against the Polish landlords. The agrarian revolution which might have provided a broader base for the Cracow insurrection was diverted into a counterrevolutionary movement in support of the Hapsburg dynasty. The peasantry, with their traditional trust in the “little Father” whose good will was always frustrated by bad advisers and greedy landlords, fought for the phantom reforms of the government rather than the real ones of the Cracow revolutionaries.
Marx and Engels did not need to be reminded of the importance of an agrarian revolution by these events. Marx had made the abolition of feudal obligations or what remained of them a central issue when he was still the liberal editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. This was before he became a socialist. Nor was this a peculiar “Marxist” position. Most radicals and liberals shared his views on this issue at least in the abstract. What the events in Cracow and Galicia did was to force supporters of “the Democracy” to take a stand on the issues which divided the Polish émigrés who were their friends.
Marx and Engels addressed two meetings of “the Democracy” memorializing Polish insurrections in the year preceding the Manifesto. The first was in London on November 29, 1847; the occasion was the seventeenth anniversary of the 1830 uprising. On this occasion, neither Marx nor Engels had much to say about Poland! They mainly took the opportunity to emphasize the international and social character of the coming revolution. Engels’ only reference to Poland emphasized the responsibility of Germans to oppose the German occupation of Poland and went on to stress the international character of the movement. It was Marx who “internationalized” the issue of Polish independence and emphasized its relation to the “social question.”
The old Poland is lost in any case and we would be the last to wish for its restoration. But it is not only the old Poland that is lost. The old Germany, the old France, the old England, the whole of the old society is lost. But the loss of the old society is no loss for those who have nothing to lose in the old society, and this is the case of the great majority in all countries at the present time.27
And that is all there is about Poland in Marx’s speech.
The second meeting took place on February 22, 1848 to commemorate the 1846 insurrection. The Manifesto was probably published in the same week. On this occasion both Marx and Engels addressed the social character of the insurrection directly and in considerable detail considering that these were both short speeches.
Marx emphasized that the standard denunciations of the Cracow revolutionary government as “communist” by the establishment press was hysteria designed to conceal the fact that the property abolished by the insurrectionaries was feudal property such as no longer existed in France. What they aimed at in their brief reign was to establish the property relations that already existed in France, Belgium, Switzerland and North America. Had the French proprietor been told this, Marx says, he would have replied “They are quite right.” However, on being told that the insurrectionaries were revolutionaries and communists who were abolishing property rights the French property owner replied “What, . . . these scoundrels must be trampled down!” Marx praises the Cracow revolutionaries because they saw that only a democratic Poland could be independent and only a Poland which had abolished feudal rights could be democratic.
Replace the Russian autocrat by Polish aristocrats and you will have given despotism naturalisation papers. . . . If the Polish lord no longer has a Russian lord over him, the Polish peasant will still have a lord over him, but a free lord in place of a slave lord. This political change will have altered nothing in his social position.28
Please note that this passage comes pretty close to saying that it doesn’t matter whether the Polish peasant is exploited by a foreign lord or a domestic one. In terms of the later debates over this question it would appear that Marx is anticipating the position of Rosa Luxemburg. But that would be overstating the case. That is not the point Marx is trying to make. What we have here is a sharp attack on the “pure and simple” nationalists in the Polish emigration. It is also an anticipatory repudiation of the paranoid anti-Russian position often attributed to Marx.
The adherents of the pro-aristocratic wing of the Polish independence movement in the audience would not have found much to cheer in Engels’ speech either. After a salute to the fallen heroes and a lament for suffering Poland, Engels, ever the optimist, goes on to announce that the defeat of the Cracow insurrection is also a victory that the meeting should celebrate! A victory over whom? It is the “. . . victory of young democratic Poland over the old aristocratic Poland.”
Yes, the latest struggle of Poland against its foreign oppressors has been preceded by a hidden struggle, concealed but decisive within Poland itself, a struggle of oppressed Poles against Polish oppressors, a struggle of democracy against the Polish aristocracy.29
As he warms to the subject, Engels claims that the Cracow revolution was “even more hostile to Poland itself than to the foreign oppressor.” What was this old Poland? Engels spells it out in a passage pillorying the aristocratic revolutionaries of 1830.
What did the Polish aristocracy want in 1830? To safeguard its own acquired rights with regard to the Emperor. It limited the insurrection to the little country which the Congress of Vienna was pleased to call the Kingdom of Poland; it restrained the uprising in the other Polish provinces; it left intact the degrading serfdom of the peasants and the infamous condition of the Jews. If the aristocracy, in the course of the insurrection, had to make concessions to the people, it only made them when it was too late, when the insurrection had failed.30
Yet, this was an insurrection which Engels supported! He makes that clear by holding up as an example Lelewel (who was in the audience.) This was the one man, according to Engels, who, in 1830, fought for the emancipation of the Jews and peasants and for restoring all of Poland thus “turning the war of Polish independence into a European war.”
These two speeches have to be read in their entirety to get a real feel for the way the Polish independence movement was linked in Marx and Engels’ mind to the struggle to free Europe from the Holy Alliance and how both were seen as dependent on a democratic and social revolution internationally.
In the Manifesto, whose analysis of the relationship of the various national movements to the social revolution we will look at later, the Polish question is reduced to the following sentence:
In Poland they [the Communists] support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection in Cracow in 1846.31
Today, this is an obscure reference. It probably was already obscure in 1888 when Engels and Samuel Moore translated the Manifesto into what has become the standard English version. In that translation (quoted above) the original German phrase Unter den Polen appears as “in Poland.” Literally, it means “among the Poles.” At the time the Manifesto was written, this paragraph was practically a declaration of war on the right wing of the Polish emigration. In Engels’ 1888 translation this point is lost.
8. Revolutionary Cattle Dealers
The revolt of the Hungarians, like that of the Czechs and Poles, divided left from right in Germany. Throughout 1849 coverage of this rebellion of the Hungarian people against the Austrian Empire dominated the columns of the NRZ. Prior to the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, however, there are only scattered references to Hungary by Engels and none by Marx.32 Certainly, the country had not played a role in the politics of the European left comparable to that played by Poland.
In early 1847, Engels did write two articles for the Deutscher-Brüsseler-Zeitung, by this time the semi-official voice of the
