Karl Marx and Frederick Engels On Poland

Communism, Revolution, and a Free Poland

Marx’s Speech

Speech delivered in French

commemorating 2nd anniversary of Krakow Uprising

Brussels, February 22, 1848

Gentlemen:

There are striking analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793 has
become the communist of our day. When Russia, Austria, and Prussia partitioned
Poland among themselves in 1793, the three powers relied on the Constitution
of 1791 which they had unanimously condemned for its alleged Jacobin principles.

And what did that Polish Constitution of 1791 proclaim? Nothing
but a constitutional monarchy: legislative power in the hands of the representatives
of the country; freedom of the press; freedom of conscience; open court
proceedings; abolition of serfdom, etc. And all that was then called Jacobinism!
Thus, gentlemen, you see that history was moved forward. What was then
Jacobinism has today become liberalism, and in its most moderate form at
that.

The three powers marched with history. In 1846, when they incorporated
Krakow into Austria and robbed the Poles of their last vestige of independence,
they designated as communism what had previously been called Jacobinism.

But, what did did the communism of the Krakow revolution consist
of? Was it communist because it wanted to restore the Polish nationality?
One could as well say that the war which the European Coalition waged against
Napoleon was communistic and that the Congress of Vienna [1815] was made
up of crowned communists. Or was the Krakow revolution communistic because
it wanted to install a democratic government? Nobody would accuse the millions
of citizens of Bern and New York of communistic impulses.

Communism denies the necessity of the existence of classes; it
wants to abolish all classes, all class distinctions. The Krakow revolution
wanted to extirpate only the political distinctions among classes, it wanted
to give equal rights to all classes.

So, in what respect, finally, was this Krakow revolution communistic?

Perchance because it wanted to break the chains of feudalism,
to liberate property from feudal obligations and to transform it into modern
property?

If one asked French property owners, “Do you know what the Polish
democrats want? The Polish democrats want to introduce in their country
the form of property that exists among you,” the French property owner
would answer, “That is very good.” But if one says to the French property
owner, as Guizot did, “The Poles want to abolish the form of property you
established by your Revolution of 1789 and which still exists among you,”
then they exclaim, “What! They are all revolutionists, communists! The
scoundrels should be destroyed” The abolition of corporations and guilds,
and the introduction of free competition – this is now called communism
in Sweden. The [Paris daily] Journal des Debats [Politiques et Litteraires]
goes even further: the abolition of revenues guaranteed to 200,000 voters
by corrupt law as a source of income, which the Journal considers
rightfully acquired property, this it calls communism. Undoubtedly the
Krakow revolution wanted to abolish a certain kind of property. But what
kind of property? The kind that in the rest of Europe can no more be abolished
than the Swiss Sonderbund [federation] – because neither one exists
any more.

Nobody will deny that in Poland the political question is tied
up with the social one. For a long time they have been inseparable from
each other.

Just ask the reactionaries about it! Did they fight during the
Restoration purely against political liberalism and the Voltaireanism that
was necessarily dragged along with it?

A very famous reactionary author has openly admitted that the
loftiest metaphysics of a de Maistre and a de Bonald reduces itself in
the last analysis to a money question – and is not every money question
directly a social question? The men of the Restoration did not conceal
the fact that in order to return to the policies of the good old days one
must restore the good old property, the feudal property and the moral property.
Everybody knows that fealty to the monarch is unthinkable without tithes
and socages.

Let us go back further. In 1789, the political question of human
rights absorbed in itself the social rights of free competition.

And what is it all about in England? Did the political parties
there, in all questions, from the Reform Bill [June 7, 1830] to the abolition
of the Corn Laws [June, 1846], fight for anything other than changes of
property, questions of property, social questions?

Here in Belgium itself, is the struggle between liberalism and
Catholicism anything else than a struggle between industrial capital and
big landownership?

And the political questions that have been debated for 17 years,
are they not at bottom social questions?

Thus no matter what position one takes – be it liberal or radical
or conservative – nobody can reproach the Krakow revolution with having
entangled a social question with a political one!

The men at the head of the revolutionary movement in Krakow were
most deeply convinced that only a democratic Poland could be independent,
and that a Polish democracy was impossible without an abolition of feudal
rights, without an agrarian movement that would transform the feudally
obligated peasants into modern owners. Put Russian autocrats over Polish
aristocrats; thereby you have merely naturalized the despotism. In exactly
the same way, in their war against foreign rule, the Germans have exchanged
one Napoleon for 36 Metternichs.

If the Polish feudal lord no longer has a Russian feudal lord
over him, the Polish peasant has not a less feudal lord over him – indeed,
a free, in place of an enslaved, lord. The political change has changed
nothing in the peasant's social position.

The Krakow revolution has set all of Europe a glorious example,
because it identified the question of nationalism with democracy and with
the liberation of the oppressed class.

Even though this revolution has been strangled with the bloody
hands of paid murderers, it now nevertheless rises gloriously and triumphantly
in Switzerland and in Italy. It finds its principles confirmed in Ireland,
where O'Connell's party [the Irish Confederation, founded January 1847]
with its narrowly restricted nationalistic aims has sunk into the grave,
and the new national party is pledged above all to reform and democracy.

Again it is Poland that has seized the initiative, and no longer
a feudal Poland but a democratic Poland; and from this point on its liberation
has become a matter of honor for all the democrats of Europe.

Marx & Engels on Poland |