Cover of the pamphlet containing the speeches " On the Polish Question" by Marx and Engels
And the political questions which have been debated for the last seventeen years, are these not basically social questions?
Thus, however you look at it, whether from a liberal, radical, even aristocratic point of view, could you still reproach the Cracow revolution with having joined a social question to a political question?
The men who led the Cracow revolutionary movement were deeply convinced that only a democratic Poland could be independent, and a democratic Poland was impossible without the abolition of feudal rights, without the agrarian movement which would transform the tied peasants into free proprietors, modern proprietors. Replace the Russian autocrat by Polish aristocrats and you will have given despotism naturalisation papers. It was thus that the Germans, in their war against foreign rule, exchanged one Napoleon for thirty-six Metternichs.[307]
If the Polish lord no longer has a Russian lord over him, the Polish peasant will still have a lord over him, but a free lord in place of a slave lord. This political change will have altered nothing in his social position.
The Cracow revolution has given a glorious example to the whole of Europe, by identifying the national cause with the democratic cause and the emancipation of the oppressed class.
If this revolution has been stifled for the moment by the bloody hands of hired assassins it is now rising gloriously and triumphantly in Switzerland and Italy. It sees the confirmation of these principles in Ireland, where the narrowly nationalist party has gone to its grave with O'Connell, and where the new national party is above all reforming and democratic.[308]
It is Poland once again which has taken the initiative, no longer feudal Poland, but democratic Poland; and from this moment its emancipation has become the point of honour for all the democrats of Europe.
Endnotes
[307] An allusion to the results of the liberation war of 1813-15 against Napoleon's rule. The victory was taken advantage of by the aristocracy and nobility of the German states to help preserve the political fragmentation of Germany (see Note 26).
[308] The reference is to the Irish Confederation founded in January 1847 by the radical and democratic elements in the Irish national movement who had broken away Young Ireland group which was formed in 1842 by the Irish bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals. The Left, revolutionary wing of the Irish Confederation advocated a people's uprising against English rule and tried to combine the struggle for Irish independence with the campaign for democratic reforms. The Irish Confederation ceased to exist in the summer of 1848 after the English authorities crushed the uprising in Ireland.