Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (21)

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Volume 21 of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels contains works dating from November 1867 to mid-July 1870, most of them relating to the activity of the First International—documents, reports, articles, statements, and outlines. Much space is devoted to works, speeches, and preparatory materials on the Irish question.

The period dealt with in this volume saw a sharpening of the economic and social conflicts in Europe and the United States of America, mass working-class actions, an intensification of the Irish national liberation struggle, a deepening of the crisis of Louis Bonaparte’s Second Empire, and a mounting threat of war in Europe.

This volume, like volume 20, reflects Marx’s diverse activity in the First International and the efforts of its General Council, led by him, to strengthen the unity of the working class and cultivate the spirit of proletarian internationalism and class consciousness in it. The First International (the International Working Men’s Association—IWMA) had constituted itself by then, and the time had come for its ideological and organisational consolidation. Its federations and sections had become active in many European countries and in the United States. In Britain its base consisted of the trade unions, which numbered tens of thousands of workers; and in other countries unions were also beginning to take their place as the first class organisations of the proletariat. The International Working Men’s Association, Engels wrote in 1869, had already shown in more than one place in Europe that it was a force the ruling classes were compelled to reckon with (see this volume, p. 64).

After the approval of the International’s basic documents defining the relationship between economic and political struggle, Marx set out to substantiate and publicly proclaim the principles of scientific socialism in the programme of the International. Besides this, he was engaged in working out the tactics of the proletariat to suit the concrete situation of the late 1860s, defining its independent class attitude to the national question and to the question of war and peace. The General Council’s documents written by Marx, like his speeches at meetings of the Council on various aspects of the working-class and general democratic movement, show him as the true leader of the first mass international working-class political organisation which, at least as far as the workers’ movement was concerned, Engels described in his article “Karl Marx” as an “epoch-making organisation” (p. 64).

In 1866 and in the following year most countries in Europe were gripped by economic crisis, accompanied by a capitalist offensive on workers’ wages. The actions of the proletariat against this economic oppression grew to unprecedented proportions, often leading to the suppression of strikes by armed force. The masters, as Marx observed in 1869, transformed their private feuds with their men into “a state crusade against the International Working Men’s Association” (p. 71). As before, the General Council saw its main objectives as defending the vital interests of the working class, assisting the strike movement, and securing unity of working-class action at national and international level. All its activity was directed to stimulating the international solidarity of the working class and winning more of its detachments to the side of the International Association.

Written by Marx, such General Council appeals as “The Belgian Massacres” and “The Lock-out of the Building Trades at Geneva”, as well as the annual reports to the Brussels and Basle congresses of the IWMA, are evidence of the far-flung organisational efforts of the Council and of Marx’s own efforts to bring material aid and moral support to the strikers. “This was a great opportunity to show the capitalists,” Marx wrote in the “Report of the General Council to the Fourth Annual Congress of the International Working Men’s Association” concerning the strike of the Rouen weavers, “that their international industrial warfare, carried on by screwing wages down now in this country, now in that, would be checked at last by the international union of the working classes” (p. 74). And in a number of large-scale strikes, the workers owed their victory to the direct assistance of the International.

The documents and materials in this volume demonstrate the intensive efforts made by Marx and the General Council to form and to consolidate sections of the International in various countries. Particular space is devoted to articles and documents on the German workers’ movement. Marx’s and Engels’ previous writings against Lassalleanism, to which was added the German and international working-class movement’s own experience, had helped some sections of the German working class to shake off the influence of Lassallean dogma and had strengthened the opposition within the General Association of German Workers to its Lassallean leaders. Marx’s letter, “To the President and Executive Committee of the General Association of German Workers”, and Engels’ articles “On the Dissolution of the Lassallean Workers’ Association ‘ note that the class struggle of the German proletariat and the pressure of the rank and file had compelled the leaders of that organisation to include agitation for political freedom, regulation of the working day, and international cooperation of the working classes—that is, points “from which, in fact, any serious workers’ movement must proceed” (p. 10)—on the agenda of its Hamburg Congress (General Assembly) in August 1868.

The constitution of the North-German Confederation greatly furthered the unification of Germany from above under the supremacy of reactionary and militarist Prussia, leading to the emergence in Europe of a source of new wars, in addition to the France of Louis Bonaparte. However, Marx and Engels held that, objectively, Germany’s unification was hastening the country’s development, and gave the working class new opportunities for revolutionary struggle, which it should use as best it could for “the national organisation and unification of the German proletariat” (see Engels’ letter to Marx of July 25, 1866, Vol. 42 of the present edition). Conditions were thus maturing in Germany for an independent proletarian party. Marx and Engels welcomed the German working class’s steps to that end, and gave August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht all possible assistance in forming such a party. To relieve Marx of at least part of the tremendous burden of his work for the International, Engels took over most of the correspondence with Germany.

On Marx’s advice, the General Council sent a representative to the Nuremberg Congress of the Union of German Workers’ Associations (September 1868), many of which were simultaneously sections of the International. The congress showed that the delegates were acquainted with the documents of the International. One of the sources of their knowledge was the then just published pamphlet by Wilhelm Eichhoff, The International Working Men’s Association, on which Marx had collaborated (see Appendices in this volume). Marx praised the Nuremberg Congress, which came out in favour of adhering to the International (see this volume, pp. 15 and 33). Its decision signified a break between the majority of the Union and the liberal bourgeoisie, and the Union’s adoption of proletarian, class positions.

The founding of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in Eisenach in 1869, as Marx saw it, was a victory for the ideas of the International in the German working-class movement. In the “Report of the General Council to the Fourth Annual Congress of the Internationa] W7 orking Men’s Association”, Marx stressed the proletarian character of the newly formed party, representing more than 150,000 workers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with a programme “literally embodying the leading principles of our Statutes” (p. 79). As Lenin observed later, “a sound basis” had been laid in Eisenach “for a genuinely SocialDemocratic workers’ party”. And he added: “In those days the essential thing was the basis of the party” (Collected Works, Vol. 19, Moscow, 1973, p. 298).

A few of the works appearing in the present volume reflect the resolve of Marx and Engels to heighten the theoretical level of the German workers’ movement by propagating the ideas of scientific socialism and criticising Lassalleanism.

Shortly before the Eisenach Congress, Engels wrote and published “Karl Marx”, the first brief biography of him, showing the importance of his activity and of his theories for the emancipation struggle of the working class. Attacking the attempts to portray Lassalle as the founder of the workers’ movement in Germany, Engels demonstrated that “nothing could be less correct” (p. 59), showing that the movement had been initiated by Marx and the Communist League founded by him. Engels described the League as a “well-organised socialist party”, stressing that later Lassalle had merely taken possession of the ground prepared by it. Not only did Engels’ article set out the basis for the criticism of Lassalle; it also called on the German workers to carry on the revolutionary traditions of the Communist League.

To further the German workers’ knowledge of the ideas of scientific socialism, Marx and Engels republished The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx) and The Peasant War in Germany (Engels), both of which they supplied with new prefaces.

Engels’ preface to the second edition of The Peasant War in Germany (February 1870) was of tremendous help to the newly formed Social-Democratic Party, impressing upon it a most important point—the attitude of the working class and its party to the peasants. Engels made a concrete historical study of the economic and political situation in Germany after 1848, and specified and projected one of Marxism’s most crucial theoretical and political tenets, spelling out the need for an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, a tenet formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of the 1848-49 revolutions. Engels warned against taking the peasants in capitalist society to be a uniform mass. He stressed the existence of different sections of peasants, and the need for considering the peculiarities of each section if there was to be a firm alliance with the labouring majority in the countryside in opposition to the capitalist farmers. He called attention to the relevance for Germany as well as Britain of the resolution of the IWMA Congress in Basle (1869), that it was in the interest of society to transform landed property into common, national property (p. 100).

Having formed their party, the German Social-Democrats had to think of expanding its mass base and of its relation to the trade unions. The “Resume of the Meetings of the General Council” and the “Report of the General Council to the Fourth Annual Congress of the International Working Men’s Association” set out Marx’s views on the relationship between the party and the unions. He called on the leaders of the party to defy Lassallean sectarianism and take the initiative in forming trade unions “on the model of the English ones” but with a broader base, giving due consideration to the relevant decisions of the Geneva, Lausanne, and Brussels congresses of the International. In January 1869, Marx noted with satisfaction that in Germany the trade unions, “brought into existence by the efforts of the Internationa] Working Men’s Association, number already 110,000 members” (p. 37).

The documents included in this volume show that Marx devoted meticulous attention to the working-class movement in England. England, he noted, was “the only country where the great majority of the population consists of wages-labourers” and where “the class struggle and the organisation of the working class by the Trades Unions have acquired a certain degree of maturity and universality” (p. 86).

As noted earlier, Marx urged working men in other countries to avail themselves of the organisational experience of the British workers when forming unions of their own. He attached great importance to the General Council’s activity as the Federal Council for England. As in previous years, this activity was designed, above all, and with some success, to place the trade unions under the influence of the International. In an article, “Connections Between the International Working Men’s Association and English Working Men’s Organisations”, Marx wrote: “Not one significant organisation of the British proletariat exists which is not directly, by its own leaders, represented on the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association” (p. 26). Some of the British trade unionists backed the line of the General Council at congresses of the International.

However, it was clear to Marx that the International would not help the British proletariat take the revolutionary road unless it managed to isolate the right-wing trade union leaders. Marx criticised their reformist view of the aims of the workers’ movement, their slide to the platform of the Liberal Party, as demonstrated, among other things, by the 1868 general election, and their ambiguous posture on the Irish question. He called on the General Council to strengthen the revolutionary trend in the British working-class movement. He commended the activity of Robert Shaw, a member of the General Council and representative of the British workers. He praised Shaw’s “truly revolutionary intelligence” and absence of “petty ambition or personal interest” (p. 92). When the sharp aggravation of the economic crisis in Britain in the late 1860s, which caused widespread impoverishment, aroused sentiment favouring nationalisation of land and gave birth to the socialistic Land and Labour League, Marx helped draw up the “Address of the Land and Labour League to the Working Men and Women of Great Britain and Ireland”, pointing out in it that “nothing short of a transformation of the existing social and political arrangements could avail” in abolishing the existing evils (p. 404).

The increasing political instability of Louis Bonaparte’s regime, accompanied by an upsurgence of mass revolutionary activity, enhanced the International’s influence in France. The Bonapartist government therefore resolved to cripple the Paris Section of the International Association. It framed court proceedings against it on two occasions in 1868 (see the account of the trials in Eichhoff’s pamphlet, this volume, pp. 366-74). Nearly all the defendants used their courtroom speeches to propagate the ideas of the International. The trials and repression of members of the International won it the sympathy of working men and of some democrats, and as Marx wrote in “The Fourth Annual Report of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association”, have “given it a fresh impulse by forcing the Empire to drop its patronising airs to the working classes” (p. 14).

The revolutionary tide in France kept rising steadily. Large-scale strikes and political demonstrations in the winter of 1868-69 and the election campaign in the spring of 1869 were clear evidence of the people’s mood. The election programme of a group of Paris workers was published, which the General Council praised as a programme based on the principles of the Association. In January 1870, analysing the prospects of revolution in Europe, Marx conjectured that the “revolutionary initiative will probably come from France” (p. 86).

To buttress its position, Louis Bonaparte’s government resorted to one more demagogic manoeuvre, scheduling a plebiscite for May 8, 1870. Before that date, it arrested leaders of the sections of the International on false charges of conspiring against the emperor. On the instructions of the General Council, Marx wrote a declaration, “Concerning the Persecution of the Members of the French Sections”, published in the press of the International and the French workers’ papers. Exposing the motives behind the plebiscite, Marx firmly denied that the International was involved in any secret conspiracies, stating that the Rules bind all the sections of the Association to act in broad daylight and that “the very nature of an Association which identifies itself with the working classes, would exclude from it every form of secret society. If the working classes, who form the great bulk of all nations, who produce all their wealth, and in the name of whom even the usurping powers always pretend to rule, conspire, they conspire publicly, as the sun conspires against darkness, in the full consciousness that without their pale there exists’ no legitimate power” (p. 127).

While standing by the true representatives of the French proletariat in the International, the General Council publicly dissociated itself from the French Federal Section in London, an organisation of the followers of Félix Pyat, a petty-bourgeois democrat. The section had lost contact with the International in 1868, but continued its adventurist and often provocative activity, ostensibly in the name of the International (p. 131).

The mass of the proletariat had by then declared adherence to the International, and the pro-socialist elements were gathered in its General Council. Along with the publication of Volume One of Marx’s Capital in 1867 and its popularisation in the press (see present edition, Vol. 20), all this helped combat Proudhonism, Lassalleanism and other petty-bourgeois trends, and contributed to the ground being laid for the acceptance of socialist principles as the foundation of the programme endorsed by congresses of the International.

The present volume contains Marx’s speeches at meetings of the General Council during the preparation of the agenda of the Brussels (1868) and Basle (1869) congresses and the drafts of the resolutions whose adoption he urged on the consequences of using machinery under capitalism, on the reduction of the working day, and on public ownership of the means of production, including land. His speeches and resolutions were all designed to bring home the key socialist principles of the programme of the International to members of the General Council.

Of special interest are the records of Marx’s speeches during the preparations for the Brussels Congress on the consequences of using machinery under capitalism and on the reduction of the working day. At the General Council meeting of July 28, 1868 (pp. 382-84), Marx set forth the basic ideas on machinery which he had developed in Volume One of Capital. Showing the calamitous consequences for the working classes of the use of machinery in capitalist society, Marx stressed at the same time that it led to “associated organised labour”. In his draft resolution, Marx pointed out that “machinery has proved a most powerful instrument of despotism and extortion in the hands of the capitalist class”, but noted that, on the other hand, “the development of machinery creates the material conditions necessary for the superseding of the wages-system by a truly social system of production” (p. 9).

Marx argued for the necessity of demanding the reduction of the working day (p. 387). In his draft resolution on this subject he reaffirmed the relevant resolution of the Geneva Congress (1866), and said that the time had arrived “when practical effect should be given to that resolution” (p. 11).

The preliminary discussion of the agenda of the Brussels Congress by the General Council yielded good results. Despite the resistance of the Proudhonist right, the Congress adopted the socialist principles of making the means of production, mines, collieries, railways, the land (including arable land), common property, and acknowledged the advantages of the public ownership of the means of production. The Congress also adopted Marx’s resolutions on the consequences of the use of machinery in capitalist society and on the reduction of the working day.

The question of landed property, already settled at the Brussels Congress, was, as a result of Marx’s motion, again on the agenda of the next congress, which gathered in Basle in 1869. This was prompted by the need for isolating any advocates of private landownership and for defining the tactics of the International on the peasantry.

Marx spoke twice during the preliminary discussion of the issue at the meeting of the General Council (pp. 392-93). He explained the error of those who favoured small private property, chiefly the Proudhonists, and of those among the British members of the International who argued in favour of the nationalisation of land with references to the “natural right “ of the farmers.

Marx maintained that “to push this natural right to its logical consequences would land us at the assertion of every individual to cultivate his own share”, that is, to the assertion of small private property in land. Not the will of individuals, he pointed out, but the “social right and social necessity determine d in what manner the means of subsistence must be procured “ (p. 392). Marx guided the members of the General Council towards understanding that any consistent solution of the agrarian question called for a revolutionary transformation of all society, which also meant nationalisation of land and its conversion into collective property.

The confirmation of the Marxian platform by the Basle Congress was a victory for revolutionary proletarian socialism over various schools of petty-bourgeois socialism, and marked an important stage in working socialist principles into the programme of the International.

The Brussels resolutions on public property showed that most members of the Association had put aside the Proudhonist dogma and held a common view of the aim of the proletarian struggle, that of building socialist society. It was left to Marx to set out a common approach to attaining this aim. But here, in questions related to the motive forces of the socialist revolution and the attitude to the state an d to the allies of the proletariat, he encountered obdurate resistance from followers of the pettybourgeois schools, notably anarchism. The chief exponent of anarchism at that time was the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, whose views were a variety of pre-Marxian pettybourgeois socialism, reflecting the sentiment of ruined petty proprietors, and were totally unsuited to chart any realistic way of ending capitalist oppression.

Some of the documents in this volume deal with the struggle by Marx and the General Council against Bakunin’s anarchist views on key aspects of the theory and tactics of the proletarian class movement, and against the disruptive activity of Bakunin and his followers in the International.

In the autumn of 1868 in Geneva, Bakunin gathered a following of heterogeneous elements to form the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. In its Programme and Rules, the Alliance declared itself part of the lWMA, claimed ideological supremacy, and also the light to autonomy within the International. He expected thereby to use the Working Men’s Association for the propagation of anarchist ideas in the international working-class movement.

What the International should do about Bakunin’s Alliance was discussed at a meeting of the General Council on December 15, 1868, when it was considering the request for its admission to the Association. The document Marx wrote on behalf of the General Council, “The International Working Men’s Association and the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy” (pp. 34-36), defended the unity and structural principles of proletarian organisations. Marx exposed Bakunin’s designs of gaining control of the International and subordinating it to his ideological influence by getting it to admit the Alliance as an independent international organisation with its own programme, organisational structure, and administrative bodies. The Alliance was denied admission to the International Working Men’s Association, the reason given being that under its Rules it admitted only local and national organisations, and not international ones. For the time being Marx saw fit to refrain from any critical examination of the programme of the Alliance. But in his “Remarksoil the Programme and Rules of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy’’ (given in this volume in the section “From the Preparatory Materials”), in which he also took note of Engels’ opinion, Marx produced the first rough outline of a criticism of these documents. He revealed the confused, purely declarative and demagogical nature of the Bakuninist programme, whose main points—”equalisation of classes”, “abolition of the right of inheritance”, and abstention from political struggle—were likely seriously to damage the workers’ movement. Probing the intentions of Bakunin and his followers in respect of the International, Marx pointed out that “they want to compromise us under our own patronage” (p. 209).

A criticism of the basic provision of the Bakuninist programme, that of the “political, economical, and social equalisation of classes”, is given in a letter of the General Council to the Central Bureau of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, drawn up by Marx on March 9, 1869 (pp. 45-46) in reply to the Alliance’s second application for admission. Marx’s reply is a model of principled tactics working for the unity of the labour movement. He pointed out that it was not the function of the General Council to examine the programmes of societies seeking admission, and that all it asked was whether their tendency did not run against the General Rules. Thereupon, Marx showed that the Bakuninists’ demand for “political, economical, and social equalisation of classes” did run against the General Rules since it amounted to the bourgeois slogan of “harmony of capital and labour”. He amplified: “It is not the logically impossible ‘equalisation of classes’, but the historically necessary, superseding ‘abolition of classes’..., this true secret of the proletarian movement, which forms the great aim of the Int. W. Ass.” (p. 46).

Again rejected by the General Council, the Central Bureau of the Alliance introduced a few amendments to its programme and publicly announced the dissolution of its international organisation, suggesting to its sections that they adhere to the International. But, in fact, Bakunin and his followers retained a secret Alliance.

The fight against the Bakuninists broke out in earnest at the Basle Congress (1869) over the right of inheritance, an item included in its agenda on their insistence.

Marx attached much importance to the question of inheritance, associating it with the attitude to the peasants, and the ways of winning them for the socialist transformation of the countryside. When the matter was discussed at a meeting of the General Council in the summer of 1869 preliminary to the Congress, and in a special report written for its delegates (pp. 65-67 and 394-97), Marx came to grips with Bakunin’s idea of abolishing the right of inheritance as the starting point of the social revolution and the only way of eliminating private property in the means of production. Marx approached the issue in the light of historical materialism and concluded that to proclaim the abolition of the right of inheritance “would be a thing false in theory, and reactionary in practice” (p. 66). Like all civil legislation, he explained, the laws of inheritance were not the cause but the effect of the social order. What the working class must grapple with, he said, “is the cause and not the effect, the economical

basis—not its juridical superstructure” (p. 65). The beginning of the social revolution, he emphasised, “must be to get the means to socialise the means of labour” (p. 396).

Marx also saw the danger that Bakunin’s idea entailed for the tactical tasks of workers’ organisations. Any call for the abolition of the right of inheritance, he warned, would inevitably turn the peasants, the workers’ natural allies, away from them. Explaining the substance of the differences of opinion with Bakunin over this important point of revolutionary tactics in a letter to Paul Lafargue of April 19, 1870, Marx said: “The proclamation of the abolition of inheritance ... would be not a serious act, but a foolish menace, rallying the whole peasantry and the whole small middle class round the reaction” (see present edition, Vol. 43).

The Bakuninists’ abortive attempt to seize control of the International at the Basle Congress precipitated an open war against the General Council in the Égalité, organ of the Romance Federal Council, which then adhered to Bakunin’s views. The General Council was accused of breaching the Rules, of refusing to form a special federal council for Britain, of toying with matters that were of no concern to the working men’s movement, such as the Irish question, all of which was said to be doing untold harm to the international interests of the proletariat.

In “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland” and the “Confidential Communication” which he addressed to the Committee of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany as the Corresponding Secretary for Germany, Marx criticised the Bakuninist papers, and explained the General Council’s position on a number of essential topics related to the international working-class movement. Scrutinising the International’s stand on the Irish question, for example, Marx demonstrated the connection between the social and national questions, and emphasised that the Bakuninist dogma about the nonconnection between the social movement and the political movement ran counter to the Rules of the IWMA (see pp, 89, 120-21). A sharp controversy with the Bakuninists developed in the years that followed. At the centre of it stood the workers’ attitude to the state and to political struggle. In the polemics with Bakunin at the Basle Congress, Marx’s comrades defended the need for the proletariat to fight for political power. Seeing the importance of the question, an item on the “relationship between the political action and the social movement of the working class” (p. 143) was, at Marx’s suggestion, put on the agenda of the next congress of the International to be held in Mainz in the summer of 1870. But that congress was not destined to convene owing to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war.

The Russian Section of the International, formed in Geneva in March 1870, gave the General Council considerable help in the fight against Bakuninism. In a letter to its members (pp. 110-11), Marx informed them officially of its admission to the International and wrote that he was pleased to accept their proposal to be their representative on the General Council. By that time, Marx was well enough acquainted with the struggle of the Russian revolutionary democrats against Tsarism, and with the thinking of Russian progressives, and had read the works of Russian economists. All of this led him to conclude that Russia “is also beginning to take part in the movement of our age” (p. 111).

With the international contradictions growing sharper in the late 1860s and a war threat hanging over Europe, the question of war and the position to be taken by the proletariat if it broke out, was still, as before, in the focus of Marx’s attention and that of the International Association. It was also discussed at the Brussels Congress.

In a letter of September 10, 1868, which he wrote to Georg Eccarius and Friedrich Lessner who had gone to Brussels as delegates of the General Council, Marx observed that the working class was not yet sufficiently organised to throw any substantial weight into the scales. However, he pointed out that the Congress must protest in the name of the working class and denounce the instigators of a war between France and Germany that was “ruinous for both countries and ruinous for Europe in general” (see present edition, Vol. 43).

The resolution of the Brussels Congress reflected in the main the ideas of Marx and his followers, stating that a final end would be put to wars only by thorough social reform, and that the number of wars and the extent of the calamities wrought by them could be diminished if the peoples, above all the working classes, resisted their governments and exposed their policy of conquest by all available means. However, the resolution contained a number of concrete proposals which Marx subjected to criticism in the above-mentioned letter to Eccarius and Lessner.

The fight for peace was becoming one of the official aims of the international workers’ movement, and its success depended in many ways on the international unity of the proletariat. In the “Address to the National Labour Union of the United States”, which Marx wrote on behalf of the General Council, he clearly saw that “the working classes are bestriding the scene of history no longer as servile retainers, but as independent actors, conscious of their own responsibility, and able to command peace where their would-be masters shout war” (p. 54).

Much space is devoted in this volume to the works, speeches, extracts and notes of Marx and Engels on the Irish question, an intricate amalgam of acute social and national contradictions. The national liberation movement in Ireland had grown to imposing proportion in the 1860s. This was due to the change in the methods of English colonial exploitation and the social and economic processes that were running their course in Ireland— the conversion from small-scale farming to large-scale, capitalist pasturage, accompanied by mass evictions of tenants, who were thus consigned to hunger or the agony of emigration. Marx described the system as a “quiet business-like extinction” (p. 192). The response to it was the Fenian movement, which “took root ... in the mass of the people, the lower orders” (p. 194). While giving their due to the courage and fighting spirit of the champions of Irish independence, Marx disapproved of their conspiratory tactics. The failed attempt of the Fenians to start an uprising in early 1867, their persecution and trial, aroused the public in Ireland and England.

In this setting, Marx and Engels faced the task of defining the proletariat’s attitude to the national question, of working out the tactics in relation to the national liberation movement, and of instilling the spirit of proletarian internationalism among the workers. With Ireland as an example, Marx and Engels spelled out their views on the national liberation struggle of oppressed nations and its bearing on the world revolutionary process, the relationship between the national liberation movement and the international workers’ movement,the attitude of the proletariat in the metropolitan countries towards the colonial policies of their governments, and the allies of the proletariat in the revolution. “The policy of Marx and Engels on the Irish question,” wrote Lenin, “serves as a splendid example of the attitude the proletariat of the oppressor nations should adopt towards national movements, an example which has lost none of its immense practical importance” (Collected Works, Vol. 20, Moscow, 1972, p. 442).

In a series of documents dating from November to December 1867, such as “The Fenian Prisoners at Manchester and the International Working Men’s Association”, “Notes for an Undelivered Speech on Ireland”, “Outline of a Report on the Irish Question Delivered to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London on December 16, 1867”, and some later works, Marx formulated the General Council’s attitude to the struggle of the Irish people and called on the English working class and the international workers’ movement to support it. The discussions of the issue at General Council meetings witnessed clashes with George Odger, Benjamin Lucraft, and other right-wing trade union leaders, who, in effect, shared the anti-Irish sentiment of the bourgeois radicals.

Marx backed the historical right of oppressed peoples to fight for their liberation. The English, he noted sarcastically, claimed “a divine right to fight the Irish on their native soil, but every Irish fighting against the British Government in England is to be treated as an outlaw” (p. 189). Stigmatising the British Government’s policy towards the Fenians, he branded the death sentence passed on four of them as an act of political revenge (p. 3). Marx also outlined the attitude the English working class should adopt on the Irish question: “Repeal [of the Union with Great Britain forced on Ireland in 1801 — Ed.] as one of the articles of the English Democratic Party” (p. 193). In the outline of a report to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London, Marx showed the pernicious effects for Ireland of the many centuries of British exploitation and oppression. He cited Thomas Francis Meagher, the Irish democrat, on the results of British rule in Ireland: “One business alone survives!... the Irish coffin-maker’s” (pp. 199-200). Marx looked closely into the process of the forcible expropriation of Irish farmers. Eccarius’ record of this report singles out Marx’s words that the Irish question is “not simply a question of nationality, but a question of land and existence” (p. 319).

Marx returned to the Irish question again in the autumn of 1869, when a broad movement was launched for the amnesty of imprisoned Fenians, in which the International took an active part. Speaking at a meeting of the General Council, Marx depicted the colonialist, anti-popular substance of the policy of Gladstone’s Liberal government, which “are the servants of the oppressors of Ireland” (p. 409). In the “Draft Resolution of the General Council on the Policy of the British Government Towards the Irish Prisoners”, submitted by Marx on November 16, 1869, he noted explicitly that the General Council “express their admiration of the spirited, firm and high-souled manner in which the Irish people carry on their Amnesty movement” (p. 83).

To impart international resonance to the Irish question and attract the attention of the European proletariat, the General Council, on Marx’s suggestion, had this resolution published in the organs of the International on the continent and in the European democratic press, as well as in the British labour press.

Marx’s article, “The English Government and the Fenian Prisoners”, exposed the brutal treatment of participants in the Irish national liberation movement by the British authorities. Marx’s daughter Jenny wrote eight articles on this subject for the Paris La Marseillaise, the third of which was composed with Marx’s assistance. They are given in the Appendices to this volume (pp. 414-41).

The most exhaustive exposition of the relation between the working-class and the national liberation movements was given by Marx in a General Council circular, “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland” (January 1870), and in the “Confidential Communication” (March 1870). Coming to grips with the Bakuninists’ nihilist attitude to the national liberation movement, Marx underlined the international significance of the Irish question and its bearing on the struggle of the English proletariat for radical social transformation in England itself. Marx stressed that the participants in the Irish independence movement were natural allies of the English working class. The proletariat of the two countries, therefore, he noted, must do all they can to overcome the antagonism between them artificially nourished by the bourgeoisie. “Any people that oppresses another people,” Marx observed, “forges its own chains.” He argued for the necessity of granting Ireland independence, including complete separation from England. “The position of the International Association with regard to the Irish question is very clear,” he states. “Its first concern is to advance the social revolution in England. To this end a great blow must be struck in Ireland” (p. 89).

All that Marx and the General Council did for the Irish national liberation movement attracted the attention of the Irish workers to the International and laid the ground for the founding of Irish sections, and, naturally, enlisted sympathy for the Irish revolutionary movement among the English workers and workers abroad. The General Council’s attitude to the Irish question and the analysis of its various aspects were based on the profound study Marx and Engels made of Ireland’s history from ancient times. Their manuscripts (included in this volume), though uncompleted, present an integral view of Ireland’s history on a historical materialist basis. They define the main periods in the country’s history and examine its key problems. This study has lost none of its relevance today. What distinguishes it is its broad view of the topics at hand. Marx and Engels used extensive source material to trace the stages, forms and methods of Ireland’s colonial subjugation, the beginnings and gradual growth of the national liberation movement, and its specific features and peculiarities. Their manuscripts provide evidence of their deep interest in the history of pre-capitalist societies—an interest that did not slacken in later years.

Marx’s manuscript, “Ireland from the American Revolution to the Union of 1801. Extracts and Notes” (see “From the Preparatory Materials” in this volume), was written preliminary to the discussion of the Irish question by the General Council.

His study of the period from 1776 to 1801 enabled him to determine the most typical features of the policy of the English ruling classes in Ireland. His attention was drawn to the colonialist nature of the Union of 1801 (abolition of the autonomy of Irish Parliament), the dissolution of which was sought by generation after generation of fighters for Ireland’s independence. The thought Marx expressed in his letter to Engels of December 10, 1869 (see present edition, Vol. 43), that “the English reaction in England had its roots (as in Cromwell’s time) in the subjugation of Ireland”, is present throughout the manuscript.

Marx painted a picture of English rule in Ireland, and analysed the motive forces of the Irish national liberation movement and the role of the peasantry in it. He also produced a vivid portrayal of the Irish bourgeois revolutionaries, the left wing of the United Irishmen, pinpointing its weaknesses and the reasons for the failure of the uprising of 1798, whose lessons were of great significance for the Irish national liberation movement as a whole.

The manuscript shows the influence of the American War of Independence and, especially, the French Revolution on the emergence and growth of the independence movement in Ireland (pp. 238-39). Marx’s observations are of immense relevance for understanding the international nature of these historic events.

The uncompleted manuscript of Engels’ History of Ireland, like his preparatory material for it (“Notes on Goldwin Smith’s Book Irish History and Irish Character” and “Varia on the History of the Irish Confiscations”), included in this volume, are evidence of his intention to produce a large, comprehensive history of Ireland from ancient times, shedding light on the phases of her subjugation and the fight of the Irish for liberation.

Engels completed only the first chapter of the manuscript of his History of Ireland (“Natural Conditions”) and the beginning of the second (“Old Ireland”), both of which appear in the main section of this volume. The first chapter is devoted to the geological structure and climate of Ireland, though it also touches on questions of a political nature. Engels rejects the attempts of the English ruling classes to justify British colonial rule in Ireland with references to the unfavourable geographic conditions for independent economic development and the “ignorance and sloth” of the country’s native population, from which it follows that Ireland’s very climate condemned it to supplying beef and butter for the English rather than bread for the Irish (pp. 148, 161). Engels portrays Ireland’s ancient history and the social and political system of the Celtic clans. Challenging the chauvinist idea of Ireland’s backwardness, he demonstrates the contribution of the Irish Christian missionaries and scholars to European culture in the early Middle Ages (p. 171), and notes the bitter Irish resistance to the invasion of the Norsemen. The manuscript refutes the theories that attribute the foundation of many European states to the Northern conquerors. Engels shows, on the contrary, that the conquests of the Norsemen were really nothing more than piratic raids (p. 179). He denounces the tendency to portray the national liberation struggle as banditism or to ascribe to it merely religious motives. The hiding or the distortion of facts relating to the Irish people’s struggle, he observes, is intended to vindicate English domination.

In his “Notes for the Preface to a Collection of Irish Songs”, Engels speaks of the deliberate obliteration of Ireland’s finest cultural traditions by the English conquerors from the seventeenth century on, with the result that Gaelic was understood in the country by only few people and the nation was forfeiting its rich culture (p. 141).

Two of Engels’ manuscripts, “Notes on Goldwin Smith’s Book Irish History and Irish Character’’’’ and “Varia on the History of the Irish Confiscations”, reflect his views on the later period of Irish history. His précis of Goldwin Smith’s book is of special interest. Goldwin Smith was an English liberal historian and economist, and his book attracted Engels’ attention as an example of how Irish history was being falsified for the benefit of the liberal bourgeoisie to justify its colonial subjection and social and national oppression. Engels’ polemical notes show that he saw one of his tasks as exposing this tendency, as well as the chauvinist conception of Irish history. Referring to Smith, he writes: “Behind the cloak of objectivity, the apologetic English bourgeois professor” (p. 283). Smith extolled the English conquerors for bringing civilisation to the country, and denounced the Irish national liberation movement as lacking reason and national roots. The concessions that the Irish had wrested from the English in many centuries of continuous struggle Smith portrays as acts of “goodwill” on the part of the English. He ignores the strong influence of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution on the Irish movement for national liberation. The English concessions, as Engels observes, are ascribed by Smith to the English “spirit of toleration”, the “liberal ideas of the new era”, and the like. “These are the ‘general causes’ which have to be kept in mind,” Engels exclaims, “but by no means the real ones!” (p. 295).

Engels’ “Varia on the History of the Irish Confiscations” deals with the basic aspect of English rule in Ireland, that of the land confiscations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here he surveys the expropriation of the country’s native population and Ireland’s conversion into a stronghold of English landlordism. He traces England’s policy in Ireland over a century and a half, and offers evidence that the leaders of the seventeenth-century English Revolution inherited the colonialist tradition of their absolutist predecessors. Engels shows that the confiscations were accompanied by the ruthless suppression of the resistance put up by the native population. “The Irish,” he observes, “were denied all rights..., with resistance treated as rebellion” (pp. 297-98).

In the Appendices to this volume the reader will find Wilhelm Eichhoff’s pamphlet, The International Working Men’s Association. Its Establishment, Organisation, Political and Social Activity, and Growth, which appears in English translation fpr the first time. It is the first history of the First International. Written with the collaboration of Marx, if offers a detailed account of the foundation and the early years of the International, its class nature, and its responsibilities in organising the economic and political struggle of the proletariat in various countries. Eichhoff pays high tribute to Marx for his role in establishing and directing the International, and in drawing up its programmatic-documents. The pamphlet contains the texts of a few of the most important ones, notably the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Rules. Eichhoff’s pamphlet made an important contribution to the spread and propagation of the ideas of the First International, and to its struggle against trends that were hostile to Marxism. It was a dependable source for later works on the history of the First International.

* * *

The present volume contains 54 works of Marx and Engels, eight of which are appearing in English for the first time, including Marx’s address “To the President and Executive Committee of the General Association of German Workers” and “Statement to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London”, and Engels’ article “Karl Marx” and the plan of the second chapter of his History of Ireland. Among Appendices three documents appear in English for the first time.

In cases where documents of the International written by Marx or with his collaboration have reached us in more or less authentic versions in several languages, their publication in this volume is based on the English-language source, whether handwritten or printed. Any discrepancies in content or sense from sources in other languages are given in footnotes.

All the texts have been translated from the German except where otherwise stated. Headings supplied by the editors where none existed in the original are given in square brackets. Asterisks indicate footnotes by the author; editors’ footnotes are indicated by index letters.

Misprints found in quotations, proper names, place names, figures, dates, and so on, have been checked and corrected with reference to the sources used by Marx and Engels. All known literary and documentary sources used by them are cited in footnotes and in the index of quoted and mentioned literature. Words written in English in the original are given in small caps.

The volume was compiled and the preface written by Marina Doroshenko and Valentina Ostrikova (Institute of MarxismLeninism of the CC CPSU). The documents of the First International in the main part of the volume, Marx’s “Remarks on the Programme and Rules of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy” and the documents on the history of the First International in the Appendices, were prepared by Valentina Ostrikova, who also wrote the relevant notes. The index of quoted and mentioned literature to these documents is by Valentina Ostrikova, who was assisted by Yuri Vasin.

The basic works of Marx and Engels on the history of Ireland (Engels’ History of Ireland and the section “From the Preparatory Materials”), all of Jenny Marx’s articles on the Irish question (in the Appendices), and the relevant notes and bibliography were compiled by Marina Doroshenko.

The text of Wilhelm Eichhoff’s pamphlet, The International Working Men’s Association (in the Appendices), and the notes and bibliography for it, were prepared by Yuri Vasin.

The name index and the index of periodicals are by Yuri Vasin in collaboration with Yelena Kofanova, the subject index is by Vasily Kuznetsov, and the editor of the volume is Tatyana Yeremeyeva (all from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The English translations were made by Barrie Selman and Joan and Trevor Walmsley (Lawrence and Wishart), Kate Cook and Vic Schneierson (Progress Publishers), and edited by Nicholas Jacobs (Lawrence and Wishart), Lydia Belyakova, Victor Schnittke and Yelena Vorotnikova (Progress Publishers), and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The volume was prepared for the press by Lydia Belyakova, Anna Vladimirova and assistant editor Natalia Kim (Progress Publishers).