32. K. Marx. Introduction to the French Edition of Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
The pages which form the subject of the present pamphlet, first published as three articles in the Revue socialiste* have been translated from the latest book by Engels Revolution in Science^
Frederick Engels, one of the foremost representatives of contemporary socialism, distinguished himself in 1844 with his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which first appeared in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, published in Paris by Marx and Ruge. The Outlines already formulates certain general principles of scientific socialism. Engels was then living in Manchester, where he wrote (in German) The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845), an important work to which Marx did full justice in Capital0 During his first stay in England he also contributed— as he later did from Brussels — to The Northern Star, the official journal of the socialistd movement, and to the New Moral World of Robert Owen.
During his stay in Brussels he and Marx founded the German workers' communist club,[377] linked with Flemish and Walloon working men's clubs, and, with Bornstedt, the Deutsche-Brüsseler Zeitung. At the invitation of the German committee (residing in London) of the League of the Just,[378] they joined this society, which had originally been set up by Karl Schapper after his flight from France, where he had taken part in the Blanqui conspiracy of 1839.[379] From then on the League was transformed into an international League of Communists after the suppression of the usual formalism of secret societies. Nevertheless, in those circumstances the society had to remain a secret as far as governments were concerned. In 1847 at the International Congress held by the League in London, Marx and Engels were instructed to draft the Manifesto of the Communist Party,[580]
published immediately before the February Revolution and translated(1) into almost all the European languages.(2)
In the same year they were involved in founding the Democratic Association of Brussels,[381] an international and public association, where the delegates of the radical bourgeois and those of the proletarian(3) workers met.
After the February Revolution, Engels became one of the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (Nouvelle Gazette Rhénane), founded in 1848 by Marx in Cologne and suppressed in June
1849(4) by a Prussian coup d'état. After taking part in the rising at Elberfeld Engels fought in the Baden campaign(5) against the Prussians (June and July 1849) as the aide-de-camp of Willich, who was then colonel of a battalion of francs-tireurs.[382]
In 1850, in London, he contributed to the Review of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung(6) edited by Marx and printed in Hamburg. There Engels for the first time published The Peasant War in Germany, which 19 years later appeared again in Leipzig as a pamphlet and ran into three editions.
After the resumption of the socialist movement in Germany, Engels contributed to the Volksstaat and Vorwärts his most
Endnotes
[377] A reference to the Communist Correspondence Committee formed by Marx and Engels at the beginning of 1846 in Brussels. Its aim was to prepare the ground for the creation of an international proletarian party. The Committee had no strictly defined composition. Besides the Belgian communist Philippe Gigot, Joseph Weydemeyer, Wilhelm Wolff, Edgar von Westphalen and others were its members at various times. As a rule, the Committee discussed problems of communist propaganda, corresponded with the leaders of existing proletarian organisations: the League of the Just (see Note 378) and the Chartists (see Note 368), tried to draw Proudhon, Cabet and other socialists into its work, and issued lithographed circulars. On the initiative of Marx and Engels, correspondence committees and groups connected with the Brussels Committee were set up in Silesia, Westphalia and the Rhine Province, Paris and London. These committees played an important role in the development of international proletarian contacts and the organisation of the Communist League in 1847.
[378] The League of the Just, the first political organisation of German workers and artisans, was formed between 1836 and 1838 as a result of a split in the Outlaws' League, which consisted of artisans led by petty-bourgeois democrats. Besides Germans, the League of the Just included workers of other nationalities. The views of its members showed the influence of various Utopian socialist ideas, primarily those of Wilhelm Weitling.
[379] Prominent members of the League of the Just (see Note 378): typesetter Karl Schapper, watchmaker Joseph Moll and others, were connected with the Blanquist secret Société des Saisons, which organised the Paris uprising of May 12-13, 1839 (see Note 32). Schapper and Moll took part in the uprising, were prosecuted by the French authorities and compelled to leave for England, where they headed local branches of the League.
[580] The reference is to the events of the Anglo-French-Chinese war of 1856-60 (Second Opium War). In August 1860 Anglo-French troops captured Tientsin and in October 1860 Peking. The Chinese government was forced to sign new, very damaging treaties with Britain and France in 1860. The war was an important step towards turning China into a semi-colony.
[381] The Democratic Association (Association démocratique) was founded in Brussels in the autumn of 1847 and united proletarian revolutionaries, mainly German emigrants, and advanced bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats. On November 15, 1847, Marx was elected its Vice-President (the President was Lucien Jottrand, a Belgian democrat), and under his influence it became a centre of the international democratic movement.
[382] The events of this period are described in Engels' The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 147-239).