Translator’s Preface (Kuhn, 1924)

The reader who, in this third decade of the 20th century, peruses the classic work from the pen of Karl Marx here presented, and does so in the light of all that has happened since the middle of the 19th century, cannot fail but be struck by the incisive manner in which the genius of Marx dissects and lays bare the innermost social relations, the hopes, fears, ambitions and strivings that animate the different social layers, shape their resolves and prompt their actions. On the one hand, we observe the intrigues and counter-intrigues of ruling classes, engaged in incessant internecine strife for place and power, but consciously or subconsciously united against what, compared with modern conditions, was then but an embryonic working class which—stumblingly immature, committing blunder after blunder and unable by the lay of the land to avoid blundering—is groping its way toward the light and toward power. Who will not discern a modern note in what Marx quotes from one of the organs of what he calls “the party of order” which, uttering itself upon the outcome of the elections of March 10, 1850, says that “between Socialism and Society exists a duel to the death, an incessant pitiless war. In this desperate duel one or the other must go down; if Society does not destroy Socialism, then Socialism will destroy Society”—which is just what we are being told today, the present capitalist social system calmly and nonchalantly identifying itself with “society,” as did its defenders in 1850.

Analogies almost force themselves upon the mind. When it is said that the Paris workers, jointly with the bourgeoisie had made the February revolution, and then, at the side of the bourgeoisie sought to enforce their interests—one is forcibly and unavoidably reminded of the German working class sweeping out the monarchy in 1918, and, leaving the bourgeoisie in possession of the Political State, is now reaping the reward of abstinence in having the small gains of the “revolution” picked one by one from its pockets. The workers of Paris had a Montagne; the workers of Germany have a Social Democracy—either and both the representative of petty bourgeois interests which made either and both betray the working class. Nor are the Legitimists and the Orleanists missing in Germany so long as they have the Hohenzollerns and the Wittelsbachs looking hopefully toward monarchist restoration, all of which and much more in the way of similarities attests the verity of the saying that “history repeats itself.”

But it does not, of course, repeat itself in every detail. One of the divergent details is the Russia of today as compared with the Russia of 1850; and another is that in our day, after the terrific convulsions that capitalist society underwent during and since the World War, the revolutionary situation is becoming every day much clearer. It seems safe to predict that capitalist rehabilitation is well nigh impossible; that an additional lease of life for as many years as have passed since Marx wrote his monograph on “The Class Stru ggles in France” cannot possibly be conceded to a social system that shows decay in so many different ways, and which, having today to deal in the most developed countries with a working class of overwhelming numbers, and unable in the long run to make tolerable the conditions of life for these numbers, seems headed for inevitable dissolution.

If Marx makes clear, in the pages here presented, that the working class alone can be the emancipator of the working class; and that the “reformer,” like the “duped Montagne, which, constantly tormented by revolutionary desires,... always felt itself in the right place behind the bourgeois republicans rather than in front of the revolutionary proletariat,” is never to be trusted unless he forms the tail of the revolutionary procession, as the workers of Germany have found by bitter experience with their Social Democracy, Engels, in his introduction to Marx’s work—written so many years later—makes it no less clear that the strategy and the tactics of the proletarian revolution practiced in 1850, and then looked upon as perfectly proper, are no longer practicable today.

Today, the success of the proletarian revolution, in all the highly developed industrial countries—where alone a real proletarian revolution is possible—lies in the organization of the Might of the working class on the industrial field, with the political organization of Labor as a helpmate, but hardly to be considered as the decisive factor. Against the iron wall of the industrial organization of Labor all the forces of reaction, Fascism, Ku Kluxism—whatever names they may take in different climes—will dash themselves into spray. There, and there alone, lies the hope of the future, of a future that will loom up bright and resplendent in the measure that an awakened working class will take in hand the work of revolutionary industrial organization.

H.K.

Richmond Hill, N.Y., January, 1924.