Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)
Ansprache der Centralbehörde an den Bund vom März 1850
The circular Marx and Engels sent to the Communist League’s members in Germany after the defeat of 1848–49, expecting a new revolution: the workers must organise independently of the petty-bourgeois democrats, arm themselves, set up their own revolutionary governments beside the official ones, and push every democratic reform further — “to make the revolution permanent.” Its battle-cry, “The Revolution in Permanence,” became the source of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the copy printed by the Prussian police in Wermuth and Stieber, Die Communisten-Verschwörungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. I (Berlin, 1853), Anlage XIII, corrected in five places from Engels’s reprint in Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln (Hottingen-Zürich, 1885), with Engels’s 1885 note. Words supplied from the 1885 text are in ⟨angle brackets⟩.
- Source
- Internet Archive (1853 Wermuth–Stieber volume)
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Contents
- Address of the Central Committee to the League (March 1850) 28 min 21
Written in London in March 1850, when Marx and Engels still expected a new revolution within months, the address reorganises the Communist League and sets out its tactics. In 1848 the German liberal bourgeoisie betrayed the workers; in the coming revolution that role will pass to the petty-bourgeois democrats, whose programme — cheap government, cheap credit, peasant property, better wages — aims only to make existing society comfortable for small owners. The workers must go with them against the common enemy but oppose them everywhere else: refuse a merged opposition party, build their own secret and public organisation, arm themselves, set up revolutionary workers’ governments beside the official ones, stand their own candidates, demand collective farming of confiscated feudal estates and the strictest centralisation (a point Engels corrected in 1885), and push every democratic reform towards confiscation. The aim is to make the revolution permanent until the proletariat holds power in the leading countries; the battle-cry, “The Revolution in Permanence.”