NOTEBOOK “ON MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM”

MEHRING, “NEW CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE BIOGRAPHY
OF MARX AND ENGELS”

F. Mehring, “New Contributions to the Biography of Marx and Engels”, Die Neue Zeit , 25th year (1907).

“I consider Mazzini’s policy fundamentally wrong. He is working entirely in the interests of Austria by inciting Italy to a breach now. On the other hand, he fails to appeal to the peasants, that part of Italy that has been oppressed for centuries, and thus prepares new resources for the counter-revolution. Signor Mazzini knows only the cities with their liberal nobility and ‘enlightened citizens’. The material needs of the Italian rural population—sucked dry and systematically enfeebled and besotted like the Irish—are, of course, too low for the heaven-in-words of his cosmopolitan-neo-Catholic-ideological manifestoes. But it would have required courage, to be sure, to tell the bourgeoisie and the nobility that the first step towards the independence of Italy is the complete emancipation of the peasants and the transformation of their share- cropping system into free bourgeois property. Mazzini seems to think that a loan of ten million francs is more revolutionary than winning over ten million human beings . I am very much afraid that if worse comes to worst the Austrian Government will itself change the system of landownership in Italy and reform it in the ‘Galician’ manner” (pp. 58- 59). [2]

| | “And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the histor- ical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the exist- ence of classes is only bound up with particular histo- rical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dic- tatorship of the proletariat , (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes THE TRANSITION TO THE ABOLITION OF ALL CLASSES and to a classless society. [1] Ignorant louts like Heinzen, who deny not merely the class struggle but even the existence of classes, only prove that, despite all their blood curdling yelps and the humanitarian airs they give themselves, they regard the social conditions under which the bourgeoisie rules as the final product, the non plus ultra of history, and that they are only the servitors of the bourgeoisie . And the less these louts realise the greatness and transient necessity of the bourgeois regime itself the more disgusting is their servitude” (pp. 164- 65). [3] |
| --- | --- |
| | |
| |
| | |
| |

| | “On January 1, 1870 , the General Council issued a confidential circular drawn up by me in French (for the reaction upon England only the French, not the German, papers are important) on the rela- tion of the Irish national struggle to the emancipation of the working class, and therefore on the attitude which the International Association should take in regard to the Irish question. I shall give you here only quite briefly the decisive points. |
| --- | --- |
| | | |
| |

“Ireland is the bulwark of the English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of that country is not only one of the main sources of this aristocracy’s material welfare; it is its greatest moral strength . It, in fact, represents the domination of England over Ireland. Ireland is therefore the great means by which the English aristocracy maintains its domination in England herself.

| “If, on the other hand, the English army and police were to withdraw from Ireland tomorrow, you would at once have an agrarian revolution there . But the overthrow of the English aristocracy in Ireland involves as a nec- essary consequence its overthrow in England . And this would fulfil the preliminary condition for the proletarian revolution in England. The destruction of the English landed aristocracy in Ireland is an infinitely easier operation than in England herself, because in Ireland the land question has hitherto been the exclusive form of the social question, because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of the Irish people, and because it is at the same time inseparable from the national question . This quite apart from the Irish being more passionate and revo- lutionary in character than the English. | |
| --- | --- |
| | |

“As for the English bourgeoisie, it has in the first place a common interest with the English aristocracy in turning Ireland into mere pasture land which provides the English market with meat and wool at the cheapest possible prices. It is equally interested in reducing, by eviction and forcible emigration, the Irish population to such a small number that English capital (capital invested in land leased for farming) can function there with ‘security’. It has the same interest in ‘clearing’ the estates of Ireland as it had in the clearing of the agricultural districts of England and Scotland. The £6,000-£10,000 absentee-landlord and other Irish revenues which at present flow annually to London have also to be taken into account.

“But the English bourgeoisie has, besides, much more important interests in Ireland’s present-day economy.

“Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of tenant-farming, Ireland steadily supplies her own surplus [of labour] to the English labour market , and thus forces down wages and lowers THE MORAL AND MATERIAL CONDITION OF THE ENGLISH working class.

| | “ And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps English proletarians and Irish prole- tarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels him- self a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland , THUS strengthening THEIR DOMINATION OVER HIMSELF . He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the poor whites to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own coin. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. |
| --- | --- |
| N.B. | | | |
| |
| N.B. | | | |
| |
| | | | |
| | | | |

| | “This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit , the comic papers , in short , by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes . This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English work- ing class, despite its organisation . It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. |
| --- | --- |
| | | |
| |

| | “But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between the English and Irish is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England . It makes any honest and serious co-operation between the working classes of the two countries impossible . It enables the governments of both countries, when- ever they think fit, to take the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying and, in case of need, by war with one another . |
| --- | --- |
| N.B. | | |
| |

| “England, being the metropolis of capital, the power which has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important country for the workers’ revolution , and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have developed up to a certain degree of maturity. Therefore to hasten the social revolution in England is the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent . | |
| --- | --- |
| | | | | N.B. |
| |

“Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground , and everywhere to side openly with Ireland . And it is the special task of the Central Council in London to awaken a consciousness in the English workers that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment , but the first condition of their own social emancipation ” (pp. 226-28). [4]

---
Notes:
[1] See present edition, Vol. 25, p. 416.— Ed .

[2] From Marx’s letter to Weydemeyer, September 11, 1851. (See Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence , Moscow, 1955, p. 69.)

[3] From Mars’s letter to Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852. (See Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence , Moscow, 1955, p. 86.)

[4] From Marx’s letter to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, April 9, 1870. (See Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence , Moscow, 1955, pp. 285-87.)