THE CENTRAL AUTHORITY TO THE LEAGUE
Brothers!
In the two revolutionary years 1848-49 the League proved itself in double fashion: first, in that its members energetically took part in the movement in all places, that in the press, on the barricades and on the battlefields, they stood in the front ranks of the only resolutely revolutionary class, the proletariat. The League further proved itself in that its conception of the movement as laid down in the circulars of the congresses and of the Central Authority of 1847 as well as in the Communist Manifesto(1) turned out to be the only correct one, that the expectations expressed in those documents were completely fulfilled and the conception of present-day social conditions, previously propagated only in secret by the League, is now on everyone's lips and is openly preached in the market places. At the same time the former firm organisation of the League was considerably slackened. A large part of the members who directly participated in the revolutionary movement believed the time for secret societies to have gone by and open activities alone to be sufficient. The individual districts and communities allowed their connections with the Central Authority to become loose and gradually dormant. Consequendy, while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, organised itself more and more in Germany, the workers' party lost its only firm foothold, remained organised at the most in separate localities for local purposes and in the general movement thus came completely under the domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats. An end must be put to this state of affairs, the independence of the workers must be restored. The Central Authority realised this necessity and therefore as early as the winter of 1848-49 it sent an emissary, Joseph Moll, to Germany to reorganise the League. Moll's mission, however, was without lasting effect, partly because the German workers at that time had not yet acquired sufficient experience and partly because it was interrupted by the insurrection in May last year. Moll himself took up the musket, joined the Baden-Palatinate army and fell on June 29a in the encounter on the Murg. The League lost in him one of its oldest, most active and most trustworthy members, one who had been active in all the congresses and Central Authorities and even prior to this had carried out a series of missions with great success. After the defeat of the revolutionary parties of Germany and France in July 1849, almost all the members of the Central Authority came together again in London, replenished their numbers with new revolutionary forces and set about the reorganisation of the League with renewed zeal.
The reorganisation can only be carried out by an emissary, and the Central Authority considers it extremely important that the emis-saryb should leave precisely at this moment when a new revolution is impending, when the workers' party, therefore, must act in the most organised, most unanimous and most independent fashion possible if it is not again to be exploited and taken in tow by the bourgeoisie as in 1848.
Brothers! We told you as early as 1848 that the German liberal bourgeois would soon come to power and would immediately turn their newly acquired power against the workers. You have seen how this has been fulfilled. In fact, it was the bourgeois who, immediately after the March movement of 1848, took possession of the state power and used this power in order at once to force the workers, their allies in the struggle, back into their former oppressed position. Though the bourgeoisie was not able to accomplish this without uniting with the feudal party, which had been ousted in March, without finally even relinquishing power once again to this feudal absolutist party, still it has secured conditions for itself which, in the long run, owing to the financial embarrassment of the government, would place power in its hands and would safeguard all its interests, if it were possible that the revolutionary movement would already now assume a so-called peaceful development. To safeguard its rule the bourgeoisie would not even need to make itself obnoxious by violent measures against the people, since all these violent steps have already been taken by the feudal counter-revolution. Developments, however, will not take this peaceful course. On the contrary, the revolution, which will accelerate these developments, is near at hand, whether it will be called forth by an independent uprising of the French proletariat or by an invasion of the Holy Alliance against the revolutionary Babylon.
And the role which the German liberal bourgeois played in 1848 against the people, this so treacherous role will be taken over in the impending revolution by the democratic petty bourgeois, who at present take the same attitude in the opposition as the liberal bourgeois before 1848. This party, the democratic party, which is far more dangerous to the workers than the previous liberal party, consists of three elements:
I. The most advanced sections of the big bourgeoisie, which pursue the aim of the immediate and complete overthrow of feudalism and absolutism. This faction is represented by the one-time Berlin agreers, the tax resisters.[221]
II. The democratic-constitutional petty bourgeois, whose main aim during the previous movement was the establishment of a more or less democratic federal state as striven for by their representatives, the Lefts in the Frankfurt Assembly, and later by the Stuttgart parliament,[222] and by themselves in the campaign for the Imperial Constitution.
III. The republican petty bourgeois, whose ideal is a German federative republic after the manner of Switzerland, and who now call themselves red and social-democratic because they cherish the pious wish of abolishing the pressure of big capital on small capital, of the big bourgeois on the petty bourgeois. The representatives of this faction were the members of the democratic congresses and committees, the leaders of the democratic associations, the editors of the democratic newspapers.
Now, after their defeat, all these factions call themselves republicans or reds, just as the republican petty bourgeois in France now call themselves socialists. Where, as in Württemberg, Bavaria, etc., they still find opportunity to pursue their aims constitutionally, they seize the occasion to retain their old phrases and to prove by deeds that they have not changed in the least. It is evident, incidentally, that the altered name of this party does not make the slightest difference to its attitude to the workers, but merely proves that it is now obliged to turn against the bourgeoisie, which is united with absolutism, and to seek the support of the proletariat.
The petty-bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very powerful; it comprises not only the great majority of the burgher inhabitants of the towns, the small people in industry and trade and the master craftsmen; it numbers among its followers also the peasants and the rural proletariat, insofar as the latter has not yet found a support in the independent urban proletariat.
The relation of the revolutionary workers' party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it marches together with them against the faction which it aims at overthrowing, it opposes them in everything by which they seek to consolidate their position in their own interests.
Far from desiring to transform the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in social conditions by means of which the existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for them. Hence they demand above all a diminution of state expenditure by curtailing the bureaucracy and shifting the bulk of the taxes on to the big landowners and bourgeois. Further, they demand the abolition of the pressure of big capital on small, through public credit institutions and laws against usury, by which means it will be possible for them and the peasants to obtain advances on favourable conditions from the state instead of from the capitalists; they also demand the establishment of bourgeois property relations in the countryside by the complete abolition of feudalism. To accomplish all this they need a democratic state structure, either constitutional or republican, that will give them and their allies, the peasants, a majority; also a democratic communal structure that will give them direct control over communal property, and a number of functions now performed by the bureaucrats.
The domination and speedy increase of capital is further to be counteracted partly by restricting the right of inheritance and partly by transferring as many jobs of work as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned, it is certain above all that they are to remain wage-workers as before; the democratic petty bourgeois only desire better wages and a more secure existence for the workers and hope to achieve this through partial employment by the state and through charity measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers by more or less concealed alms and to sap their revolutionary vigour by making their position tolerable for the moment. The demands of the petty-bourgeois democrats here summarised are not put forward by all of their factions and only very few of their members consider these demands in their aggregate as a definite aim. The further individual people or factions among them go, the more of these demands will they make their own, and those few who see their own programme in what has been outlined above would believe that thereby they have put forward the utmost that can be demanded from the revolution. But these demands can in no wise suffice for the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one. That, during the further development of the revolution, petty-bourgeois democracy will for a moment obtain predominating influence in Germany is not open to doubt. The question, therefore, is what the attitude of the proletariat and in particular of the League will be in relation to it:
1. during the continuance of the present relations, under which the petty-bourgeois democrats are likewise oppressed;
2. in the next revolutionary struggle, which will give them the upper hand;
3. after this struggle, during the period of preponderance over the overthrown classes and the proletariat.
1. At the present moment, when the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach in general unity and reconciliation to the proletariat, they offer it their hand and strive for the establishment of a large opposition party which will embrace all shades of opinion in the democratic party, that is, they strive to entangle the workers in a party organisation in which general social-democratic phrases predominate, and serve to conceal their special interests, and in which the definite demands of the proletariat must not be brought forward for the sake of beloved peace. Such a union would turn out solely to their advantage and altogether to the disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose its whole independent, laboriously achieved position and once more be reduced to an appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This union must, therefore, be most decisively rejected. Instead of once again stooping to serve as the applauding chorus of the bourgeois democrats, the workers, and above all the League, must exert themselves to establish an independent secret and public organisation of the workers' party alongside the official democrats and make each community the central point and nucleus of workers' associations in which the attitude and interests of the proletariat will be discussed independently of bourgeois influences. How far the bourgeois democrats are from seriously considering an alliance in which the proletarians would stand side by side with them with equal power and equal rights is shown, for example, by the Breslau democrats who, in their organ, the Neue Oder-Zeitung, most furiously attack the independently organised workers, whom they style socialists. In the case of a struggle against a common adversary no special union is required. As soon as such an adversary has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties, for the moment, coincide, and, as previously so also in the future, this alliance, calculated to last only for the moment, will come about of itself. It is self-evident that in the impending bloody conflicts, as in all earlier ones, it is the workers who, in the main, will have to win the victory by their courage, determination and self-sacrifice. As previously so also in this struggle, the mass of the petty bourgeois will as long as possible remain hesitant, undecided and inactive, and then, as soon as the issue has been decided, will seize the victory for themselves, will call upon the workers to maintain tranquillity and return to their work, will guard against so-called excesses and bar the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It is not in the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this, but it is in their power to make it difficult for them to gain the upper hand as against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats will from the outset bear within it the seeds of its downfall, and that its subsequent extrusion by the rule of the proletariat will be considerably facilitated. Above all things, the workers must counteract, as much as is at all possible, during the conflict and immediately after the struggle, the bourgeois endeavours to allay the storm, and must compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. They must work to prevent the direct revolutionary excitement from being suppressed again immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible. Far from opposing so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associated only with hateful recollections, such instances must not only be tolerated but the lead in them must be taken. During the struggle and after the struggle, the workers must, at every opportunity, put forward their own demands alongside the demands of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeois set about taking the government into their hands. If necessary they must wring these guarantees by force and in general they must see to it that the new rulers pledge themselves to all possible concessions and promises — the surest way to compromise them. In general, they must in every way restrain as far as possible the intoxication of victory and the enthusiasm for the new state of things which follows every victorious street battle by a calm and dispassionate assess-ment of the situation and by unconcealed mistrust in the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must immediately establish their own revolutionary workers' governments, whether in the form of municipal committees and municipal councils or in the form of workers' clubs or workers' committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but from the outset see themselves supervised and threatened by authorities backed by the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the first moment of victory, mistrust must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party, but against the workers' previous allies, against the party that wishes to exploit the common victory for itself alone.
2. But in order to be able energetically 'and threateningly to oppose this party, whose treachery to the workers will begin from the first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organised. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and ammunition must be carried out at once, the revival of the old civic militia directed against the workers must be resisted. However, where the latter is not feasible the workers must try to organise themselves independently as a proletarian guard with commanders elected by themselves and with a general staff of their own choosing, and to put themselves under the command not of the state authority but of the revolutionary municipal councils set up by the workers. Where workers are employed at the expense of the state they must see that they are armed and organised in a separate corps with commanders of their own choosing or as part of the proletarian guard. Arms and ammunition must not be surrendered on any pretext; any attempt at disarming must be frustrated, if necessary, by force. Destruction of the influence of the bourgeois democrats upon the workers, immediate independent and armed organisation of the workers and the enforcement of conditions as difficult and compromising as possible for the inevitable momentary rule of bourgeois democracy — these are the main points which the proletariat and hence the League must keep in view during and after the impending insurrection.
3. As soon as the new governments have consolidated their positions to some extent, their struggle against the workers will begin. Here in order to be able to offer energetic opposition to the democratic petty bourgeois, it is above all necessary for the workers to be independently organised and centralised in clubs. After the overthrow of the existing governments, the Central Authority will, as soon as at all possible, betake itself to Germany, immediately convene a congress and put before it the necessary proposals for the centralisation of the workers' clubs under a leadership established in the chief seat of the movement. The speedy organisation of at least a provincial association of the workers' clubs is one of the most important points for strengthening and developing the workers' party; the immediate consequence of the overthrow of the existing governments will be the election of a national representative assembly. Here the proletariat must see to it:
I. that no groups of workers are barred on any pretext by any kind of trickery on the part of local authorities or government commissaries;
II. that everywhere workers' candidates are put up alongside the bourgeois-democratic candidates, that they are as far as possible members of the League, and that their election is promoted by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to lay before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be bribed by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and giving the reactionaries the possibility of victory. The ultimate purpose of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is infinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. If from the outset the democrats come out resolutely and terroristically against the reactionaries, the influence of the latter in the elections will be destroyed in advance.
The first point on which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism. As in the first French Revolution, the petty bourgeois will give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property, that is to say, try to leave the rural proletariat in existence and form a petty-bourgeois peasant class, which will go through the same cycle of impoverishment and indebtedness which the French peasant is now still caught in.
The workers must oppose this plan in the interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest. They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remain state property and be converted into workers' colonies cultivated by the associated rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale agriculture, through which the principle of common property immediately obtains a firm basis in the midst of the tottering bourgeois property relations. Just as the democrats combine with the peasants so must the workers combine with the rural proletariat.[223] further, the democrats will work either directly for a federative republic or, if they cannot avoid a single and indivisible republic, they will at least attempt to cripple the central government by the utmost possible autonomy and independence for the communities and provinces. The workers, in opposition to this plan, must not only strive for a single and indivisible German republic, but also within , this republic for the most determined centralisation of power iri the hands of the state authority. They must not allow themselves to be misguided by the democratic talk of freedom for the communities, of self-government, etc. In a country like Germany, where there are still so many remnants of the Middle Ages to be abolished, where there is so much local and provincial obstinacy to be broken, it must under no circumstances be permitted that every village, every town and every province should put a new obstacle in the path of revolutionary activity, which can proceed with full force only from the centre.— It is not to be tolerated that the present state of affairs should be renewed, that Germans must fight separately in every town and in every province for one and the same advance. Least of all is it to be tolerated that a form of property which still lags behind modern private property and everywhere is necessarily disintegrating into it — that communal property with the quarrels between poor and rich communities resulting from it, as well as communal civil law, with its trickery against the workers, which exists alongside state civil law, should be perpetuated by a so-called free communal constitution. As in France in 1793 so today in Germany, it is the task of the really revolutionary party to carry through the strictest centralisation.* We have seen how the democrats will come to power with the next movement, how they will be compelled to propose more or less socialist measures. It will be asked what measures the workers ought to propose in reply. At the beginning of the movement, of course, the workers cannot yet propose any directly communist measures. But they can:
1. Compel the democrats to interfere in as many spheres as possible of the hitherto existing social order, to disturb its regular course and to compromise themselves as well as to concentrate the utmost possible productive forces, means of transport, factories, railways, etc., in the hands of the state.
2. They must carry to the extreme the proposals of the democrats, who in any case will not act in a revolutionary but in a merely reformist manner, and transform them into direct attacks upon private property; thus, for example, if the petty bourgeois propose purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories should be simply confiscated by the state without compensation as being the property of reactionaries. If the democrats propose proportional taxation, the workers must demand progressive taxation; if the democrats themselves put forward a moderately progressive taxation, the workers must insist on a taxation with rates that rise so steeply that big capital will be ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of state debts, the workers must demand state bankruptcy. Thus, the demands of the workers must everywhere be governed by the concessions and measures of the democrats.
If the German workers are not able to attain power and achieve their own class interests without completely going through a lengthy revolutionary development, they at least know for a certainty this time that the first act of this approaching revolutionary drama will
federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will be very much accelerated by it.
But they themselves must do the utmost for their final victory by making it clear to themselves what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be misled for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois into re-fraining from the independent organisation of the party of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence.
London, March 1850
Written about March 24, 1850
Distributed in handwritten copies in 1850
Published by Engels in the appendices to the book: Karl Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln, Hottingen-Zurich, 1885
Endnotes
[220] T h e Address of the Central Authority to the League contained fundamental propositions of the Marxist programme and tactics. It played an important part in restoring and reorganising the Communist League after the defeat of the 1848-49 revolution, as a result of which the activities of the League had fallen off, the ties between its members had weakened and many of its communities and district branches had fallen apart. The Address contained detailed instructions for the emissaries of the Central Authority, which had been reconstituted by Marx, and for local League leaders in their work in restoring the League. The Address was written by Marx and Engels at the end of March (not later than the 24th) and unanimously approved by Central Authority members in London. According to recent findings, the Address reached a fairly wide circle of League members. At the end of March, Heinrich Bauer, Central Authority emissary, brought a manuscript copy to Cologne; later the document was secretly circulated in handwritten form in Germany, Switzerland and other countries. The Prussian police seized a number of copies from League members and in 1851 the Address was printed in a number of German newspapers, in particular in the Dresdner Journal und Anzeiger No. 177, June 28, the Allgemeiner Polizei-Anzeiger (special supplement) No. 52, Dresden, June 30, the Kölnische ZeitungNo. 156, July 1 and the Schwäbischer Merkur No. 158, July 4, and also in the Hungarian-language Magyar Hirlup, published in Pest (Nos. 503 and 504, July 8 and 9). During the trial of Communists in Cologne, the Address, together with other Communist League documents, was reprinted in the Bill of Indictment (put out as a separate edition under the title Anklageschrift gegen 1) P. G. Roeser, 2) J. H.G.Bürgers... [Köln, 1852]) and published in several newspapers. Later it appeared in the book by the two police officials Wermuth and Stieber, Die Communisten-Verschwörungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Th. 1, Berlin, 1853, which had been compiled for the purpose of compromising the Communist League. The first authoritative edition of the Address came out in 1885, when Engels appended it to the German edition of Marx's Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne (Karl Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln, Hottingen-Zürich, 1885). Engels reviewed the text published in the book by Wermuth and Stieber, and supplied it with a footnote. The present publication is based on the 1885 edition. The Address was first published in English in The Marxian, New York, 1921, Vol. 1, No. 2, and was later printed in Labour Monthly, London, 1922, Vol. 3, No. 3.
[221] The agreers was the name given by Marx and Engels to the liberal majority of the Prussian National Assembly convened in Berlin on May 22, 1848, to draw up a Constitution and introduce a constitutional system by "agreement with the Crown". In November 1848, with counter-revolutionary forces on the offensive in Prussia, the liberals and democrats secured a resolution calling for the non-payment of taxes. Confining themselves to passive resistance, however, they failed to rebuff a monarchist coup d'état. On December 5, 1848, the National Assembly was disbanded.
[222] The Stuttgart parliament—those deputies to the all-German Frankfurt Assembly (mostly Leftists) who did not relinquish their powers during the conflict with the Prussian and other German governments in May qnd June 1849, but moved to Stuttgart (see Note 8).
[223] The proposition advanced here on turning the confiscated landed estates into state property and handing them over to associations of agricultural workers is an elaboration of the respective provisions of the agrarian programme set forth by Marx and Engels in the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, which also called for the break-up of feudal relations in the interests of the peasants: the abolition of corvée and other feudal duties without compensation, etc. (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 3-4). Stressing this proposition in the new document, Marx and Engels proceeded from the idea that the proletarian revolution was at hand, a notion partly due to their overestimation of the factors conducive to revolution at the time. They considered that the measure in question would facilitate the future socialist transformation of agriculture, relieving the peasant masses from the threat of ruin. Far from regarding this measure as an absolute necessity, however, Marx and Engels, and all their followers, made it dependent on actual historical conditions. Later events showed that, in countries with deep-rooted survivals of feudalism, the need for a stronger alliance with the peasantry sometimes makes it necessary for the working class to support the demand for confiscated landed estates to be handed over to the peasants, without, however, abandoning the idea of a subsequent socialist transformation of agriculture on the basis of collective property.