Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (15)

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Volume 15 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains their writings between May 1856 and September 1858. Most of them are articles and reports published in the progressive American newspaper, the New-York Daily Tribune, in its special issues, the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune and the New-York Weekly Tribune, and also in the Chartist weekly, The People's Paper, and other newspapers.

In these years, besides his strenuous activities as a journalist, Marx was intensively engaged in the study of political economy. Between August 1857 and May 1858 he wrote the first draft of what was to become Capital—the Economic Manuscript of 1857-58 (see present edition, vols. 28 and 29). At that time Marx and Engels also wrote a number of articles, mainly on military and military-historical subjects for The New American Cyclopaedia (present edition, Vol. 18).

Their contributions to the New-York Daily Tribune in this period were almost the only opportunity Marx and Engels had to express their attitude on the vital international issues and on the internal politics of the European countries, to reveal the class essence of world events, and appraise them from the standpoint of the fundamental interests of the proletariat. The most notable of those events were: the economic crisis of 1857-58, the first to grip the whole capitalist world, the colonial wars, and the armed struggle of the peoples of India to liberate themselves from British rule. Writing for the New-York Daily Tribune became even more important for Marx and Engels because in December 1856, in view of the changed position taken by Ernest Jones, the editor of The People's Paper, who had agreed to a compromise with the bourgeois radicals, they were obliged to stop contributing to that paper. This meant that in Europe there was no other press organ where they could expound their views.

A considerable portion of Marx’s articles included in this volume are devoted to the economic crisis of 1857-58, and also to the specific economic problems of the major European countries.

On the basis of his analysis of European economic development since the revolutions of 1848-49 Marx had, by the autumn of 1856, already come to the conclusion that an economic crisis was approaching. He predicted that it would hit many countries and inevitably affect not only industrial production but also trade and fiscal relations. When the crisis broke in 1857, it provided vivid confirmation of the conclusion Marx had reached earlier on the cyclical nature of the development of capitalist production, and the inevitable succession of phases within each cycle. He identified the cause of the crisis in the internal contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production, and convincingly refuted the attempts of bourgeois economists to find an explanation for it in mere secondary causes, particularly in the wave of speculation. “The political economists who pretend to explain the regular spasms of industry and commerce by speculation,” he wrote, “resemble the now extinct school of natural philosophers who considered fever as the true cause of all maladies” (see this volume, p. 401).

Marx devoted much attention to the symptoms of financial crisis, analysing their influence throughout the European economy. Step by step he traced every change on the world money market and investigated the positions of the major British and French banks. Of considerable interest in this respect are his articles on the French joint-stock company Crédit Mobilier, one of the main centres of the stock exchange speculation that exacerbated the world economic crisis. Marx described this company as “one of the most economical phenomena of our epoch” (p. 10). The activities of the Crédit Mobilier, which enjoyed the special patronage of Napoleon III, ranged far beyond the realm of credit. The company invested its capital in industrial enterprises and construction, including the building of railways.

Marx’s articles on the Crédit Mobilier contain important theoretical propositions and conclusions concerning the laws of capitalist development. The enhanced role of joint-stock capital marked the appearance of trends that heralded the onset of capitalism’s imperialist stage at the turn of the century. As Marx wrote, this opened “a new epoch in the economical life of modern nations” (p. 21), creating opportunities for setting up industrial enterprises that would have been beyond the means of individual capitalists. Taking the Crédit Mobilier as an example, Marx noted the appearance of “a sort of industrial kings” (p. 21), who could manipulate in their own interests capital that was far in excess of their own and which allowed them to indulge in unlimited speculation. On the other hand, Marx pointed out, this accelerated concentration of production and capital, strengthened the rule of the financial and industrial oligarchy and spelled bankruptcy for the middle and small capitalist.

In the development of large-scale bank and industrial capital Marx accurately foresaw the prospect of the capitalism of free competition becoming monopoly capitalism. As Lenin was to write later, “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, Moscow, 1974, p. 297). The consequent increase in the number of wage workers along with the decrease in the number of capitalists further polarised capitalist society, sharpening the endemic class struggle.

In his articles on the economic crisis of 1857 Marx gave a profound analysis of the industrial, financial and trading positions of the major European countries, studied in detail the dynamics of world exports and imports, and investigated the fluctuations of British and French bank rates and the value of securities on the European stock exchanges.

In his articles “The Economic Crisis in France”, “The Trade Crisis in England”, “The French Crisis”, “The British Revulsion”, and others, Marx accurately discerned the specific features of the crisis in each country. The worst hit country was Britain, where the crisis bore “the character of an industrial crisis” and struck “at the very roots of the national prosperity” (p. 390).

The articles on the crisis contain a huge amount of factual material, which Marx gleaned from British, French and German newspapers, magazines and statistical reports. His articles reflected both his own observations and researches, and information he received from Engels. The specific factual material, and his resulting generalisations and conclusions, were later used to work out his theory of economic crises.

Marx noted in particular that the crisis-ridden economies of the European countries were impoverishing the rural and urban workers and, above all, the industrial working class. “Through the whole of Europe the palsy of industrial activity and the consequent distress of the laboring classes are rapidly spreading,” Marx wrote in his article “The Financial Crisis in Europe” (p. 404). Of undoubted interest in this respect are the articles “Condition of Factory Laborers” and “The English Factory System”, and also “Important British Documents”.

Harsh exploitation of the workers, Marx pointed out, was the other side of the thriving capitalist industry in the pre-crisis period. Circumventing the factory acts that Parliament had passed under the pressure of the proletariat’s stubborn class struggle, British manufacturers lengthened the working day, reduced wages and showed a preference for employing women and children instead of adult workmen. “The infamies of the British factory system are growing with its growth,” he wrote, “...the laws enacted for checking the cruel greediness of the mill-lords are a sham and a delusion, being so worded as to baffle their own ostensible end and to disarm the men entrusted with their execution” (pp. 253-54). In his article “The Economic Crisis in France” Marx observes that in that country the very first symptoms of crisis aggravated the sufferings of the workers and stimulated the growth of discontent among them (p. 133).

Regarding the period after the defeat of the 1848-49 revolutions as “a mere respite given by history to Old European Society” (p. 115) Marx and Engels believed in the inevitability of a new revolutionary upsurgence and thought that it would be triggered by the economic crisis. This was what Marx had in mind when he wrote that in 1857 material conditions were provided “for the ideal tendencies of 1848” (p. 114). This was the main reason for the great interest Marx and Engels showed in the domestic policies of the European countries, in all the facts and phenomena testifying, on the one hand, to the increasing crisis among the ruling classes themselves and, on the other, to the growing revolutionary and democratic movement.

In a number of articles Marx analysed the internal situation in the European countries, particularly Britain and France, singling out political tension as a symptom of a possible revolutionary explosion. In his view Bonapartist France offered the greatest hope in this respect. The hardships caused by the economic crisis “must tend to bring the French people into that state of mind in which they are wont to embark in fresh political ventures,” Marx wrote in his article “The Economic Crisis in France”. “With the disappearance of material prosperity and its regular appendage of political indifference, every pretext for the prolongation of the second Empire ... disappears” (p. 463).

Marx noted the signs of mounting political crisis in the Second Empire: workers’ strikes in various industries, peasant discontent, severer measures against democratic elements (pp. 135, 302). “The time of the sullen acquiescence of the nation in the rule of the Society of the perjured usurper has definitely passed away,” he wrote (pp. 456-57), alluding to the Bonapartist Society of December 10, which had played an important role in the preparation of the coup d’état of December 2, 1851.

In the articles “The Attempt upon the Life of Bonaparte”, “The Rule of the Pretorians”, “Bonaparte’s Present Position”, and also in the articles on the Crédit Mobilier, Marx develops and clarifies the definition of Bonapartism which he gave in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and other earlier works, for example, “The France of Bonaparte the Little” (see present edition, vols. 11 and 14). Basing himself on hard facts, he reveals such characteristic features of the Bonapartist monarchy as the undisguised dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie, relying on the force of bayonets and police terror, the wildfire spread of speculation, corruption and bribery, the embezzlement of state funds, foreign policy adventurism, the manoeuvring between various classes and sections of the population, and Napoleon Ill’s attempts to play the role of protector of the peasantry, and in various ways “to purchase the conscience of the French working classes” (p. 478). Marx reveals the direct connections between the Bonapartist monarchy and the stock exchange speculators, a monarchy which, as Lenin put it, “is obliged to walk the tightrope in order not to fall, make advances in order to govern, bribe in order to gain affections, fraternise with the dregs of society, with plain thieves and swindlers, in order not to rely only on bayonets” (V. I. Lenin, op. cit., Vol. 15, p. 269).

One of the most important themes in Marx’s journalism continued to be Britain’s domestic and foreign policy, including the evolution of her parliamentary system. In his newspaper reports, “Defeat of the Palmerston Ministry”, “The Coming Election in England”, “The English Election”, “The Defeat of Cobden, Bright and Gibson”, “Political Parties in England.— Situation in Europe”, and others, Marx put his finger on a characteristic phenomenon of English political life in the 1850s, the decay of the traditional political parties. Detecting in this process a manifestation of the bankruptcy of the existing oligarchic system of government, Marx notes the English bourgeoisie’s “longing for compromises with the oligarchs, in order to escape concessions to the proletarians” (p. 203).

Marx emphasised that the bourgeois-oligarchic regime in England retarded the country’s development. Anti-popular and counter-revolutionary in character, this regime, which was most vividly expressed in the administration of Palmerston, whom Marx ironically called a “truly British Minister”, stood in the way of democratic reforms. Parliamentary legislation served the interests of the ruling clique, as was plainly demonstrated by the budgets and financial reforms of those years (see the articles “The New English Budget”, “The Bank Act of 1844 and the Monetary Crisis in England”, and “Mr. Disraeli’s Budget”). Marx showed that, in effect, Palmerston expressed the interests of the sections of the English capitalist class that sought to expand markets, to consolidate Britain’s industrial monopoly, and achieve further colonial expansion.

Analysis of the internal situation in Britain and the consequences of her colonial wars, which had diverted considerable manpower and material resources, brought Marx to the conclusion that “in case of a serious revolutionary explosion on the continent of Europe, England ... would prove unable to reassume the proud position she occupied in 1848 and 1849”. Marx expressed confidence that England “will be disabled from clogging, as she did in 1848, the European Revolution that draws visibly nearer” (pp. 301-02, 567-68).

Well before the crisis broke, Marx and Engels kept a close watch for any sign of revolutionary activity among the masses in Europe, and regarded such signs as proof of the instability and impermanence of îhe period of political reaction that had set in during the 1850s.

In the summer of 1856 Marx’s attention was once again drawn to events on the Iberian peninsula. This volume includes two articles by Marx on the revolution in Spain (pp. 97-108). Written in July-August 1856, they round off, as it were, the series of articles entitled “Revolutionary Spain”, published in the Neiv-York Daily Tribune in 1854, and his other articles on this subject (see present edition, Vol. 13). The articles sum up the results of the fourth Spanish bourgeois revolution, which began in June 1854 and brought the liberal Progresista party to power.

In assessing the significance and peculiarities of this revolution, Marx observes that what distinguished it from the revolutions in Spain in the first half of the 19th century was that it had discarded its dynastic and military character. The development of industry had altered the line-up of class forces. For the first time the workers—”the product of the modern organization of labor”—were taking part in the revolution “to claim their due share.of the result of victory” (this volume, p. 102). Another important new factor was the warm support given by the peasantry which, Marx points out, “would have proved a most formidable element of resistance” (p. 104). However, the bourgeois leaders of the revolution were unable and unwilling to use the peasantry’s determination and energy, while the army had become a counter-revolutionary force. Both the course of the revolution itself, and its defeat, confirmed the conclusion Marx had reached on the basis of the experience of 1848-49 concerning the counter-revolutionary degeneration of the liberal bourgeoisie and its betrayal of the revolutionary cause as soon as the masses and, above all, the working class, began to put forward their own demands. “Frightened by the consequences of an alliance thus imposed on their unwilling shoulders,” Marx wrote, “the middle classes shrink back again under the protecting batteries of the hated despotism.” Their conduct “furnishes a new illustration of the character of most of the European struggles of 1848-49, and of those hereafter to take place in the Western portion of that continent” (p. 102).

Analysis of the revolutionary events in one of the most backward countries of Western Europe led Marx to conclude that “the next European revolution will find Spain matured for cooperation with it. The years 1854 and 1856 were phases of transition she had to pass through to arrive at that maturity” (p. 108).

Several of the works published in this volume (the never completed work consisting to a considerable extent of extracts from documents and quotations, Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century and the unfinished work “B. Bauer’s Pamphlets on the Collision with Russia”, never published in Marx’s lifetime, the article “The Right Divine of the Hohenzollerns”, and a few others) reflect Marx’s interest in the history of diplomacy and international relations. The special need to investigate this subject sprang from the events of those years—the growing rivalry between the European powers in the Near and the Middle East, the Crimean War, and other international conflicts. Analysis of the foreign policies of the European countries contributed a great deal to the theory of the class struggle and to the determination of the strategic and tactical objectives of the proletariat.

Marx and Engels assessed international events and international politics from the perspective of Europe’s revolutionary, democratic development, an essential condition for which was the overthrow of the reactionary regimes that had established themselves after the defeat of the 1848-49 revolutions. In the 1850s, the critical study of the foreign policy of bourgeois-aristocratic England, Bonapartist France, Tsarist Russia, and the reactionary governments of Austria and Prussia became one of the main subjects of Marx’s and Engels’s writing for the press. To these five powers, whose governments were pursuing a reactionary political course, Marx contrasted the “sixth and greatest European power”. That power was the Revolution (present edition, Vol. 12, p. 557).

The works in this volume reveal the essence and distinctive features of the diplomacy of the exploiting classes: Marx assigns diplomacy and foreign policy to the sphere of the political superstructure as something determined in the final analysis by the economic base (pp. 185-86, 188-89).

His work “B. Bauer’s Pamphlets on the Collision with Russia” shows how diplomatic relations develop under capitalism, and notes the persistence of reactionary traditions in foreign policy inherited from the feudal monarchies. Marx emphasises that “the society of modern production calls for international conditions different from those of feudal society...” (p. 190). In Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century he dwells on certain features of the diplomatic practice of bourgeois states. In its pursuit of profit, capital is prepared to embark on any betrayal of national interests. For the bourgeoisie, Marx wrote, its fatherland was “where the best interest for its capital was paid” (p. 64).

Dealing with some of the general principles of historical research, Marx poses the question of the relation between fact and generalisation in the analysis of this or that event, and the role and relevance of historical analogies. With biting sarcasm he criticises Bauer for drawing superficial parallels between the events that sparked off the revolution of 1789 in France and the events that took place in mid-19th century Britain, which sprang from entirely different socio-economic conditions. It would be . impossible, Marx points out, “to coax into an analogy any two things of a more disparate kind” (p. 185, see also p. 186).

The Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century is, in Marx’s own words, only an introduction to a projected but never written work on Anglo-Russian relations. This introduction (five printers’ sheets of twenty sheets for the whole work) is unfinished and breaks off with a quotation. It consists to a great extent of lengthy quotations from pamphlets and diplomatic reports. The general aim of the project was to prove that the reactionary aspirations of the English ruling oligarchy and the Tsarist autocracy had much in common, which in the mid-19th century showed itself mainly in the suppression of revolutionary and national liberation movements. Before this, Marx and Engels had exposed the counter-revolutionary nature of the foreign policy of Britain’s ruling circles (see the pamphlet Lord Palmerston and a number of other articles, present edition, vols. 12, 13 and 14). They repeatedly stressed that these circles, unless it contradicted their own immediate interests, supported the foreign policy of Russian Tsarism, which they saw as one of the main forces of European reaction. Marx believed that the roots of this policy should be traced to the 18th century.

The Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century is more a political pamphlet than a piece of historical research. Moreover, in writing it Marx deliberately concentrated attention on certain features of Anglo-Russian relations while ignoring others. In several instances this led him to make one-sided assessments and judgments, particularly in characterising British policy towards Russia, which, so he alleged, had ever since the 18th century traditionally supported the foreign-policy aims of the Tsarist autocracy.

Such one-sidedness was determined to an even greater degree by the extremely tendentious nature of the 18th-century sources Marx used, which reflected the rivalry between the two oligarchic cliques of the English ruling élite—Whigs and Tories. A large part of Marx’s sources are anti-Russian pamphlets dating from the days of the Northern War (1700-21), which were often directly inspired by Sweden, Russia’s main adversary in that war (see chapters II, III and V), and individual reports and letters written by diplomats and other English representatives in St. Petersburg between the mid-1730s and mid-1790s (see Chapter I). The documents relate to the period of the Russo-Turkish war of 1735-39, to the diplomatic activities of the European powers after the Seven Years’ War, 1756-63, to England’s war against the North American colonies, 1775-83, and to the first years of the reign of Paul I in Russia. The documents testify to the great displeasure evoked in Tory circles by the efforts of the ruling Whigs to develop a close relationship with the Imperial Russian court for the purpose of gaining its diplomatic support.

The Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century also gives a brief outline of events in the history of Russia from the days of Kiev Rus to the time of Peter I (chapters IV and V). In these, to use Marx’s own words, “preliminary remarks on the general history of Russian politics” (p. 74) attention is concentrated only on certain stages and some external political aspects of Russia’s history, without due consideration for her internal socio-economic relations, and without apalysis of the alignment of class and political forces. The whole emphasis is on external factors. The 16th and 17th centuries are totally omitted. The literature used by Marx (his basic source was a book by the French aristocrat Ph. Ségur, which had appeared in 1829) was even in those days outdated, and scarcely touched upon the socioeconomic aspects of the history of ancient Russia and the state of Muscovy, the study of which had only just begun. So in this work Marx’s interpretation of Russia’s historical development was one-sided and far from complete. Some of his appraisals (of the activities of Ivan I Kalita and Ivan III, of the history of the founding of the centralised Russian state, the assertion that the Mongol yoke left an indelible impression on the methods of Russian diplomacy, and so on) do not correspond to the historical facts.

Following the view accepted in 19th-century historiography, Marx believed that the decisive factor in the formation of Kiev Rus was the Norman (Varangian) conquest. At that time he regarded the Norman conquests as a stage in the development of all Europe and noted that “warfare and organisation of conquest on the part of the first Ruriks differ in no point from those of the Normans in the rest of Europe” (p. 76).

The idea that for any people to acquire statehood there must be internal preconditions—the development of socio-economic relations, crisis of the communal system and formation of a class society—and that the Normans did not play a decisive role in forming the statehood of the Russian and other peoples, was clearly formulated some time later by Engels. The raids of the Normans, he wrote in his History of Ireland, “... came too late and emanated from nations too small for them to culminate in conquest, colonisation and the formation of states on any large scale, as had been the case with the earlier incursions of the Germanic tribes. As far as historical development is concerned, the advantages they bequeathed are quite imperceptible compared with the immense and—even for Scandinavia—fruitless disturbances they caused” (present edition, Vol. 21, 179).

Recent research, particularly the work of Soviet scholars in the 1950s-70s, the excavations in Novgorod, Kiev and other ancient Russian cities, the comparison of the archaeologists’ discoveries with written sources, and anthropological, ethnographical and other data, has exploded the Norman theory of the origin of the ancient Russian state.

The Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century does not reflect the struggle of the great mass of the people of Russia against the Tartar-Mongol yoke and puts no emphasis on the decisive role the Russian people played in its overthrow. In the early 1880s, however, in his “Chronological Notes” on world history Marx stressed as an important fact the victory in 1380 of Russian troops led by the Muscovite prince Dmitry Donskoi over the Tartar hordes on the “broad field of Kulikovo” (see Marx-Engels Archives, Russian edition, Vol. VIII, Moscow, 1946, p. 151).

Marx rightly notes the daring nature of Peter I’s reforming zeal, his persistence in converting “Muscovy into Russia”. But in discussing the wars waged by Peter I, and his desire to strengthen Russia’s might and increase her weight in international affairs, Marx did not take into consideration the direct threat to the national interests and integrity of the Russian state from its north-western neighbours.

On the other hand in the Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century Marx did make several perceptive statements. Considering Russia’s past in the general context of European history, he stressed that the epoch of early feudalism, the expansion of Russian territory and feudal strife were determined in the final analysis by the same laws that characterised the early feudal states of Western Europe: “As the empire of Charlemagne precedes the foundation of modern France, Germany, and Italy, so the empire of the Ruriks precedes the foundation of Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic Settlements, Turkey and Muscovy itself” (pp. 75-76). Taking Kiev Rns as an example, Marx shows the causes and inevitability of the disintegration of the large state formations characteristic of the early Middle Ages: “The incongruous, unwieldy, and precocious Empire heaped together by the Ruriks, like the other empires of similar growth, is broken up into appanages, divided and sub-divided among the descendants of the conquerors, dilacerated by feudal wars, rent to pieces by the intervention of foreign peoples” (p. 77).

Marx showed the grave consequences of the Tartar-Mongol invasion for the Russian people. The Tartar yoke, he writes, was “a yoke not only crushing, but dishonouring and withering the very soul of the people that fell its prey” (p. 77). Referring to the “rule of systematic terror” which the Tartar-Mongols imposed in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the “wholesale slaughter” of the population, Marx compares their policy with that of the ruling classes of England at a later time, which had “depopulated the Highlands of Scotland”, and also with the onslaught of the barbarians in the Campagna di Roma (p. 77-78). He draws attention to materials referring to Russia as a shield against the TartarMongol invasions, “a kind of stay or stop-gap to the infidels” (p. 46).

Neither Marx, nor Engels ever attempted to have the Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century republished, and as we have already noted, the one-sided approach and occasional inaccuracies that found their way into it were to a great extent overcome in their later works.

Thus, in June 1858 we find Marx already noting that Russia’s internal development, the widespread peasant disturbances, point to the birth of a revolutionary movement in that country which openly opposes the official, reactionary Russia of the serf-owning landlords. Whereas in the period of European revolutions, 1848-49, Tsarist Russia had been one of the main reactionary forces blocking the advance of the revolution, now, in 1858, as Marx wrote, “combustible matter has accumulated under her own feet, which a strong blast from the West may suddenly set on fire” (p. 568). In the late 1850s and particularly after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, which accelerated the development of capitalist relations there, Marx and Engels devoted increasing attention to the study of the socio-economic processes at work there and to the Russian revolutionary movement.

In the awakening masses of Russia that were entering the struggle Marx and Engels saw a force capable of changing the situation within the country and ending the reactionary policies of Tsarist autocracy in the international field. On April 29, 1858 Marx wrote to Engels: “The movement for the emancipation of the serfs in Russia strikes me as important in so far as it indicates the beginning of an internal development that might run counter to the country’s traditional foreign policy” (present edition, Vol. 40, p. 310).

Prominently represented in the volume are the articles by Marx and Engels exposing the colonial policies of the European capitalist powers, particularly Britain, and considering the national liberation struggle of the peoples of Asia against colonial oppression and enslavement.

The articles on the Anglo-Persian war of 1856-57, the second “opium” war waged by England against China in 1856-60, and particularly the popular uprising against British rule in India, 1857-59, develop ideas and propositions expressed by Marx and Engels in the first half of the 1850s (present edition, Vol. 13). These events, which they reported in detail in the New-York Daily Tribune, gave them enormous factual material for further generalisation, for interpreting the processes of development of the oriental states, and the colonial and dependent countries, for tracing the mutual influence of the national liberation struggle in Asia and the revolutionary movement in the European capitalist countries.

Writing of Britain’s wars against Persia and China, Marx and Engels expose the methods of British colonial policy in Asia and show that Britain acquired territory either by means of direct seizure and blatant coercion or through deceit and bribery.

In several articles (“The War Against Persia”, “The Prospects of the Anglo-Persian War”, and others) Marx and Engels reveal such provocative methods of British diplomacy as accusing the government of this or that country of failing to observe previous treaties or agreements, of allegedly violating the rights of British citizens, and the use of other pretexts.

One example of such unceremonious action in defiance of the elementary rules of international law was the war unleashed by the British government and military against China on the pretext of protecting the lives and property of British citizens living there. Marx examines the history of the conflict and angrily condemns “this mode of invading a peaceful country, without previous declaration of war, for an alleged infringement of the fanciful code of diplomatic etiquette” (p. 163). Reminding their readers of the atrocities committed against civilians by the British aggressors during the first “opium” war (1840-42), Marx and Engels observe that this new war provoked by the British themselves was being waged by the same ruthless means (see the articles “Defeat of the Palmerston Ministry”, “English Atrocities in China”, “A New English Expedition to China”, and others). Marx and Engels write with great sympathy of the Chinese people’s resistance to the forces of the aggressor, and stress the active participation of the masses in this struggle. In his article “Persia—China” Engels cites facts showing that various sections of the population were joining in the struggle. He describes it as a people’s war for the preservation of Chinese nationality and stresses that “the piratical policy of the British Government has caused this universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners” (p. 281). Replying to the hypocritical comments of the British bourgeois press concerning the “horrible atrocities of the Chinese”, Engels writes that the means used by a nation defending its independence cannot be measured by abstract standards, but “by the degree of civilization only attained by that insurgent nation” p. 282).

Engels regarded the popular character of the war against the British aggressors as a symptom of the awakening of the masses, as a sign of the approaching death agony of the ancient empire.

Marx and Engels watched with particular interest the course taken by the Indian national uprising of 1857-59. Their numerous articles and reports contain a profound analysis of the causes of the uprising, its driving forces, and the circumstances that led to its defeat; the course of the military actions, the major battles and operations are considered in detail.

Countering the attempts of the authorities and the British capitalist press to belittle the significance and scale of the uprising and to portray it merely as a mutiny of the native Sepoy units in the Anglo-Indian army, Marx and Engels from the outset stressed the national character of the uprising and recognised it as a revolution of the Indian people against British rule (see articles “The Revolt in the Indian Army”, “The Revolt in India” [July 17, 1857], “Indian News”, and “The Relief of Lucknow”). Although the uprising did not embrace the whole territory of the country, and some groups of the population took no part in it, it was outstandingly important that “Mussulmans and Hindoos, renouncing their mutual antipathies, have combined against their common masters” (p. 298), that the insurgents included people of various castes—Brahmans, Rajputs, and others, that the uprising was supported by various sections of the population. The ramification of conspiracy in the Bengal army, the enormous scale the uprising immediately assumed, testified, as Marx noted in his article “The Indian Insurrection”, to secret sympathy and support for the insurgents among the local population, while the difficulties experienced by the British in transporting and supplying their troops indicated peasant hostility towards them. “The unarmed population,” Engels states in his article “The Revolt in India” [end of May 1858], “fail to afford the English either assistance or information” (p. 555).

Marx and Engels attached special importance to the fact that the native troops the British had come to rely on were the crucial force behind the uprising. In the process of conquering more and more Indian territory, the British authorities had exploited the enmity between various tribes, castes, religions, and principalities, to create a native army, which served as an instrument of their policy of conquest. When the conquest had been completed, Marx points out, this army was virtually charged with police functions. On the other hand, in the shape of this army the British without knowing it “organized the first general center of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of” (pp. 297-98). It was this that from the beginning endowed the uprising with unprecedented strength and extent.

The causes of the uprising lay not only in the discontent among the Sepoy troops evoked by British flouting of their religious traditions. This only triggered the indignation. The Indian peasants, the overwhelming majority of the population, were crushed by taxes, the collection of which involved the foulest methods, including violence and torture, as Marx writes in his article “Investigation of Tortures in India”. He noted that of the revenues collected “no part ... is returned to the people in works of public utility, more indispensable in Asiatic countries than anywhere else” (p. 579).

Marx also placed among the causes of the uprising the British authorities’ policy of annexing any as yet independent Indian principalities, as well as confiscating land, which evoked fierce opposition from the feudal landowners (see the articles “The Annexation of Oude”, “Lord Canning’s Proclamation and Land Tenure in India”, etc.). When they defined the uprising as something national, Marx and Engels had in mind not only its territorial scale and its unifying effect on different sections and groups of the population, but also the insurgents’ basic intent—to throw off the colonial oppression that had lasted almost a hundred and fifty years.

Marx and Engels write with anger and indignation about the atrocities and plunder perpetrated by the British forces in the towns and villages they captured (see the articles “The Revolt in India” [September 4, 1857], “Details of the Attack on Lucknow”, etc.). Such actions as the sacking of Lucknow “will remain an everlasting disgrace to the British military service” (p. 531). Without denying the facts of brutality on the part of the insurgent Sepoys, which were exaggerated in every possible way by the British capitalist press, Marx stressed that “it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule” (p. 353).

In many articles, particularly Engels’ military reviews, the methods and means used by the insurgents are subjected to analysis. In his article “The Relief of Lucknow” Engels reaches the following conclusion: “The strength of a national insurrection does not lie in pitched battles, but in petty warfare, in the defense of towns, and in the interruption of the enemy’s communications” (p. 441).

Assessing the causes of the military failures of the uprising that led to its eventual defeat, Marx and Engels in their articles “The Capture of Delhi”, “The Siege and Storming of Lucknow”, “The Relief of Lucknow”, etc., point to the insurgents’ lack of unified central command, resulting in a lack of coordinated action between their separate forces, and their lack of effective discipline. “A motley crew of mutineering soldiers who have murdered their officers, torn asunder the ties of discipline, and not succeeded in discovering a man upon whom to bestow the supreme command, are certainly the body least likely to organize a serious and protracted resistance” (p. 305).

The insurgents’ military actions were much hampered by their leaders’ inability to conduct large-scale military operations, and their lack of strategic or tactical experience and knowledge. “They entirely lacked,” Engels writes, “the scientific element without which an army is now-a-days helpless” (p. 392).

Besides these purely military causes of the defeat, Marx and Engels note the dissension and discord among the insurgents, the renewed religious enmity between Moslems and Hindus, the ethnic diversity of the Indian population, and the treachery of the majority of the local feudal princes who found themselves at the head of the uprising.

Defining the historical importance of the Indian uprising, Marx gives priority to its internal connection with such events of the 1850s as the Chinese people’s resistance to Britain’s penetration of China and the Anglo-Persian war. “The revolt in the AngloIndian army,” he writes, “has coincided with a general disaffection exhibited against English supremacy on the part of the great Asiatic nations” (p. 298). He goes on to stress that the Indian people’s war of national liberation exacerbated the economic crisis in Britain and could—had there been a new revolutionary explosion in Europe—have weakened her counter-revolutionary role. “In view of the DRAIN OF MEN and BULLION which she will cost the English, India is now our best ally,” Marx wrote to Engels on January 16, 1858 (present edition, Vol. 40, p. 249).

Marx points to the fact that, although the insurrection did not bring India liberation from national oppression, it forced England to change her methods of rule and put a final end to the East India Company. The uprising revealed the deep hatred felt by the great mass of the people for the colonialists and demonstrated their ability to resist.

The ideas expressed by Marx in the articles on the national liberation struggle of the peoples of Asia were further developed by Lenin. In the new historical epoch Lenin worked out and substantiated the theory of the national-colonial problem and showed that the peoples of the colonial and dependent countries oppressed by imperialist powers are the natural allies of the proletariat in the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, and in building the new society.

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This volume contains 105 works by Marx and Engels. Only three of them were written in German and appear in English for the first time. Of the other works written in English 56 were never reprinted after their first publication.

The Supplement contains Article IX from Marx’s series of articles Revolutionary Spain, which came to light after the appearance of Volume 13 of the present edition, where the first eight articles had been published.

In the present edition all known cases of editorial intervention in the Marx and Engels text have been indicated in the notes. When studying the specific historical material cited, in the articles, it must be remembered that Marx’s and Engels’ sources for their pieces on current events were newspaper reports, which were sometimes inaccurate; this too is commented on in the notes. In the event of an article having no title, the editors have supplied a heading in square brackets.

The asterisks indicate footnotes by the author, the editors’ footnotes are indicated by index letters. The spelling of proper and geographical names corresponds to that in the publications from which the texts are reproduced.

The selection of material for the volume, preparation of the text and writing of the notes was done by Valentina Smirnova (for Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century and “B. Bauer’s Pamphlets on the Collision with Russia”); by Tatyana Andrushchenko (for works written between May 1856 and May 1857), Yelena Vashchenko (for works written between June and November 1857) and Natalia Martynova (for works written between November 1857 and September 1858). The Preface was prepared by Valentina Smirnova and Tatyana Andrushchenko under the editorship of Boris Tartakovsky. The editors of the volume are Tatyana Yeremeyeva and Boris Tartakovsky. Name index, index of periodicals and glossary were compiled by Yelena Vashchenko, and index of quoted and mentioned literature by Tatyana Andrushchenko, Yelena Vashchenko, and Natalia Martynova, with the participation of Felix Ryabov. Nadezhda Borodina took part in the general work of preparing the notes and indexes (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

The English translations were made by Peter and Betty Ross (Lawrence & Wishart).

The volume was prepared for the press by Natalia Karmanova, Margarita Lopukhina and Yelena Vorotnikova (Progress Publishers) and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism)