts to destroy it, who with its counter-revolutionary policy prepared the ground for the establishment of the Bonapartist dictatorship. Published between February and April 1852 in the newspaper Notes to the People, this series for the first time acquainted the English reader with the Marxist evaluation of the events in France.

This volume includes a joint work by Marx and Engçls, the pamphlet The Great Men of the Exile, aimed against the leaders of petty-bourgeois democracy. It was written to defend and promote the political, organisational and ideological independence of the working-class movement.

Marx and Engels considered it essential to criticise the adventurist activities of many of the émigré groupings. For these people ignored the real situation and conditions of revolutionary struggle, behaved as though they could at will create a revolution, and all the time did no more than engage in catch-phrases, careerism, ambition, internal feuds and unprincipled squabbles. In satirical sketches of a whole gallery of the leaders of the petty-bourgeois emigration—the heads of various ephemeral émigré organisations, members of fictitious provisional governments and committees, would-be revolutionary dictators and so on—Marx and Engels showed up the primitiveness of their philosophical views and political standpoints. They once again demonstrated how pernicious were the effects of playing at revolution, and how ludicrous the claims of mere petty-bourgeois windbags to the leadership of the working class and the revolutionary struggle.

The clumsy activities of the émigrés were used by the police as a pretext to clamp down upon the real revolutionaries. In May and June 1851, the Prussian Government arrested a number of prominent members of the Communist League in Germany. Forgeries and falsifications readily provided “material for the prosecution” and, on the basis of this, the trial of eleven Communists was staged in Cologne, starting on October 4, 1852.

As soon as the arrests began, Marx and Engels did everything in their power to help the accused, denouncing the unprincipled methods resorted to by the Prussian Government and the police. Describing the atmosphere in which Marx, Engels and their associates were struggling against police arbitrariness, Jenny Marx wrote on October 28, 1852 to Adolf Cluss, a member of the Communist League who had emigrated to the USA: “As you can imagine, the ‘Marx party’ is busy day and night and is having to throw itself into the work body and soul.... A complete office has now been set up in our house. Two or three people writing, others running errands, others scraping pennies together so that writers may continue to exist and provide proof of the most outrageous scandals ever perpetrated by the old world of officialdom” (see present edition, Vol. 39).

How much Marx and Engels helped the accused Communists is shown by the number of statements they sent to the editors of English newspapers and appeals to the American workers. The trial was covered in Engels’ article “The Late Trial at Cologne”, published in the New-York Daily Tribune.

The whole machinery of Prussian police-Junker justice was exposed by Marx in his pamphlet Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. He not only proved that the charges preferred at the trial were groundless, but denounced the Prussian police-bureaucratic order and the class bias of the bourgeois jury, and exposed the whole string of provocations, espionage and perjury on which the organisers of the Cologne trial relied. This work is a passionate defence of the Communists not only from police persecution, but from attempts to slander them in the eyes of the public by portraying them as organisers of sinister putsches and conspiracies. Marx exposed the fabricated police charge of conspiracy, which was the trump card of the prosecution at the Cologne trial.

At the same time, Marx publicly dissociated himself from the sectarian and adventurist elements in the communist movement of that time. He proved that the split in the Communist League was provoked by the attempts of the Willich-Schapper group to push the League into adventurist acts on the pretext that these would unleash revolution in Germany. Such tactics, he said, do nothing but harm to the working-class movement, lead to isolation from the masses and play into the hands of the police.

Although the pamphlet was mainly devoted to the issues at stake in the trial, Marx, in this work too, dwelt upon some of the vital questions of the theory of scientific communism. He emphasised the Communist League’s disagreements with the Willich-Schapper group and attacked its simplistic voluntarist ideas about revolution and the possibility of leaping straight into communism even in countries where the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution were not yet solved. The real revolutionary process, Marx declared, must go through a complex and comparatively lengthy span of revolutionary development. There must inevitably be a series of stages, and the transformation of the people themselves as well as of circumstances (p. 403). He thus made clear the essential point of the theory of permanent or uninterrupted revolution which he and Engels had put forward earlier (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 281-86).

The result of the arrest and imprisonment of the Communist League members was the virtual disintegration of the organisation in Germany. The position was much the same in other European countries. In conditions of steadily growing reaction, Marx and Engels concluded that the Communist League—a secret and relatively narrow organisation—had exhausted its possibilities and that it would be useless for its activities to continue any further. The Communist League in fact proved to have been the historical prototype of an international proletarian party, a precursor of the First International. After its dissolution the struggle by Marx and Engels for a proletarian party did not cease, but continued in other forms corresponding to the new situation. They worked might and main to preserve the cadres of revolutionary fighters. They never ceased to propagate scientific communism and, in particular, used the progressive bourgeois press for these purposes.

In this volume there also begins the publication of articles written by Marx for the New-York Daily Tribune and partly reprinted in the Chartist People’s Paper.

The New-York Daily Tribune had, on the whole, a progressive political orientation in those years. This offered Marx and Engels opportunities, however limited, for legal expression of a revolutionary political line. Their reports and articles are, indeed, models of how to utilise such opportunities. They were able to develop an extensive critique of the capitalist social system, which made clear to their readers its main contradictions. They were able to denounce in very forthright terms the anti-popular regimes in Europe, and both the home and foreign policies of the European ruling classes. And they set forth the positions of the working class and revolutionary democracy on the major issues of the day.

Marx, in particular, supplied an all-round critical analysis of economic, political and social life in England. Thus in his articles “The Elections in England.—Tories and Whigs”, “Political Parties and Prospects” and others, he examined the bourgeois-aristocratic political system of England, under which the two most powerful parties of the ruling classes, the Tories and the Whigs, enjoyed power alternately, creating the semblance of a great battle between opposed political forces. He showed up the anti-democratic nature of the English electoral system which denied to the majority the right to vote, and drew a vivid picture of the bribery and intimidation which flourished at the elections (this is the subject of the articles “Corruption at Elections”, “Result of the Elections” and others).

Marx devoted considerable attention to the English workers’ struggle. Particularly interesting is his article “The Chartists”, in which he made clear the real opportunities in England, unlike other European countries at that time, for a peaceful transfer of power into the hands of the working class. In England, he explained, there was no highly developed military-bureaucratic machine, and the proletariat formed the large majority of the population. What was above all essential was to introduce universal suffrage and to meet the other demands of the Chartist programme—the People’s Charter. In English conditions, this could open up the way to the radical transformation of the existing parliamentary system and the démocratisation of the entire political structure. Consequently, wrote Marx, universal suffrage in England “would be a far more socialistic measure” than on the Continent. For there it did not go beyond the framework of a bourgeois-democratic programme, and was sometimes even used demagogically by reaction, as, for example, in Bonapartist France. The English working class could achieve its demands, Marx considered, by uniting its forces, strengthening its organisations and intensifying its political campaigning. This is vvhy he attached such importance to the Chartists’ activities and in every way assisted and supported their efforts to revive the greatness of the Chartist movement after its setback in 1848.

In a series of articles, Marx was able to dispel the myth of “permanent prosperity” under capitalism. He demonstrated how false were the claims of bourgeois apologists that any swing from slump to boom brings prosperity to all the working people. On the contrary, no boom in industry and commerce in the capitalist countries had ever yet halted the impoverishment of the toiling masses or the growth of unemployment.

At that time, the “population problem” was becoming particularly acute. In his article “Forced Emigration”, Marx indicated that under capitalism “it is the increase of productive power which demands a diminution of population, and drives away the surplus by famine or emigration” (p. 531). To put an end to this situation, the workers must take over the productive forces and place them at the service of society.

During this period Marx was already directing his attention towards primitive accumulation as the most important feature of the genesis of capitalist society. His article “Elections.— Financial Clouds.—The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery” contains the first outline of his analysis. The material it contains on the merciless expropriation of the crofters, their eviction from their ancestral lands and the history of the enrichment of the Sutherland family, was to be used later in Capital.

Castigating the evils of capitalist society, Marx also examined the problem of crime. He showed (in his article “Capital Punishment”) that the growth of criminality was conditioned by social causes and that crime could only be eradicated after liquidating bourgeois society, itself the nutrient of crime.

The section “From the Preparatory Materials” contains Engels’ “Critical Review of Proudhon’s Book Idée générale de la Révolution au XlX-e siècle”. It was Marx who suggested a critique of Proudhon’s book, having conceived but not written this work under the title “The Latest Discoveries of Socialism, or ‘The General Idea of Revolution in the 19th Century’ by P.-J. Proudhon”.

Proudhon claimed to have created his own political economy and science of social revolution. Using Marx’s preliminary comments in his letters of August 8 and 14, 1851, Engels subjects Proudhon’s anarchistic views to a searching political analysis—his idea of “social liquidation”, and his plans for the peaceful institution of an “economic system” in which the political or, to use his term, governmental system was supposed to disappear. Engels disclosed the Utopian character of Proudhon’s idea of “social liquidation”, casing his projects to pay off the national debt, abolish interest, buy up privately-owned land, etc., “colossal nonsense” (p. 563). He showed that Proudhon’s social ideal meant nothing—above all because he did not propose to touch private ownership of the means of production. Proudhon’s social Utopia, as Engels emphasised, amounted to preserving capitalism, but without, as Proudhon fondly hoped, its “bad sides” and its grievous consequences for the petty-bourgeois producer.

Engels showed that Proudhon’s so-called anti-government ideas were not aimed at abolishing the bourgeois state, and amounted to no more than Utopian and essentially reactionary projects for the decentralisation of political power. Engels made clear the kinship between Proudhon’s milk and water anarchism and Stirner’s extreme individualism. He made clear, too, the thoroughly retrograde character of Proudhon’s attacks on the representatives of Utopian socialism and communism, and of his polemics against the progressive democratic ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

The task of fighting Proudhonism—a petty-bourgeois reformist trend which was becoming an obstacle to the formation of class consciousness among the proletariat, especially in France, Italy and Spain—became even more urgent in the next few years, and this prompted Marx and Engels to turn many times to critical analysis of the works of Proudhon and like-minded theoreticians.

In the “Appendices” are included, for the first time in any collection of the works of Marx and Engels, articles by Ernest Jones and Johann Georg Eccarius written with Marx’s collaboration. Marx’s role as the virtual co-author or editor of these articles was established in research carried out at the Moscow Institute of Marxism-Leninism in preparing this volume. The articles on the co-operative movement by Ernest Jones, Chartist and editor of the weekly Notes to the People, contain ideas which Marx was to elaborate further in the “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association” and other documents. In these articles, criticism is levelled against the theory and practice of the bourgeois co-operators, “Christian socialists” and others who were attempting to distract the workers from class struggle and convince them that it was possible to abolish social evils and exploitation by creating workers’ co-operative societies. Jones contended that co-operation could never serve as a lever for social transformation so long as it was practised only in the form of scattered, local and isolated societies acting in the conditions, and on the basis, of the capitalist system. On the other hand, co-operative production and trade would be one of the main economic measures of the working class after it had won state power on a nation-wide scale. Co-operation must needs be nation-wide, and its success must depend on who commands political power. Political power was needed “to reconstruct the bases of society”. “Under the present system,” Jones wrote, addressing the co-op members, “... all your efforts must prove vain—have proved vain—towards the production of a national result” (p. 577).

Marx’s direct participation in these articles by Jones bears witness to the close association of the founders of Marxism and the representatives of the revolutionary wing of the Chartist movement, and also to the extent of the influence of Marxist ideas on the Left-wing Chartists.

Written by Marx’s colleague Georg Eccarius and published in the Chartist People’s Paper, “A Review of the Literature on the Coup d’Etat” is also an item of propaganda for the ideas of scientific communism in the English working-class press. Following Marx’s advice, Eccarius reviewed the books of Xavier Durrieu, Victor Hugo and Pierre Joseph Proudhon on the coup d’état. “All these publications,” he wrote, “pretend, more or less, to be the expressions and sentiments of the parties or classes to which their authors respectively belong” (p. 592). Not one of them could properly explain the causes and nature of the Bonapartist coup. The only account of it that met the requirements of science, Eccarius declared, was that written by Marx, who had approached these events from the standpoint of the most revolutionary and progressive class and was guided by the revolutionary theory which he had created, the effectiveness and force of which he clearly demonstrated. Eccarius’ review contains copious excerpts from the first chapter of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Other documents published in the Appendices illustrate the practical revolutionary activities of Marx and Engels in the period covered.

* * *

In this volume, eight works by Marx and Engels are published in English for the first time. They include Engels' article "England", his "Critical Review of Proudhon's Book Idée générale de la Révolution au XIX-e siècle”, letters to newspaper editors and appeals for aid for the accused in the Cologne trial (in the Appendices). This volume also includes 15 articles by Marx and Engels published in American and English newspapers, but never subsequently reprinted in English. Marx’s work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is published for the first time in English with the variants in the different editions that appeared in his lifetime. Articles printed in both the New-York Daily Tribune and The People's Paper are reproduced in the different readings in the texts of these two periodicals.

Works of Marx and Engels written in German and previously published in English are given in verified and improved translations. Details of the first English publication of these works are supplied in the notes. A description is also supplied of the layout of the text of individual works, especially the manuscripts.

Texts originally written in English are reproduced from the sources indicated at the end. Obvious misprints, misspellings of proper and geographical names, inaccurate statistics, etc., particularly frequent in articles by Marx and Engels in the New-York Daily Tribune, have been corrected without comment. Errors in quotations have been corrected from the originals, but the authors’ form of quoting has been preserved.

The volume was compiled, the text prepared, and the Preface and Notes written by Lev Churbanov and edited by Lev Golman (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism). The Name Index, the Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature and the Index of Periodicals were prepared by Nina Loiko and the Subject Index by Marien Arzumanov (both of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

The English translations were made by Clemens Dutt, Rodney Livingstone and Christopher Upward and edited by Maurice Cornforth, E. J. Hobsbawm, Nicholas Jacobs and Margaret Mynatt (Lawrence & Wishart), Salo Ryazanskaya, Lydia Belyakova and Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishers), and Norire Ter-Akopyan, scientific editor (Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

The volume was prepared for the press by Yelena Kalinina, Nadezhda Rudenko and Alia Varavitskaya (Progress Publishers).