57. K. Marx and F. Engels. On the Polish Question
SPEECHES IN BRUSSELS, ON FEBRUARY 22, 1848
ON THE OCCASION OF THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY
[301] OF THE CRACOW INSURRECTION
Speech by Mr. Karl Marx
Gentlemen,
There are striking analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793 has become the Communist of the present day. In 1793, when Russia, Austria and Prussia divided up Poland, the three powers produced the constitution of 1791,[302] which had been condemned unanimously because of its alleged Jacobin principles.
And what had it proclaimed? The Polish constitution of 1791! Nothing other than a constitutional monarchy: legislation placed in the hands of the representatives of the country, freedom of the press, ireedom of conscience, public judicial trial, abolition of serfdom, etc. And all this was then called pure Jacobinism! Thus you see, gentlemen, that history has moved on. The Jacobinism of those days has today become, as far as liberalism goes, the most moderate imaginable.
The three Powers have marched with history. In 1846 when by incorporating Cracow into Austria they confiscated the last remains of Polish nationality, they gave the name communism to what they once called Jacobinism.
Now, what is the communism of the Cracow revolution? Was it communism to have wanted to restore Polish nationality? This is as much as to say that the war waged against Napoleon by the European coalition to save nationalities was a communist war, and that the Congress of Vienna[303] was made up of crowned Communists. Or was the Cracow revolution communist because it wanted to set up a democratic government? Nobody will charge the millionaire citizens of Berne and New York with communist leanings.
Communism denies the necessity for the existence of classes; it wants to abolish all classes, all class distinctions. The revolutionaries of Cracow wanted only to abolish political distinctions between the classes; they wanted to give equal rights to the different classes.
But, briefly, to what extent was the Cracow revolution communist? Was it perhaps that it tried to break the chains of feudalism, to turn tributary property into free property, into modern property?
If one asked French proprietors: "Do you know what Polish democrats want? The Polish democrats want to have the kind of property ownership which you already have", the French proprietors would answer, "They are quite right." But if you say, with M. Guizot, to the French proprietors: "The Poles want to abolish property as you instituted it by the revolution of 1789 and as it still exists in your country." "What!" they will shout, "they are revolutionaries, Communists; these scoundrels must be trampled down!" The abolition of guilds, of corporations, the introduction of free competition, is now called communism in Sweden. The Journal des Débats went further: to abolish the unearned income constituted by the right of corruption for two hundred thousand electors, is to abolish a source of revenue, to destroy an acquired property, to be communist. Doubtless the Cracow revolution also wanted to abolish one kind of property. But what kind of property? One which could not be destroyed in the rest of Europe any more than the Sonderbund[304] in Switzerland, both having already disappeared.
No one will deny that in Poland the political question is tied to the social question. The one has always been inseparable from the other.
Better ask it of the reactionaries! During the Restoration[305] were they only fighting political liberalism and its inevitable load of Voltairianism?
A very renowned reactionary writer loudly professed that the highest metaphysics of a de Maistre and of a de Bonald was in the end a question of money, and is not every question of money a directly social question? The men of the Restoration did not conceal the fact that to bring back good politics it was necessary to bring back good property rights, feudal property, moral property. Everybody knows that loyalty to monarchy cannot dispense with tithes and corvée labour.
Let us go further back. In 1789 the political question of the rights of man included the social question of free competition.
And what then happened in England? In all questions from the Reform Bill until the abolition of the Corn Laws,[306] did the political parties fight about anything except changes in property rights, questions of property, social questions?
Here, in Belgium itself, is the struggle of liberalism with Catholicism anything but the struggle of industrial capital with large landed property?
DU DEUXIEME ANNIVERSAIRE
RÉVOLUTION POLONAISE
du 22 février 1846.
t0C0urs
mOKOKCES
PAS MM, A. J. SENAULT, KARL MARX, LELEWEL, F. ENGELS
ET LOUIS LUBL1NER, AVOCAT.
BRUXELLES.
C. G. VOGLER, LIBRAIRE-EDITEUR.
1 8 4 8
Endnotes
[301] The report on the meeting in Brussels to mark the second anniversary of the Cracow uprising (see Note 55) was published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on February 24, 1848 (see this volume, p. 644). After the meeting a pamphlet in French was issued, containing the reports of the main speakers. The letters of C. G. Vogler, a German publisher in Brussels, member of the Communist League, to Marx, who on March 5, 1848 moved to Paris after his expulsion from Belgium, show that Marx and Engels took a direct part in the publication of this pamphlet. It came out about March 15, 1848 under the title: "Celebration, à Bruxelles, du deuxième anniversaire de la Révolution Polonaise du 22 février 1846.— Discours prononcés par MM. A. J. Senault, Karl Marx, Lelewel, F. Engels et Louis Lubliner, Avocat, Bruxelles, C. G. Vogler, Libraire-Editeur, 1848." The pamphlet was prefaced with the following short introductory note (possibly written by Marx or Engels): "Together with the Polish democrats, the Brussels Democratic Association consisting of representatives of various nations celebrated at a public meeting the and the public most enthusiastically expressed its sympathy for the event. "Unfortunately, we were unable to reproduce the ardent speeches in Flemish made by two workers, MM. Kats and Pellering. M. Wallau, President of the German Workers' Society in Brussels, himself a working man, spoke in German. His extemporaneous and highly enthusiastic speech testified that the German workers fully share the sentiments of their brothers in France and in England. "The speeches are given here in the order they were made. They are preceded by the Manifesto of the Provisional Government formed in Cracow on February 22, 1846." Extracts from Marx's speech were first published in English in the journal Labour Monthly, February 1948, and in the collection, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.
[302] The reference is to the constitution of May 3, 1791 adopted by the Four Years'Diet (1788-92). "The Party of Patriots" which constituted a majority in the Diet strove, through a new constitution and reforms, to undermine the rule of feudal anarchy and the domination of the magnates, to strengthen the Polish state (demands to establish a hereditary constitutional monarchy, to abolish the right of every deputy of the nobility to veto the décisions of the Diet) and also to adapt the feudal system to the needs of bourgeois development (the demand to extend the rights of the urban population, and recognise a moderate form of certain bourgeois freedoms). The constitution preserved serfdom, but gave the peasants a certain opportunity to establish state-guaranteed contractual relations with the landowners. The constitution was opposed by the big land magnates, on whose call Prussia and Russia occupied Poland in 1793 and partitioned it for the second time (it was first partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria in 1772). After the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1794 (the insurgents aimed at restoring the 1791 constitution), the Polish state ceased to exist in 1795 as a result of the third partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and tsarist Russia.
[303] The Congress of Vienna (September 1814-June 1815) composed of European monarchs and their ministers established, after the war of the European powers against Napoleonic France, a system of general treaties embracing the whole of Europe (with the exception of Turkey). The Congress decisions helped to restore feudal order and a number of former dynasties in the states previously conquered by Napoleon, sanctioned the political fragmentation of Germany and Italy, the incorporation of Belgium into Holland and the partition of Poland and outlined repressive measures to be taken against the revolutionary movement.
[304] See Note 172.
[305] See Note 72.
[306] On the Reform Bill of 1832 in England—see Note 33; on the abolition of the Corn Laws—see Note 28.