1 Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” Marx- Engels Gesamtausgabe (hereafter to be referred to as MEGA), 1st Section, Vol. 6 (Berlin, 1923), pp. 529, 536, 543, 557. The translation here and in all subsequent passages is my own.

A closer reading of the Manifesto reveals the presence of diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas on the national question. “The workers have no country to defend” is counterposed to the idea that the proletariat's first aim is to “establish itself as the nation.” Nationalism is treated as an ideological superstructure that grew up on the foundation of a nationwide market and a nationwide economy, but Polish nationalism is treated as an independent demi-urge, a spirit or “superstructure” that has no such foundation but rather exists or persists despite the fact that Poland's economy is divided into three parts, one geared into the German, one into the Austrian, and one into the Russian economies and markets. Polish freedom is supported, indeed, though this involves tearing the integrated parts out of the three great-nation economies.

2 In the last document which Marx and Engels issued when they were still confidently expecting German unification by revolution from below, their “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” (March 1850), they came out against federalism, local autonomy, and various other democratic aspirations. The German Democrats, they warned, “will either directly work for the federal republic, or at least … will try to cripple the central government by the greatest possible autonomy and independence of the communes and provinces. Against these plans the workers must not only work for the one and indivisible German Republic, but within it for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the State. They must not let themselves be fooled by democratic talk of the freedom of communes, self-government, etc.” [The Address is now most readily available in “Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin zur Deutschen Geschichte (hereafter referred to as MELS) (Berlin, 1954), Vol. 2, Part 2, pp. 593-603.]

As advocates of ruthless unification and centralization, Marx and Engels were pleased rather than alienated by that aspect of Bismarck's “work.” Thus Engels, in his introduction to the Second Edition of “Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg,” spoke of the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony as “a good example,” despite its monarchical and despotic aspects. In his “Die Rolle der Gewalt in der Geschichte,” he wrote: “Bismarck recognized the German Civil War [Engels means by this Bismarck's war with Austria] of 1866 for what it was, namely a Resolution, and he was ready to carry out this revolution by revolutionary methods. And that is what he did.” (MELS, Vol. 2, Part 2, p. 1077.)

In his introduction to a reissue of Marx's “Class Struggles in France,” Engels explained the relation between Bismarck's revolution and their own intended one in these terms: “The period of revolutions from below was for the time being closed [i.e., at the end of 1851]. There followed a period of revolutions from above … After the war of 1870-71, Bonaparte disappears from the scene and Bismarck's mission is completed, so that he can now sink to an ordinary Junker once more.” (Ibid., p. 1160).

To August Bebel Engels wrote on Nov. 18, 1884: “The German-Prussian Empire, as a perfecting of the North German Bund by force in 1866, is a thoroughly revolutionary creation. I don't complain about it. What I reproach the people who made it with is that they were only miserable revolutionaries, failed to go much farther, and did not annex all of Germany to Prussia. [Engels has in mind particularly the German, but as we shall see below, also the Slavic parts of Austria, except for Austrian Poland.] However, he who operates with blood and iron, swallows entire states, overthrows thrones and confiscates private property, should not condemn other people as revolutionaries. If our party has but the right to be not more and not less revolutionary than the Government of the Reich has been, then it has all it needs.” (Ibid., p. 1305).

In their private letters to each other Marx and Engels expressed the same attitude towards Bismarck. Marx wrote to Engels during the Franco-Prussian War a comment on the strange way in which History was realizing the major national aims of the Revolutions of 1848:

“L’Empire est fait, i.e., the German Empire. By hook and crook, neither on the intended road nor in the imagined way, it seems that all the trickery since the Second Empire [of Napoleon III] has finally led to the carrying out of the ‘national’ aims of 1848—Hungary, Italy, Germany! This sort of movement, it seems to me, will not come to an end until it comes to a clash between Prussians and Russians. This is by no means improbable.” (Letter of Aug. 8, 1870, MEGA, 3d Section, Vol. 4, p. 358.)

Engels, for his part, wrote to Marx:

“If we were paying the old boy, he couldn't do better work for us.” And again: “Herr Bismarck has been working for us for the last seven years.” (Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels, [New York, 1936], p. 246. The English edition of Mayer's biography is not annotated, but the original German is.)

All this does not mean that Marx and Engels ever gave up their opposition to Bismarck. They could not, for example, forgive the Iron Chancellor for lack of sufficient “iron” to force Austria into the Reich; for having shifted the center of gravity in the new Germany from their native region, the more progressive Rhineland, to the more reactionary Prussia; for thwarting the bourgeoisie, persecuting the Socialists, combining Prussian state socialism and the welfare state with Junker rule; for hobbling the universal suffrage he introduced by continuing plural voting in Prussia, and for preserving an autocratic independence of Emperor, army, bureaucracy and police from parliamentary control.

3 For the German makeup of the Communist League, see Engels, “Zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten,” in MELS, Vol. 2, Part 1, pp. 189-97. For the demand for unification, see MEGA, 1st Section, Vol. 7, pp. 3-4.

4 The statement of the basic aims of the NR£ is in the Engels article cited in note 3.

5 Some of the NRZ calls for war are in MEGA, 1st Section, Vol. 7, pp. 24, 30, 92, 181, 204, 303-04, 354-55, 376. That of June 25 is on p. 92; July 12 on p. 181, the call for war with England, Russia, Prussia and Denmark on p. 355. Actually there is no discussion of foreign affairs in NRZ which does not involve a war with one or more countries.

6 The relevant excerpts are in Karl Kautsky, “Sozialisten und Krieg,” (Prague, 1937), pp. 131-32. Lasalle's letter contained the revealing remark that to make propaganda against Russia in Germany was like “bringing owls to Athens, and carrying water to the sea,” since the “bitterness of our people against Russia” was so intense that it could not be any greater. Precisely because “war against Russia would be the most popular of all battlecries in the history of Germany” was it dangerous to call upon the present rulers to wage such a war. It is likely that this observation throws some light on the anti-Russianism of Marx and Engels as well as that of Lasalle.

7 Kapuschtschiks is a term of contempt for Russian soldiers. It is not to be found in standard or etymological dictionaries. Philologists I consulted were of the opinion that it is derived either from the Russian soldiers’ headgear, or more probably, from the Russian word for cabbage (kapusta), in which case the term “cabbages” for Russian soldiers would be. analogous with “frogs” for French soldiers.

8 The quoted passages are from the Stuttgart, 1915, edition in which the two pamphlets are published together. They are page-numbered separately, the second one beginning again with page 1. The quotes are from the concluding sections, pp. 50-52 of Po und Rhein and pp. 46-47 of Savoyen, Nizza und der Rhein. The fact that they were originally thought to be the work of a Prussian general is reported by Engels’ biographer, Gustav Mayer, op. cit., p. 152. Mayer writes admiringly of the pamphlets, and points out, correctly, that many of their strategical and tactical calculations “were astonishingly corroborated by the World War.” (Ibid., p. 68).

That they do not represent a “deviation” from the “Marxism” of Marx is indicated by a letter of Marx to Engels after he read the first one in manuscript: “Exceedingly clever; the political side, too, is handled marvelously, which was damned hard. The pamphlet will have a great success.” MEGA, 3rd Section, Vol. 2, p. 371. The italicized expressions were written by Marx in English, the rest in German.

Marx also wrote several rather poor articles on the Italian question for the New York Tribune and the London German-language journal, Das Volk. They are reprinted in MELS, Vol. 2, Part 1, pp. 77-794. Their central theme is that Prussia must arm in earnest and join Austria in war against France. This is peculiar, for France is allied with Italy, and Marx is for Italian freedom and unification. He reconciles the two ideas by contending that this war would require a general arming of the German people, lead to the revolutionizing and unifying of Germany, and a unified Germany would liberate Italy.

Such articles by Marx and Engels put Lenin in an awkward situation when they were cited by socialist opponents during World War I. On the one hand, Lenin's devout orthodoxy required him to believe that in all their calls for war and all their judgments on the national questions of their day, Marx and Engels were correct. On the other hand, these were uncomfortable precedents to apply in any particular to the war of 1914. His chief defense of Marx and Engels lay in the contention that “in their day” capitalism in general, and German capitalism in particular, were “progressive,” that the unification of Germany would aid the progress of German capitalism and was therefore in and of itself progressive, and that any war waged with that objective or leading to it would also therefore be progressive, hence worthy of support by Marx and Engels.

Actually, when Germany embarked on some of the wars Marx and Engels had called for—with Denmark, with Austria, with France—the wars did indeed bring about the rapid unification of Germany. But the union did not include Austria, nor was Germany revolutionized. On the contrary, the hegemony of Junker Prussia and the prestige of Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns was the result.

Both Lenin and his socialist opponents were too pious in their attitude towards “the founders of scientific socialism” to point out how mistaken their hopes had been. Lenin set Zinoviev to work to do a stout book (Voina i krizis socializma—“War and the Crisis in Socialism“—691 pp.) to justify and explain the stand of Marx and Engels on every war of their lifetime, and at the same time to distinguish between “two ages of war” in such fashion that none of these attitudes or approaches should be regarded as a precedent for Lenin's day. Lenin himself made a number of essays in this form of casuistry. Typical is his discussion of Marx and Engels on Italy in Pod chuzhom Jlagom (1915), in which he attempts to justify Marx's call to Prussia to join Austria against France while Garibaldi and Cavour are getting support from Napoleon III. (Lenin, Sochinenija, 4th Edition, Vol. 21, pp. 119-122). This attempt to combine orthodoxy with novelty is the central concern of Lenin's wartime Marxism.

9 It would doubtless be impolitic to quote such utterances of Marx and Engels in the “Marxist” Russia, Poland, or East Germany of today. Yet there was one curious resemblance between the methods of calculating the national interest of their respective fatherlands on the part of Stalin and of Marx. Thus Stalin was determined to annex all of Eastern Poland while “compensating” Poland with additional territory in the West in order to increase its fear of Germany and dependence on Russia. And, over Marx's signature, in an article written for him by Engels and published in the New Tork Tribune of March 5, 1852, we read: “The Poles, by receiving extended territories in the East, would have become more tractable in the West.”

The various articles of Marx and Engels from which all the above quotations have been taken, and those to be cited below as well, are most readily available in a compilation of their writings on Russia and related subjects by Paul W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz under the title: The Russian Menace to Europe by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, (Glencoe, 1952). The statements here summarized and quoted occur again and again in the articles on Poland, pp. 91-120. The reader desiring to see the original German texts will find the sources indicated in the notes of Blackstock and Hoselitz.

I have not differentiated between Marx and Engels in citing their views on Poland, the Austrian Slavs, Hungary, Italy, German unification, war with Russia, etc. because they explicitly shared their views on these subjects. Moreover, it is not always certain which of the two wrote a particular article, or first made a particular formulation. Considerably more of this material is from Engels’ pen, but in the NR£ Marx approved as the Editor (in Engels’ words, “the Dictator“). In the New York Tribune often Marx signed and mailed the article that Engels had written for him. In the case of three letters written by Engels in English and published in the British journal, Commonwealth, Marx requested Engels to write up their common views on Poland.

10 NRZ, Feb. 15, 1849, in “Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,” 4th Edition (Berlin-Stuttgart, 1923), Vol. 3, p. 255. (Hereafter to be referred to as Nachlass). Marx started the attack on the “Slavic riffraff” (Lumpengesindel) in the New Year's article for Jan. 1, 1849, but Engels as usual improved on, enlarged and intensified it in three long articles in January and February.

11 Blackstock and Hoselitz, op. cit., pp. 95-104.

12 The pronouncement on the final judgment of History and the two quotations are from Engels’ NRZ articles of Jan. 13 and Feb. 14 and 15, 1849. They are in Nachlass, Vol. III, pp. 233-64. An English translation is in Blackstock and Hoselitz, pp. 56-84. Though I have been quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing from these articles, the same thoughts occur again and again, in similar or identical language, briefly and occasionally in the articles of Marx, at greater length in the articles of Engels, long after 1848 is but a memory.

13 See note 12.

14 See note 12.

15 Gustav Mayer, op. cit. p. 107.

16 A book of Marx's articles in the Tribune and the People's Paper, entitled The Eastern Question was published in London in 1897 by his daughter Eleanor and her husband, Edward Aveling. His ferocious articles against Palmerston were reprinted and widely sold in England by Palmerston's enemies, and then published as a book by his daughter in 1899. The quotation from Lasalle is in Blackstock and Hoselitz, p. 269. His contention that he had proved Palmerston an agent is cited by his daughter in her introduction to Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (Chicago, 1919), p. 3. The letter to Engels is in MEGA, 3d Section, Vol. 1, p. 511).

17 Written from London to the New York Tribune, April 12, 1853. It is in “Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels 1852-62,” edited by N. Ryazanov, 2^nd edition (Stuttgart, 1920), Vol. I., p. 158. These volumes contain Marx's articles on Lord Palmerston, on the Crimean War, on the Eastern Question, etc. They contain an enormous amount of material which Blackstock and Hoselitz have omitted from their collection. Of course, it goes without saying that the present article has been able to cite only a few of the characteristic utterances of Marx and Engels in this mood.

18 Nachlass, Vol. 3, p. 78.

19 Stalin's attack on Engel's article was kept secret from 1934 to May, 1941, when it was published in No. 9 of Bolshevik. Engels’ article has not been republished in Russian to this day. It is available in German in Neue Zeit, 8th Year (1890), pp. 145-54 and 193-203. An English translation is in Blackstock and Hoselitz, pp. 25-55.

20 Engels wrote his article in French, then made his own translation into German for Neue Zeit, 10th Year, Vol. I, pp. 580-87. The letter to Bebel is cited in Mayer, op. cit., p. 311.