Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (18)

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Volume 18 of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels contains mainly military and military-historical works written between 1857 and 1862. It includes a series of articles written by Marx and Engels between July 1857 and November 1860 for The New American Cyclopaedia, and the preparatory materials for some of them. A separate section is devoted to articles by Engels for military periodicals, namely the British weekly The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire and the German weekly Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung (August 1860 to August 1862).

Marx’s and Engels’ contributions to The New American Cyclopaedia form a notable page in the history of their literary output. From their letters, notebooks and from the preparatory materials for some of the articles it is clear that they took their work for this publication very seriously. As required by such works of reference, their essays, articles and shorter items are concise, factual and clear. Despite the demand of the editors that the contributors refrain from political judgments, Marx and Engels managed even in these articles to express their opinion on social development and historical events, to expound dialectical-materialist views on them, and to evaluate the subjects of their contributions from a revolutionary socialist position. Most of the articles for the Cyclopaedia were written by Engels, although Marx was the official contributor. Engels undertook the bulk of the work in order to leave Marx free for his studies in political economy, the elaboration of which they both regarded at the time as the paramount theoretical task for the working-class movement. By helping to write these articles Engels also sought to alleviate the financial difficulties his friend’s family continued to experience. However, many articles were the fruit of close collaboration between Marx and Engels, which often amounte d to co-authorship.

It should be remembered that the work of Marx and Engels for the Cyclopaedia and of Engels for the military periodicals ran parallel with their other theoretical and practical activities, and with their efforts to unite the proletarian revolutionaries, which became particularly intense at the end of the 1850s, at the time of the revival of the democratic and proletarian movements in Europe and the United States. The essays and articles for the Cyclopaedia and the military periodicals were written concurrently with Marx’s economic manuscripts and other works (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Herr Vogt), with Engels’ pamphlets (Po and Rhine and Savoy, Nice and the Rhine), and with their articles on topical questions for the European and American press (the London newspaper Das Volk, the Viennese Die Presse and the New-York Daily Tribune). A complete picture of the work of Marx and Engels during this period can therefore only be obtained by collating the contents of this volume with those of volumes 16, 17, 19, 29 and 30, and also with the relevant volumes of their correspondence (40 and 41).

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A central place in the volume is held by the writings of Engels on military subjects, like “Army” , “Artillerv”, “Cavalry,” “Fortification” , “Infantry” , “Navy” and “Th e History of the Rifle”. Thes e works, particularly the articles for The New American Cyclopaedia, deal with a wide range of military problems and analyse many important events in military history, from the campaigns of ancient times to the wars of Engels’ own day. The y consider, mainly from the historical standpoint, the problems of the formation, structure and equipping of armies, their recruitment and training, the control of the armed forces, strategy and tactics, the organisation and use of the different fighting services, the various aspects of military engineering, permanent and field fortifications, methods of siege and defence of fortresses, logistical problems and encamping.

The major works are supplemented and illustrated in concrete terms by shorter articles. Some of these, like “Actium” , “Albuera” , “Alma” , “Aspern” , “Borodino “ and “Bidassoa”, analyse specific battles. Others, like “Amusette”, “Ammunition”, “Bonnet”, “Case Shot“ and “Bridge-Head”, were written by Engels to explain specific military and military-technical terms. The articles “Attack” , “Battle” and “Campaign“ contain important theoretical statements on the forms and methods of conducting battle, the use of various battle formations and the employment of reserves.

The volume reflects an important stage in the elaboration of the Marxist theory of war and the army. Particularly after the revolution of 1848-49, Engels had always shown a lively interest in military affairs. He had responded in the press to all the key military events, and in the early 1850s began a systematic study of the various military sciences, creatively absorbing the legacy of the military theorists of the past, and contemporary writings. Marx wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle on February 25, 1859 that, after being in action with the Baden-Palatinate insurgent army in 1849, Engels had “made military matters his special study” (see present edition, Vol. 40). And Lenin called Engels “the great expert on this subject” (Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 565).

In his earlier works Engels used specific examples to show how the condition of the army and the outcome of military operations are influenced by the level of socio-economic development and the political system of the country in question, how strategy depends on the policy of the ruling classes and on the aims which they pursue in war. He also set down his thoughts about various types of war, defined what he meant by revolutionary, liberation wars, and pointed out many specific features of the tactics of armed uprising and revolutionary armies. The works included in the present volume, particularly the more general New American Cyclopaedia articles, systematise and concretise Engels’ views on armed struggle and war, and back them up with new conclusions and generalisations. For the first time he applied dialectical-materialist analysis not only to separate periods or episodes in military history but to the evolution of warfare as a whole, on land and sea, including the history of the different fighting services.

In these works Engels cast light on the historical conditions giving rise to wars, and especially to organised armed forces, which he associated with the epoch of the formation of class society and the state. On the basis of a vast amount of factual material he traced the main stages and specific features of the development of armies and noted the changes in their organisation, strategy and tactics through various historical periods. He showed the determining influence of the economic basis and class structure of society on the organisation, equipping and composition of armies, on the methods of conducting armed struggle and on the development of the art of war. His work in this field was based not on isolated examples but on copious factual material covering the main stages of world history. “More graphically than anything else,” Marx wrote to Engels on September 25, 1857, after reading his article “Army”, “the history of the army demonstrates the Tightness of our views as to the connection between the productive forces and social relations” (see present edition, Vol. 40).

The impact of the productive forces on warfare, as Engels showed, manifested itself primarily in the role played in its evolution by changes in the technical means of armed struggle. Engels attached exceptional importance to the technical aspect of warfare. Besides the many pages devoted to the history of military technology in the above-mentioned works, he wrote several shorter items on specific types of weapons (“Arquebuse”, “Bayonet”, “Carabine”, “Carronade”, “Catapult”, etc.), and on various offensive, defensive and accessory means of armed struggle (“Bastion”, “Battery”, “Blindage”, “Bomb-Proof”, “Bomb Vessel”, “Bridge, Military”, etc.). His numerous examples revealed the revolutionising effect of the major technical discoveries—the invention of gunpowder, the use and improvement of fire-arms, the introduction of the bayonet, which made it possible to combine thrust weapons with the fire-arms, the progress in artillery and military engineering, the use of steam power in navies, etc.—on the development of armed forces and the art of war. The dependence of military tactics on military technology, the emergence of new tactical forms of military operations as a result of the spread of new types of mass weapons, Engels argued in his articles, reflects the determining influence of social production on social life, including the military sphere.

However, Engels did not reduce the cause of the evolution of warfare and the art of war exclusively to technological progress. He pointed to other, primarily social and political, factors that influenced this evolution. Engels overcame the tendency in the military historical writings of his day to isolate military history from that of civil life and to underrate the impact of social conditions on military organisation. He was thus virtually the first to examine the history of warfare on the basis of the Marxist theory of socio-economic formations. He demonstrated that the armed forces of every society were the product of a certain social system, that every social formation tended to have a corresponding type of army and, to some degree, a corresponding way of waging war. Engels established the fact that ever since the army—”the organised body of armed men which a state maintains for purposes of offensive or defensive war” (p. 85)—arose in slave-owning society, its organisation, condition and fighting qualities, as well as its armaments, had been determined by the socio-political system that engendered it, by the class environment from which it was recruited. The specific features of every social formation had left their mark on the social composition of the army, its level of training, and the psychology and morale of its soldiers.

Nor did the conduct of warfare remain static within the framework of a given social formation. Within these historical limits, Engels noted, armies and the art of war evolved in a way that reflected the internal dynamic of the given social system. The armies of ancient Greece and Macedonia with their phalanx tactics were superseded by the Roman army with its more advanced system of legions. This in turn fell into decline owing to the growing contradictions in slave society, its profound crisis, causing a deterioration of the elements composing the army, which “very soon reacted upon its armament and tactics” (pp. 102-03). The decay of the feudal social system led to the disintegration of the feudal military system, to the disappearance of the no longer battleworthy mounted knights in armour. As capitalism arose, Engels noted, the armed forces underwent a significant evolution, from mercenary troops to mass armies recruited on the basis of universal conscription, an evolution ultimately conditioned by the needs of bourgeois society.

Engels held that a key role in the development of warfare was played by revolutionary periods, which gave a fresh impetus to progress in the military sphere. Moreover, the initiators and carriers of these progressive changes were, he pointed out, the revolutionary classes fighting the decaying forces of society. Engels illustrated this law by the history of the bourgeois revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and particularly by the French Revolution of 1789-94. “The war consequent upon the rebellion of the Netherlands,” he wrote about the Netherlands revolution of the late sixteenth century, “was of great influence on the formation of armies” (p. 107). In his article “Cavalry” he noted the substantial improvement in this service and in its tactics during the revolution and civil war in England in the mid-seventeenth century (p. 300). He linked the emergence of the new, more complex battle formation (extended order combined with columns as opposed to the linear tactics of the armies of the feudal-absolutist states of the eighteenth century), and other important changes in warfare (more effective use of artillery, the bivouac system of stationing troops, who were thus freed of unwieldy baggage trains, camp equipment, etc.), with the French Revolution of the eighteenth century and partly with the war of England’s North-American colonies for independence. When the war of the coalition of counter-revolutionary states against the French Republic began, he wrote, a new tactical system was called for. “The American revolution had shown the advantage to be gained, with undisciplined troops, from extended order and skirmishing fire. The French adopted it, and supported the skirmishers by deep columns, in which a little disorder was less objectionable, so long as the mass remained well together. In this formation, they launched their superior numbers against the enemy, and were generally successful” (pp. 113-14).

Engels stressed the point that revolutionary wars brought out the military creativity of the masses, the direct participants in the armed struggle. To cope with the new conditions they sought, and found, new forms of combat and tactical formation, which were later formalised in the organisation and regulations of armies and reduced to a system by military leaders, generals, and so on.

Engels attached great importance to the struggle of oppressed peoples against foreign invaders and pointed out that it was often interwoven with action by the working masses against their own exploiting classes. Ever since the Middle Ages this struggle had greatly influenced the conduct of warfare, bringing about progressive changes in it. For example, the revival of infantry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after its long decline, when the battlefields were dominated by mounted knights in armour, was the work of the freedom-loving Swiss peasants, who defended their country’s independence against incursions by Austrian and Burgundian feudal forces, and also of the urban artisans of Flanders, who resisted the encroachments of the French nobility upon the Flemish lands. “The French chivalry succumbed as much to the weavers and fullers, the goldsmiths and tanners of the Belgian cities, as the Burgundian and Austrian nobility to the peasants and cowherds of Switzerland” (p. 350). In modern times, too, wars of national liberation played an extremely important role in military history, as seen in the resistance of some of the peoples of Europe to the domination of Napoleonic France, the war of the Hungarians against Austrian oppression in 1848-49, and so on. Engels touched upon these wars not only in his major works but also in a number erf short articles for the Cyclopaedia (“Albuera”, “Buda” and others).

Besides giving a Marxist interpretation of the role of the masses in history with reference to the military sphere, Engels set forth scientific principles for assessing the activities of outstanding generals, military reformers, engineers and inventors, and acknowledged their contribution to the development of the art of war. He showed, however, that their activities were also determined by material factors and by social demands operating independently of their will. In analysing the generalship of many military leaders from ancient times to his own day, and the innovations they made in warfare, he shows how their role lies in the skilful application of the forms and methods of warfare, produced by the objective development of the armed forces resulting from social change and revolution. The service rendered by Napoleon, for example, was that he made the new mode of warfare generated by the French Revolution into a regular system (p. 114).

At the same time Engels criticised the cult of generals and the exaggeration of their role characteristic of idealist military history, and found class limitations and contradictions in the activities of even outstanding military leaders. Frederick II of Prussia, he wrote, though successful in military operations and organising the army, had, “beside laying the foundation for that pedantry and martinetism which have since distinguished the Prussians, actually prepared them for the unparalleled disgrace of Jena and Auerstädt” (p. 359). In Napoleon’s strategy and tactics Engels stressed the elements of adventurism and schematicism, such as the use of huge divisional columns, which “lost him many a battle” (p. 313).

Engels exploded the conception cherished by some bourgeois military theoreticians that the basic rules of the art of war are eternal and immutable. His works argue vigorously in favour of the principle of historicism in military science and of the dialectical approach to the various aspects of warfare. Thus, he pointed out that the tactical rules that could be applied in one set of historical circumstances often proved inapplicable in another. In his article “Blenheim”, for instance, analysing one of the major battles of the early eighteenth century, he drew attention to the fact that the very circumstances which, with the linear tactics of those days, caused the defeat of the French army would, in the nineteenth century, in the age of extended order supported by columns, have been regarded as “one of the greatest advantages of a defensive position” (p. 250).

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The series of articles which Engels wrote for The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire, published in Manchester, was an important contribution to the Marxist elaboration of the problems of military history and theory. Engels was prompted to write for this journal by his desire to support the democratic volunteer movement against the annexationist policies of the Bonapartist circles of the Second Empire, which were seen as a threat to the British Isles. This movement gained a wide response among the democratic sections of the population, including the workers. Many trade unions demanded that workers should be allowed to join the volunteer units. The progressive forces counted on using the volunteer organisations to promote military reform, reorganise the extremely conservative military system, and get rid of the aristocratic caste practices prevailing in the British army and its still surviving traditions of mercenary service and annexationist colonial wars. Engels took a keen interest in the campaign to organise volunteer units. In addition to his series of articles for The Volunteer Journal (the most important of them were also published as a separate book), he popularised the volunteer movement in the columns of the German Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung (pp. 409-16, 535-41). At the same time he openly criticised the defects in the organisation and system of military training of the volunteer units and suggested ways of remedying them. He believed that the volunteers could play an important role in national defence and in reorganising the British armed forces if they acquired real professional skill and learned from the experience of past wars. This was what he sought to promote in his articles.

Engels’ articles for The Volunteer Journal (“The History of the Rifle”, “Volunteer Artillery”, “Volunteer Engineers: Their Value and Sphere of Action”, “The French Light Infantry”, “On the Moral Element in Fighting. By Marshal Bugeaud”, “Company Drill”, and others) illustrate how the development of military technology and the improvement of weapons lead to changes in the tactics of armed struggle, and show the various methods of raising the morale and fighting capacity of troops. In his articles for the Cyclopaedia Engels stressed the importance of bravery and moral and psychological preparedness in armed struggle. In discussing cavalry battles, for instance, Engels observed that at the decisive moment of the clash of cavalry “the moral element, bravery, is here at once transformed into material force” (p. 310). He also emphasised the importance of developing moral and psychological qualities in soldiers and officers.

In his articles for The Volunteer Journal Engels focussed attention on the methods and forms of military and physical training, drilling and shooting practice. He spoke of the importance of approximating the conditions of training to those of actual battle and the need to develop the men’s initiative, as well as the fostering of a spirit of solidarity and military discipline. Engels was exacting in his demands on officers. He held that in the volunteer units both officers and men should strive to broaden and perfect their military knowledge, to assimilate the military experience of other countries besides their own, and to know not only how to use their weapons but how those weapons function. “Isfo intelligent soldier ought to be ignorant of the principles on which his arms are constructed, and are expected to act” (p. 459).

Engels urged the readers of The Volunteer Journal to keep track of military developments in all countries. Significant in this respect were his articles on the American Civil War (“Lessons of the American War” and “The War in America”). They summed up the results of the military operations in the initial period of this crucial military conflict and touched upon the prospects of the struggle between the Northern states and the slave-owning South (pp. 525-34).

The military works by Engels included in this volume analyse the history of war in various epochs, particularly that of capitalism. Engels discussed the achievements of military theory, from the writers of antiquity to the bourgeois theorists and historians of his own day. He traced the development of the armies of many nations, attempting to show the contribution made by each nation to military science and the art of war in general. His coverage of the military experience of Oriental countries and of Russia was less complete, the military history of the latter being discussed mainly in the biographies of Russian military leaders, written in collaboration with Marx (“Barclay de Tolly” and “Bennigsen”). This may be attributed to the inadequate presentation of the military history of these countries in the writings available to Engels, which moreover often suffered from preconceived notions about the military past of the Russian people. While not claiming to cover the whole military history of mankind, Engels none the less laid the foundation for the dialectical-materialist interpretation and elaboration of military theory and history. His generalisations and conclusions, and also his method of investigating the various spheres of the art of war and military events, have become an integral part of Marxist theory.

The predictions concerning certain trends in the development of the armed forces which Engels made in some of his articles and which have been confirmed by history are significant examples of scientific foresight. They include, for example, his forecast of changes in infantry tactics under the influence of increasingly effective fire-arms (“Infantry”), and also in naval tactics and types of vessels in view of the growing firepower of warships (“Navy”).

At the same time it should be remembered that Engels was generalising the experience of wars that preceded the period of the mass employment of machinery and automatic weapons. His propositions and judgments reflecting the peculiarities of warfare in the pre-imperialist epoch should not therefore be automatically applied to contemporary conditions and accepted unconditionally in modern strategy and tactics. To do this would conflict with the creative spirit of the legacy of military theory left to us by Engels, who firmly opposed any such absolutising of the rules of military art and consistently advocated an historical approach in this as in other spheres.

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The essays on Asian and African countries written by Engels for the Cyclopaedia—”Afghanistan”, “Algeria” and “Burmah” — make a group of their own in the volume. These are reference articles supplying geographical and ethnographical data and descriptions of the economy, political organisation and the main stages in the historical development of these countries. An important feature, however, is a sharp condemnation of the colonial policies of capitalist powers, the system of enslavement and exploitation of the peoples of Asia and Africa by the West European bourgeoisie, and its colonial annexations and adventures, to which one country after another of these continents fell victim. In this respect these essays rank among the series of denunciations of colonialism that constituted an outstanding page in the journalistic writings of Marx and Engels of that period. They testify to the concern they felt for the destinies of the peoples of the East and their national liberation movements.

In his essay “Burmah” Engels shows how the country’s natural resources aroused the annexationist appetites of the British ruling classes and their desire to expand Britain’s colonial empire at Burma’s expense. As in the case of other countries in Asia and Africa, the colonisers took advantage of Burma’s economic backwardness and semi-patriarchal system to turn it into an arena of plunder. Engels noted that as a result of the first and second Anglo-Burmese wars (1824-26 and 1852) “Burmah has been robbed of its most fertile territory” and deprived of its access to the sea (p. 280). This was the prologue to Britain’s annexation of the whole country, which occurred in 1885.

The essay on Afghanistan centres on the failure of Britain’s ruling circles to subdue the country at the close of the 1830s and in the early 1840s. This attempt was to be followed by further encroachments on the independence of the Afghan people. Engels exposed the machinations of the British agents in Afghanistan, their blatant interference in the country’s internal affairs, and the provocatory methods used to unleash the Anglo-Afghan war of 1838-42, the purpose of which was the annexation of Afghanistan. The invasion of Afghanistan was to be seen as an integral part of Britain’s colonial expansion in Central Asia.

The essay on Afghanistan is supplemented by the summary of John W. Kaye’s History of the War in Afghanistan which Engels made while working on the essay. In contrast to the author’s apologetics, Engels found facts in the documents cited in the book that showed what had really been going on. These facts exposed the expansionist aims and ambitions of the organisers of the Afghan expedition that lay behind the fabrications about the threat to British possessions in India from Tsarist Russia, and the cynicism and guile of the British aggressors who, to get what they wanted, had no scruples about using such means as inflaming tribal enmity, bribing venal elements among the feudal-tribal nobility and hiring assassins to dispose of anyone considered dangerous to British domination (pp. 380, 382, 387 and elsewhere).

Engels recorded the collapse of the British adventure in Afghanistan and dwelt in detail on the uprisings of the local population against the aggressors in 1840-41, by which the Afghans, this “brave, hardy, and independent race”, resolutely opposed the colonisers and succeeded in driving them from the country.

Engels’ description of the French conquest of Algeria vividly illustrated the harsh methods of colonial rule and the grievous consequences of colonial enslavement. “From the first occupation of Algeria by the French to the present time,” he wrote, “the unhappy country has been the arena of unceasing bloodshed, rapine, and violence. Each town, large and small, has been conquered in detail at an immense sacrifice of life. The Arab and Kabyle tribes, to whom independence is precious, and hatred of foreign domination a principle dearer than life itself, have been crushed and broken by the terrible razzias in which dwellings and property are burnt and destroyed, standing crops cut down, and the miserable wretches who remain massacred, or subjected to all the horrors of lust and brutality” (p. 67).

Stressing the instability of the colonial regime, Engels noted the continual uprisings of the Algerian people against French rule. He wrote that despite three decades of bloody wars (beginning from 1830), despite the large forces sent to subdue Algeria, and the vast sums expended, “the French supremacy is perfectly illusory, except on the coast and near the towns. The tribes still assert their independence and detestation of the French regime” (p. 69).

Engels’ articles on colonial topics are inspired with faith in the mounting strength and invincibility of the anti-colonial liberation movement which, as he showed, had deep roots in the people, who hated colonial oppression and longed for freedom. Although written for a bourgeois publication, these articles reflect the common interest of the proletariat throughout the world, the solidarity of proletarian revolutionaries with participants in the anti-colonial struggle, and the desire to foster feelings of sympathy for the peoples of colonial and dependent countries among the working people of the metropolitan countries.

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In addition to works by Engels The New American Cyclopaedia published a number of articles by Marx. They are mostly biographies of military leaders and politicians of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Many of them—”Barclay de Tolly”, “Bennigsen”, “Bern”, “Bosquet”, “Blücher” and “Beresford”— were actually written in collaboration with Engels, as were the articles “Armada” and “Ayacucho” (the latter dealt with the decisive battle in the liberation war of the peoples of Latin America against Spanish domination).

The biographical essays included in this volume are graphic character sketches of leading figures in various military and political events. They demonstrate clearly that schematicism is alien to the Marxist approach to history, that Marx and Engels saw the task of historical science not only in revealing the trends that determine social development but also in tracing their concrete embodiment in the varied panorama of historical reality itself, in the actions of real people. In many of their works Marx and Engels portrayed various historical figures and achieved considerable mastery in doing so. In the case of the biographies written for the Cyclopaedia they also showed their ability to single out not only individual peculiarities but features that reflected the epoch, and the class attributes of the individuals represented.

Marx’s articles “Berthier”, “Bourrienne”, “Bessières”, “Bernadotte” and “Brune” provide us with a gallery of military leaders and statesmen of Napoleonic France. As Marx showed, the careers of many of them reflected the evolution of the sections of the French bourgeoisie who took part in the revolutionary events of 1789-94 and later became pillars of the Bonapartist regime. Most of them owed their military or diplomatic careers solely to the revolution, which “opened a field for military talents” (p. 56). In the conditions of the supremacy of the counter-revolutionary big bourgeoisie they grew into ruthless money-grubbers and knights of profit (Bourrienne and Brune), ambitious men hungering for rank, title and vacant thrones (Bernadotte), and careerists prepared to serve any regime (Berthier). The biographies of Napoleon’s marshals written by Marx offer a striking picture of the morals of the bourgeois coterie of Napoleon I’s empire.

In his article “Bugeaud” Marx graphically portrayed a cruel and unscrupulous reactionary, a faithful servant of the July monarchy, whose political and military career was marked by bloody reprisals against French workers, by the treacherous and ferocious methods used to subdue Algeria, and by the colonial adventure in Morocco. Another typical figure of the time was the British General Beresford, who led several colonial expeditions and participated in the suppression of the revolutionary movement in Brazil and Portugal.

The biography of Field Marshal Blücher written by Marx and Engels forms a broad historical canvas. The activities of this outstanding German general and patriot are shown against the backdrop of the war of liberation fought by the German and other peoples against Napoleonic domination. Noting the major role played by Blücher in the campaigns of 1813-15 against Napoleonic France and emphasising that he participated “to the highest degree in the popular hatred against Napoleon” and was “popular with the multitude for his plebeian passions”, Marx and Engels maintained that Blücher “was the true general for the military operations of 1813-15, which bore the character half of regular and half of insurrectionary warfare” (p. 187). Linked with the biography of Blücher is a brief biographical note by Marx on Bülow, also a participant in the wars against Napoleonic France.

The articles “Blum” and “Bern” recount the lives of these revolutionaries. The former was composed on the basis of Blum’s own autobiographical material, as indicated by the excerpts made by Marx from German encyclopaedias of the 1840s and early 1850s, where it was first reproduced. The character sketch of Robert Blum, a prominent figure in the revolution of 1848 and a victim of the counter-revolutionary terror that followed, shows that Marx, while clearly aware of the limitations and moderation of the German petty-bourgeois democrats as a whole, had a high opinion of those who remained loyal to the interests of the people. The article devoted to Jôzef Bern described this Polish general, who came to the fore in the revolutionary war of 1849 in Hungary, as “a first-rate general for the partisan and small mountain warfare” (p. 132).

In his article “Bolivar y Ponte” Marx showed the role of the masses in the struggle of the Latin American countries against Spanish colonial rule (1810-26), stressing the revolutionary, emancipatory nature of this struggle. He was misled, however, by the numerous memoirs and writings of the time, whose authors were hostile to Simon Bolivar, the leader of the national liberation movement, and therefore his assessment of Bolivar’s activities and personality is one-sided. To some extent this was due to Marx’s and Engels’ anti-Bonapartist orientation in those years, and their desire to explode the mystique of Napoleon and his imitators, among whom Marx, on the basis of the sources he was using (he could not have discovered their lack of objectivity at the time), counted Bolivar.

Marx’s method of writing the biographical essays for The New American Cyclopaedia is illustrated by the preparatory materials for some of them (besides the already mentioned excerpts for the article “Blum”, this volume includes excerpts for the articles “Bourrienne” and “Bülow” and the rough draft of the article “Brune”). A comparison of these materials with the text of the articles will introduce the reader to the methods Marx used to deal with the original sources, the notes he made in the course of this work, and also certain facts that he had gathered but that did not appear in the final versions.

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In all, this volume contains 107 works by Marx and Engels, seven of which (including the works comprising the section “From the Preparatory Materials for the Articles in The New American Cyclopaedia”) are published in English for the first time. Of the remaining works, all of which were written in English, the majority have not been reprinted in that language since their publication during the authors’ lifetime.

The works in this volume, including the articles for The New American Cyclopaedia, appear in chronological order, according to the date of writing, as distinct from the alphabetical order in which they were printed in the Cyclopaedia itself (see the list on page 2 of this volume). The dating of the articles for the Cyclopaedia was verified on the basis of references in the Marx-Engels correspondence and entries in Marx’s notebooks concerning their dispatch to New York. Overlong paragraphs in the articles for the Cyclopaedia have been divided into paragraphs of more convenient length.

The texts of the articles by Engels that have come down to us in several versions owing to their parallel publication in the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung and The Volunteer Journal, or their republication from the latter in the collection Essays Addressed to Volunteers, have been collated. Changes in headings and in the form of publication are mentioned in the editorial notes at the end of the volume, and variant readings that alter the meaning are reproduced in footnotes.

The specific features of the publication of the preparatory materials are also noted.

Misprints in quotations, proper and geographical names, numerical data, dates, and so on, have been corrected with reference to the sources used by Marx and Engels. The known literary and documentary sources are referred to in footnotes and in the index of quoted and mentioned literature.

The compilation of the volume, its preface and notes, the subject index, the index of quoted and mentioned literature and the glossary of geographical names, is the work of Tatyana Vasilyeva, under the editorship of Lev Golman (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism). The name index and the index of periodicals were prepared by Yelizaveta Ovsyannikova (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

The translations were made by Henry Mins, Peter and Betty

Ross and Barrie Selman, and edited by J. S. Allen (International Publishers), Nicholas Jacobs (Lawrence and Wishart), Richard Dixon, Lydia Belyakova and Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishers), and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor (CC CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

The volume was prepared for the press by the editors Lydia Belyakova, Yelena Chistyakova, Mzia Pitskhelauri and Lyudgarda Zubrilova and the assistant editors Natalia Kim and Lyudmila Mikhailova (Progress Publishers).