The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published early in the sixties by the printing office of the KolokoL [81] At that time the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement still occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section of the Manifesto: the position of the Communists in relation to the different opposition parties in the various countries.(1) Russia and the United States of all places are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through emigration. Both countries supplied Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for its industrial products. At that time both were, therefore, in one way or another, pillars of the existing European order.
How very different today! It was precisely European immigration that enabled North America to attain gigantic agricultural production, competition from which is shaking the very foundations of European landed property — large and small. Moreover, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the prevailing industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England. Both circumstances react in revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step the smaller and middle landownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; simultaneously, a numerous proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-49, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat, which was just beginning to awaken, in Russian intervention. The Tsar(2) was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today he (3) is a prisoner of war of the revolution, in Gatchina,[482] and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had as its object the proclamation of the inevitably impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, which is just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchinaf a form of primeval common ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West?
The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels London, January 21, 1882
Published, in Russian, in: K. Marx and Printed according to the manu-F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, script Geneva, 1882
Endnotes
[4] 4 The Polish People (Zwia.zek Ludu Polskiego)—a revolutionary-democratic society set up in September 1872 on the initiative of Walery Wroblewski, Ludwik Oborski and Jan Krynski. The society included a number of Polish revolutionaries, members of the Paris Commune, and supported the line pursued by the General Council of the International Working Men's Association. It drew on the best traditions of the society Lud Polski of the 1840s, and linked the national and social emancipation of the Polish people with the international working-class movement. Its newspaper was the Wici
[81] 81 In the report on this meeting carried by Vperyod! (Forward!), No. 3, February 15 (3), 1875—"The Anniversary of the Polish Uprising of 1863 in London"— the following sentence was added: "It is therefore necessary to popularise the principles of the International Association among the Polish people." This sentence, which was not included in the reports printed by the Polish periodicals (see Note 71) or in Engels' text for Der Volksstaat, was written in by Valerian Smirnov, who prepared the report for Vperyod! and insisted that he had heard it from Marx himself. In a letter to Marx of February 15, 1875, Smirnov asked him to confirm this fact. Marx's reply has not been found.
[482] After the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881 (see Note 417), Alexander III was staying in Gatchina (the Russian tsars' country residence), fearing that new terrorist acts would be staged by the Executive Committee of the People's Will.