Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (14)

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Volume 14 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains articles and newspaper reports written between February 9, 1855 and April 25, 1856. Most of these items were published in the American newspaper the New-York Daily Tribune (and often reprinted in its special issues—the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune and the New-York Weekly Tribune), and also in the German democratic newspaper, the Neue Oder-Zeitung. As in previous years some items were published in the Chartist weekly The People's Paper. In the spring of 1856 Marx began to write occasionally for periodicals published by David Urquhart and his supporters— The Free Press (London) and The Sheffield Free Press.

Writing for the comparatively progressive bourgeois press was the only effective means available to Marx and Engels at that time to communicate with a mass readership, and to influence public opinion in favour of proletarian communist ideas. Since a properly working-class and revolutionary democratic press was still so weak, they attached great importance to this channel of communication. The possibility of addressing the German reader through the Neue Oder-Zeitung, the most radical of all the newspapers that remained in Germany in the mid-1850s, was particularly important. Marx wrote for the Neue Oder-Zeitung from December 1854 (the relevant section of his articles for this newspaper is published in Volume 13 of the present edition) until November 1855, when due to serious financial difficulties and pressure from the censorship the editorial board was compelled to reduce the number of foreign correspondents and later to cease publication of the newspaper entirely. He also sent to the Neue Oder-Zeitung military reviews written at his request by Engels for the New-York Daily Tribune, translating them into German and often shortening them and adapting them to the requirements of the German reader. In a number of cases Marx included the texts of the military reviews in his own contributions, supplementing them with other material (reviews of international and domestic events, parliamentary debates, etc.).

The editorial board of the Neue Oder-Zeitung printed the material Marx sent them in its authentic form. On the other hand, the interference of the New-York Tribune editors with the text of articles by Marx and Engels, including arbitrary cuts and insertion of passages which contradicted the original content, became particularly frequent during this period. Thus, Marx’s pamphlet Lord John Russell was published in the Tribune in an abridged form, one of Engels’ articles on Pan-Slavism was arbitrarily revised, and many articles were supplemented with introductory, and sometimes also concluding, paragraphs to give them the appearance of having been written in the United States of Northern America (all these cases of editorial interference are indicated in the notes). Eventually the editorial board of the Tribune ceased almost entirely publishing articles by Marx under his name, printing them instead in the form of its own editorials. Although angered by such cavalier treatment, Marx and Engels nevertheless continued to write for the Tribune. They could not renounce the opportunity of contributing to this widely circulated newspaper, read not only in America but also in Europe.

The present volume is largely a continuation of Volumes 12 and 13 of the present edition. Among the numerous events which attracted the attention of Marx and Engels in 1855 and early 1856, the central place was still held by the Crimean War, which had entered its final stage and was accompanied, as in the preceding stages, by a bitter diplomatic struggle. They continued to analyse in their articles the economic condition of the European countries—England in particular—the domestic and foreign policy of the ruling classes, the state of the working-class and democratic movements, and the prospects for their development. Marx’s and Engels’ journalistic activity in this period was also closely intertwined with their theoretical researches, in particular, with Marx’s studies in both political economy and foreign policy and diplomacy, and Engels’ in military science, the history of the Slavonic peoples, and linguistics. At the same time, through their journalistic activities they accumulated new facts and observations which were then generalised in their scientific writings. Thus, the material Engels used in his regular reports on the Crimean War was summarised by him in important works on military theory, like his series of articles, The Armies of Europe written for the American journal Putnam’s Monthly and published in the present volume. Reports by factory inspectors and information on agrarian relations in Ireland, quoted in Marx’s articles for the Neue Oder-Zeitung, were later incorporated by him in Capital.

Marx’s and Engels’ journalistic work played an important part in crystallising their sociological views. By analysing current events in their articles, they acquired an increasingly profound understanding of the interconnection between historical processes, the laws of social development and class struggle. This is well illustrated by the contents of the present volume. Its articles and reports present a broad panorama of European social and political life during the mid-1850s against the background of continuing political reaction. They give a clear idea of the class structure of society at that time, the domestic and international conflicts of the day, the characteristic features of the state and its various forms, the position of the political parties, of various organs of the press as their ideological mouthpieces, and the customs and morals of the ruling classes. Serious attention is devoted in these articles to the working-class and national liberation movements.

The main aim of Marx’s and Engels’ journalistic writings during this period, as in previous years, was to provide the theoretical basis for the strategy and tactics of proletarian revolutionaries on cardinal questions of domestic and international policy, taking into account that in a large part of Europe the transition from the feudal system to capitalism had by no means been completed. The over-riding task was to effect the abolition of the vestiges of feudalism, the unification of politically divided countries, the liberation of oppressed nationalities. And this meant the revolutionary overthrow of the counter-revolutionary regimes which stood in the way of these transformations, and principally the Austrian, Prussian and Russian monarchies, the Bonapartist Second Empire, and the British bourgeois-aristocratic oligarchy. This was the way, in the opinion of Marx and Engels, to prepare for the working class winning political power in the capitalist countries.

The revolutionary approach to current events is seen clearly in those articles by Marx and Engels in which they continued to analyse the causes of the outbreak and the true character of the Crimean War. The final stage of the war confirmed the conclusions of their previous articles and reports, during the period when the conflict between the European powers was coming to a head, and in the early stages of the military operations against Russia by the Anglo-Franco-Turkish coalition, which was later joined by Piedmont. Marx and Engels became even more firmly convinced of the falseness of the official attitude of the West European governments and press, which was that the war of England and France against Russia was being waged in the “national interest” to defend “freedom” and “civilisation” against the encroachments of “despotism”. They showed convincingly in their articles that the war was the result of a clash of economic and military interests of the ruling classes of the states engaged in it—the struggle for the partition of the Ottoman Empire and for dominion in the Balkans and the Black Sea straits. Marx and Engels came to the conclusion that the counter-revolutionary standpoint and class self-interest of the West European bourgeoisie made it increasingly incapable of expressing and defending any national interests. “As soon as the effects of the war should become taxable upon their pockets,” Marx wrote in the article “Prospect in France and England”, “mercantile sense was sure to overcome national pride, and the loss of immediate individual profits was sure to outweigh the certainty of losing, gradually, great national advantages” (see this volume, p. 143).

Marx and Engels concluded that bourgeois-aristocratic England and Bonapartist France, while striving to weaken Tsarist Russia as a rival in the Near East and the Balkans, to capture Sevastopol, to take the Crimea and the Caucasus away from Russia, and to destroy the Russian navy, had no interest whatever in the collapse of Tsarism. The conservative forces in Europe, headed by the governments of the West European states, needed the Tsarist autocracy as an instrument for repressing popular movements and so as one of the bulwarks of the system of capitalist exploitation. Above all, Western politicians feared the revolutionary consequences of the collapse of the Russian autocracy, which would lead to the destruction of the foundation of the political system in Europe laid down by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Crimean War, Marx stressed in the article “Eccentricities of Politics”, “is undertaken with a view not to supersede but rather to consolidate the Treaty of Vienna by the introduction, in a supplementary way, of Turkey into the protocols of 1815. Then it is expected the conservative millennium will dawn and the aggregate force of the Governments be allowed to direct itself exclusively to the ‘tranquillization’ of the European mind” (see this volume, p. 284).

In the articles “From Parliament”, “Napoleon’s War Plans”, “The Debate on Layard’s Motion.— The War in the Crimea”, “The Local War.—Debate on Administrative Reform.—Report of the Roebuck Committee” and others Marx and Engels showed that these counter-revolutionary aspirations of the ruling circles in Britain and France had left a profound imprint on their diplomacy, military plans and methods of warfare. Seeking to avoid any revolutionary consequences, the Allied states had launched military operations in one of Russia’s outlying areas, away from the possible centres of the revolutionary and national liberation struggle. Marx and Engels revealed the hidded purpose behind the plan of “local war for local objects” put forward by the French Government and supported by the British Government (see this volume, p. 272). They showed that this strategy was by no means prompted by the desire to reduce the number of casualties and scale of destruction. The “local” Crimean War had inflicted enormous losses and bitter tribulations on the armies and peoples of the belligerents. The Anglo-French strategic plan was aimed at preventing the Crimean War from turning into a war of the peoples against Tsarism, a war which would have threatened the very existence of the anti-democratic system of government in Western Europe.

To change the character of the war, and turn it into a war for the democratic reconstruction of Europe and the liberation of the oppressed nationalities, including the peoples of the Balkans who were under Turkish rule, depended on the level of activity of the proletarian and revolutionary-democratic masses. In place of anti-popular governments, Marx wrote, “other powers must step on to the stage” (see this volume, p. 289). In the articles “The Crisis in England”, “Prospect in France and England” and others, Marx and Engels continued to show the working class and the revolutionary democrats how advantage could be taken of the military conflict to develop the movement against the existing counter-revolutionary regimes. Marx hoped that a revolutionary turn of events would “enable the proletarian class to resume that position which they lost, irt France, by the battle of June, 1848, and that not only as far as France is concerned* but for all Central Europe, England included” (see this volume, p. 145).

Marx and Engels placed special hopes on the initiative of the French working class. In the article “Fate of the Great Adventurer” Engels wrote openly about the possibility of “the fourth and greatest French revolution” capable of producing an outbreak of powerful revolutionary and national liberation movements all over the continent of Europe. “Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, Croats are loosened from the forced bond which ties them together, and instead of the undetermined and haphazard alliances and antagonisms of today, Europe will again be divided into two great camps with distinct banners and new issues. Then the struggle will be only between the Democratic Revolution on one side and the Monarchical Counter-Revolution on the other” (see this volume, p. 89).

The idea that the way out of the war lay in a popular revolution was the theme running through many articles by Marx and Engels. They sought to show the real instability not only of the domestic, but also of the foreign-policy positions of the counterrevolutionary ruling circles, the contradictions between them in the international arena, and the vulnerability of their diplomacy.

In particular, Marx and Engels revealed deep splits in the coalition of the European powers opposing Tsarist Russia. They noted the constant friction between its main participants, Britain and France, both in the conduct of military operations and in diplomatic talks (see the articles “Some Observations on the History of the French Alliance”, “A Critique of the Crimean Affair.— From Parliament”, “From the Crimea”, “Another British Revelation”, “The Reports of Generals Simpson, Pélissier and Niel”, “The American Difficulty.—Affairs of France” and others). The collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance predicted by them soon took place, during the Congress of Paris in 1856, at which Russian diplomacy skilfully exploited the differences between the Western powers.

Marx’s article “Palmerston.—The Physiology of the Ruling Class of Great Britain”, his pamphlet The Fall of Kars and Engels’ military review “The War in Asia” revealed the colonialist aims underlying the policies of the Western powers, and their treachery in relation to their junior coalition partner—Turkey. Taking advantage of Turkey’s backwardness, Marx noted, the governments of Britain and France, under the guise of defending the unity of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, had taken a new step towards its colonial subjection. They had set up effective control over its foreign policy, intervened in its internal affairs, and were laying a hand on Turkish finances (see this volume, p. 368). In The Fall of Kars, which has survived in several versions, Marx showed on the basis of facts and diplomatic material how frequently the Western statesmen — the British, in particular—took decisions concerning Turkey behind the back of the Turkish Government, using the weak Turkish army at their discretion and exposing it to attack. The moves of Western diplomacy in relation to the Ottoman Empire, Marx noted, constituted a web of intrigue and provocation aimed at using Turkey as small change in the diplomatic game of the great powers and increasing even more its dependence on the West.

A number of articles in the present volume (“The European War” and others) were written by Marx and Engels when the outcome of the Crimean War was already predetermined. They could already sum it up to a certain extent: “The Anglo-French war against Russia will undoubtedly always figure in military history as ‘the incomprehensible war’. Big talk combined with minimal action, vast preparations and insignificant results, caution bordering on timidity, followed by the foolhardiness that is born of ignorance, generals who are more than mediocre coupled with troops who are more than brave, almost deliberate reverses on the heels of victories won through mistakes, armies ruined by negligence, then saved by the strangest of accidents—a grand ensemble of contradictions and inconsistencies. And this is nearly as much the distinguishing mark of the Russians as of their enemies” (see this volume, p. 484).

Marx’s and Engels’ hopes that the Crimean War would be turned into a war for revolutionary change in Europe were not realised. Apart from its influence on the internal development of Russia, it brought about no significant changes in the social and political structure of the European states. The question of the national independence of the peoples subject to the Ottoman Empire also remained unsolved. Nor did the war resolve the contradictions which existed between the European powers on the Eastern and other questions. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 not only failed to settle the points of dispute, but engendered new, even more bitter conflicts. Marx called it a “sham peace” (see this volume, p. 623).

Many of the journalistic works of Marx and Engels dealt with the effect of the war on the economic and social life in the main European countries. Participation in this large-scale military conflict, they noted, had put the existing anti-popular regimes to a serious test, which revealed their defects and inability to meet the new social requirements. War “puts a nation to the test”, wrote Marx in the article “Another British Revelation”. “As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social organisations that have outlived their vitality” (see this volume, p. 516).

Marx’s main attention was devoted to capitalist Britain, where the contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were more developed than in any other country at the time. In the articles “Questions of Finance”, “The Commercial and Financial Situation”, “The Crisis in England” and others, Marx analysed the state of the British economy. It provided, he stressed, a striking example of the operation of the general economic laws of capitalist society, in particular, the cyclical nature of capitalist production, the inevitable alternation of phases of prosperity and crisis. Marx showed that even within the limits of a given cycle the capitalist economy develops unevenly, in fits and starts, and is subject to the emergence of crisis phenomena. Thus, the period of economic prosperity which began at the end of the 1840s was repeatedly interrupted by stagnation in certain branches of industry and commerce in England, particularly in the textile industry. Marx noted an economic decline in late 1853 and early 1854 and another one in 1855. Analysing the tendencies which he had discovered in the economic life of Britain, and also on the world market, Marx predicted that in the near future Britain would undergo a more serious economic crisis than it had ever experienced before. This prediction was fully borne out in 1857, when the first world economic crisis broke out.

Marx’s articles “Palmerston”, “The British Constitution”, “The Morning Post versus Prussia.—The Character of the Whigs and Tories”, “The House of Lords and the Duke of York’s Monument” and a number of others contain an accurate description of Britain’s traditional two-party system under which power was held in turn by the Whigs and Tories. “The British Constitution,” Marx wrote, “is indeed nothing but an antiquated, obsolete, out-of-date compromise between the bourgeoisie, which rules not officially but in fact in all decisive spheres of civil society, and the landed aristocracy, which governs officially” (see this volume, p. 53). One of the main supports of the regime of the bourgeoisaristocratic oligarchy, Marx pointed out, was the aristocracy’s monopoly of the key state offices. In many of his articles Marx showed that the oligarchical political system was an obstacle to the country’s progressive development. The debates held in both houses of Parliament on various questions, which Marx closely analysed, showed clearly enough what was the class essence of the British Parliament. He revealed the hypocrisy and cupidity of the representatives of both the main political groupings, the obstacles they raised to the exposure of the scandalous abuses in the various departments of the state machine and to progressive reforms.

Ah important contribution to his vivid description of the ruling oligarchy was the pamphlet Lord John Russell (see this volume, pp. 371-93). It provided an addition to Marx’s gallery of portraits of leading nineteenth-century British politicians. In this pamphlet Marx showed that Russell’s false, ostentatious liberalism, his political wiliness and time-serving, were fully in keeping with the whole character of the Whigs, that party of careerists who, like the Tories, were striving to strengthen the oligarchical regime, but in doing so showed greater flexibility and a readiness to make certain concessions to the industrial bourgeoisie. The struggle between the Whigs and Tories, Marx pointed out, was merely a quarrel between the two ruling factions of the aristocratic upper crust of the exploiting classes; the differences in their policies were becoming less and less marked. Bitter attacks on the government by one or other party when it was in opposition were a means of removing the rival party from power. Once in power, however, each party continued to follow the political course of its predecessor.

Marx discovered more and more signs of the political disintegration of both the Whig and Tory parties, which he had noted when he first began to write for the Neue Oder-Zeitung (see present edition, Vol. 13). It was manifest in the bankruptcy of the political doctrines of these old aristocratic parties, their division into separate groupings, the increasing need to resort to manoeuvres and parliamentary alliances. Political instability was giving rise to the tendency to strengthen the personal power of the head of the government, which Marx noted, in particular, in the policy of Palmerston during the formation of his ministry in 1855 and in following years. In the article “Palmerston” Marx drew attention to the way in which this leader of the Right wing of the Whigs had assured by skilful manoeuvring such a composition of his Cabinet as left all the most important threads of government in his own hands. “This time we have not a Cabinet at all, but Lord Palmerston in lieu of a Cabinet” (see this volume, p. 50).

The phenomena detected by Marx reflected a process that had begun under the influence of the drawing together of the interests of industrial capital and of the landed aristocracy and the commercial and financial magnates—the transformation of the Tories into the party of the big bourgeoisie, the Conservatives, and of the Whigs, around whom the middle and petty bourgeoisie were grouped, into the Liberal party. The latter were soon joined by representatives of the bourgeois opposition—the Free Traders.

In his articles of this period Marx continued his trenchant criticism of the ideology and political positions of the Free Traders, using them to expose the class limitations of bourgeois liberalism as a whole. He again showed the illusions of the Free Traders’ argument that capitalism could develop without crises, and exposed their hypocritical protestations about love of peace which concealed the striving of the British bourgeoisie to dominate the world market. The Manchester School, Marx stressed, was striving for peace “in order to wage industrial war at home and abroad” (see this volume, p. 258). Cobden, Bright and the other leaders of the Free Traders, he pointed out, while proclaiming themselves “champions of liberty” and “defenders” of the interests of the masses, in fact supported the cruel exploitation of the working class. Evidence of this was their encroachments on the institution of factory inspectors, who to a certain extent restrained the arbitrariness of employers, and their attempts to repeal the laws which limited the working day for women and children.

In contrast to the false statements of the Free Traders about the “prosperity” of the English workers, Marx made use of reports by factory inspectors to show the terrible working conditions at capitalist factories and the constant growth in the number of industrial accidents, particularly among women and children. “The industrial bulletin of the factory inspectors,” he wrote, “is more terrible and more appalling than any of the war bulletins from the Crimea. Women and children provide a regular and sizeable contingent in the list of the wounded and killed” (see this volume, p. 370).

Bourgeois-aristocratic Britain was confronted by the working masses, first and foremost, the English industrial proletariat. Marx followed carefully every manifestation of discontent and revolutionary ferment among the masses both in Britain itself and in its colonies. Thus, in the article “The Buying of Commissions.— News from Australia” he noted that in the Australian state of Victoria resistance had been “initiated by the workers against the monopolists linked with the colonial bureaucracy” (see this volume, p. 65).

Marx, who never ceased to take an interest in the fate of the oppressed Irish people, regarded Ireland, which was the arena of bitter social antagonism, as one of the permanent centres of popular discontent (see the article “Ireland’s Revenge”).

Opposition tendencies among the various social strata in Britain, including the working class, were also being promoted by David Urquhart and his supporters, who, despite their conservative world outlook, criticised the foreign policy of the ruling oligarchy. Marx continued to attack Urquhart’s views in the press. But nevertheless he thought it expedient to devote attention in his articles to the comparatively progressive activity of the committees on foreign affairs set up by Urquhart and his followers, which also included representatives of the workers (“The Late Birmingham Conference”, “The Committee at Newcastle-upon-Tyne”).

Marx’s main attention was directed to the English working-class movement—first and foremost, to the continuing attempts, despite the general decline of Chartism, of the leaders of its revolutionary wing to revive mass political agitation under the banner of the People’s Charter. In the articles “Anti-Church Movement.— Demonstration in Hyde Park”, “Clashes between the Police and the People.—The Events in the Crimea” Marx noted that the Chartists had succeeded in reviving to a certain extent the political activity of the working class, which found expression in mass popular demonstrations in London in the summer of 1855 against the parliamentary ban on Sunday trading. Marx praised the refusal of Ernest Jones and other Chartists to follow the lead of the bourgeois radicals, instead of which they continued to defend the independent positions of the working class and retain its political progamme in full, in spite of the radicals’ intentions to replace the latter with “moderate” demands for administrative and other reforms.

In the article “The Association for Administrative Reform.— People’s Charter” Marx explained the historical significai.ee of the Chartist programme, the central point of which was the demand for universal suffrage. Adopting a historical approach to political slogans, he showed that whereas in France and on the Continent in general the demand for universal suffrage did not extend beyond the framework of bourgeois democracy, it had a different significance in England. “There it is regarded as a political question and here, as a social one,” Marx noted. In England, where the working class constituted the majority of the population, he pointed out that the implementation of this and other points of the People’s Charter could lead to a radical democratic transformation of the whole parliamentary system and the country’s political structure by the proletarian masses, which would mean “the assumption of political power as a means of satisfying their social needs” (see this volume, pp. 242, 243). From these arguments it is clear that Marx at that time admitted the possibility of the English proletariat coming to power by peaceful means, unlike the countries on the Continent where, in his opinion, the working class could triumph only as a result of the forcible destruction of a military-bureaucratic state machine.

The Chartists’ attempts to instil revolutionary energy in the English proletarian masses could not, however, arrest the decline of the Chartist movement, which was increasingly on the wane. This was due to the peculiarities of the development of British capitalism. The British bourgeoisie had succeeded by means of colonial conquests and profits and monopolies on the world market in chaining a significant section of the higher-paid skilled workers to the capitalist system, thereby splitting the working class and strengthening reformist tendencies in the British workingclass movement. Nevertheless right up to the end Marx never tired of encouraging his Chartist friends and urging them not to give way to difficulties and to keep faith in the coming proletarian revolution.

On April 14, 1856 at a banquet in honour of the fourth anniversary of the publication of The People's Paper Marx delivered a speech full of revolutionary optimism. He spoke of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the world historic mission of the working class as the social force called upon to overthrow the exploiting system. “History is the judge—its executioner, the proletarian” (see this volume, p. 656),

Continuing to regard the struggle against Bonapartism as one of the most important tasks of the working class and revolutionary democracy, Marx and Engels sought to expose in their articles the close connection between the Bonapartist state’s foreign and domestic policy. “It would be easy to demonstrate,” we read in the article “Criticism of the French Conduct of the War” by Marx and Engels, “that the pretentious mediocrity with which the Second Empire is conducting this war is reflected in its internal administration, that here, too, semblance has taken the place of essence, and that the ‘economic’ campaigns were in no way any more successful than the military ones” (see this volume, p. 93). In this article, and also in the articles “Fate of the Great Adventurer”, “Napoleon’s Last Dodge”, “The Local War.—Debate on Administrative Reform.—Report of the Roebuck Committee”, “The American Difficulty.—Affairs of France” and others, Marx and Engels stressed that military adventurism was an intrinsic feature of Bonapartist policy, that conquest and aggression were one of the principles on which the political rule of the Bonapartist circles in France itself rested.

Marx’s article “The France of Bonaparte the Little” revealed the glaring contrast between official France, which was recklessly squandering the nation’s wealth, and the France of the people, to whom the Bonapartist regime had brought poverty and police repression. In the heart of this France of the people, Marx emphasised, revolutionary ferment was maturing against the Bonapartist dictatorship, which betokened “the downfall of the Empire of Agio” (see this volume, p. 620). In the articles “The Reports of Generals Simpson, Pélissier and Niel” and “The Bank of France.—Reinforcements to the Crimea.—The New FieldMarshals”, Marx and Engels noted the deterioration of the political situation in France, drawing attention to the signs of growth in the revolutionary mood of the working class, the students and other strata of the population, and to the discontent displayed by a certain section of the bourgeoisie and even of the army, which had up till then served as a bulwark of the Second Empire.

Marx and Engels continued to analyse in the press the events in Prussia, Austria and Tsarist Russia. The Crimean War had exposed the profound contradictions between these states and at the same time confirmed the common counter-revolutionary aims of their ruling circles, united by the attempt to preserve intact the reactionary systems within each of these countries and the corresponding pattern of international relations. Thus, as Marx repeatedly pointed out, the neutrality in the war proclaimed by the Prussian Government was dictated by fear of the revolutionary consequences of transferring the theatre of military operations to Central Europe. In the article “Prussia”, Marx dealt with the political system of the Prussian monarchy, in which the formally proclaimed constitution served merely as a cover for the continuation of absolutism and its product-—an all-powerful bureaucracy. He notes the lack of rights of the majority of the population, the oppression of the peasantry which remained, as before, “under the direct yoke of the nobility”, both administratively and judicially (see this volume, p. 661). At the same time Marx pointed to the rapid growth of industry and commerce, and the unprecedented wealth of the Prussian propertied classes—the Junkers and the bourgeoisie. But the latter remained, as always, politically passive and servile, which confirmed the opinion expressed by Marx and Engels as early as 1848-49 that the German bourgeoisie was incapable of playing a leading role in the struggle for radical bourgeois-democratic demands.

As to the ruling circles in the Austrian Empire, they were striving to obtain Turkish possessions in Europe, and so adopted a hostile attitude towards Russia as their main rival in the Balkans. In his reports “On the Critique of Austrian Policy in the Crimean Campaign” and “Austria and the War” Marx quoted documents that revealed the duplicity of the Austrian government’s foreign policy. Marx and Engels saw the cause of this in the internal weakness of the reactionary Habsburg Empire, which stemmed not only from the backwardness of its social system, but also from profound national antagonisms. Reaping the fruits of the centuriesold oppression of the peoples who made up the Empire and fanning national enmity between them, the rulers of the Austrian Empire were in constant fear of an upsurge of the national liberation movements. It was these fears that held them back from open intervention in the military conflict.

Quoting information in their articles about the situation in Russia, Marx and Engels drew attention to the difficulties experienced by the Tsarist autocracy in the course of the war, the exhaustion of its material resources, which were in any case limited by the serf system and the economic backwardness it engendered (see Engels’ article “The State of the War” and other items). As Marx and Engels soon realised, the consequences of the Crimean War had a serious effect on the internal development of the Russian Empire. The defeat sustained by Tsarism, which showed, in the words of Lenin “the rottenness and impotence of feudal Russia” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 17, p. 121), created the prerequisites for the maturing of a revolutionary situation in the country, which compelled the ruling classes to introduce reforms. “The Russian war of 1854-55,” Marx remarked in a letter to Engels of October 8, 1858, “...has ... obviously hastened the present turn of events in Russia” (see present edition, Vol. 40). Later, in 1871, in a draft of The Civil War in France Marx again emphasised the connection between the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861 and other transformations. The Crimean War revealed the profound crisis of the whole social and political system of Tsarist Russia, even though it had “saved its honour by the defence of Sevastopol and dazzled foreign states by its diplomatic triumphs in Paris”.

Marx and Engels continued throughout the final period of the war to point out that, despite numerous military defeats, Tsarist despotism still represented a serious threat to the European working-class and democratic movement. As one might have expected, they remarked, the changes on the Tsarist throne did not lead to any substantial changes in the foreign policy of the Russian autocracy. Nicholas I’s successor Alexander II and his government did not renounce aggressive intentions—in particular, the attempts to exploit Pan-Slavist propaganda as an instrument of aggrandizement.

Engels’ article “Germany and Pan-Slavism”, together with its English versions, “The European Struggle” and “Austria’s Weakness”, showed how reactionary were current Pan-Slavist ideas, and Alexander IFs Pan-Slavist sentiments. The dissemination of these ideas by the monarchistic elements of certain Slavonic national movements, Engels noted, played into the hands of the Habsburg monarchy and Russian Tsarism in their struggle against the revolution in Germany and Hungary in 1848-49.

Marx and Engels resolutely attacked all nationalistic ideology, whatever form it took, whether Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, or any other form. They stressed that this ideology fanned national differences, that it was deeply alien to the interests of democratic development and the national and social liberation of all peoples, including the Slav peoples.

In his polemic with Pan-Slavism, however, Engels repeated certain theses which have not been borne out by history, about the alleged loss by a number of Slav peoples who formed part of the Austrian Empire (Czechs, Slovaks, and others) of the ability to lead an independent national existence—theses which were expressed by him earlier in the works “Democratic Pan-Slavism” and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (on this see the prefaces to Volumes 8 and 11 of the present edition). The process of social development, which up to the 1860s was dominated by tendencies towards centralisation, the creation of large states, had not yet provided sufficient objective evidence for revising this mistaken view. It was only subsequently that another historical tendency manifested itself fully, namely, the striving of oppressed small peoples, including the Slav peoples of the Austrian Empire, for national independence, and their ability not only to create their own states but also to march in the van of social progress.

The present volume contains a large number of military articles by Engels, who regularly analysed the whole course of the Crimean War, and also his military survey The Armies of Europe. These works constitute an important part of his studies on military theory. Although based on contemporary reports primarily in the English and French press, which contained many omissions and inaccuracies, Engels’ military reviews show great insight and a profound understanding of the nature of the military operations in the various theatres of the war—the Caucasus, the Crimea and the Baltic—and of the decisive role of the siege and defence of Sevastopol in the overall course of the military operations, which by then had reached culmination point. Engels found increasing confirmation in the development of the military events of his basic propositions on the theory of warfare, the dependence of warfare on the social and political system, the interconnection between military strategy and the policy of the ruling classes, and the influence of the general state of the organisation of the armed forces on the mode of waging war. He held that the organisation of the army was an integral part of the system of state administration and reflected its characteristic class features.

Thus in the articles “The Struggle in the Crimea”, “The War that Looms on Europe”, “The Punishment of the Ranks” and others Engels shows the connection between the crude blunders of the British military command, the wretched state of the British expeditionary forces and the conservatism of the British military system as such. He noted the routine nature of the organisation of the British army, the caste spirit and favouritism that prevailed in the War Office, the quartermaster service and the officer corps, the practice of selling commissions and other defects engendered by the oligarchical political regime. The article “The Reports of Generals Simpson, Pélissier and Niel” by Marx and Engels states openly that “the miserable leadership of the British Army is the inevitable result of rule by the antiquated oligarchy” (this volume, p. 542).

In many articles Engels points to the pernicious consequences for the French and Allied armed forces of interference by the ruling clique of the Second Empire and Emperor Napoleon III himself in the conduct of military operations, and also of the effect of the counter-revolutionary aims for which the Bonapartist circles sought to use the army. Under pressure from Paris the operations by the Allied troops were often determined not by military, but by totally unrelated political and dynastic considerations (see the article “From Sevastopol” and others).

Describing the armed forces of Tsarist Russia, in the article “The Russian Army”, the relevant section of The Armies of Europe and in other works, Engels noted the weakness of the economic base and the archaic nature of the social base of the Tsarist military system. The technological backwardness of the Tsarist army, he emphasised, the almost total absence of modern means of transport, the old-fashioned methods of recruiting and training troops, the substitution of parade-ground drilling for proper military training, the length of military service, the corruption and embezzlement of public funds in the military and civilian administration—all this was the product of the social and political order of the Russia of autocracy and serfdom.

At the same time Engels constantly emphasised the military qualities of the rank and file participants in the armed struggle. He

paid tribute to the initiative and élan of the French officers and men, and the stamina and resolve of the English in battle. He invariably spoke with respect of the traditional courage of the Russian soldier. “The Russian soldier is one of the bravest men in Europe”, he wrote in The Armies of Europe (see this volume, p. 444).

However, the description of the Russian army which Engels gave in these and other works, for all the aptness of his assessment of the state of the army in the Russia of serfdom, was influenced by his sources of information at that time, the anti-Russian bias of the West European press and the tendentious works of Western historians. This, and to a certain extent also the political slant of his articles against Russian Tsarism, explains the presence in his works at that time of certain exaggerations and one-sided opinions, which he revised to a large extent in his later works (Po and Rhine, see this edition, Volume 16, and others). Such opinions include, in particular, his statements on the passivity of Russian soldiers, the special role of foreigners in the Russian army due to a lack of native talent, and that Russia in the past had triumphed only over weak opponents and suffered defeat from those equal to it in strength.

It must be said, however, that even though he possessed biased information, Engels assessed the operations of the belligerent powers objectively in the overwhelming majority of cases. This is demonstrated most strikingly by his many articles on the heroic eleven-month defence of Sevastopol by Russian troops. In the articles “The Siege of Sevastopol”, “A Battle at Sevastopol” and others, the brilliant operations of the defenders, the skill of the military engineers of the Sevastopol garrison, including the head of the engineering service Todtleben, and the excellent arrangement of the line of fire are contrasted by Engels with the Allied siege operations. He rates the latter very low, emphasising that “not a single siege can be shown in the annals of war, since that of Troy, carried on with such a degree of incoherence and stupidity” (see this volume, p. 155).

Noting the heroism and military fervour of the defenders of the Russian fortress, Engels praised their successful sorties in which they acted “with great skill combined with their usual tenacity” (see this volume, p. 116). He regarded as unprecedented in the history of warfare the creation by the besieged garrison during the defence of new fortifications which they set up in front of the first line, and commented most favourably on the Russians’ use of a tiered arrangement of batteries which enabled them to make good use of the terrain.

In the article “Progress of the War” Engels sums up his assessments of the operations by the organisers of and participants in the defence of Sevastopol as follows. “The justness and rapidity of glance—the promptness, boldness, and faultlessness of execution, which the Russian engineers have shown in throwing up their lines around Sevastopol—the indefatigable attention with which every weak point was protected as soon as discovered by the enemy—the excellent arrangement of the line of fire, so as to concentrate a force, superior to that of the besiegers, upon any given point of the ground in front—the preparation of a second, third and fourth line of fortifications in rear of the first—in short, the whole conduct of this defense has been classic” (see this volume, pp. 134-35). Later Engels often returned to the analysis of the Sevastopol campaign (in his articles on the national liberation uprising in India of 1857-59 and in his “Notes on the War” in 1870-71), regarding it as an outstanding example of active defence.

The experience of the defence of Sevastopol enabled Engels to make important generalisations in his articles on the art of warfare, especially with respect to the significance of fortresses in nineteenthcentury warfare and their use in conjunction with field armies. From his analysis of other battles of the Crimean War and its general lessons he drew conclusions concerning the advantages of an offensive strategy and the concentration of forces in inflicting the main blow on the enemy’s principal groupings, and on the often ephemeral nature of the surprise factor in cases when the consolidation and development of successes achieved in such a way are not ensured by corresponding means, etc.

In short, Engels in his work The Armies of Europe gave a broad picture of the level of development of warfare and the state of the armed forces in the middle of the nineteenth century. He analysed the equipment, recruiting method and special tactics of the armies of the different states to show the operation in this sphere of the basic laws of social development. This was to apply the basic principles of historical materialism by showing how the fighting efficiency of an army is determined primarily by the economy and the social and political system of the given country. Thus Engels pointed out that in the Prussian army, for example, the promising principle of recruiting and training of troops by means of a comparatively short period of military service for all those capable of it was frustrated by the representatives of the reactionary political system in order to have a “disposable and reliable army to be used, in case of need, against disturbances at home” (see this volume, p. 433). Again, Engels stressed that the fanning of national strife characteristic of the Habsburg monarchy was also reflected in the Austrian army and had an adverse effect on its fighting efficiency. Engels similarly noted the influence of the surviving feudal relations on the armies of Russia, Turkey and a number of other states. Stressing that the general laws of the evolution of the armed forces manifest themselves in each country in a specific form, Engels showed the importance of national characteristics and traditions in the development of each army. At the same time he pointed out that the general progress of military technology and improvements introduced into warfare induce each army to take into account and use the experience of all the others. An important place in his work is occupied by criticism of the nationalistic tendencies in the treatment of military history by the ruling classes, in particular, in the thesis about the invincibility of this or that army at all times.

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The present volume contains 135 works by Marx and Engels. Seventy-six of the articles are published in English for the first time (six of them have been published in English in part). These include the great majority of articles published in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, among them versions of items in the New-York Daily Tribune which Marx adapted for the German newspaper, and also the rough draft of Engels’ “Crimean War”, which is included in the section “From the Preparatory Materials”. Thirty-seven of the articles contained in the present volume have not been reproduced in English since their first publication in English and American newspapers. Previous English publications of individual articles by Marx and Engels, in particular in The Eastern Question, London, 1897, are indicated in the notes.

In the absence of Marx’s notebook for this period with entries concerning the dispatching of items to New York, authorship of articles by Marx and Engels in the New-York Tribune, which were usually printed anonymously, has been established mainly on the basis of information contained in correspondence, simultaneous publication in the European and American press, and peculiarities of content and style. During preparation of the articles the date when they were written was checked and most of the sources used by the authors were established.

Discrepancies of substance between the Versions of the articles published simultaneously in the New-York Daily Tribune and the Neue Oder-Zeitung are indicated in the footnotes. The same applies to other parallel publications (in the New-York Daily Tribune and The People's Paper, Engels’ work The Armies of Europe which was published in Putnam’s Monthly and the extracts from it that were translated into German by Marx for the Neue Oder-Zeitung, and other items). When the versions differ considerably, their texts are given in full. In quoting, Marx sometimes gives a free rendering rather than the exact words of the source. In the present edition quotations are given in the form in which they occur in Marx’s text.

Misprints in quotations, proper names, geographical names, figures, dates, etc., discovered during the preparation of the present volume have been corrected (usually silently) on the basis of the sources used by Marx and Engels.

In the case of newspaper articles without a title, or of a number of those which formed part of a series, a heading or number has been provided by the editors in square brackets.

The volume was compiled, the text prepared and the preface and notes written by Stanislav Nikonenko and edited by Lev Golman (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU). The name index, the index of periodicals and the glossary of geographical names were compiled by Natalia Martynova, the subject index by Marien Arzumanov, and the index of quoted and mentioned literature by Yevgenia Dakhina (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The translations were made by Susanne Flatauer, Hugh Rodwell, Peter and Betty Ross, Barbara Ruhemann, Barrie Selman, Christopher Upward, Joan and Trevor Walmsley (Lawrence and Wishart) and Salo Ryazanskaya (Progress Publishers), and edited by Nicholas Jacobs, Frida Knight, Sheila Lynd (Lawrence and Wishart), Salo Ryazanskaya, Tatyana Grishina, Natalia Karmanova and Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishers), and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The volume was prepared for the press by the editors Yelena Kalinina, Alia Varavitskaya and Lyudgarda Zubrilova (Progress Publishers).