Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (19)

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Volume 19 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains articles, letters and documents written between the end of January 1861 and the beginning of June 1864, except for Engels’ articles for The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire, which are published in Volume 18 with other works of his on military subjects.

The first half of the 1860s saw the continued rise of the bourgeois-democratic and national liberation movements that began in Europe and America after the world economic crisis of 1857. In Germany and Italy, which had yet to complete their bourgeois revolutions, the movement for national unity gained fresh impetus; in Russia peasant unrest continued, and revolutionary ideas spread in progressive circles after the abolition of serfdom in February 1861; in the USA civil war broke out between North and South (1861-65); there was growing opposition to the régime of the Second Empire in France; centrifugal tendencies intensified in the Austrian monarchy; in Mexico the bourgeois revolution triumphed; in China the Taiping peasant uprising entered its closing stage.

The industrial revolution in the economically advanced countries led to a great increase in the numerical strength of the proletariat and far-reaching changes in its composition and class consciousness. The world economic crisis of 1857, the first of such magnitude in the history of capitalism, and the strikes that followed, vividly demonstrated the opposing economic and political interests of proletariat and bourgeoisie. The working-class movement began to pursue an independent struggle and this created conditions for its liberation from the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie. In the first half of the 1860s this showed itself in the growth of the British trade-union movement and the awakening of political activity of the British proletariat, in particular its demonstrations in defence of the national liberation movements and its opposition to the attempts by the British and French ruling classes to intervene in the US Civil War on behalf of the slave-owning Southern states. This process of working-class emancipation from bourgeois ideology was also expressed in the awakening of class consciousness among the French proletariat; in the attempts by the German workers to shake off the influence of the liberal bourgeoisie, and the foundation in 1863 of the General Association of German Workers; and in the active support by workers of various nationalities of the struggle for greater freedom and democracy in the USA (against the South in the Civil War) and of Garibaldi in Italy. The workers’ realisation that their interests were in opposition to those of the ruling classes, an increased sense of proletarian solidarity, and the strengthening of international contacts, finally led to the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) on September 28, 1864.

Marx’s and Engels’ theoretical work and political activities during these years were many-sided. As before, Marx’s main concern was political economy. From August 1861 to July 1863 he wrote A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; from the end of July or beginning of August 1863, to the summer of 1864, he worked on Book I of Capital—”The Process of Capitalist Production”. Meanwhile, Engels continued with the theoretical development of the proletarian party’s military strategy and tactics. At the same time they both pursued their interests in problems of philosophy and world history.

At the end of the 1850s, Marx and Engels began their attempts to restore old contacts—and to establish new ones—with German, French, Polish and Italian revolutionary democratic emigrants in London, and above all with the working-class and democratic movements in Britain, Germany, France, Austria and the USA. These efforts, both to consolidate the forces of the working class and to establish contacts with progressive democratic circles, were dictated by the general revolutionary upsurge.

Marx and Engels were above all guided by the objective interests of the proletariat: the bourgeois-democratic transformation of the countries of Europe and America, and the creation of legal conditions for the development of the working-class and democratic movement. The revolution of 1848-1849 had shown that in the more economically developed capitalist countries of Europe, the liberal bourgeoisie did not want, while the democratic and radical petty bourgeoisie proved unfit, to carry the bourgeois revolution through to the end. So in the 1860s the fulfilment of this historic task was becoming more and more the cause of the working class. Marx and Engels favoured the unification by revolutionary means of Germany and Italy, and the transition to revolutionary methods of conducting the US Civil War. They attached particular importance to the revolutionary movement in France and Russia, regarding Bonapartism and tsarism as the chief obstacles to the national liberation of the oppressed peoples of Europe.

The many-sided activity by Marx and Engels during this period is partly reflected in this volume. Their journalistic work is represented most fully. Until March 1862 Marx continued writing for the progressive American bourgeois newspaper, the New York Tribune; from October 1861 to December 1862 he contributed to the Viennese liberal newspaper Die Presse. Engels helped Marx in his work as correspondent for these newspapers; furthermore, as has been mentioned above, Engels wrote a great deal about military matters for the English magazine The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire, and for the German newspaper Allgemeine Mi litär-Zeitung.

A theme central to the journalistic writings of Marx and Engels during these years was the US Civil War, which they saw as a crucial turning-point in the history of the USA, and of overall progressive significance. Their articles provided the first systematic account of its history, its political and social ramifications, its economic consequences, and the diplomatic struggles that resulted not only in America, but in Europe and especially in Britain. Most of the works on this subject were written by Marx and published in Die Presse and the New-York Daily Tribune in 1861-62.

For the American paper, Marx wrote mainly about the impact of the Civil War on Great Britain’s economy, foreign policy and public opinion. Die Presse, which was read not only in Austria, but in Germany, carried articles mainly about the Civil War itself, its character, motive forces and historical significance. Marx endeavoured to give the European reader more exact information, based on American sources. He wrote to Engels on April 28, 1862 about the need to “disseminate correct views on this important matter in the land of the Teutons” (this edition, Vol. 41).

In the very first articles for European readers—”The North American Civil War” and “The Civil War in the United States” — and in his article for the Tribune, “The American Question in England”, Marx demonstrated the groundlessness of the claims by the British bourgeois press (The Times and other newspapers) that the war between North and South was not a war over slavery, but over tariffs, the political rivalry of North and South for supremacy in the Union and the like. For Marx the conflict between the Northern and Southern states was the struggle between “two social systems”—slavery and wage labour (p. 50). He regarded the Civil War as an inevitable consequence of the long struggle of the industrial North and the slave-owning South, a struggle which “was the moving power of its [America’s] history for half a century” (p. 11). Marx saw7 this war as a form of bourgeois-democratic revolution, the inevitability of which was conditioned by economic and political factors and, above all, by the “growth of the North-West, the immense strides its population has made from 1850 to 1860” (p. 10).

Analysis in depth of social-political relations in the United States throughout the first half of the 19th century enabled Marx to reveal in his articles the contradictory essence of American plantation slavery. A pre-capitalist form of exploitation, slavery was also closely linked with the world capitalist market; cotton produced by slave labour became one of the “monstrous pivots” of British industry (p. 19).

Studying the conditions under which plantation slavery and its primitive technology could exist, Marx wrote: “The cultivation of the Southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative a« long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass sc.° and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requirer only simple labour” (p. 39).

Given the extensive nature of a plantation economy based on slave labour, unlimited reserves of free land were necessary, which resulted in the “continual expansion of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits” (p. 39).

Analysis of the economic structure of the plantation economy and the conditions for its survival enabled Marx to expose the groundlessness of the claims by the bourgeois press about the peaceful nature of the Secession (the withdrawal of the Southern states from the Union), and to rebuff attempts to portray the slave-owners of the South as defending the rights of individual states from the encroachments of the Federal Government. Marx stressed that it was the Southern Confederacy that “assumed the offensive in the Civil War” (p. 43). He repeatedly noted that the Secession was a form of aggression by the slave-owning planters against the lawful government, that the “wat of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery” (p. 49). He warned against the real danger of slavery spreading all over the Republic: “The slave system would infect the whole Union” (p. 50).

Marx showed that the perpetuation and further spread of slavery would have fatal social consequences. “In the Northern States, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry” (p. 50). In the Southern states, he pointed out, the numerically small slave-owning oligarchy was opposed by the disadvantaged “poor whites”, whose numbers “have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property” (p. 40). These déclassé groups of the population, corrupted by the slave-owning ideology, could only be kept in subjection by flattery of their own hopes of obtaining new territory and by “the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves” (41).

Marx and Engels repeatedly emphasised that the existence of slavery was retarding the development of the American workingclass movement, was serving as a foundation for the intensified exploitation of the free workers of the North, and was a threat to the constitutional rights of the American workers.

Marx showed that although slavery partially facilitated the development of capitalism in the USA—as some of the bourgeoisie in the North were living off the trade in cotton and other products of slave labour—it was becoming more and more incompatible with the capitalist development of the Northern states. It was the problem of slavery, as Marx emphasised, that was at the root of the US Civil War: “The whole movement was and is based ... on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but ... whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery” (p. 42).

Using a wealth of factual material, Marx was already pointing out in his first articles on the US Civil War that the more advanced social system, namely, that of the Northern States, must win. While noting the progressive nature of the war as fought by the North, he also condemned the indecision and vacillation shown in the war by Union bourgeois circles in proclaiming the abolition of slavery. In his articles “The Dismissal of Fremont”, “A Criticism of American Affairs” and others, Marx showed the reluctance of the bourgeois Republican Government to make it a popular and revolutionary war. This, in his opinion, showed up the limitations of American bourgeois democracy. The Lincoln government “fights shy of every step that could mislead the ‘loyal’ slaveholders of the border states” (p. 87), as a result of which the war as a struggle against slavery was being blunted (p. 227). It was this policy of the Northern government during the initial stages of the war that Marx saw as the main reason for the military failures of the Unionists, in spite of their superiority in economic potential and in manpower reserves.

In a series of articles written in 1862, Marx indicated the process of differentiation in the ruling Republican Party under the influence of the growth and consolidation of the forces favouring the immediate abolition of slavery (“Abolitionist Demonstrations in America”, “The Election Results in the Northern States”). He noted changes in the balance of forces within the Republican Party, forced under pressure from the general public to take a more decisive stand over the emancipation of the slaves. After analysing the results of the voting in the states, Marx demonstrated that the failure of the Republicans at the elections was caused above all by the discontent of the farmers in the North with the former methods of conducting the war and by a shift to the left of the masses who followed the Republicans: “They came out emphatically for immediate emancipation, whether for its own sake or as a means of ending the rebellion” (p. 264). Summing up the first stage of the war, Marx wrote: “So far, we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand” (p. 228).

Marx and Engels followed the increasingly revolutionary nature of the Civil War closely and noted the revolutionary-democratic measures to which the Lincoln government was compelled to resort and which ultimately led to the victory of the North. Marx attached special importance to two social measures: the Homestead Act, which gave a great many American farmers the chance of acquiring land, and the Proclamation that the black slaves of the rebellious planters were free. Marx valued the latter as “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union”, pointing out that it was “tantamount to the tearing up of the old American constitution” (p. 250).

In the initial period of the war, Marx criticised Lincoln for vacillation and indecision, and for the bourgeois limitations of certain of his measure s and legal enactments (see, e.g., p. 87). Items in the volume show, however, that the Lincoln government’s revolutionary measures gradually changed the attitude of Marx and Engels to the President himself. In October 1862, Marx gave high praise to Lincoln’s activity, declaring that “Lincoln’s place in the history of the United States and of mankind will ... be next to that of Washington” (p. 250).

In their New-York Daily Tribune and Die Presse articles, the leaders of the proletariat tried to help the struggle of the revolutionary-democratic forces for a fuller and more consistent solution to the pressing historical tasks during the war. The consolidation of the forces of revolutionary democracy, which was pushing the bourgeois to the left, was regarded by Marx and Engels as an important task for the American working class. The farming and working-class population of the North played a major role in the struggle against slavery. Marx wrote: “New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to force on the government a revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of ‘Abolition of Slavery’ on the star-spangled banner “ (p. 228). Marx noted that although the consolidation of “the parties of the North which are consistent in point of principle”, i.e. confirmed Abolitionists, takes place very slowly, they all nevertheless “are being pushed ... into the foreground by events “ (p. 233).

Marx and Engels set great store by the participation of the Black masses in the liberation struggle and severely criticised the policy of the Northern states over the “Negro question”. Fearing revolutionary disturbances, the American government could not at first make up its mind whether or not to admit Blacks into the army. The recruitment of Blacks into the army of the North would, in Marx’s opinion, have had a tremendous influence on the course of the war; it would have considerably increased the North’s chances by weakening the rea r of the South. A single Black regiment, he wrote on August 7, 1862, “would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves “ (this edition, Vol. 41). Marx had a high estimation of the new officers brought into being in the course of the Civil War, since they were the ones actually solving the problem of abolition, declaring the slaves free and demanding that they be armed (see this volume, pp. 115-16).

Even early in the Civil War, Marx perceived the social-economic factors that subsequently, after the victory of the Republicans and the abolition of slavery, favoured the preservation of racial discrimination and of national and social oppression in the USA. Marx stressed the direct interest of the commercial and finance bourgeoisie in preserving the remnants of slave ownership. In his article, “The Election Results in the Northern States”, he wrote that it was New York, “the seat of the American money market and full of holders of mortgages on Southern plantations”, a city “actively engaged in the slave trade until recently”, that had been, immediately before and during the Civil War, the main bulwark of the Democratic party (p. 263).

Much space in Marx’s and Engels’ articles on the Civil War is taken up by its military aspects. Engels pointed out the decisive role of the masses and the interrelation of economic, political and moral factors in the military operations. “The American Civil War, “ he wrote, “given the inventive spirit of the nation and the high technical level of engineering in America, would lead to great advances ... in the technical side of warfare...” (p. 289). At the same time, while acknowledging the role of war in technical development, Marx and Engels condemned the social role of the “human slaughter industry” (see letters from Marx to Engels, July 7, 1866, and Engels to Marx, July 12, 1866, this edition, Vol. 42).

In his article, “Artillery News from America”, after analysing, on the evidence of individual operations, the forms and methods of conducting the war, Engels demonstrated the natural tendency of military equipment to become obsolete very quickly and the necessity for its continual improvement. Study of the Civil War enabled Engels to plot the main trends in the development of artillery, in the art of fortification and especially in the development of the navy, and to specify and elaborate certain points made in his earlier articles in The New American Cyclopaedia (see this edition, Vol. 18). Fundamentally significant, in particular, was Engels’ forecast of the predominance in future naval armed forces of armoured vessels with gun turrets (p. 291).

In their jointly written articles, “The American Civil War”, “The Situation in the American Theatre of War “ and others, Marx and Engels developed the idea, important for military science, of the influence exerted by the character of a war on the methods by which it is conducted. Marx and Engels pointed out the negative role of the cadre officers under McClellan who were sympathetic to the South. Marx wrote that there was a strong esprit de corps among them and that they were more or less closely connected with their old comrades in the enemy camp. “In their view, the war must be waged in a strictly businesslike fashion, with constant regard to the restoration of the Union on its old basis, and therefore must above all be kept free from revolutionary tendencies and tendencies affecting matters of principle” (p. 179). Marx and Engels considered that the dismissal from the Northern army of reactionary officers sympathetic to the South was a military measure of the utmost priority. They also demonstrated that the strategic plan of the McClellan command (the North’s “Anaconda Plan” envisaged a slowly contracting ring of troops round the rebellious slave-owning states) was not only intended to avoid a true revolutionary war of the people, but was untenable in military terms (pp. 193-95).

In the article “The American Civil War”, Marx and Engels put forward their own strategic plan, taking into consideration the class content, the political and social aims of the war, and demanding revolutionary methods of conducting it. This consisted of a decisive blow by concentrated forces against the vitally important enemy centres and envisaged first and foremost the occupation of Georgia, as a result of which the territory of the Confederation would be cut into two parts (pp. 194-95). The subsequent course of the war showed that this plan was the only right one. A turning point in military operations occurred and the North achieved final victory in 1865, but only after the Northern command had carried out a similar plan (General Sherman’s “march to the sea”) in the second half of 1864 and had taken revolutionary measures the necessity of which Marx and Engels had been indicating all through 1861 and 1862.

The denunciation of bourgeois diplomacy and the reactionary designs of the ruling classes against the revolutionary democratic and national liberation movements were regarded by Marx and Engels as one of the most important tasks of the proletarian revolutionaries. The events of the US Civil War gave Marx the opportunity to denounce in his articles the foreign policy of the British ruling oligarchy which, in spite of Britain’s declared neutrality, was secretly supporting the Southern rebels and was preparing an armed intervention to help the slave-owners. In connection with the seizure in November 1861 by an American warship of the British packet boat Trent with emissaries of the Confederacy on board, there was a real threat of armed conflict between Britain and the United States. In his articles “The Anglo-American Conflict”, “Controversy over the Trent Case”, “The Washington Cabinet and the Western Powers” and others, Marx irrefutably demonstrated the groundlessness of the arguments put forward by British ruling circles and their allies on the continent, who were trying to use this incident as a pretext for unleashing a war on the side of the slave-owners.

Marx and Engels considered that the attitude of the European and American proletariat to the US Civil War should be determined by the prospects of the revolutionary movement in Europe and America and that the war against slavery in the USA would increase the political activity of the working class. Regarding an active influence on the foreign policy of the ruling classes as one of the most important tasks of the revolutionary proletariat, and as part of its general struggle for the liberation of the working people, Marx and Engels set great store by the demonstrations of the English workers against their government’s intention to create a coalition of reactionary European states to provide armed help to the South. These demonstrations, in Marx’s opinion, played a large part in educating the proletarian masses in the spirit of international solidarity and as a counterweight to the chauvinistic propaganda of the ruling classes, and, above all, of the Palmerston press. Marx demonstrated that the masses in Britain, France, Germany and, indeed, all Europe, considered the defence of the North as their cause, the cause of freedom “now to be defended sword in hand, from the sordid grasp of the slaveholder” (p. 29).

Marx’s articles “The Opinion of the Newspapers and the Opinion of the People”, “English Public Opinion”, “A London Workers’ Meeting”, “Anti-Intervention Feeling” and others, taught the workers how to work out their own revolutionary line and stand up for it in international conflicts. Marx was particularly delighted by the actions of the British proletariat; he considered that “the English working class has won immortal historical honour for itself”, having by means of mass protest meetings foiled the attempts of the ruling classes to organise an intervention on behalf of the South, although the continuation of the US Civil War and also the crisis in the cotton industry connected with it subjected “a million English workers to the most fearful sufferings and privations” (p. 297).

Marx described the appalling poverty of the Lancashire weavers left unemployed by the closure of many cotton mills. He denounced the attempts by the ruling classes (the articles “On the Cotton Crisis”, “Workers’ Distress in England”, etc.) to attribute the stagnation in the British cotton industry exclusively to the cessation of the import of cotton from the USA as a result of the Civil War, to the protectionist measures of the North and to its blockade of the secessionist South. Marx showed that the disastrous plight of this industry was first and foremost caused by a crisis of overproduction (pp. 160-62, 239). He condemned the pathetic system of social charity in Britain (pp. 241-42). Marx wrote with indignation about the inhuman selfishness of the ruling classes, of the “strange dispute” between the landed and industrial aristocracy “as to which of them grinds the working class down the most, and which of them is least obliged to do something about the workers’ distress” (p. 241).

The position of the British workers during the US Civil War, their demonstrations in defence of the Italian national liberation movement and their stand on other issues, enabled Marx to conclude that in the political life of Britain the actions of the working class were acquiring national significance for the first time since the defeat of Chartism. In his article, “Garibaldi Meetings.— The Distressed Condition of Cotton Workers”, Marx wrote: “Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of English conditions and the attitude prevailing here knows, in addition, that any interference on the part of the present cabinet with the popular demonstrations can only end in the fall of the government” (p. 246).

Marx also noted that in its political demonstrations the working class was beginning to play an increasingly independent role, pursuing its aims and not acting simply as members of “the chorus” (p. 153). The demonstrations of the British proletariat in connection with international conflicts enabled Marx and Engels further to develop the theory of class struggle, to substantiate the position of the proletariat in problems of foreign policy and to define the strategic and tactical tasks of the proletarian party. Marx became still more convinced of his conclusion that even before the winning of political power, the working class, by influencing the foreign policy of the government of its own country, could compel it to renounce an aggressive course aimed at the enslavement of other peoples. As is known, this conclusion found expression in one of the first programme documents of the International, the Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association, written by Marx in October 1864 (see this edition, Vol. 20).

The problems of international relations and the colonial policy of the European powers are discussed in a group of articles about the beginning of the Anglo-French-Spanish intervention in Mexico in 1861. (“The Intervention in Mexico”, “The Parliamentary

Debate on the Address” and others). Marx disclosed the true aims of the participants in the “Mexican Expedition” and denounced its colonial character. Describing the intervention in Mexico as “one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history” (p. 71), Marx stressed that the real purpose of the intervention was to render assistance to the Mexican reactionaries in the struggle against the progressive Juarez government, to consolidate the anti-popular party of the clericals with the aid of French and Spanish bayonets, and once again to provoke a civil war. In articles filled with deep sympathy for the Mexican people and its liberation struggle, Marx sternly condemned the actions of the interventionists, who had perfidiously started a war against a peace-loving country under the false pretence of a struggle against anarchy. The articles on the intervention in Mexico are a vivid manifestation of the irreconcilable struggle waged by Marx and Engels against colonialism and national oppression, against exploitation and the enslavement of economically backward and dependent countries by European states more developed in the capitalist sense.

Interference by the “European armed Areopagus” in the internal affairs of American countries was seen by Marx as an attempt at the “transplantation of the Holy Alliance to the other side of the Atlantic” (p. 77).

Marx also pointed out another danger associated with the Anglo-French-Spanish intervention. For Palmerston and Napoleon III, the Mexican intervention was a means of provoking an armed conflict with the United States. In his articles “Progress of Feeling in England”, “The Mexican Imbroglio” and others, Marx denounced the efforts of the British ruling circles to use the events in Mexico as a pretext, and the territory of Mexico as a base of operations, for the interference of Britain and France in the US Civil War on the side of the Southern slave-owning states. “Decembrist France, bankrupt, paralysed at home, beset with difficulty abroad, pounces upon an Anglo-American War as a real godsend and, in order to buy English support in Europe, will strain all her power to support ‘Perfidious Albion’ on the other side of the Atlantic” (p. 111).

In his articles “The London Times and Lord Palmerston”, “The Intervention in Mexico” and others, Marx strips the mask off British diplomacy. Marx and Engels noted during this period an undoubted intensification of the counter-revolutionary role which bourgeois-aristocratic Britain had long played in international affairs. Britain’s conversion in the 19th century into the “workshop of the world”, and her efforts to preserve her industrial and colonial monopoly, inevitably made her ruling classes a bulwark of reaction not only in Europe but all over the world.

Exposing the aggressive foreign policy of the European powers— Britain, Austria and France—directed at the suppression of national liberation movements and the enslavement of other peoples, Marx demonstrated the grave consequences of the Palmerston government’s colonial expansion for the peoples of China, India, Persia, Afghanistan and other countries (pp. 18-20, 23, 78, 209, 216).

Marx also paid attention to the social and political movements in these countries, especially in his article “Chinese Affairs”, in which he discussed the causes and the contradictory nature of the Taiping movement. In this, Marx noted a combination of revolutionary tendencies—the striving for the overthrow of the reactionary system and the domination of the alien Manchurian dynasty—with conservative tendencies, the latter becoming especially pronounced in the last years of the Taiping state, within which a bureaucratic top layer had grown. Marx associated the conservative features of the movement with religious fanaticism, cruel customs inculcated in the army, the aggrandisement and even deification of the leaders, and “destruction without any nucleus of new construction” (p. 216).

A large part of the volume is made up of newspaper articles which Marx and Engels wrote on European problems. The articles about the economic position of Britain and France show that in analysing the internal and foreign policy of the European powers (and also of the USA), Marx and Engels were invariably guided by the principles of historical materialism.

In analysing the state of industry in Britain and its prospects of further development and influence on the world market, Marx took into account the situation that had developed in the cotton industry as a result of the blockade of the Southern states, the stopping of shipments of American cotton, and also the internal laws of capitalist production (“The Crisis in England”, “British Commerce”, “Economic Notes”, “On the Cotton Crisis” and others). Marx noted the growth of economic contradictions between the metropolitan country and its colonies, the attempts of the latter to resort for the defence of their economy to protectionism, which they “find ... better suited to their interests” (p. 162).

Examining the condition of the British working class, Marx not only disclosed the horrors of unemployment among the cotton workers, but also described the ruthless capitalist exploitation of the workers, including children, in other branches of industry, and the in human working conditions in the baking industry (p. 254). He showed how in Britain, the country of machines and steam, there were branches of industry that had hardly experienced the influence of large-scale industry and in which obsolete techniques and heavy manual labour still predominated. Touching on the contradictory nature of technical progress under capitalism, Marx stressed that one of its positive sides was the supplanting of archaic, semiartisan forms of production organisation. “The triumph of machinemade bread, “ he wrote, “will mark a turning point in the history of large-scale industry, the point at which it will storm the hitherto doggedly defended last ditch of medieval artisanship” (p. 255).

Marx drew on various examples to illustrate the disgraceful relics of domination by the landed aristocracy in the social life of England (his article “A Scandal”), and the true essence of bourgeois democracy. In his article “A Suppressed Debate on Mexico and the Alliance with France” , he disclosed the voting procedure in the House of Commons, which allowed it not to put to the vote any motion that was “equally irksome to both oligarchical factions, the Ins an d the Outs (those in office an d those in opposition)...” (P- 223).

In his articles, “Economic Notes”, “France’s Financial Situation” and others, Marx analysed France’s economic plight, revealing the causes of the financial, commercial and agricultural crisis and the growth of corruption; he demonstrated that the Bonapartist regime, with its predatory interference in the economy, was the cause of disruption in French finance and economy (pp. 83-84). In the autumn of 1861 Marx forecast that Napoleon III would seek away out of his internal difficulties in foreign policy escapades (pp. 62-63, 83-84); the very next year, France took an active part in the punitive expedition against the Mexican Republic. In April 1861, in his article “An International Affaire Mirés”, Marx explained the participation of France in the military intervention as a necessity for supporting “the gambling operations of certain rouge-et-noir politicians” (p. 198), i.e. the direct interest of the financial circles of the Second Empire , to extricate themselves by means of the Mexican escapade from the increasingly critical situation.

During the period covered by this volume, Marx and Engels wrote a number of articles about the struggle for national unity in Germany and in Italy (“German Movements” , “A Meeting for Garibaldi” , “Garibaldi Meetings.—The Distressed Condition of Cotton Workers“ and others), advocating its pursuit by revolutionary-democratic means. The struggle for unification in Germany and Italy by revolutionary means came up against resistance from reactionary forces in Germany itself, especially in Prussia and Austria, and also against countermeasure s by the governments of other European powers, particularly Bonapartist France, which was endeavouring to keep Germany disunited and was actively obstructing the final unification of Italy. In his articles “The Strength of the Armies in Schleswig”, “Artillery News from America” , “England’s Fighting Forces as against Germany” , written in connection with the exacerbation of the conflict between Denmark and the German Confederation in 1863-1864, Engels analysed the military aspects of the country’s unification from the viewpoint of the revolutionary camp’s interests.

Marx and Engels also regarded the Polish national liberation movement as closely associated with that in Germany. Written in connection with the Polish national liberation uprising of 1863-64, the “Proclamation on Poland by the German Workers’ Educational Society in London “ disclosed the significance of the uprising for the future of Germany.

Marx’s work on the theory of political economy is only indirectly represented in this volume in the articles on the economic position of Britain, France and the USA, and also in the manuscript, “Ground Rent” . This is evidently a draft plan for one of the lectures on political economy that Marx delivered to the London German Workers’ Educational Society at the end of the 1850s and the beginning of the 1860s. In it, Marx treated ground rent as the excess of the market price of the agricultural product over the cost of production. This definition echoes the corresponding formulations of the Theories of Surplus-Value (part of the above-mentioned manuscript of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy on which Marx worked from August 1861 to July 1863) and Volume III of Capital, which he began writing at the end of summer, 1864.

In addition to the above-mentioned articles on military matters by Engels, the present volume contains his unfinished manuscript “Kinglake on the Battle of the Alma” . He attacks the nationalistic tendencies and prejudices typical of bourgeois military historiography, expressed in the exaggerated portrayal of the armed forces of one’s own country and in minimising the fighting qualities of the armies of other states. Engels debunked the myth, created by British military writers, about the invincibility of the British troops during the Crimean War. The ultimate aim of Kinglake’s book, writes Engels, was the “glorification, carried to absurdity, of the English army”, for the sake of which he filled his work with “embellishments, rodomontades and conjectures “ (p. 274).

In his manuscript “The English Army”, Engels, discussing the organisation, recruitment and training of the British armed forces, highlighted the conservative features of the British military system. He noted, in particular, the caste spirit prevalent in the officers’ corps, the pernicious practice of selling commissions, the archaic forms of recruitment and the barbaric use of corporal punishment for breaches of discipline by the soldiers. Engels concluded that the customs of the British army were typical of the obsolescent régime of a bourgeois-aristocratic oligarchy and testified to the necessity for profound reforms, including radical military changes, in the country’s social and political system.

The Appendices to this volume include applications by Marx for the restoration of his Prussian citizenship after the 1861 Amnesty. These steps were taken by him in connection with the rise of the working-class movement and the approaching revolutionary crisis in Germany, so that he could return at the necessary moment to active political work in his homeland. The Berlin Police President rejected Marx’s applications (p. 353).

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The volume contains 82 works by Marx and Engels, of which 52 were printed in Die Presse and 11 in the New-York Daily Tribune. Engels’ article “England’s Fighting Forces as against Germany“ was published in the German Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung, and three more works by Engels, “Artillery News from America” , “Kinglake on the Battle of the Alma “ and “The English Army”, also included in this volume, were intended for the same newspaper. Twenty-eight items are being published in English for the first time. Two items, “German Movements“ and “British Commerce”, have never been reproduced in English since their publication by the New-York Daily Tribune. English publications of individual articles by Marx and Engels in various editions, especially in the collection The Civil War in the United States, London , 1937 and New York, 1937, are mentioned in the notes.

Most of the articles in this volume were published unsigned in the New-York Daily Tribune; the articles in Die Presse were also

published anonymously but, as a rule, with a special note “Orig.-Corr.” , “Von unserem Londoner Correspondenten” . The authorship of the unsigned articles is confirmed by the correspondence between Marx and Engels, by cross references and also by other documents.

When the articles were in preparation, the dates were checked and most of the sources used by the authors were identified. Th e results of this work will be found at the end of each article and in the editorial notes. Headings given by the editors of the volume are in square brackets.

Obvious errors discovered in the text, in personal and geographical names, figures, dates and so on, have been silently corrected, by reference to sources used by Marx and Engels. The personal and geographical names in the English texts are reproduced as spelled in the originals, which were checked with 19th-century reference books; in translated articles, the modern spelling is given. The use of English words in the German text is indicated in the footnotes. In quoting from newspapers and other sources, Marx sometimes gives a free rendering rather than the exact words. In this edition quotations are given in the form in which they occur in Marx’s text.

The volume was compiled, the greater part of the texts prepared and the preface and notes written by Yevgenia Dakhina. The articles from the New-York Daily Tribune were prepared and notes to them written by Alexander Zubkov. The volume was edited by Valentina Smirnova except the articles “Kinglake on the Battle of the Alma”, “The English Army“ and “England’s Fighting Forces as against Germany“ which were prepared by Tatyana Vasilyeva and edited by Lev Golman. The name index and the index of periodicals were prepared by Tatyana Nikolayeva; the index of quoted and mentioned literature by Alexander Zubkov and the subject index by Marien Arzumanov (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CG CPSU).

The translations were made by Henry Mins (International Publishers), Rodney Livingstone, Peter and Betty Ross and Barrie Selman (Lawrence Sc Wishart) and Salo Ryazanskaya and Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishers). Items 8, 10, 11, 19, 25-28, 30, 31 , 33-35, 37, 40, 42, 46, 50 and 64 were reproduced from the collection The Civil War in the United States, International Publishers, N. Y., 1937. Items 6, 7, 15-17, 20, 39, 41 , 43-45, 51 , 53, 60 and 63 were reproduced from the collection Marx and Engels on the United States, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1979. The translations, including those from the two collections, were checked with the German and edited for the present edition by James S. Allen (International Publishers), Nicholas Jacobs (Lawrence & Wishart) and Richard Dixon, Glenys Ann Kozlov, Tatiana Grishina and Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishers) and Norire Ter-Akopyan, scientific editor (USSR Academy of Sciences).

The volume was prepared for the press by editors Nadezhda Rudenko, Anna Vladimirova, and assistant editor Tatyana Bannikova.