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KARL MARX
and
FREDERICK ENGELS

ADDRESS OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE
TO THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE

(March 1850)


Disseminated as a circular in 1850
 
Published by Engels as an appendix to the new edition of Marx's
Revelations   About   the   Cologne Communist    Trial,    Hottingen-Zurich, 1885

The original is in German
 
 
 



From the Appendices to Frederick Engels,

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany

FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS, PEKING 1977

First Edition 1977

pp. 149-64.

" . . . reprinted with a few corrections of the translation from the English edition of Marx and Engels, Selected Works, in two volumes, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951. The notes at the end of the book are compiled from various sources."

Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@cruzio.com (December 1997)



    Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

    ADDRESS OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE   TO THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE[47]

    (March 1850 )

    THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE
    TO THE LEAGUE



    Brothers!

        In the two revolutionary years 1848-49 the League proved itself in two ways: 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 decidedly 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 Committee of 1847 as well as in The Communist Manifesto has turned out to be the only correct one, that the expectations expressed in those documents have been 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 formerly firm organization of the League has been 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 public activities alone sufficient. The individual circles and communities[*] allowed their connections with the Central Committee to become loose and gradually dormant. Consequently, while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, organized itself more and more in Germany, the workers' party lost its only firm foothold, remained organized at the most in individual 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 Committee realized this necessity and therefore already in the winter of 1848-49 it sent an emissary, Joseph Moll, to Germany for the reorganization of the League. Moll's mission, however, failed to produce any lasting effect, partly because the German workers at that time had not acquired sufficient experience and partly because it was interrupted by the insurrection in May last year. Moll himself took up the musket, entered the Baden-Palatinate army and fell on June 29 in the battle of the River Murg. The League lost in him one of its oldest, most active and most trustworthy members, one who had been active in all the <"fnp150">

        * The basic group of the Communist League was the community (Gemeinde ), which consisted of three to twenty members. A circle (Kreis ) comprised two to ten communities. --Ed.

    page 151

    congresses and Central Committees 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 Committee came together again in London, replenished their numbers with new revolutionary forces and set about reorganizing the League with renewed zeal.

        This reorganization can only be carried out by an emissary, and the Central Committee considers it extremely important that the emissary should leave precisely at this moment when a new revolution is impending, when the workers' party, therefore, must act in the most organized, most unanimous and most independent fashion possible if it is not to be exploited and taken in tow again 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 forecast came true. Indeed it was the bourgeois who, immediately after the March movement of 1848, took possession of the state power and at once used this power to force back the workers, their allies in the struggle, into their former oppressed position. Though the bourgeoisie was not able to accomplish this without uniting with the feudal party, which had been disposed of in March, without finally even surrendering power once again to this feudal absolutist party, still it has secured conditions for itself which, in the long run, owing to the financial difficulties of the government, would place power in its hands and would safeguard all its interests, if it were possible for the revolutionary movement to assume already a so-called peaceful development. In order to safeguard its rule, the bourgeoisie would not even need to make itself odious by taking violent measures against the people, since all such 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 this development, is near at hand, whether it will be called forth by an independent uprising<"p152"> of the French proletariat or by an invasion of the Holy Alliance[13] against the revolutionary Babylon.

        And the role, this so treacherous role which the German liberal bourgeois played against the people in 1848, will in the impending revolution be assumed by the democratic petty bourgeois, who at present occupy the same position in the opposition as the liberal bourgeois did before 1848. This party, the democratic party, which is far more dangerous to the workers than the liberals of the past, consists of three elements:

        I. The most advanced sections of the big bourgeoisie, which pursue the aim of the immediate complete overthrow of feudalism and absolutism. This faction is represented by the former Berlin compromisers, the tax-resisters;

        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 Frankfort Assembly,<"p152a"> and later by the Stuttgart parliament, and by themselves in the campaign for the Imperial Constitution;[48]

        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 and 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 by constitutional means, 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, moreover, that the altered name of this party does not make the slightest difference in 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 support in the proletariat.

        The petty-bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very powerful; it comprises not only the great majority of the urban middle class, the small industrial merchants and master craftsmen; it numbers among its followers also the peasants and the rural proletariat, in so far as the latter has not yet found 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 whereby they seek to consolidate their position in their own interests.

        Far from desiring to transform all society for the revolutionary proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in social conditions by means of which existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for themselves. Hence they demand above all a reduction of government spending by a curtailment of the bureaucracy and shifting the chief taxes on to the big landowners and bour-geois. 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 form of government, either constitutional or republican, that will give them and their allies, the peasants, a majority, and also a democratic form of local government that will give them direct control over communal property and over a series of functions now performed by the bureaucrats.

        The rule and speedy increase of capital is further to be counteracted partly by restricting the right of inheritance and partly by transferring as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned, it is above all certain that they are to remain wageworkers 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 a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary potency by making their situation tolerable for the moment. The demands of the petty-bourgeois democracy here summarized are not put forward by all of its factions at the same time and only a very few of its members consider that in their entirety these demands constitute definite aims. The further particular individuals or factions among the petty-bourgeois democrats go, the more of these demands will they adopt as their own, and those few who see their own programme in what has been outlined above might 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, through 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 are forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat conquers state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, advances so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries ceases 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 abolition, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one. That, during the further development of the revolution, the petty-bourgeois democrats will for a moment obtain predominating influence in Germany is not open to doubt. The question is, therefore, what is to be the attitude of the proletariat and in particular of the League towards them:

        1. During the continuance of the present conditions where 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 their 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 organization in which general social-democratic phrases predominate, behind which their special interests are hidden, and in which the particular demands of the proletariat may 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 entire hard-won independent position and once more sink down to being 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 work for the establishment of an independent, secret and open organization of the workers' party alongside the official democrats and make every community a centre and nucleus of workers' societies 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,<"p156"> by the Breslau democrats who, in their organ, the Neue Oder Zeitung,[49] most furiously attack the independently organized workers, whom they style Socialists. In the case of a struggle against a common adversary no special alliance is required. As soon as such an adversary has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment, and, as previously, so also in the future, this connection, calculated to last only for the moment, will arise of itself. It is self-evident that in the impending bloody conflicts, as in all ear- lier ones, it is mainly the workers who 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, they will seize the victory for themselves and will call upon the workers to calm down, to return to their work and to guard against so-called excesses, and they will bar the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this, but it does lie within their power to make it difficult for them to prevail 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 own destruction, and that its subsequent displacement by the rule of the proletariat will be considerably facilitated. Above all things, during the conflict and immediately after the struggle, the workers must counteract, as much as is at all possible, the bourgeois endeavours at pacification, and compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. They must work to ensure that the direct revolutionary excitement is not suppressed again immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible. Far from opposing so-called excesses, they must not only tolerate instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associated only with hateful recollections, but must take upon themselves the leadership of these actions. 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 over the government.

    If necessary they must obtain these guarantees by force and in general they must see to it that the new rulers bind themselves to all possible concessions and promises -- the surest way to compromise them. They must in every way check as far as possible the intoxication of victory and the enthusiasm for the new state of things, which make their appearance after every victorious street battle, by a calm and dispassionate estimate of the situation and by unconcealed mistrust in the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must establish simultaneously their own revolutionary workers' governments, whether in the form of municipal committees and municipal councils or through workers' clubs or workers' committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but from the outset find themselves supervised and threatened by authorities which are backed by the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the first moment of victory, the workers' mistrust must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party, but against their 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 organized. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and munitions must be done at once, the revival of the old Bürgerwehr, or Citizens' Militia, directed against the workers must be opposed. However, where the latter is not feasible the workers must attempt to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard with commanders elected by themselves and with a general staff of their own choosing, and to put themselves at the command not of the state authority but of the revolutionary municipal councils which the workers will have managed to set up. Where workers are employed at the expense of the state they must see that they are armed and organized 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 them must be frustrated, by force if necessary. To destroy the influence of the bourgeois democrats upon the workers, establish immediately an independent and armed organization of the workers and create conditions which will be the most difficult and compromising for the inevitable momentary rule of the 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 that the workers should be able to offer energetic opposition to the democratic petty bourgeois, it is above all necessary that they shall be independently organized and centralized in clubs. At the soonest possible moment after the overthrow of the existing governments, the Central Committee will betake itself to Germany, immediately convene a congress and put before the latter the necessary proposals for the centralization of the workers' clubs under a leadership established in the chief seat of the movement. The speedy organization of at least a provincial union of the workers' clubs is one of the most important points for the strengthening and development of 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 or by any kind of trickery on the part of local authorities or government commissioners;

        II. That everywhere workers' candidates, who should as far as possible consist of members of the League, are put up alongside the bourgeois-democratic candidates, and that their election is promoted by all possible means. Even where thereis no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to gauge their forces and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be misled by such fine speeches of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing the workers are splitting the democratic party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such claptrap is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by independent action of this kind is infinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. If the forces of democracy from the outset come out resolutely and terroristically against the reaction, the influence of the latter in the elections will be destroyed in advance.

        The first point over 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, they will try to perpetuate the existence of the rural proletariat 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 experiencing.

    page 161

        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 will immediately obtain a firm basis in the midst of the tottering bourgeois property relations. Just as the democrats ally with the peasants so must the workers ally with the rural proletariat. Further, the democrats will work either directly for a federative republic or at least, if they cannot avoid a republic, one and indivisible, they will attempt to cripple the central government by the utmost possible autonomy and independence for the communities[*] and provinces. In opposition to this plan, the workers must strive not only for a German republic, one and indivisible, but also within this republic for the most determined centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They must not allow themselves to be confused by the democratic talk of freedom for the communities, of self-government, etc. In a country like Germany, where there are still so many relics of the Middle Ages to be abolished, where there is so much local and provincial obstinacy to be broken, on no account should every village, every town and every province be permitted to 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, in which the Germans must fight separately in every town and in every province for one and the <"fnp161">

        * Community [Gemeinde ]: This term refers here to an urban municipality or a rural district. --Ed.

    page 162

    same advance. Least of all is it permissible to perpetuate, by means of a so-called free system of local government, a form of property which is even more backward than modern private property and which everywhere is necessarily breaking up into the latter, i.e., communal property, with its consequent disputes between poor and rich communities; nor can this so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate communal civil law, with its trickery against the workers, that exists alongside state civil law. As in France in 1793 so today in Germany it is the task of the really revolutionary party to carry through the strictest centralization.[*]

        We have seen how the democrats will come to power with the next movement, how they will be compelled to propose more or less socialistic 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 communistic measures. But the following are possible:

        1. They can compel the democrats to interfere in as many spheres as possible of the hitherto existing social order, to disturb its regular functioning and to compromise themselves as well as to concentrate as many productive forces as pos- <"fnp162">

        * It muse be noted today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time -- thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history -- it was considered as established that the French centralized machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and that it had been espccially used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the whole revolution up to the 18th Brumaire the whole administration of the departments, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities which wcre elected by the rcspective constitucnts themselves, and which acted with complete freedom within the limits of the general state [cont. onto p. 163. -- DJR] 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 d'etat of the 18th Brumaire, hastened to replace it by an administration by prefects, which still exists and which, therefore, was purely an instrument of reaction from the beginning. But just as little as local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralization, so is it to an equally small extent necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded, cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849. [Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.]

    page 163

    sible -- means of transport, factories, railways, etc. -- in the hands of the state.

        2. They must drive forward to the extreme limits the proposals of the democrats, who in any case will not act in a revolutionary but in a merely reformist manner, and transform these into direct attacks upon private property; thus, for example, if the petty bourgeois propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories shall be simply confiscated by the state without compensation as being the property of reactionaries. If the democrats propose a proportional tax, the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the democrats themselves put forward a moderately progressive tax, the workers must insist on a tax with rates rising so steeply that big capital will be ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of state debts, the workers must demand national bankruptcy. Thus, the demands of the workers must everywhere depend on the concessions and measures of the democrats.

        If the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of 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

    page 164

    approaching revolutionary drama will 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 clarifying their minds as to 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 refraining from the independent organization of the party of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence.

    London, March 1850

    Disseminated as a circular in 1850
     
    Published by Engels as an appen-
    dix to the new edition of Marx's
    Revelations   About   the   Cologne
    Communist    Trial    ,    Hottingen-
    Zurich, 1885

    The original is in German
     
     
     
     
     
     


NOTES


      <"en47">[47] The Address of tbe Central Committee to tbe Communist League was written by Marx and Engels at the end of March 1850 and distributed secretly among the German members of the League who had emigrated abroad, as well as among those in Germany. In 1851, the document was seized by the Prussian police in the arrests of some members of the League, and printed in the bourgeois newspapers the Kölnische Zeitung and the Dresdner Journal und Anzeiger. Later it was included in the book The Communist Conspiracies of the Nineteenth Century, compiled by Wermuth and Stieber, whom Engels characterized as "two most contemptible police scoundrels." In 1885, this Address, edited by Engels, was included as a supplement in a new German edition of Marx's pamphlet Revelations About the Cologne Communist Trial.
        For The Communist League, see above, pp. 165-91.    [p.149]

      <"en13">[13] The Holy Alliance -- a reactionary association of European monarchs founded in 1815 by tsarist Russia, Austria and Prussia to suppress revolutionary movements in different countries and to preserve the feudal monarchies there.    [p.152]

      <"en48">[48] This refers to the campaign for the Imperial Constitution adopted by the National Assembly at Frankfort on March 28, 1849. The Constitution was rejected by most German states. In May and June of the same year an insurrection in its support broke out in Baden and the Palatinate. The Frankfort Asscmbly, however, refused to give any support to the insurrectionists. Engels commented on this movement in his works, The Campaign for the Imperial Constitution in Germany and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.    [p.152]

      <"en49">[49] Neue Oder-Zeitung (New Oder Gazette ) -- a German bourgeois-democratic daily published in Breslau (Wroclaw) from 1849 to 1855. In the

    16

    1850s it was considered as the most radical paper in Germany and persecuted by government journals. In 1855 Marx was its London correspondent.    [p.156]