Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (12)

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Volume 12 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains articles and reports written between March 22, 1853, and February 10, 1854. Most of the articles were published in the New-York Daily Tribune, for which Marx began to work in August 1851.

Writing for the Tribune became for Marx and also Engels, whom Marx enlisted to write some of the articles, an important part of their revolutionary activity. In the climate of political reaction which prevailed on the European continent in the 1850s, the opportunity to propagate revolutionary communist ideas in the columns of a popular American newspaper was one not to be missed. Marx had no hesitation about contributing to this bourgeois newspaper in view of the progressive role it was then playing in the social life of the USA. It condemned slavery and supported the abolitionist movement at a time when the conflict between the bourgeois North and the slave-owning South was coming to a head; and since this stand corresponded to the mood of broad sections of the population, it attracted many readers to the paper.

Marx’s and Engels’ articles aroused great interest in America. Many of them, in addition to appearing in the daily issues of the Tribune, were reprinted in special supplements: the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune and the New-York Weekly Tribune. Eventually it became editorial practice to publish these articles and reports in the form of leaders.

The articles by Marx and Engels in the New-York Daily Tribune became known in Europe as well. Thus, in a speech in the House of Commons on July 1, 1853, the leader of the Free Traders, John Bright, mentioned Marx’s New-York Daily Tribune article on Gladstone’s budget (see this volume, p. 176).

At the same time Marx and Engels tried to use for revolutionary propaganda the then very few organs of the proletarian press. Thus, Marx published a number of articles in the Chartist People’s Paper, which began to appear in May 1852 with Ernest Jones as editor. It also reproduced some articles by him written for the Tribune. Marx also supported the New York working-class paper Die Reform, which came out from 1853 to 1854 in German and played a considerable part in the dissemination of communist ideas in the USA. Joseph Weydemeyer and Adolph Cluss were among its most active contributors. Marx did all he could to help his German-American friends with the work of editing Die Reform. He allowed them to print gratis in the newspaper translations of his articles from the Tribune. His letters to Cluss and Weydemeyer often contained ready-made material for articles. Thus, Cluss included in his article “The ‘Best Paper in the Union’ and Its ‘Best Men’ and Political Economists” extracts from Marx’s letters criticising the economic theory of Carey, then in fashion in the USA and acclaimed by the bourgeois editors of the Tribune. The article “David Urquhart” published in Die Reform reproduced in its entirety the text of a letter from Marx to Cluss which has not survived.

Marx and Engels used their journalistic activity to expose reactionary regimes in Europe, to reveal the contradictions of capitalist society, to criticise the different trends of bourgeois ideology, and to formulate the position of the working class and revolutionary democracy on major political questions. Although after the disbandment of the Communist League there was no international working-class organisation on which they could lean, they set themselves the task of preserving international links between the representatives of the working-class movement in different countries, uniting them on the platform of scientific communism, and preparing the conditions for the creation of a proletarian party. By their articles in the press and by other means, they sought to show the more politically conscious elements of the proletariat how unstable was the reign of reaction and to strengthen their belief in the advent of a new revolutionary upsurge.

The journalistic activity of Marx and Engels was closely linked with their theoretical research and rested largely on the results obtained by Marx in his studies of political economy and world history, and by Engels in his research on military science, Oriental studies, philology and history. The extant notebooks contain numerous copied extracts showing that in addition to accumulating a vast amount of material for his economic work, Marx made a special study of a large number of sources for his articles and reports (these sources are given in the notes to the individual articles). Conversely, Marx’s continuous interest in current economic questions broadened the base for his work on general economic theory. The materials quoted by Marx in his articles for the New-York Daily Tribune were later used by him in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58 (the Grundrisse), and also in Volume I of Capital.

In this period, 1853-54, Marx’s and Engels’ attention was centred on three questions: the economic condition of the European countries, in particular of the most developed one, England, and the consequent prospects for a new upsurge of the democratic and working-class movements; the colonial policy of the capitalist powers and the national liberation struggle of the oppressed peoples; and, finally, international relations.

Analysing the economic position of the European countries, Marx devoted a number of articles—”The War Question.—British Population and Trade Returns.—Doings of Parliament”, “Political Movements.—Scarcity of Bread in Europe”, “The Western Powers and Turkey.—Symptoms of Economic Crisis”, and many others— to the state of industrial production, primarily in England, agriculture, domestic and foreign trade, market prices, foreign exchange rates, etc. He distinguished different phases in the current trade and industrial cycle and gave concrete expression to the thesis he had propounded as early as the 1840s on the cyclical nature of the development of production under capitalism. Marx revealed laws actually operating in a capitalist economy, and so refuted the arguments of bourgeois apologists who represented capitalism as a never-changing, harmonious system which ensures the well-being of all classes of society. The whole secret of bourgeois political economy, he observed, “consists simply in transforming transitory social relations belonging to a determined epoch of history and corresponding with a given state of material production, into eternal, general, never-changing laws, natural laws, as they call them” (see this volume, p. 247). At the same time, Marx called attention to specific features in the different economic schools and doctrines current in the various countries. Thus, Carey’s views were influenced by specific features of social-economic development in the USA, and his attacks on British industrialists and economists, Ricardo in particular, reflected the struggle between the American and British capitalists. What Carey had in common with the French economist Bastiat and a number of British followers of the classical school, however, was his preaching of the harmony of class interests under capitalism and his defence of the foundations of the capitalist system.

Marx’s articles include a sharp, critical description of the economic and political liberalism proclaimed by the British Free Traders. The hypocritical phrases of the Free Traders about “freedom” and prosperity concealed a defence of the unlimited exploitation of the workers, and their pacifist propaganda expressed not their love of peace, but the belief of the British industrial bourgeoisie in Britain’s ability to retain its monopoly of world industry and trade by peaceful means, without the onerous expenditure of waging war.

The falsity of the Free Traders’ argument that free trade would lead to a development of capitalism without crises was strikingly revealed at the end of 1853, when a phase of prosperity gave way to a period of stagnation in industry and trade. Emphasising the growing influence of British industry and its periodic crises on the world market and on the world economy as a whole, Marx concluded that the symptoms of crisis observable in 1853-54 were inevitably bound to develop into a universal economic crisis, which did in fact break out in 1857.

A number of articles in the present volume, e.g. “The Russian Victory.— Position of England and France” and “The Fighting in the East.— Finances of Austria and France.— Fortification of Constantinople”, dealt with the position of France. In them Marx called attention to the political consequences in France of economic difficulties, poor harvests, the rising cost of living, financial mismanagement, and so on. The discontent of the masses, particularly a section of the peasantry, with the measures of Louis Bonaparte’s government bore witness to the instability of the Second Empire (see this volume, pp. 540-42). The decisive blow against this counter-revolutionary regime, Marx predicted, would be dealt by the French workers. The time would come “when general causes and the universal discontent of all other classes” would enable the workers of France “to resume their revolutionary work anew” (see this volume, p. 541).

Closely related to the economic reviews were Marx’s articles on financial questions: “The New Financial Juggle; or Gladstone and the Pennies”, “Achievements of the Ministry”, “L.S.D., or Class Budgets and Who’s Relieved by Them”, and others. Some of these were written for the Chartist People’s Paper. In this series of articles Marx showed up the class nature of the economic policy of the bourgeois state and of the financial and fiscal measures taken by the British Government, which was always careful, on this as on other questions, not to overstep the limit “beyond which the working man would gain—the aristocrat and middle classes lose” (see this volume, p. 66). The budget of Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Coalition Cabinet, is described by Marx as “a middle-class Budget—written by an aristocratic pen” (see this volume, p. 63).

Describing the destitution of the English workers and the aggravation of contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, manifested in large-scale class conflicts, strikes and lockouts, Marx made a profound analysis of the strike movement. He gave a detailed description of the strikes which were taking place in the industrial areas of Britain in his articles “English Prosperity.—Strikes.—The Turkish Question.— India”, “Russian Policy Against Turkey.—Chartism”, “Panic on the London Stock Exchange.—Strikes”, and others, noting a new and positive phenomenon—the participation of unorganised workers in strikes. An analysis of the results of the mass strikes in 1853 and early 1854 helped Marx to give more concrete expression to conclusions on the different forms of the class struggle of the proletariat which he and Engels had drawn in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and other works. Marx showed that strikes are natural phenomena in capitalist society, that they serve as a means of restraining the arbitrary behaviour of factory owners and ensuring that the vital needs of the workers are satisfied. He stressed the influence of the capitalist economic cycle, the fluctuations in the state of the market and the level of wages, in exacerbating social antagonisms and the growth of the class consciousness of the proletariat. “Without the great alternative phases of dullness, prosperity, over-excitement, crisis and distress, which modern industry traverses in periodically recurring cycles, with the up and down of wages resulting from them, as with the constant warfare between masters and men closely corresponding with those variations in wages and profits, the working classes of Great Britain, and of all Europe, would be a heart-broken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass, whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome” (see this volume, p. 169—written by Marx in English).

Marx saw the prime importance of strikes in the political and moral influence which they have on workers, increasing their spirit of resistance and further promoting their class solidarity and organisation.

Describing the working-class movement in Britain, Marx concluded that the workers should not confine themselves to waging an economic struggle, important as it might be, but must combine it with a political struggle as the main means of liberating the working people from wage slavery. He constantly emphasised the need to organise the proletariat on a national scale, form a mass political party of the working class and wage a struggle for the conquest of political power. The trade unions—class organisations often created by the workers in the course of the strikes themselves—would, he said, assume particularly great importance for the working class when “their activity will ... be carried over to the political field” (see this volume, p. 334). In Marx’s view, to overcome the idea that trade unions were not concerned with politics and to draw them into political life was one of the ways of achieving a higher form of class organisation of the British proletariat—of creating a proletarian party.

Marx assigned an important role in this to the revolutionary Chartists led by Ernest Jones, then a small but highly active detachment of the British working-class movement. In the articles “The Labor Question”, “Prosperity.—The Labor Question”, “Manteuffel’s Speech.—Religious Movement in Prussia.—Mazzini’s Address.—London Corporation.—Russell’s Reform.—Labor Parliament”, and others, Marx wrote with great sympathy of Jones’ attempts to strengthen the influence of the Chartists among the masses, his tours of industrial areas and his agitation among strikers, trade union members and unorganised workers. In many cases Marx reproduced reports of workers’ meetings and Jones’ speeches at them, in which one can sense the influence of Marx’s own ideas. Marx welcomed the Chartist proposal to convene a representative Labor Parliament as a step towards the founding of a national workers’ organisation capable not only of co-ordinating the sporadic strikes, but also of directing the political actions of the masses.

Marx and Engels did all they could to support the endeavours of Jones and other revolutionary Chartist leaders to revive the Chartist movement on a new basis, combining the struggle for the People’s Charter with the propaganda of revolutionary socialism. They attached great importance to the struggle of the British workers for universal suffrage. At a time when the British proletariat already constituted the majority of the population, and the ruling classes did not yet possess a sufficiently powerful military and bureaucratic machine, universal suffrage could help the proletariat to win political power as an essential prerequisite for achieving socialism in Britain.

Marx pointed to symptoms of revolutionary ferment not only in Britain and France, but also in other European countries— Prussia, Austria, and Italy. For him they were signs of the imminent new revolutionary events. Even the Prussian Government, he noted, “smells the breath of Revolution in midst of the apparent apathy” (see this volume, p. 30). The realisation that the situation in Europe was fraught with a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement impelled Marx and Engels to return to tactical problems and to criticise false tactical premises, particularly those of a conspiratorial and adventurist nature. Thus, criticising the tactics of the Italian revolutionary Mazzini, Marx stressed the mistaken and Utopian nature of his view that an Italian revolution “is not to be effected by the favorable chances of European complications, but by the private action of Italian conspirators acting by surprise” (see this volume, p. 512).

Marx’s pamphlet The Knight of the Noble Consciousness, the text of which includes a letter from Engels, was also aimed against adventurism and sectarianism in the revolutionary movement. In this work, as in two earlier ones— The Great Men of the Exile and Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne—Marx and Engels exposed the petty-bourgeois pseudo-revolutionism and phrase-mongering, the demagogic playing at revolutions and conspiracies, in which the leaders of the petty-bourgeois émigrés indulged. The pamphlet unmasks August Willich, one of the leaders of the sectarian faction of the Communist League, who used the émigré democratic press to attack working-class revolutionaries. Analysing Willich’s “revolutionary” plans, Marx sharply criticised the voluntarism and subjectivism characteristic of the supporters of conspiratorial tactics, their reluctance and inability to make a sober assessment of the situation, and their political vacillation.

A new and important feature in the theoretical and journalistic work of Marx and Engels at this period was their deep interest in the historical fate of the colonial peoples. At this time they began to publish articles systematically in the press about the situation in the colonial countries of the East, exposing the predatory policy of the capitalist states in relation to these countries. Whereas earlier Marx had treated colonial problems on a general theoretical plane, explaining the general laws of capitalist development and the place which colonial exploitation occupied in it, in the 1850s he began to pay far more attention to the history of the colonies and dependent countries, colonial policy, and the methods and consequences of colonial rule. And he made extensive use of the results of his studies in his journalistic writings. Marx’s articles on this subject proclaimed the ideas of proletarian internationalism, and of the solidarity of the working class with the oppressed peoples of the colonies and dependent countries.

This approach to the colonial question enabled Marx to give a new interpretation of the history of the peoples of the oppressed countries, to reveal the interrelation and interdependence of the historical development of the countries where capitalism was well established and the economically backward countries of the East, of the metropolises and the colonies. Marx regarded colonial policy as an expression of the most repulsive and cruel aspects of the capitalist system. “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked” (see this volume, p. 221).

Marx devoted considerable space in his works to India. The position and history of this great country, which had fallen under the rule of British colonialism, was examined by him in a series of articles, “The British Rule in India”, “The East India Company — Its History and Results”, “The Future Results of British Rule in India”, and others, in which he traced the most important stages and methods of the colonial enslavement of India by Britain.

A major role in the subjugation of India, with its colossal natural resources and ancient culture, as Marx shows in his articles, was played by the East India Company—”merchant adventurers, who conquered India to make money out of it” (see this volume, p. 179). Over the decades, the Company robbed the peoples of Hindustan, annexing one region after another, and using the resources it had seized to organise aggressive incursions into neighbouring territories— Afghanistan, Burma and Persia. The Company made wide use of the Ancient Roman principle divide et impera (divide and rule), which, as Marx stressed, was one of the main methods of effecting colonial conquests in the capitalist age as well. The colonialists took advantage of India’s political fragmentation, its communal heterogeneity, and the strife between the local rulers, and bribed members of the local aristocracy to win their support. Binding the native sovereign princes to them by a system of subsidiary treaties, promissory notes and other bonds of “alliance”, they turned them into the Company’s puppets. “After having won over their allies in the way of ancient Rome, the East India Company executed them in the modern manner of Change-Alley,” wrote Marx, comparing the methods of the colonialists to the practices of one of the centres of usury in London (see this volume, p. 197). The robbery and usurpation committed by the Company in India served as a source of wealth and strength for the land-owning magnates and money-lords in Britain itself.

While revealing the essence and methods of colonial policy, Marx at the same time showed by his analysis of the internal situation in India and other Eastern countries the reason for their retarded historical development in the periods preceding conquest. He saw the source of their backwardness and weakness, as a result of which they became easy prey for conquerors, in the isolated nature of the small village communities, in the concentration of considerable means of production in the hands of despotic rulers, which impeded the emergence of a capitalist economy, and in other specific features of the social system of the Asian countries, which had at one time attained a high level of civilisation.

Marx gives a vivid portrayal of the British colonialists’ predatory rule in India and its appalling consequences for the peoples of that country. Having inherited from the Eastern rulers such branches of administration as the financial and war departments, and using them to rob and oppress the people, the British rulers of India disregarded a third branch, to which even the Eastern despots devoted attention — the department of public works. As a result, irrigated farming in India fell into total decline. The competition of British manufactures was disastrous for local handicraft production, particularly hand-spinning and handweaving, and doomed millions of people to poverty and death. A great burden was put upon the population by the land and salt taxes and the whole system of financial extortion practised by the colonialists. While destroying old patriarchal forms of communal land-owning, the British retained in India’s social and political system numerous feudal forms which hampered the country’s progressive development.

Marx showed that the system of land-tenure and land taxes introduced by the British in India essentially consolidated precapitalist relations in the countryside and adapted them to the interests of the colonialists. It strengthened the various forms of shackling tenure in India’s agrarian system, and increased the exploitation of the peasants by the landowners, land middlemen and tax collectors to the absolute limit. As a result, Marx remarks, “the Ryots—and they form ll/12ths of the whole Indian population—have been wretchedly pauperized” (see this volume, p. 215).

Pre-capitalist forms of exploitation flourished under colonial rule in other enslaved countries too—in particular, Ireland, which Marx and Engels considered the first British colony. In the article “The Indian Question.— Irish Tenant Right”, for example, Marx vividly compared the extortion practised by landlords on the enslaved Irish tenants—an extortion legalised by the British—with the relations “between the robber who presents his pistol, and the traveler who presents his purse” (see this volume, p. 160).

In the article “Revolution in China and in Europe” Marx also showed the pernicious consequences of the intervention of European capital in the internal life of the Asian countries. He pointed to the destructive influence of the competition of British goods on Chinese local industry, to the drain of silver from the country as a result of the import of opium, which threatened to ruin the Chinese economy, and to the enormous growth of taxes in connection with the payment of the indemnity imposed on China by Britain at the end of the First Opium War.

The colonial administrative, legal and military apparatus was a parasite on the body of the oppressed country. Marx showed that under the extraordinarily confused and cumbersome system of government in India true power was wielded by a clique of officials from the head office of the East India Company in London. “...The real Home Government of India are the permanent and irresponsible bureaucracy” (see this volume, p. 183).

Marx used the example of British rule in India to show the contradictoriness and double-faced nature of the bourgeois system as a whole, and revealed the reverse side of progress under the rule of the exploiters. The period of the rule of the bourgeoisie, he pointed out in the article “The Future Results of British Rule in India”, was in general to create the material basis for a new, socialist society. However, these material prerequisites, the powerful productive forces which constitute the foundation of bourgeois civilisation, are created at the cost of incredible sufferings on the part of the masses. Whole peoples are doomed by the bourgeois age to follow the bitter path of blood and filth, poverty and humiliation. Only after the socialist revolution, he wrote, will “human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain” (see this volume, p. 222).

At a time when the colonial system of capitalism was still in the process of formation, Marx saw that it bore the seeds of its own destruction. He noted, for example, that the British colonialists of India, who were motivated solely by the pursuit of profit, would be compelled, against their will, to promote the development of elements of capitalism in their colony, in particular, to commence railway construction and create related branches of industry. By permitting, albeit in a colonially distorted form, the birth of capitalist economy, the colonialists were bringing to life forces which threatened their rule—a local proletariat and a national bourgeoisie, which were capable of giving a more organised and stable character to the growing resistance of the masses to colonial oppression. These processes had barely begun at that time, but Marx was already fully aware of their significance for the future of the colonial world. He foresaw the growth of the opposition of the masses to the colonialists in India and other oppressed countries. In the article “Revolution in China and in Europe” he noted, in particular, the great successes of the Taiping peasant rebellion. The Taiping movement was ostensibly directed against the oppression of the foreign Manchu nobility. At the same time, like other progressive liberation movements in the East, it was an anti-colonial movement. Its advent was accelerated by “English cannon forcing upon China that soporific drug called opium” (see this volume, p. 93).

Marx saw in the liberation struggle of the enslaved peoples and the victory of the proletariat in the metropolis the two conditions for freeing the oppressed countries from colonial oppression and for their true social rebirth. The population of India, he wrote, would be unable to benefit from the fruits of modern civilisation “till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether” (see this volume, p. 221).

Thus, Marx saw two possible paths for the future liberation of the colonies, which he by no means regarded as mutually exclusive. He considered the struggle of the working class for proletarian revolution in the capitalist countries and the national liberation movement as two interconnected aspects of the revolutionary process.

His discovery of the profound inner connection between the processes of revolutionary ferment in the colonial world and the maturing of the prerequisites for proletarian revolution in the West was perhaps the most important result of Marx’s study of colonial problems. In his articles he showed that the drawing of the colonial and dependent countries into the orbit of capitalist relations would inevitably sharpen the antagonisms of the capitalist world, and that the national liberation movement in these countries, by inflicting blows on the capitalist colonial system, would weaken the position of capitalism in the metropolis. Marx referred to the revolutionary processes in the East as a spark thrown into the “overloaded mine of the present industrial system” (see this volume, p . 98). Conversely, as all Marx’s articles on India, Ireland an d China show, the working class of the capitalist countries must in the long term benefit from the destruction of the colonial system, an d should render all possible assistance to the liberation of the colonies.

Marx’s studies of national and colonial problems in his articles of 1853 and subsequent years were vital contributions to revolutionary theory and provided the foundation for working-class policy on the colonial question. They were the point of departure for Lenin’s subsequent analysis of imperialism, and of the liberation movement in the colonial and dependent countries as an integral part of the world-wide anti-imperialist revolutionary process.

Marx and Engels examined problems of international relations in the context of prospects for the proletarian and national liberation movement. The articles on these questions constitute a considerable section of the present volume. The experience of the revolution of 1848-49 convinced Marx and Engels of the important role of diplomacy and foreign policy. Diplomatic means were used extensively by the reactionary forces of absolutist states and the ruling bourgeoisie for the achievement of counter-revolutionary ends.

Marx and Engels considered, as Marx later formulated it in the “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association”, that one of the most important tasks of proletarian revolutionaries was to understand the secrets of international politics and to expose the machinations of the diplomacy of the ruling classes and their aggressive designs. In the working class they saw a real social force capable of effectively counteracting the aggressive policies of governments. They stressed the need for the working class to pursue its own revolutionary line in international conflicts, aimed at thorough-going bourgeois-democratic transformations in Europe and the preparation of the conditions for a victorious proletarian revolution. It was from this position, the position of the “Sixth Power” , as Marx and Engels called the European revolution, contrasting it with the five “Great Powers “ of the day (see this volume, p . 557), that they approached all international questions. In their numerous articles on these subjects Marx and Engels exposed the whole system of international relations which had taken shape since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The y saw this system as an obstacle to the progressive development of Europe , the liberation of the oppressed nations, an d the national unification of politically disunited countries. Statesmen and diplomats clung to this decrepit system, but not from any belief in the principle of observing international agreements. Marx showed in many of his articles that the treaties of 1815 were constantly violated by the rulers of European states when it suited their purpose. Thus the traditional cunning methods of the diplomacy of the ruling classes continued to flourish on the basis of established international relations. Marx and Engels in their articles condemned its practice of setting nations against one another, of intimidation and blackmail, and blatant interference in the internal affairs of small states. In the article “Political Position of the Swiss Republic”, in particular, Engels pointed out that the declared neutrality of the small states had in fact become a pure formality and that the existing “European political system” doomed these states to the role of lackeys of the counter-revolutionary forces and the “scapegoat” in the diplomatic game of the Great Powers (see this volume, p. 86).

At the centre of the attention of Marx and Engels at that time were the contradictions between the European powers in the Middle East, the struggle for the partition of the Turkish Empire, for control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and for predominance in the Balkans and the countries of Asia Minor. A long series of articles by Marx and Engels is devoted to “the Eastern question”, the aggravation of which led to the outbreak of the Crimean War. Already in the first articles on this subject, which were written by Engels—the section “Turkey” in the article “British Politics.— Disraeli.—The Refugees.— Mazzini in London.—Turkey”, the articles “The Real Issue in Turkey”, “The Turkish Question”, and “What Is to Become of Turkey in Europe?” — Marx’s and Engels’ position on this question was substantially outlined. Their point of view was further developed in Marx’s articles “The Turkish Question.— The Times.— Russian Aggrandizement”, “The War Question.—Doings of Parliament.— India”, “The Western Powers and Turkey”, and others.

Analysing the position in the Middle East and the Balkans, Marx and Engels revealed the economic, political and military causes of the rivalry between the European powers in this region. The complexity of the problem, in their opinion, lay in the fact that this competition was linked with international confrontations caused by the liberation movement of the Balkan peoples against the rule of feudal Turkey.

In contrast to West European politicians and diplomats, who concealed their aggressive aims in the Middle East behind the doctrine of maintaining the status quo as established by the Congress of Vienna and the pretence of defending the inviolability of the feudal Ottoman Empire, Marx and Engels saw that Empire as a great obstacle to historical progress and the development of the Balkan peoples who were under the rule of the Ottoman conquerors. The revolutionary-democratic solution to the Eastern question lay, in their opinion, first and foremost, in the granting of independence and the right to choose the form of their future state system to the Southern Slavs and all the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. Marx wrote that the choice would depend on the concrete historical conditions. He did not exclude the possibility of the creation in the Balkans of a Federal Republic of Slavonic States (see this volume, p. 212).

A genuine solution to the Middle East crisis, Marx and Engels stressed, should not be expected from the Western politicians. “The solution of the Turkish problem is reserved, with that of other great problems, to the European Revolution,” wrote Engels (see this volume, p. 34). Moreover he foresaw the possibility of the revolution spreading eastwards. Already in 1789 the boundaries of revolution had begun steadily to extend further and further. “The last revolutionary outposts were Warsaw, Debreczin, Bucharest; the advanced posts of the next revolution must be Petersburg and Constantinople” (see this volume, p. 34).

Marx and Engels denounced in particular the policy of Tsarist autocracy, its role of gendarme in Europe, its striving for aggrandisement. Tsarism, they stressed, sought to use for counterrevolutionary and aggressive aims the sincere sympathy which the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula felt for Russia, particularly since its victory in the wars with Turkey had actually facilitated the liberation of those peoples from Turkish oppression. But Tsarist autocracy, the oppressor of the Russian people and the other peoples of the Russian Empire, was the worst enemy of revolution. The strengthening of Tsarism presented a serious threat to the democratic and working-class movement in Europe.

Marx’s and Engels’ detestation of Tsarism was shared by the progressive representatives of revolutionary democracy, first and foremost, by the Russian revolutionaries themselves. “Half a century ago,” Lenin wrote in 1903, “Russia’s reputation as an international gendarme was firmly established. In the course of the last century our autocracy rendered no small support to various reactionary causes in Europe even to the point of crushing by downright military force the revolutionary movements in neighbouring countries. One has only to recall the Hungarian campaign of Nicholas I, and the repeated repressions of Poland, to understand why the leaders of the international socialist proletariat from the forties onward denounced tsarism so often to the European workers and European democrats as the chief mainstay of reaction in the whole civilised world.

“Beginning with the last three decades or so of the nineteenth century, the revolutionary movement in Russia gradually altered this state of affairs. The more tsarism was shaken by the blows of the growing revolutionary movement at home, the weaker it became as the enemy of freedom in Europe” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 461).

Marx and Engels regarded the exposure of the self-seeking, anti-democratic position of the ruling circles of the Western powers, above all, of Britain and France, as one of the main aims of their articles on the Eastern question.

In their view the essence of the foreign policy of these powers was to strive to weaken Russia as a rival in the struggle for supremacy in the Middle East and the Balkans, while at the same time seeking to preserve Tsarism as a dependable weapon and bulwark of counter-revolutionary regimes in Europe. The desire to prevent the revolutionary consequences of the collapse of Tsarism and to avoid a decisive clash with Tsarism on the assumption that it would continue to perform the services of a gendarme in the future revealed, to quote Marx, “the mean and abject spirit of the European middle classes” (see this volume, p. 590). However, he stressed that all the ambiguous manoeuvres and tricks of Western diplomacy—the provocative incitement of the Sultan to offer resistance to Tsarist Russia, while at the same time conniving with the Tsar, and the attempt to perform a mediatory role as “peacemaker”—could only aggravate the situation and precipitate the impending military conflict. Western diplomats and politicians, Marx stated, “will not get rid of their embarrassment in this sneaking way” (see this volume, p. 561). The hostilities between Russia and Turkey which began in October 1853 were inevitably developing into a European war.

The France of Napoleon III, Marx stressed, played the role of one of the main instigators of the Crimean War. “The Bonapartist usurpation, therefore,” he pointed out, “is the true origin of the present Eastern complication” (see this volume, p. 615). In the article “The London Press.—Policy of Napoleon on the Turkish Question”, and others Marx exposed the adventurism and dynastic aims of Louis Bonaparte and his supporters in the Eastern question. For the ruler of the Second Empire foreign adventures were a means of preserving the counter-revolutionary Bonapartist dictatorship and a way for the usurper of the imperial throne of France to gain recognition from the European monarchs as one of those who decided the fate of Europe.

Marx’s articles “Urquhart.—Bern.—The Turkish Question in the House of Lords”, “The Turkish Question in the Commons”, “The Quadruple Convention.—England and the War”, “The Czar’s Views.— Prince Albert”, “Russian Diplomacy.—The Blue Book on the Eastern Question.— Montenegro”, and many others dealt with the position of the British ruling circles on the Eastern question. They contain a scathing criticism of the foreign policy of the British Government which, as Marx and Engels frequently stressed, was dictated by the interests of the bourgeois-aristocratic oligarchy. The founders of Marxism saw this policy as a manifestation of the counter-revolutionary role which Britain played in Europe during the wars against the French Revolution of 1789-94 and in 1848-49, when the British bourgeoisie in league with Tsarism and other reactionary forces acted as the suppressor of the revolutionary movement. Marx and Engels stressed that British ruling circles were especially apprehensive lest the conflict with Russia on the Eastern question should develop into a general revolutionary conflagration on the continent, which might find a response among the mass of the people in Great Britain. This factor, they noted, left its mark on the whole of British diplomacy.

By their criticism of the British ruling oligarchy, which was acting as a counter-revolutionary force not only in Great Britain itself, but also in the international arena, Marx and Engels sought to promote the democratic struggle for a change in the domestic and foreign policy of Great Britain. This was the aim, in particular, of a series of revealing articles by Marx entitled “Lord Palmerston”, which were printed in The People's Paper and,in part,in the New-York Daily Tribune. Some of the articles in this series were reprinted in Britain in the form of pamphlets.

“Lord Palmerston” is a brilliant exposé written on the basis of a detailed study of numerous diplomatic documents, parliamentary debates and the press. In this work Marx draws a remarkably accurate and witty portrait of the eminent statesman of bourgeoisaristocratic Britain. His description of Palmerston actually contains an assessment of the whole British system of government, the whole political course of official Britain, the characteristic features of its diplomacy, its striving to exploit other nations for its own ends, its provocative role in many European conflicts, and its perfidious attitude to its allies. Marx revealed the class roots of this system, showing that British statesmen of the Palmerston type were concerned above all that no clouds should darken “the bright sky of the landlords and moneylords” (see this volume, p. 351).

Analysing Palmerston’s stand on the Irish question and his attitude towards the Italian, Hungarian and Polish national movements, Marx revealed the anti-democratic, anti-revolutionary character of British policy which was demagogically concealed by liberal phrases and hypocritical expressions of sympathy for the victims of despotism. A self-proclaimed supporter of “constitutionalism”, Palmerston was in Britain itself the initiator of repressive measures and the opponent of all progressive reforms, while in Europe—in Greece, Spain and Portugal—he supported the reactionary monarchist governments and flirted with Bonapartist circles in France.

Palmerston, Marx emphasises, possessed remarkable political cunning, and an actor’s ability to play the role required by this or that situation, in keeping with the British two-party system and the constant polemics between representatives of the government party and the opposition. Marx regarded as one of the main features of Palmerston’s political art the ability to represent actions taken in the interest of bourgeois-aristocratic circles as national policy, his feigned concern for the well-being and prestige of the British nation. Palmerston proclaimed himself everywhere as a “truly English minister”.

In stressing the similarity between the counter-revolutionary aspirations of Russian Tsarism and of the British oligarchy, however, Marx somewhat exaggerated Palmerston’s subservient role in relation to the Tsarist autocracy. The position of Palmerston, as of other leading British statesmen, on the Eastern question was determined not only by fear of revolution and the desire to make use of the Russian autocracy in the struggle against it, but also by the British ruling class’s own aggressive aspirations in the Middle East, its expansionist ambitions with respect to the Caucasus, and its plans to build up its own supremacy at the expense of Tsarist Russia. This was, indeed, one of the main causes of the Crimean War.

In writing the pamphlet against Palmerston, and in a number of other works, Marx made use of factual material from the articles and brochures of David Urquhart, then a leading figure in propaganda about “the Russian menace” to Britain. And this caused several newspapers, and also bourgeois historians of a later period, to conclude that Marx and Urquhart shared the same position on the Eastern question. However, in fact, as the works in the present volume show, Marx and Engels disagreed radically with Urquhart and regarded his views as on the whole reactionary. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is the article “David Urquhart”, published in Die Reform. In it Marx attacked the emotional attitudinising of David Urquhart, “who is basically conservative”, his arbitrary interpretation of revolutionary events as, allegedly, the result of the machinations of Tsarist diplomacy, his Russophobia, and his idealisation of the feudal Ottoman Empire and the reactionary Empire of the Habsburgs. Marx also emphatically refutes Urquhart’s conception of history as “more or less exclusively the work of diplomacy” (see this volume, p. 478). Marx regarded Urquhart’s denunciation of the foreign policy of Palmerston and the Tsarist government as the only positive aspect of his activity.

When the Crimean War began, Marx and Engels followed its course with the greatest attention. Engels wrote a number of reviews on the fighting on the Danubian and Caucasian fronts, and also on the Black Sea (“The Holy War”, “The War on the Danube”, “The Last Battle in Europe”, and others). These reviews were written immediately after the events in question and some of them inevitably show traces of the influence of the one-sided and sometimes also tendentious information about them in the Western press, which Engels could not immediately check from other sources. As a result of this, his assessment of, in particular, the sea-battle of Sinope on November 30, 1853, in the article “Progress of the Turkish War”, was inaccurate. In his reviews (see this volume, pp. 471-73, 520-22) Engels amended some exaggerated statistics about the strength of the Russian troops on the Danube which he had quoted in the articles “The Russians in Turkey” and “Movements of the Armies in Turkey” on the basis of information in the Western press. Nevertheless, Engels’ long series of articles on the Crimean War, published in this volume, and also in Volumes 13 and 14 of the present edition, occupies an important place in his writings on military theory. It contains important observations and conclusions on questions of the art of warfare, military strategy and tactics. In analysing the political and military aspects of the Crimean War Marx and Engels worked out a general tactical line for the revolutionary proletariat in this major European military conflict. They arrived at the conclusion that the policy of the ruling classes, whose aggressive aims had plunged the peoples into bloodshed, should be contrasted with the idea of a revolutionary war against Tsarism in the name of the democratic reorganisation of Europe, the liberation of the Poles, Hungarians, Southern Slavs and other oppressed peoples, and the national unification of Germany and also Italy by revolutionary means. Such a war, in their opinion, would inflict a telling blow on Tsarist autocracy, facilitate the liberation of the peoples of Russia, and lead to the collapse of counter-revolutionary regimes in Western Europe, France and Britain included, and thereby advance the victory of the West European working class.

In this volume four works by Marx are published for the first time in English—”Hirsch’s Confessions”, “David Urquhart”, The Knight of the Noble Consciousness, and “Apropos Carey”. The articles by Marx and Engels written in English, mainly from the New-York Daily Tribune, are published for the first time in the language of the original in collected form (publication in part of a number of them in the collection The Eastern Question, London, 1897, is indicated in the notes).

As Marx and Engels repeatedly pointed out in their correspondence, the editors of the New-York Daily Tribune treated their articles in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, particularly those which were printed, unsigned, in the form of editorials. During the preparation of this volume editorial insertions were discovered in some of these articles. These insertions are reproduced in the present edition in notes to the relevant passages in the given article. Parallel publications in the New-York Daily Tribune and The People's Paper have been collated. Important divergencies between the two texts are indicated in footnotes. Rare instances of discrepancies in the texts of the New-York Daily Tribune and its special issues—the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune and New-York Weekly Tribune—are also indicated in footnotes, with the exception of corrections of misprints made in the main issue. In this case corrections are made in the text without special mention. Obvious misprints in quotations, proper names, geographical names, numbers, dates, etc., discovered in the text of the New-York Daily Tribune and other newspapers, have been corrected after checking with the sources used by Marx and Engels. The articles are published under the titles under which they appeared in the newspapers. In cases when an article bore no title in the original, the editorial heading is given in square brackets.

The volume was compiled and the preface, notes, subject index and the index of quoted and mentioned literature written by Tatyana Vasilyeva and edited by Lev Golman (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism). The indexes of names and of periodicals were prepared by Galina Kostryukova (CC CPSU Institute of MarxismLeninism). The translations were made by Clemens Dutt, Rodney Livingstone, and Joan and Trevor Walmsley and were edited by Maurice Cornforth and Nicholas Jacobs (Lawrence and Wishart) and Victor Schneierson (Progress Publishers).

The volume was prepared for the press by the editors Tatyana Grishina, Victor Schnittke, Lyudgarda Zubrilova and Alia Varavitskaya, and the assistant editors Nadezhda Korneyeva and Alexander Strelnikov for Progress Publishers, and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor, for the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU.