Speeches on Poland (2)

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Engels’ Speech

Gentlemen,

The insurrection whose anniversary we are celebrating today has failed. After some days of heroic resistance Cracow fell and the bleeding ghost of Poland, which had risen for a moment before the eyes of its assassins, descended again into its grave.

The Cracow revolution was a defeat, a very deplorable defeat. Let us render the last honours to the fallen heroes, lament their setback and offer our sympathy to the twenty million Polish people whom this failure has again enchained.

But, gentlemen, is that all we have to do? Is it enough to shed a tear on the tomb of an unhappy country and to pledge against its oppressors an implacable hatred, till now not very potent?

No, gentlemen! The anniversary of Cracow is not only a day of mourning, it is a day of rejoicing for us other democrats; for the defeat itself contains a victory, a victory whose fruits are ours to gather, while the results of the defeat are only transitory.

This victory is the victory of young democratic Poland over the old aristocratic Poland.

Yes, the latest struggle of Poland against its foreign oppressors has been preceded by a hidden struggle, concealed but decisive within Poland itself, a struggle of oppressed Poles against Polish oppressors, a struggle of democracy against the Polish aristocracy.

Compare 1830 and 1846, compare Warsaw and Cracow. In 1830 the ruling class in Poland was as selfish, narrow-minded and cowardly in the legislative body as it was devoted, enthusiastic and courageous on the field of battle.

What did the Polish aristocracy want in 1830? To safeguard its own acquired rights with regard to the Emperor [Nicholas I]. It limited the insurrection to the little country which the Congress of Vienna was pleased to call the Kingdom of Poland ; it restrained the uprising in the other Polish provinces; it left intact the degrading serfdom of the peasants and the infamous condition of the Jews. If the aristocracy, in the course of the insurrection, had to make concessions to the people, it only made them when it was too late, when the insurrection had failed.

Let it be said clearly: the insurrection of 1830 was neither a national revolution (it excluded three-quarters of Poland) nor a social or a political revolution; it changed nothing in the internal condition of the people; it was a conservative revolution.

But within the conservative revolution, within the national government itself, there was one man who vigorously attacked the narrow views of the ruling class. He proposed really revolutionary measures before whose boldness the aristocrats of the Diet recoiled. By calling the whole of ancient Poland to arms, by thus making the war for Polish independence a European war, by emancipating the Jews and the peasants, by making the latter share in landed property, by reconstructing Poland on the basis of democracy and equality, he wanted to make the national cause the cause of freedom; he wanted to identify the interest of all peoples with that of the Polish people. Need I name the genius who conceived this plan, at once so vast and so simple? It was Lelewel.

In 1830, these proposals were continually rejected by the blind self-interest of the aristocratic majority. But these principles, ripened and developed by the experience of fifteen years of servitude, we saw inscribed on the flag of the Cracow uprising. At Cracow, it was clearly seen that there were no longer men who had much to lose; there were no aristocrats; every step that was taken bore the stamp of that democratic, I might almost say proletarian, boldness which has only its misery to lose and a whole country, a whole world, to gain. There, no hesitation, no scruples; the three foreign powers were attacked together; the freeing of the peasants, agrarian reform, the emancipation of the Jews were proclaimed, without caring for a moment whether this offended certain aristocratic interests.

The Cracow revolution wanted neither to re-establish ancient Poland nor to preserve what the foreign governments had let remain of the old Polish institutions; it was neither reactionary nor conservative.

No, it was even more hostile to Poland itself than to its foreign oppressors, hostile to the ancient Poland, barbarous, feudal and aristocratic, based on the serfdom of the majority of the people. Far from wanting to re-establish the ancient Poland, it aimed to overthrow it utterly, and to found on its ruins, with a wholly new class, with the majority of the people, a new Poland, modern, civilised and democratic, worthy of the nineteenth century, and which might be really the outpost of civilisation.

The difference between 1830 and 1846, the immense progress made within unhappy Poland itself, bleeding and torn; the Polish aristocracy completely separated from the Polish people and thrown into the arms of the oppressors of its country; the Polish people irrevocably committed to the democratic cause; and finally the class struggle, the motive force of all social progress, established in Poland as here, that is the victory of democracy proved by the Cracow revolution, that is the result which will bear fruit when the defeat of the insurgents has been avenged.

Yes, gentlemen, by the Cracow insurrection the Polish cause, from being national, as it was, has become the cause of all peoples; from a question of sympathy, as it was, it has become a question of interest of all democrats. Until 1846 we had a crime to avenge; henceforth we have allies to support, and we shall do it.

And it is above all our Germany which ought to congratulate itself on this explosion of democratic passion in Poland. We are, ourselves, on the eve of a democratic revolution; we shall have to fight barbarian hordes from Austria and Russia. Before 1846 we might have had doubts as to what side Poland would take if there were a democratic revolution in Germany. The Cracow revolution has removed all doubts. Henceforth the German people and the Polish people are irrevocably allied. We have the same enemies, the same oppressors, for the Russian government weighs on us as much as on the Poles. The first condition for the deliverance both of Germany and of Poland is the overturning of the present political state in Germany, the downfall of Prussia and Austria, the driving back of Russia beyond the Dniester and the Dvina.

The alliance of the two nations is therefore not by any means a beautiful dream, a charming illusion; no, gentlemen, it is an inevitable necessity resulting from the common interests of the two nations, and it has become necessary through the Cracow revolution. The German people, which until now had little of its own except words, will now have deeds to offer its Polish brothers; and just as we German democrats present here clasp hands with the Polish democrats, so the whole German people will celebrate its alliance with the Polish people on the very field of the first battle won in common over our common oppressors.

Marx’s Speech

Speech delivered in French, commemorating 2nd anniversary of Krakow Uprising

Brussels, February 22, 1848

Gentlemen:

There are striking analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793 has become the communist of our day. When Russia, Austria, and Prussia partitioned Poland among themselves in 1793, the three powers relied on the Constitution of 1791 which they had unanimously condemned for its alleged Jacobin principles.

And what did that Polish Constitution of 1791 proclaim? Nothing but a constitutional monarchy: legislative power in the hands of the representatives of the country; freedom of the press; freedom of conscience; open court proceedings; abolition of serfdom, etc. And all that was then called Jacobinism! Thus, gentlemen, you see that history was moved forward. What was then Jacobinism has today become liberalism, and in its most moderate form at that.

The three powers marched with history. In 1846, when they incorporated Krakow into Austria and robbed the Poles of their last vestige of independence, they designated as communism what had previously been called Jacobinism.

But, what did did the communism of the Krakow revolution consist of? Was it communist because it wanted to restore the Polish nationality? One could as well say that the war which the European Coalition waged against Napoleon was communistic and that the Congress of Vienna [1815] was made up of crowned communists. Or was the Krakow revolution communistic because it wanted to install a democratic government? Nobody would accuse the millions of citizens of Bern and New York of communistic impulses.

Communism denies the necessity of the existence of classes; it wants to abolish all classes, all class distinctions. The Krakow revolution wanted to extirpate only the political distinctions among classes, it wanted to give equal rights to all classes.

So, in what respect, finally, was this Krakow revolution communistic?

Perchance because it wanted to break the chains of feudalism, to liberate property from feudal obligations and to transform it into modern property?

If one asked French property owners, “Do you know what the Polish democrats want? The Polish democrats want to introduce in their country the form of property that exists among you,” the French property owner would answer, “That is very good.” But if one says to the French property owner, as Guizot did, “The Poles want to abolish the form of property you established by your Revolution of 1789 and which still exists among you,” then they exclaim, “What! They are all revolutionists, communists! The scoundrels should be destroyed” The abolition of corporations and guilds, and the introduction of free competition – this is now called communism in Sweden. The [Paris daily] Journal des Debats [Politiques et Litteraires] goes even further: the abolition of revenues guaranteed to 200,000 voters by corrupt law as a source of income, which the Journal considers rightfully acquired property, this it calls communism. Undoubtedly the Krakow revolution wanted to abolish a certain kind of property. But what kind of property? The kind that in the rest of Europe can no more be abolished than the Swiss Sonderbund [federation] – because neither one exists any more.

Nobody will deny that in Poland the political question is tied up with the social one. For a long time they have been inseparable from each other.

Just ask the reactionaries about it! Did they fight during the Restoration purely against political liberalism and the Voltaireanism that was necessarily dragged along with it?

A very famous reactionary author has openly admitted that the loftiest metaphysics of a de Maistre and a de Bonald reduces itself in the last analysis to a money question – and is not every money question directly a social question? The men of the Restoration did not conceal the fact that in order to return to the policies of the good old days one must restore the good old property, the feudal property and the moral property. Everybody knows that fealty to the monarch is unthinkable without tithes and socages.

Let us go back further. In 1789, the political question of human rights absorbed in itself the social rights of free competition.

And what is it all about in England? Did the political parties there, in all questions, from the Reform Bill [June 7, 1830] to the abolition of the Corn Laws [June, 1846], fight for anything other than changes of property, questions of property, social questions?

Here in Belgium itself, is the struggle between liberalism and Catholicism anything else than a struggle between industrial capital and big landownership?

And the political questions that have been debated for 17 years, are they not at bottom social questions?

Thus no matter what position one takes – be it liberal or radical or conservative – nobody can reproach the Krakow revolution with having entangled a social question with a political one!

The men at the head of the revolutionary movement in Krakow were most deeply convinced that only a democratic Poland could be independent, and that a Polish democracy was impossible without an abolition of feudal rights, without an agrarian movement that would transform the feudally obligated peasants into modern owners. Put Russian autocrats over Polish aristocrats; thereby you have merely naturalized the despotism. In exactly the same way, in their war against foreign rule, the Germans have exchanged one Napoleon for 36 Metternichs.

If the Polish feudal lord no longer has a Russian feudal lord over him, the Polish peasant has not a less feudal lord over him – indeed, a free, in place of an enslaved, lord. The political change has changed nothing in the peasant's social position.

The Krakow revolution has set all of Europe a glorious example, because it identified the question of nationalism with democracy and with the liberation of the oppressed class.

Even though this revolution has been strangled with the bloody hands of paid murderers, it now nevertheless rises gloriously and triumphantly in Switzerland and in Italy. It finds its principles confirmed in Ireland, where O'Connell's party [the Irish Confederation, founded January 1847] with its narrowly restricted nationalistic aims has sunk into the grave, and the new national party is pledged above all to reform and democracy.

Again it is Poland that has seized the initiative, and no longer a feudal Poland but a democratic Poland; and from this point on its liberation has become a matter of honor for all the democrats of Europe.