Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (17)

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Volume 17 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels comprises works written between October 1859 and December 1860. The first half of the volume is devoted to Marx’s long polemic Herr Vogt and the letters and statements connected with the so-called Vogt Case that he sent to the editors of various newspapers. The second half consists of articles written by Marx and Engels for the American progressive newspaper New-York Daily Tribune between January and December 1860. All these works are linked in subject-matter with those published in volumes 16, 18 and 19 of the present edition.

As Marx and Engels had foreseen, the first world economic crisis of 1857-58 was followed by a fresh upswing of the democratic, proletarian and national liberation movements. An ever widening struggle was being waged over the tasks the bourgeois revolutions of 1848-49 had left unsolved, one of which was the now urgent necessity for the unification of Germany, and also of Italy. In this period the international situation, as the Italian war of 1859 (France and Piedmont against Austria) had shown, was charged with the danger of armed conflict.

In the complex conditions of the time the activity of the masses, particularly that of the proletariat, grew rapidly, and Marx and Engels devoted themselves to preparing the working class for the forthcoming battles. Besides elaborating revolutionary theory and crucial questions of the tactics of proletarian struggle, they concentrated more and more of their practical activity on rallying the revolutionary forces and setting up an independent political party of the working class. Their task now was not only to preserve the cadres of experienced proletarian revolutionaries, but also to establish closer ties with the broad masses, to give the movement its own newspaper (the attempts to turn the London German émigré paper Das Volk into such an organ are described in Volume 16) and to win more supporters.

Increasingly Marx and Engels devoted their journalistic writings on home and foreign policy to substantiating the position of the emerging party of the proletariat. Defending its political and moral authority, Marx vigorously rebuffed the ideological enemies of the working class, who were trying to slander and discredit the active members of the Communist League. A rebuttal of these slanderous fabrications was particularly necessary at this crucial moment in the development of the working-class movement, when the proletarians of many countries had begun to awaken to political activity and showed a tendency to set up their own political organisations and establish international connections, when new forces were entering the working-class movement and there was thus a real opportunity for creating a mass proletarian party. Its nucleus was to be, as Marx and Engels envisaged, a united and well-tested group of proletarian revolutionaries. “The moment is approaching,” Marx wrote to Lassalle in September 1860, “when our ‘small’ and yet, in a certain sense, powerful party’ (insofar as the other parties do not know what they want or do not want what they know) must draft a plan of its campaign” (see present edition, Vol. 41).

Marx’s long polemical work—Herr Vogt—reflects the struggle waged by Marx and Engels against attempts by the ideologists and agents of the bourgeoisie to denigrate the proletarian party. Their exposure had become an important task and in the circumstances of the time was not only a means of self-defence, but also a form of active upholding and propagation of communist principles.

In his letter to Freiligrath of February 29, 1860 Marx wrote that he and his associates were being attacked with utter ruthlessness by the bourgeois circles of many countries, by the whole official world “who in order to ruin us are not just occasionally infringing the penal code but have ranged widely over its length and breadth...” (see present edition, Vol. 41). One of the spokesmen of this “official world” was the German scientist and politician Karl Vogt, who had formerly sided with the petty-bourgeois democrats. In December 1859 Vogt published a pamphlet entitled Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung, which was full of slanderous statements about Marx and his associates.

In this pamphlet Vogt deliberately falsified facts and invented charges against Marx and his associates, distorting the true picture of the activities of the Communist League. Armed with police forgeries used in the Cologne communist trial in 1852, Vogt even went so far as to accuse Marx and his associates of mercenary, if not criminal aims. In principle there was nothing new in these insinuations. They were merely a rehash of the fabricated charges brought against members of the Communist League by Prussian police agents. The same lies had often been used by groups of petty-bourgeois emigres hostile to the proletarian revolutionaries. “...At all times and in all places,” Marx wrote, “the sycophants of the ruling class have always resorted to these despicable slanders to denigrate the literary and political champions of the oppressed classes” (see this volume, p. 69). However, Vogt’s slanderous fabrications were on this occasion immediately taken up by the bourgeois press of Germany, England, Switzerland and other European countries and also found their way into the émigré press in the United States. The dissemination of anti-communist inventions assumed a massive scale. “Naturally the jubilation of the bourgeois press knows no bounds,” Marx wrote to Engels on January 31, 1860 about the reaction of the bourgeois press to the publication of the Vogt pamphlet (see present edition, Vol. 41).

Marx rightly saw this as an attempt by the bourgeoisie to discredit the proletarian revolutionaries, to strike a blow at the emerging party of the proletariat and undermine its positions morally and politically in the eyes of the public. “His [Vogt’s] attack on me...”, Marx wrote to Engels on February 3, 1860, “is intended as a grand coup by vulgar bourgeois democracy ... against the whole party. It must therefore be answered by a grand coup. The defensive is not for us” (see present edition, Vol. 41). Marx’s exposé Herr Vogt was the answer to this anti-communist campaign. The unmasking of Vogt was particularly important for Germany, where the proletarian revolutionaries were faced with the task of building up their influence among the masses in the struggle for the country’s democratic unification.

Marx pursued a dual aim in his writings against Vogt. He exposed him both as an individual spreading slander and as “an individual who stands for a whole trend” (this volume, p. 26) of ideologists whom the bourgeoisie was using to discredit proletarian revolutionaries and disorganise the working-class movement. Marx was not merely answering the attacks on himself personally, was not only defending the proletarian revolutionaries’ past activities, he was also fighting for the future of the proletarian party. The exposure of Vogt was “of decisive importance for the historical vindication of the party and for its future position in Germany”, Marx wrote to Freiligrath on February 23, 1860 (see present edition, Vol. 41). The importance Marx attached to defending the party, which was still only in the process of formation, from slander by its enemies is shown by the fact that he put aside his work on Capital for nearly a year in order to write the pamphlet.

Herr Vogt is a complex, highly satirical work. The wealth of information it contains, the importance of the problems raised, the vast quantity of thoroughly researched and skilfully presented material, make it one of the finest examples of Marx’s polemical writings and one of the most important of his historical works. He succeeded in creating a broad canvas portraying the period, the prevailing political systems, the home and foreign policies of the ruling classes, the bourgeois court, the police and the venal press. At the same time, he levelled revealing criticism at the antiproletarian trends of bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democracy.

In dealing with the formation and development of the international communist movement, Marx refuted Vogt’s allegations that the Communist League was a narrow conspiratorial organisation pursuing aims that were not revolutionary at all. In Chapter IV of the work (“Techow’s Letter”) he gave a brief but succinct description of the emergence and activities of this first international communist organisation of the proletariat. In this and other chapters (Chapter III, “Police Matters”, and Chapter VI, “Vogt and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”) he portrayed the historical setting in which the League operated, its connections with working-class circles and its role in the propagation of communist ideas, and also the struggle waged by the proletarian trend against sectarian elements. Discussing the reasons for the split in the Communist League, Marx pointed out the harm done by the adventurist and conspiratorial tactics of the WillichSchapper sectarian group, their incompatibility with the true aims of the proletarian party, and particularly stressed the demoralising and disorganising consequences of the voluntarist and conspiratorial trends for the working-class movement.

Herr Vogt is the first work in Marxist literature to pinpoint the basic elements of the initial phase in the process of combining scientific communism with the working-class movement. It pioneers the idea of the continuity of the various stages of this process, the various steps in the struggle for a proletarian party. Along with Marx’s Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne and The Knight of the Noble Consciousness, and Marx and

Engels’ The Great Men of the Exile (see present edition, Vols. 11, 12), Herr Vogt marks the beginning of the Marxist historiography of the communist movement.

The portrait of the main character in the pamphlet is generalised. Marx used Vogt as an example to show that the anti-revolutionary, anti-proletarian prejudices of the unstable elements among the bourgeois intellectuals brought them into the camp of reaction and allowed the ruling classes, particularly those of such a corrupt state as Bonapartist France, to exploit them for counter-revolutionary purposes. Marx exposed Vogt as a petty politician and ridiculed him as one of the cowardly leaders of the leftist petty-bourgeois group in the Frankfurt National Assembly and a member of the imperial regency, set up by the rump of the Frankfurt Parliament at the closing stage of the 1848-49 revolution. Marx showed that Vogt’s whole political activity was in fact counter-revolutionary. According to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he was “the ‘faithful warner’ against revolution” (this volume, p. 55). This exposure of Vogt had a great impact because he had been widely regarded as a democratic and even radical politician.

Marx considered Vogt mainly as a political figure, but some of his sharply satirical observations illuminated the nature of Vogt’s philosophical views as a spokesman of German vulgar materialism. The pamphlet’s focal point is the exposure of Vogt as a paid agent of Napoleon III (Chapter VIII, “Dâ-Dâ Vogt and His Studies”; IX, “Agency”; and X, “Patrons and Accomplices”), as “one of the coundess mouthpieces through whom the grotesque ventriloquist in the Tuileries spoke in foreign tongues” (this volume, p. 159). As Marx proved, Vogt performed the function of moulding European public opinion in the Bonapartist spirit and recruiting members of the liberal and democratic opposition to Bonapartism by admitting them to the “French feeding-trough”. Vogt’s Studien zur gegenwärtigen Lage Europas (Studies on the Present Situation in Europe), published a month before the outbreak of the Italian war, left Marx “in no doubt about his connection with Bonapartist propaganda” (this volume, p. 116) since it was a rehash of the official propaganda hand-outs of the Second Empire and was designed to assist the latter in its foreign-policy adventures. Subsequently, in 1870, after the fall of the Second Empire, when details of the expenditure of secret funds in 1859 were released, Vogt’s name was found to be on the list of recipients. This was incontrovertible documentary proof of the charges Marx had brought against him ten years before.

Marx exposed not only Vogt but also his “patrons and accomplices”, the whole circle of paid agents, hack writers and journalists, and unprincipled politicians acting in the interests of the Second Empire. The pages describing the typical ways in which the bourgeois press serves the ruling circles ideologically in their struggle against the revolutionary working-class movement, and purveys bourgeois influence among proletarians and democrats are brilliant political satire. Marx lashed out at the venality of the Bonapartist press, whose scribes “one and all take their inspiration from one and the same illustrious—money-box” (this volume, p. 211), and had some equally hard things to say about the bourgeois press of Germany and England. He treated the action of the then liberal Daily Telegraph, which had reprinted Vogt’s slander and refused to publish Marx’s denial, as a striking example of how the press and journalism as a whole in bourgeois society become a field for private money-making, spreading lies and misinformation, derogatory rumours and scandalous gossip to satisfy the tastes of the philistine. Marx compares the newspaper to a “great central paper cloaca” receiving all the “social refuse” (this volume, p. 243).

The social and national demagoguery of Bonapartism, Louis Bonaparte’s “leftist” gestures in social and national policy, designed to present the police state of the Second Empire as a champion of the workers’ interests and a defender of oppressed nations, were particularly dangerous, Marx wrote. He drew attention to the attempts of the Bonapartist Vogt to persuade the Swiss artisans that Napoleon III was a “workers’ dictator” (this volume, p. 191) deeply concerned for the welfare of the working people and their protection from exploitation by the bourgeoisie. Marx demonstrated the demoralising effect on the working class of this brand of social demagoguery, which was later to spread in other countries in the form of “police socialism”. Taking Vogt’s role as an accessory to the Bonapartist monarchy as an example, Marx pointed to the danger of the democratic and proletarian movements being penetrated by all kinds of hostile agents, and to the need for their timely identification and exposure.

Marx’s revelations of Vogt’s connections with Bonapartist circles grew into a general unmasking of the Bonapartist regime. Marx and Engels regarded the Second Empire as one of the bastions of reaction in Europe and the fight against Bonapartism as one of the international proletariat’s key tasks. In Herr Vogt (Chapters VIII, IX and X) Marx developed and deepened the analysis of Bonapartism that he had made in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (see present edition, Vol. 11) and quotes from this work.

Dealing with Vogt’s and other mercenary writers’ efforts to embellish the foreign policy of the Second Empire, Marx showed the reactionary aims and methods of this policy, revealing the demagogic essence of the Bonapartist “principle of nationality”, and the false concept of “natural frontiers”, which were used to cover up the plans of the ruling circles to exploit the national movements in order to establish French hegemony and redraw the map of Europe in favour of the Bonapartist camarilla. Marx noted that the Bonapartist clique was trying to consolidate the dictatorial regime in France by means of “local wars” and combat the revolutionary-democratic struggle in Italy and other countries by armed force. He showed that the rulers of the Second Empire were enemies of all national liberation movements and hypocritically masked their true position by a pretence of sympathy for the Poles, Hungarians, Italians and other oppressed nations. In Marx’s view the tendency of some of the national leaders to succumb to Bonapartist demagoguery, their readiness to make a deal with Bonapartism, presented a grave danger to the revolutionary development of these movements. Marx revealed the true nature of the policies pursued by the ruling circles of England, and also of Tsarist Russia, who were giving Napoleon III diplomatic support and thus contributing to the outbreak of the Italian war.

In Herr Vogt Marx analysed various aspects of international relations from the eighteenth century up to the 1850s and highlighted the key points of contradiction and conflict between the European powers. His interest in these problems is also documented by the excerpts, published here in the section “From the Preparatory Materials”, from the book by the Hungarian historian and participant in the 1848-49 revolution Imre Szabö, The State Policy of Modern Europe, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Present Time, which was a source used for several passages of Herr Vogt.

The writings of Marx and Engels against Bonapartism were closely linked with their struggle for the unification of Germany, and also of Italy, by revolutionary-democratic means. They saw Bonapartist France as one of the main obstacles to German and Italian unity (see present edition, Vol. 16). In Herr Vogt Marx exposed Vogt’s pro-Bonaparte stance on this issue as well.

Marx’s pamphlet against Vogt and his associates was also a kind of answer to Lassalle, whose view on the ways and means of unifying Germany, and also Italy, was expounded in his pamphlet Der italienische Krieg und die Aufgabe Preussens (The Italian War and the Tasks of Prussia). Lassalle justified the policy of Napoleon III in Italy and supported the dynastic way of uniting Germany under Prussian auspices that was being canvassed by the Prussophile bourgeoisie. “Lassalle’s pamphlet is an enormous blunder,” Marx wrote to Engels on May 18, 1859, and in a letter of November 26 of the same year he declared even more emphatically that Lassalle “in point of fact was piping the same tune as Vogt” (see present edition, Vol. 40). Not for nothing did Lassalle try to dissuade Marx from openly opposing this Bonapartist agent. In Herr Vogt Marx indirectly, without naming Lassalle, was actually criticising the ideas of Lassalle’s pamphlet along with die views expressed by other vulgar democrats who shared Vogt’s opinion. In contrast to the nationalistic ideas of Lassalle, who did not believe in die revolutionary-democratic forces of Italy and Germany, in contrast to his attempts to justify die policy of Bonapartism and the Prussian ruling circles, Marx proposed a plan for the revolutionary-democratic unification of each of die two countries from below, dirough the revolutionary action of the masses. “Lassalle deviated towards a national-liberal labour policy, whereas Marx encouraged and developed an independent, consistendy democratic policy hostile to nationalliberal cowardice” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 141).

The pamphlet Herr Vogt, and Engels’ pamphlet Savoy, Nice and the Rhine written a short time before (see present edition, Vol. 16),were the first works in which die founders of Marxism actually opposed in print the tactics advocated by Lassalle.

An important problem raised by Marx in Herr Vogt was that of how to fight die influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology on die proletariat, an ideology emanating from circles that Marx classified as vulgar democrats (see his letters to Engels, January 28 and February 3, 1860, present edition, Vol. 41). In his Preface to the pamphlet, referring to German bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democracy, he wrote that one of the reasons that had prompted him to come out publicly against Vogt was the opportunity this offered of exposing die whole trend to which Vogt belonged. This was important as a means of securing die independence of die emerging proletarian party’s ideological and tactical principles. The German petty-bourgeois democrats had evolved to the right since the revolution of 1848-49 and were steadily deteriorating into an appendage of bourgeois liberalism. Some of diem, like Vogt, had taken up pro-Bonapartist positions. Marx and Engels had criticised the leaders of the petty bourgeoisie in tiieir work The Great Men of the Exile (see present edition, Vol. 11). In Chapters IV and XII of Herr Vogt (“Techow’s Letter” and “Appendices”) Marx returns to this subject and ridicules the narrowness and political instability of the vulgar democrats, their contempt for the true interests of the toiling masses, and the petty quarrels between the various groups.

Brilliant both in its content and form, Herr Vogt is outstanding among the best examples of political satire and journalism and leaves one in no doubt as to Marx’s extensive knowledge of literature. Its sparkling aphorisms and literary references add to the acerbity of its style. “This is, of course, the best polemical work you have ever written,” was Engels’ comment in a letter to Marx of December 19, 1860 (see present edition, Vol. 41), as soon as he had read the pamphlet. Franz Mehring, who thought highly of the pamphlet’s artistic merits, although he did not fully appreciate its significance in upholding the principles of the proletarian party, wrote that it would afford great pleasure to the literary connoisseur.

Marx’s pamphlet is written in a spirit of militant partisanship. It has retained its scientific and political significance both as a source for studying die history of the international working-class movement and the struggle waged by Marx and Engels to create a proletarian party, and as an example of their opposition to Bonapartism and other reactionary forces. It remains a model of the impassioned defence of the interests of the working class and is a classic rebuttal of the opponents of communism.

The second half of die volume consists of articles by Marx and Engels on crucial problems of the social and political development of Europe in 1860. With the revolutionary movement again on the upswing their writings were of especial significance as a way of working out and popularising the tactical principles that should be adopted by the working-class and democratic movement. In 1860 the New-York Daily Tribune was the only newspaper for which Marx and Engels wrote on political subjects (the articles on military questions that Engels contributed in 1860 to The New American Cyclopaedia, The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire, and the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung, are published in Volume 18 of the present edition, as part of the cycle of works on this subject written by Marx and Engels in diose years). Though he did not share Marx’s beliefs, the editor of the paper realised the importance of his articles (see this volume, p. 323-24).

The journalistic activities of Marx and Engels in this period show that they were continuing their studies of the economic contours and dynamics of the social and political development of various countries, and the crucial points of international contradictions and conflicts. As always they took a particular interest in the unfolding of revolutionary events.

One of the main themes in the journalism of Marx and Engels in 1860 was the events in Italy. Their articles continue the cycle of their works on this subject written during the Italian war (see present edition, Vol. 16). The war resulted neither in the unification of Italy nor in its complete liberation from Austrian domination. Austria kept its grip on Venice. In return for the cession of Lombardy to Piedmont France had been given Savoy and Nice. With its national and social problems still unsolved,Italy remained one of the main centres of revolutionary ferment in Europe. In April 1860 the popular uprising in Palermo (Sicily) against the regime of the Neapolitan Bourbons launched a new stage in the struggle for the country’s unification that took the form of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Marx responded to these events with the article “Sicily and the Sicilians”, drawing a graphic picture of the hardships suffered by the people of the island, where all land was owned by a few large landowners, where the medieval system of land tenure was still intact, and the tenant farmers led an impoverished existence under a crushing burden of taxes and exorbitant rent. Marx taunted Europe’s official circles for their indifference over the brutal reprisals that the Neapolitan authorities had taken against the insurgents. But, as Marx noted, the people’s spirit was not broken. The Sicilians “have battled, and still battle, for their freedom” (this volume, p. 370).

Garibaldi’s landing with his famous “thousand” volunteers helped to unite the scattered guerrilla bands and develop the revolutionary war in Sicily. Marx and Engels followed with great sympathy the actions of Garibaldi, around whom all Italy’s patriotic forces had rallied. “If the insurrection develops much vital power, Garibaldi’s army will be swelled to more formidable dimensions,” wrote Marx in his article “Garibaldi in Sicily.— Affairs in Prussia” (this volume, p. 382). A high evaluation of the actions of Garibaldi’s insurrectionist forces is to be found in the articles “Garibaldi in Sicily”, “Garibaldi’s Movements”, “Garibaldi’s Progress” and “Garibaldi in Calabria”, which Engels wrote at Marx’s request. Engels spoke of Garibaldi as “the man who has borne high the flag of Italian revolution in the face of French, Neapolitan, and Austrian battalions” (this volume, p. 386). And in another place he said, “The Sicilian insurrection has found a first-rate military chief” (pp. 389-90). After Garibaldi’s landing in Calabria Engels wrote that he had “shown himself to be not only a brave leader and clever strategist, but also a scientific general” (this volume, p. 476).

Marx and Engels held that the broad scope of the popular movement in Italy offered the opportunity of achieving the unification of Italy in a democratic way. They assessed Garibaldi’s successes as evidence of the superiority of Italy’s revolutionarydemocratic forces over the aristocratic and bourgeois monarchist camp that had assembled round Piedmont. Marx and Engels also considered Garibaldi’s victories in the light of their positive international repercussions, and the revolutionary response that they had evoked among the masses in the European countries. The operations of Garibaldi’s revolutionary army not only disrupted the plans of the Italian liberal-monarchist circles and the Savoyan dynasty; they also struck at the hopes nurtured by France’s Bonapartist rulers of bringing Italy under its control. In the article “Interesting from Sicily.— Garibaldi’s Quarrel with La Farina.—A Letter from Garibaldi”, Marx joyfully reported the expulsion of Piedmont’s agent La Farina from a Sicily liberated by Garibaldi’s forces. Marx believed that if the movement retained “its pure popular character”, and Garibaldi prevented Piedmont’s ruling circles from intervening, it might lead to “rescuing Italy, not only from its old tyrants and divisions, but also from the clutches of the new French protectorate” (this volume, p. 422).

At the same time Marx and Engels were quite sober in assessing the complexity of the situation and the development of events. The liberal-monarchist circles of Piedmont were preparing, in the event of Garibaldi’s campaign proving successful, to snatch the fruits of his victory and bring about the unification of Italy by dynastic means. Despite the hopes cherished by Marx and Engels, this was what happened, in the shape of the creation of the Italian monarchy headed by Victor Emmanuel II, the King of Piedmont.

A number of articles published in this volume are devoted to Germany, and more specifically to Prussia, one of the leading states of the German Confederation. In considering the principal task confronting Germany—the country’s national unification— Marx and Engels developed ideas that they had already voiced in their articles of the Italian war period. The need for the unification of Germany sprang from the country’s whole internal development and answered the demands of economic and social progress. In upholding the revolutionary-democratic way of solving this problem, Marx and Engels believed that only a movement involving the whole people could paralyse the opposition of the Prussian and Austrian counter-revolutionary elements. The elimination of the relics of the feudal-absolutist system, they concluded, would create favourable conditions for developing the productive forces, for social progress and rallying and organising the proletariat. “To withstand encroachments from without,” Marx wrote, “or realise unity and liberty at home, she [Germany] must clear her own house of its dynastic landlords” (this volume, p. 487). Marx exposed the Prussian ruling circles’ schemes for uniting the country under their aegis without any changes in its internal system by introducing and employing Prussian police and bureaucratic practices throughout the country. Opposing these plans for the Prussianisation of Germany, Marx wrote that “after the blow dealt to Austria [in the Italian war, 1859], Germany stands in need of a similar blow being dealt to Prussia, in order to get rid of ‘both the houses’” (this volume, p. 378). In the article “Public Feeling in Berlin” and in other articles Marx dealt with the internal situation in Prussia. He ridiculed the sham liberalism of the Prince Regent (the future king William), the first years of whose reign—from 1858—had been proclaimed by the liberals as the beginning of a “new era”, and regarded the government’s manoeuvres as only a nominal rejection of “the old reactionary system of mingled feudalism and bureaucratism”. In reality, he pointed out, the Prussian ruling circles had no intention of removing “the bureaucratic and police shackles” (this volume, p. 367, 368).

The articles published in this volume throw light on the beginnings of the constitutional conflict in Prussia between the liberal majority of the lower Chamber and the government, a conflict over the government plan for reorganising the army. The Bill was rejected by the Chamber, although it sanctioned the allocations “for putting the army into a state fit to encounter the dangers apprehended from without”. The government launched the reform without the consent of the Provincial Diet. Marx and Engels saw the far-reaching consequences of this policy of the Prussian ruling circles, who were intent on militarising the country and creating an army “trained to passive obedience, drilled into a mere instrument of the dynasty which owns it as its property and uses it according to its caprice” (this volume, pp. 495, 496).

Marx and Engels denounced the conciliatory tactics of the German liberal bourgeoisie and also the bourgeois and pettybourgeois democrats. They pointed to the timidity and inconsistency of their opposition to the government, their readiness to make concessions, and their actual orientation towards the unification of Germany round monarchical Prussia. In his article “Preparations for War in Prussia” Engels pointed out ironically that the only retort from these “mock representatives” of the people to the government’s military reform launched without die sanction of the Provincial Diet would be “some low grumbling, pickled with fervent assertions of dynastic loyalty, and unbounded confidence in the Cabinet” (this volume, p. 495).

Some of the articles included in this volume fill in the details of the picture of the Second Empire presented in Herr Vogt They focus on the counter-revolutionary essence of the Bonapartist regime, the internal situation in France, and the mainsprings of the adventurist foreign policy pursued by its rulers. In his articles “Affairs in France”, “Events in Syria.—Session of the British Parliament.—The State of British Commerce”, and others, Marx showed that behind the growth of foreign trade and the spread of the railways, there were signs of the rapid economic collapse of the Second Empire—the fifty per cent increase in the national debt, the threat of financial bankruptcy, the decline of agriculture and the ruination of the peasantry. “The Empire itself,” he wrote, “is the great incubus whose burden grows in a greater ratio than the productive powers of the French nation” (this volume, p. 333). The instability of the Bonapartist regime was becoming increasingly apparent and “the rebellious spirit of Gaul is rekindling from its cinders”. The rulers of the Second Empire, as always, saw the way out of the crisis in foreign-policy adventures. This was what gave rise to the plan for “some fresh and thrilling crusade, to plunge his Empire again into the Lethe of war-hallucinations”. This was the purpose of Napoleon Ill’s colonial expedition to Syria (this volume, pp. 431, 430).

Marx exposed the annexationist plans of the Bonapartist circles with regard to the left bank of the Rhine, and also the demagoguery of their promises to assist in furthering the unification of the North German states around Prussia in return for the cession of the Rhineland to France (see “Preparations for Napoleon’s Coming War on the Rhine”, “The Emperor Napoleon III and Prussia”, “Interesting from Prussia”, and others).

Economic problems and also the internal development of Britain, Austria and Russia, and the situation in the colonial world, figure among the themes of the journalistic writings included in this volume, and the ideas expressed on these questions in previous years are developed in many of them.

In some of his articles Marx analysed the state of the British economy and against this background considered the general economic condition of the bourgeois world. In two surveys entitled “British Commerce” Marx noted that one of the peculiar features of the capitalist economy was the involvement of distant regions of the globe in world trade and the interdependence of the economic processes going on in the world. These problems are also treated in Marx’s articles on the Anglo-French trade agreement of 1860.

In his reviews on “The State of British Manufacturing Industry” Marx used official data—the reports of the factory inspectors—to analyse the mechanism of the industrial system and the various forms of the exploitation of the working class. Specifically, he pointed out that child labour was being widely used in British factories although Britain was at the time an advanced industrial country. In breach of laws already passed to restrict rht use of child labour, the so-called apprentice system had been revived. Agreements were being made between manufacturers and boards of guardians for the employment of destitute children who had no other means of subsistence. In some industries (at the calicoprinting, dyeing and bleaching factories), Marx observed, the working day of women and children of tender age was virtually unlimited and they toiled 14-15 hours a day while their real wages tended to decrease. The industrial accident rate was appalling and safety regulations were applied at by no means all factories (this volume, pp. 416-18).

Marx and Engels were by this time paying more and more attention to the situation in Russia. They attached tremendous importance to the Russian peasant movement for the abolition of serfdom and regarded this movement as a massive reserve for the European revolution (see Marx’s letter to Engels of January 11, 1860, present edition, Vol. 41). In his article “Russia Using Austria.— The Meeting at Warsaw” Marx delves into the position of the various classes of Russian society on the eve of the imminent abolition of serfdom and stresses the likelihood of a deal between the Tsarist Government and the nobility in the interests of the big landowners and at the expense of the broad masses of the peasantry. He wrote that “an understanding ... has been arrived at between the existing powers at the cost of the oppressed class” (this volume, p. 486).

The above-mentioned article by Marx, Engels’ articles “The Sick Man of Austria”, “Austria—Progress of the Revolution”, and others examine the process of the decay of the Austrian Empire, torn by internal contradictions and intensification of the national liberation struggle of the peoples within its borders. Marx associates the final disintegration of the Austrian Empire with the German revolution, which, he believed, would have “one of its centers at Vienna and the other at Berlin” (this volume, p. 487).

A number of works by Engels on military subjects have been included in the volume. Engels continued his profound study of the problems of military theory, specifically analysing the character of revolutionary wars, the influence of the advance of military technology on tactics and on the methods of warfare, and studying the history of the making and perfection of various weapons. In his articles on the Italian events Engels analysed the campaigns of Garibaldi’s volunteers in Sicily and Calabria from the military point of view. In a series of articles “On Rifled Cannon” Engels considered the development of artillery. His articles “Military Reform in Germany”, “British Defenses” and “Could the French Sack London?” deal with military problems in connection with international relations and the mounting military conflicts. The article “The British Volunteer Force” discusses the class composition of volunteer troops.

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The volume comprises 45 works by Marx and Engels, including Marx’s Herr Vogt, 35 articles written for the New-York Daily Tribune (some of them were reprinted in its special issues, the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune and the New-York Weekly Tribune) and 9 letters and statements that Marx sent to the editors of various newspapers. There are 8 works that appear in English for the first time—Herr Vogt and 7 letters and statements sent by Marx to the newspapers. The other works originally written in English had not been reprinted since their publication in 1860. One of Marx’s statements (written in English) was never published in his lifetime.

In the section “From the Preparatory Materials” there appear for the first time in English the passages that Marx copied from Szabo’s book The State Policy of Modern Europe, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Present Time.

In preparing the present volume for the press the sources used by Marx were checked and the necessary corrections made. In quoting the works of other authors Marx sometimes ran paragraphs together, omitted authors’ italics and introduced his own. He also abridged some passages and gave only a general summing up of their content. The present volume retains Marx’s form of quotation. The most substantial changes are indicated in footnotes and passages left out of quotations are indicated by omission marks in square brackets. For the convenience of the readers some additional paragraphing has been introduced; obvious misprints have been silendy corrected.

In studying the historical material quoted in Marx’s and Engels’ articles, it must be borne in mind that they made use of newspaper information which in a number of cases proved to be inaccurate.

In cases where an article has no title, the editors have provided one which is given in square brackets.

The volume was compiled and the text prepared by Tatyana Yeremeyeva, who also wrote the preface and notes. Chapter XII of the pamphlet Herr Vogt and the section “From the Preparatory Materials” were prepared by Marina Vaninskaya, who also compiled the name index and the indexes of quoted and mentioned literature and of periodicals. The subject index was compiled by Marien Arzumanov. The editor of the volume was Lev Churbanov (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The publishers express their gratitude to the editors of Marx/ Engels, Gesamtausgabe—MEGA, Bd. 18, erste Abteilung (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC, Socialist Unity Party of Germany), for the loan of materials used in preparing the volume.

The translations were made by Rodney Livingstone and edited by Nicholas Jacobs (Lawrence & Wishart), Salo Ryazanskaya, Yelena Chistyàkova, 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 editor Lyudgarda Zubrilova and the assistant editor Natalya Belskaya (Progress Publishers).