Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)
Address of the Central Committee to the League (March 1850)
Section summary
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.”
Brothers! In the two revolutionary years 1848–49 the League proved itself in two ways. First, in that its members everywhere threw themselves energetically into the movement, and in the press, on the barricades and on the battlefields stood in the front ranks of the only resolutely revolutionary class, the proletariat. The League proved itself further in that its conception of the movement, as laid down in the circulars of the congresses and of the Central Committee of 1847 and in the Communist Manifesto, has turned out to be the only correct one; in that the expectations expressed in those documents have been completely fulfilled; and in that the view of present-day social conditions which the League formerly propagated only in secret is now on the lips of the peoples and is preached openly in the market-places.
At the same time the former firm organisation of the League was considerably loosened. A large part of the members, taking a direct part in the revolutionary movement, believed that the time of secret societies was over and that public activity alone was enough. The individual circles and communities let their connections with the Central Committee grow slack and gradually fall asleep. So while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, organised itself more and more in Germany, the workers’ party lost its only firm foothold, remained organised at most in a few localities for local purposes, and so in the general movement fell entirely under the domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats. This state of affairs must be ended; the independence of the workers must be restored.
The Central Committee understood this necessity and for that reason sent an emissary, Joseph Moll, to Germany as early as the winter of 1848–49 to reorganise the League. Moll’s mission, however, had no lasting effect, partly because the German workers at that time had not yet gained enough experience, partly because it was interrupted by the insurrection of last May. Moll himself took up a musket, joined the Baden-Palatinate army and fell on 19 July in the engagement on the Murg. In him the League lost one of its oldest, most active and most reliable members, who had taken part in all the congresses and Central Committees and had earlier carried out a series of missions with great success.
After the defeat of the revolutionary parties of Germany and France in June 1849, almost all the members of the Central Committee came together again in London, filled up their numbers with new revolutionary forces, and set about the reorganisation of the League with renewed zeal.
This reorganisation can be effected only by an emissary, and the Central Committee considers it extremely important that the emissary should leave at this very moment, when a new revolution is imminent, when the workers’ party must therefore come forward as organised, as united and as independent as possible, if it is not once again, as in 1848, to be exploited and taken in tow by the bourgeoisie.
We told you, brothers, as early as 1848, that the German liberal bourgeois would soon come to power and would at once turn their newly won power against the workers. You have seen how this has come to pass. It was in fact the bourgeois who, after the March movement of 1848, immediately took possession of the state power and used this power to force the workers, their allies in the struggle, straight back into their former oppressed position. If the bourgeoisie could not accomplish this without allying itself with the feudal party that had been swept aside in March, without in the end even handing power back to this feudal absolutist party, it has nevertheless secured conditions for itself which, in the long run, through the government’s financial embarrassments, would play power back into its hands and safeguard all its interests, if it were possible for the revolutionary movement to settle down even now into a so-called peaceful development. To secure its rule, the bourgeoisie would not even need to make itself hated by measures of violence against the people, since all these violent steps have already been carried out by the feudal counter-revolution. But events will not take this peaceful course. On the contrary, the revolution which will hasten them is close at hand, whether it is set off by an independent rising of the French proletariat or by an invasion of the revolutionary Babel by the Holy Alliance.
And the part which the German liberal bourgeois played towards the people in 1848, this so treacherous part, will be taken over in the coming revolution by the democratic petty bourgeois, who now 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 former liberal one, is made up of three elements:
I. The most advanced sections of the big bourgeoisie, whose aim is the immediate and complete overthrow of feudalism and absolutism. This faction is represented by the former Berlin “Vereinbarer” and by the tax-refusers.
II. The democratic-constitutional petty bourgeois, whose chief aim during the movement so far was the establishment of a more or less democratic federal state, as striven for by their representatives, the Left of the Frankfurt Assembly and later the Stuttgart parliament, and by themselves in the campaign for the Imperial Constitution.
III. The republican petty bourgeois, whose ideal is a German federal republic on the Swiss model, 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, the editors of the democratic newspapers.
All these factions now, after their defeat, call themselves republicans or Reds, just as the republican petty bourgeois in France now call themselves socialists. Where, as in Württemberg and Bavaria, they still find an opportunity to pursue their aims by constitutional means, they seize the opportunity to keep their old phrases and to prove by their deeds that they have not changed in the least. It goes without saying, moreover, that the changed name of this party alters nothing whatever in its relation to the workers, but merely proves that it must now make a front against the bourgeoisie, which has united with absolutism, and must lean on the proletariat.
The petty-bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very powerful. It embraces not only the great majority of the burgher inhabitants of the towns, the small industrial tradespeople and the master craftsmen; it has in its train the peasants and the rural proletariat, so long as the latter has not yet found support in the independent proletariat of the towns.
The relation of the revolutionary workers’ party ⟨to the petty-bourgeois democracy is this: it⟩ goes with it against the faction whose overthrow it aims at; it opposes them in everything by which they seek to establish themselves in their own interest.
Far from wishing to overturn the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in social conditions that will make existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible. They therefore demand above all a reduction of state expenditure by curtailing the bureaucracy and shifting the main burden of taxation on to the big landowners and bourgeois. They further demand that the pressure of big capital on small be removed by public credit institutions and laws against usury, so that they and the peasants can obtain advances on favourable terms from the state instead of from the capitalists; and further, the establishment of bourgeois property relations in the countryside through the complete abolition of feudalism. To carry all this through they need a democratic constitution, whether constitutional or republican, that gives a majority to them and their allies the peasants, and a democratic local government that puts into their hands direct control over communal property and a number of functions now exercised by the bureaucrats.
The domination and rapid growth of capital is further to be counteracted, partly by restricting the right of inheritance, partly by transferring as many undertakings as possible to the state. As for the workers, one thing above all is settled: they are to remain wage-workers as before. The democratic petty bourgeois only want the workers to have better wages and a more secure existence, and hope to achieve this through partial employment by the state and through charitable measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with more or less disguised alms and to break their revolutionary strength by making their situation tolerable for the moment. The demands of the petty-bourgeois democracy summarised here are not put forward by all its factions at once, and only very few of its people have them in view as a definite goal in their entirety. The further individual people or factions among them go, the more of these demands they will make their own; and the few who see their own programme in the above would believe that they had thereby set out the utmost that can be asked of the revolution.
But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to a close as quickly as possible, having at most carried out the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their positions of rule, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and until the association of the proletarians, not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the whole world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased 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 in the further course of the revolution the petty-bourgeois democracy will for a moment gain the preponderant influence in Germany is beyond doubt. The question, then, is what the position of the proletariat, and in particular of the League, towards it is to be:
3. After this struggle, during the period of their ascendancy over the overthrown classes and the proletariat.
1. At the present moment, when the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat in general unity and reconciliation; they hold out their hand to it and strive to set up a great opposition party embracing all shades of the democratic party. That is, they strive to entangle the workers in a party organisation in which general social-democratic phrases predominate, behind which their particular interests are hidden, and in which the definite demands of the proletariat may not be brought forward for the sake of peace and quiet. Such a union would turn out entirely to their advantage and entirely to the disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose its whole independent position, won with so much effort, and sink once again into an appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This union must therefore be rejected in the most decisive manner. Instead of once again stooping to serve the bourgeois democrats as an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work to set up an independent organisation of the workers’ party, both secret and public, alongside the official democrats, and to make each community the centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat are discussed independently of bourgeois influences.
How little the bourgeois democrats are in earnest about an alliance in which the proletarians stand beside them with equal power and equal rights is shown, for example, by the Breslau democrats, who in their organ, the Neue Oder-Zeitung, furiously persecute the independently organised workers, whom they style socialists. In the event of a struggle against a common enemy no special union is needed. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties coincide for the moment, and, as hitherto, so in future this connection, calculated only for the moment, will come about of itself.
It goes without saying that in the coming bloody conflicts, as in all earlier ones, it is the workers who, by their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, will chiefly have to win the victory. As hitherto, so in this struggle too, the mass of the petty bourgeois will hold back as long as possible, hesitant, irresolute and inactive, and then, as soon as the victory is decided, seize it for themselves, call on the workers to keep calm and return to their work, guard against so-called excesses, and shut the proletariat out from the fruits of victory. It is not in the workers’ power to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this; but it is in their power to make it difficult for them to gain the upper hand over the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats carries within it from the outset the seeds of its downfall, and its later supplanting by the rule of the proletariat is considerably eased.
Above all, during the conflict and immediately after the fighting, the workers must counteract as far as at all possible the bourgeois efforts to calm things down, and compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suppressed again at once after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings with which only hateful memories are connected, they must not only tolerate these instances but take their direction into their own hands. During the struggle and after it the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic burghers set about taking over the government. If necessary they must extort these guarantees by force, and in general make sure that the new rulers bind themselves to every possible concession and promise — the surest means of compromising them. In general they must restrain, in every way and as far as possible, the intoxication of victory and the enthusiasm for the new state of things that follow every victorious street battle, by a calm and cool-headed view of the new conditions and by undisguised mistrust of the new government.
Alongside the new official governments they must at the same time set up their own revolutionary workers’ governments, whether in the form of municipal executives and municipal councils or of workers’ clubs or workers’ committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the backing of the workers but from the outset see themselves supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stands the whole mass of the workers. In a word: from the first moment of victory, mistrust must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against the workers’ previous allies, against the party that wants to exploit the common victory for itself alone.
2. But in order to be able to oppose this party energetically and threateningly, the party whose treachery to the workers will begin from the first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organised. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and ammunition must be carried through at once, and the revival of the old citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be resisted. Where this cannot be done, the workers must try to organise themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with commanders and a general staff of their own choosing, and to put themselves under the orders not of the state power but of the revolutionary municipal councils set up by the workers. Where workers are employed at the expense of the state, they must see to it that they are armed and organised 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 must if necessary be frustrated by force. Destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, immediate independent and armed organisation of the workers, and the imposition of the most burdensome and compromising possible conditions on the momentarily unavoidable rule of the bourgeois democracy: these are the main points which the proletariat, and therefore the League, must keep in view during and after the coming insurrection.
3. As soon as the new governments have consolidated themselves to some extent, their struggle against the workers will begin at once. In order to be able to oppose the democratic petty bourgeois with force, it is above all necessary that the workers should be independently organised and centralised in clubs. After the overthrow of the existing governments the Central Committee will, as soon as at all possible, move to Germany, immediately convene a congress, and lay before it the necessary proposals for the centralisation of the workers’ clubs under a leadership established at the chief seat of the movement. The rapid organisation of at least a provincial association of workers’ clubs is one of the most important points for strengthening and developing 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 number of workers is excluded on any pretext whatever by any chicanery of local authorities or government commissioners.
II. That everywhere workers’ candidates are put up alongside the bourgeois-democratic candidates, consisting as far as possible of members of the League, and that their election is promoted by every possible means. Even where there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary position and their party standpoint. In this they must not let themselves be bribed by the arguments of the democrats, such as that by doing so they are splitting the democratic party and giving the reaction the possibility of victory. All such phrases come down in the end to this, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The advances which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action are infinitely more important than the disadvantage that might arise from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. If the democracy comes out from the beginning resolutely and terroristically against the reaction, the latter’s influence in the elections will in any case have been destroyed in advance.
The first point on 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, they will want to leave the rural proletariat in existence and to create a petty-bourgeois peasant class, which will go through the same cycle of impoverishment and indebtedness in which the French peasant is still caught up. 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 used for workers’ colonies, cultivated by the associated rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale agriculture, whereby the principle of common property will at once obtain a firm basis in the midst of the tottering bourgeois property relations. Just as the democrats ally themselves with the peasants, so must the workers ally themselves with the rural proletariat.
The democrats will further either work directly for a federal republic or, if they cannot avoid the one and indivisible republic, at least try to cripple the central government by giving the communities and provinces the greatest possible autonomy and independence. In opposition to this plan the workers must strive not only for the one and indivisible German republic but also, within it, for the most decisive centralisation of power in the hands of the state authority. They must not let themselves be misled by the democratic talk of freedom of the communities, of self-government and so on. In a country like Germany, where so many remnants of the Middle Ages have still to be swept away, where so much local and provincial obstinacy has to be broken, it must on no account be tolerated that every village, every town and every province should put a new obstacle in the path of revolutionary activity, which can proceed with full force only from the centre. It must not be tolerated that the present state of things should be renewed, in which Germans have to fight separately in every town and every province for one and the same advance. Least of all must it be tolerated that a form of property which still lags behind modern private property and is everywhere necessarily dissolving into it — communal property, with the quarrels it brings between rich and poor communities — together with the communal citizenship that exists alongside state citizenship, with its chicanery against the workers, should be perpetuated by a so-called free communal constitution. As in France in 1793, so today in Germany the carrying through of the strictest centralisation is the task of the really revolutionary party.
We have seen how the democrats will come to power with the next movement, and how they will be compelled to propose more or less socialist 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 communist measures. But they can:
1. Compel the democrats to interfere in as many spheres as possible of the existing social order, to disturb its regular course and to compromise themselves, and to concentrate as many productive forces, means of transport, factories, railways and so on as possible in the hands of the state.
2. They must carry the proposals of the democrats, who will in any case act not as revolutionaries but merely as reformers, to their extreme, and turn them into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeois propose to buy up the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories, as the property of reactionaries, simply be confiscated by the state without compensation. If the democrats propose a proportional tax, the workers demand a progressive one; if the democrats themselves move a moderate progressive tax, the workers insist on a tax whose rates rise so steeply that big capital is ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of the state debt, the workers demand state bankruptcy. The demands of the workers must therefore everywhere be governed by the concessions and measures of the democrats.
If the German workers cannot come to power and achieve their class interests without going through a lengthy revolutionary development in full, they have this time at least the certainty that the first act of this coming revolutionary drama coincides with the direct victory of their own class in France, and will be greatly hastened by it.
But they themselves must do the most for their final victory, by making clear to themselves what their class interests are, by taking up their independent position as a party as soon as possible, and by not letting themselves be misled for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois from the independent organisation of the party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence.