|
Monday, August 31, 2009 - 6:46 PM
“Demands of the Communist
Party in Germany” were written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in
Paris between March 21 (when Engels arrived in Paris from Brussels) and
March 24, 1848. This document was discussed by members of the Central
Authority, who approved and signed it as the. political programme of
the Communist League in the revolution that broke out in Germany. In
March it was printed as a leaflet, for distribution among revolutionary
German emigrant workers who were about to return home. Austrian and
German diplomats in Paris informed their respective governments about
this as early as March 27, 28 and 29. (The Austrian Ambassador enclosed
in his letter a copy of the leaflet which he dated “March 25”.) The
leaflet soon reached members of the Communist League in other
countries, in particular, German emigrant workers in London. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Early in April, the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” were published in such German democratic papers as Berliner Zeitungs-Halle (special supplement to No. 82, April 5, 1848), Düsseldorfer Zeitung (No. 96, April 5, 1848), Mannheimer Abendzeitung (No. 96, April 6, 1848), Trier’sche Zeitung (No. 97, April 6, 1848, supplement), Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (No. 100, April 9, 1848, supplement), and Zeitung für das deutsche Volk (No. 2 1, April 9, 1848).
Marx and Engels, who left for Germany round about April 6 and some
time later settled in Cologne, did their best along with their
followers to popularise this programme document during the revolution.
In 1848 and 1849 it was repeatedly published in the periodical press
and in leaflet form. Not later than September 10, 1848, the “Demands”
were printed in Cologne as a leaflet for circulation by the Cologne
Workers’ Association both in the town itself and in a number of
districts of Rhenish Prussia. In addition to minor stylistic changes,
point 10 in the text of the leaflet was worded differently from that
published in March-April 1848. At the Second Democratic Congress held
in Berlin in October 1848, Friedrich Beust, delegate from the Cologne
Workers’ Association, spoke, on behalf of the social question
commission, in favour of adopting a programme of action closely
following the “Demands”. In November and December 1848, various points
of the “Demands” were discussed at meetings of the Cologne Workers’
Association.
Many editions of the “Demands” published during the revolution and
after its defeat have survived to this day in their original form, some
of them as copies kept in the police archives.
At the end of 1848 or the beginning of 1849 an abridged version of
the “Demands” was published in pamphlet form by Weller Publishers in
Leipzig. The slogan at the beginning of the document, the second
paragraph of point 9 and the last sentence of point 10 were omitted,
and the words “The Committee” were not included among the signatories.
In 1853, an abridged version of the “Demands” was printed, together
with other documents of the Communist League, in the first part of the
book Die Communisten-Verschworungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
published in Berlin for purposes of information by Wermuth and Stieber,
two police officials, who staged a trial against the Communists in
Cologne in 1852.
Later Engels reproduced the main points of the “Demands” in his essay On the History of the Communist League, published in November 1885 in the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, and as an introduction to the pamphlet: K. Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten Prozess zu Köln, Hottingen-Zürich, 1885.
English translations of the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” appeared in the collections: The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with an introduction and explanatory notes by D. Ryazanoff, Martin Lawrence, London (1930); K. Marx, Selected Works, Vol.
II, ed. V. Adoratsky, Moscow-Leningrad, Co-operative Publishing Society
of Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Foreign Workers in the USSR (1936); ibid., New York (1 936); Birth of the Communist Manifesto,
edited and annotated, with an Introduction by D. J. Struik,
International Publishers, New York, 197 1, and in other publications.
2 The letter to the editor of the Populaire
and the Declaration are in Engels’ handwriting. Both documents were
drawn up at the end of March 1848 after Engels’ arrival in Paris and
reflect the struggle which the leaders of the Communist League were
waging against those German petty-bourgeois emigrant leaders in Paris,
Herwegh and Bornstedt among others, who intended to speed up revolution
in Germany by moving in a volunteer legion organised by using private
donations and subsidies from the Provisional Government of the French
Republic. Appeals to enlist were accompanied by demagogic appeals to
the patriotic and revolutionary sentiments of German emigrants. Marx,
Engels and other members of the Central Authority of the Communist
League spoke out against the adventurist nature of such plans to
“export revolution” and advised German workers instead to return to
their home country Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire individually in order to take part in the
revolutionary events that were brewing there. “We opposed this playing
with revolution in the most decisive fashion,” Engels later wrote in
his work On the History of the Communist League. “To carry
out an invasion, which was to import the revolution forcibly from
outside, into the midst of the ferment then going on in Germany, meant
to undermine the revolution in Germany itself, to strengthen the
governments and to deliver the legionaries ... defenceless into the
hands of the German troops.”
The letter and the Declaration were first published in English in the journal Science and Society, 1940, Vol. IV, No. 2. The first publication in the language of the original appeared in the collection Der Bund der Kommunisten. Dokumente und Materialien, Bd. 1, 1836-1849, Berlin, 1970.
|