Speeches at the Commemoration in Brussels

Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels

[Speeches at the Commemoration in Brussels
on 22 February 1848, on the 2nd Anniversary of the Cracow Insurrection of 1846]

After: “Célébration, à Bruxelles, du deuxième anniversaire de la Révolution Polonaise du 22 février l846”, Brussels 1848.
Translated from the French.

[Speech by Karl Marx]

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 unanimously condemned on account of its allegedly Jacobin principles.

And what had this Polish Constitution of 1791 proclaimed? Nothing other than constitutional monarchy: legislative power in the hands of the representatives of the country, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, public trial by jury, abolition of serfdom, etc. And all this was called the purest Jacobinism at the time! So you see, gentlemen, history has moved forward. What was Jacobinism then has today become liberalism, and indeed in its most moderate form.

The three powers have kept pace with history. When they incorporated Cracow into Austria in 1846 and robbed the Poles of the last remnants of their national independence, they branded as communism everything that they had previously called Jacobinism.

But in what, then, does the communism of the Cracow revolution consist? Was it communist because it sought to restore Polish nationality? One might just as well say that the war waged by the European coalition against Napoleon to save the nations was a communist war, and that the Congress of Vienna was composed of crowned communists. Or was the Cracow revolution communist because it sought to install a democratic government? No one will accuse the millionaire citizens of Berne and New York of communist leanings.

Communism denies the necessity of the existence of classes; it aims to abolish all classes, all class distinctions. The Cracow revolutionaries merely wanted to eliminate the political distinctions between the classes; they wanted to give equal rights to the various classes.

But in what respect, then, was this Cracow revolution finally communist? Was it because it attempted to break the chains of feudalism, to liberate encumbered property and transform it into free, modern property?

If one said to the French property owners: “Do you know what the Polish democrats want? The Polish democrats want to introduce in their own country the form of property that already exists among you,” the French property owners would reply: “They are doing very well.” But if one says to the French property owners, as Monsieur Guizot does: “The Poles want to abolish that property which you established by the Revolution of 1789 and which still exists among you today,” then they will cry out: “What! So they are revolutionaries, communists! The scoundrels must be destroyed!” The abolition of the guilds, of the corporations, the introduction of free competition is now called communism in Sweden. The
Journal des Débats
goes even further: to abolish the rent granted to two hundred thousand electors by a corrupted law, it calls the abolition of a source of income, it calls the destruction of lawfully acquired property, it calls communism. Undoubtedly, the Cracow revolution also wanted to abolish a very specific kind of property. But what kind of property? That which in the rest of Europe can no more be destroyed than the
Sonderbund
in Switzerland – because neither phenomenon exists any longer.

No one will deny that in Poland the political question is bound up with a social question. From time immemorial, the one has been inseparable from the other.

Just ask the reactionaries! Did they, for example, during the Restoration fight solely against political liberalism and the Voltairianism that it dragged along with it of necessity?

A very famous reactionary writer has openly admitted that the most sublime metaphysics of a de Maistre and a de Bonald ultimately boiled down to a money question – and is not every money question directly a social question? The men of the Restoration made no secret of the fact that, in order to return to the politics of the good old times, one must restore the good old property, feudal property, moral property. Everyone knows that loyalty to the monarch is inconceivable without tithes and corvée labour.

Let us go still further back. In 1789, the political question of the rights of man included within itself the social question of free competition.

And what is the case in England? Have the political parties fought over anything other than changes in property, questions of property, social questions, in all matters from the Reform Bill to the repeal of the Corn Laws?

Is even here in Belgium the struggle between Liberalism and Catholicism anything other than the struggle between industrial capital and large landed property?

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

Thus, whatever standpoint one may adopt, whether liberal, radical, or even aristocratic, no one can any longer reproach the Cracow revolution for having linked a social question with a political one!

The men who stood at the head of the revolutionary movement in Cracow were deeply convinced that only a democratic Poland could be independent and that a Polish democracy was impossible without the abolition of feudal rights, without an agrarian movement that would transform the quit-rent peasants into free proprietors, modern proprietors. Replace the Russian autocrat with Polish aristocrats; you will have merely naturalised despotism. In exactly the same way, the Germans in their war against foreign domination exchanged a single Napoleon for thirty-six Metternichs.

Even if the Polish feudal lord then no longer has a Russian feudal lord over him, the Polish peasant still has a feudal lord over him – a free one, it is true, in place of an enslaved one. This political change would have altered nothing in his social position.

The Cracow revolution gave a glorious example to all Europe by identifying the cause of the nation with the cause of democracy and the emancipation of the oppressed class.

Though for the moment this revolution has been stifled by the bloody hands of hired assassins, it is now rising again, glorious and triumphant, in Switzerland and Italy. It finds its principles confirmed in Ireland, where the party narrowly limited to national aims has sunk into the grave with O’Connell, while the new national party is above all committed to reforms and democracy.

Once again it is Poland that has taken the initiative, but no longer feudal Poland, but democratic Poland; and from this moment on, its liberation has become a point of honour for all democrats of Europe.

[Speech by Friedrich Engels]

Gentlemen!

The uprising whose anniversary we are celebrating today has failed. After a few days of heroic resistance, Cracow was taken, and the bloody spectre of Poland, which had risen for a moment before the eyes of its murderers, has sunk back into the grave.

The Cracow revolution ended in a defeat, a most lamentable defeat. Let us pay the last honours to the fallen heroes, let us lament their failure, let us express our sympathy to the twenty million Poles whose chains have been tightened by this failure.

But, gentlemen, is that all we have to do? Is it enough to shed a tear at the grave of that unhappy country and to swear an implacable but so far fairly ineffectual hatred to its oppressors?

No, gentlemen! The anniversary of Cracow is not only a day of mourning, it is for us democrats a day of glad courage; for the defeat bears victory within itself, and we are certain of the fruits of this victory, while the consequences of the defeat are only short-lived.

This victory is the victory of the young democratic Poland over the old aristocratic Poland.

In fact, the last struggle of Poland against its foreign oppressors was preceded by a hidden, secret, but decisive struggle within Poland itself, the struggle of the oppressed Poles against the Polish oppressors, the struggle of the Polish democracy against the Polish aristocracy.

Compare 1830 with 1846, compare Warsaw with Cracow! In 1830 the ruling class in Poland was as selfish, narrow-minded, and cowardly in the legislative body as it was self-sacrificing, enthusiastic, and brave on the field of battle.

What did the Polish aristocracy want in 1830? To defend the rights it had won against the Tsar. It confined the uprising to the small area which the Congress of Vienna had seen fit to call the Kingdom of Poland; it restrained the urge of the other Polish provinces; it left untouched the brutalising serfdom of the peasants and the disgraceful position of the Jews. If the aristocracy was compelled to make concessions to the people in the course of the uprising, it made them only when it was already too late, when the uprising was already lost.

Let us state it openly: the uprising of 1830 was neither a national revolution (it excluded three-quarters of Poland), nor a social or political revolution; it changed nothing in the internal condition of the people; it was a conservative revolution.

But in the midst of this conservative revolution, in the midst of the national government, there was one man who violently attacked the narrow-minded views of the ruling class. He proposed truly revolutionary measures, from whose boldness the aristocratic representatives in parliament shrank back; when he called the whole of old Poland to arms, when he thereby turned the war for the independence of Poland into a European war, when he emancipated the Jews and the peasants, when he gave the peasants a share in the ownership of the land, when he restored Poland on the basis of democracy and equality, he wanted to make the national cause the cause of freedom, he wanted to identify the interest of all peoples with that of the Polish people. Must I name this man, whose genius conceived this plan so vast and yet so simple? This man was Lelewel.

In 1830 the aristocratic majority, blinded by its own interests, persistently rejected these proposals. But those ideas, matured and developed through the experience of fifteen years of bondage, we saw the same ideas inscribed on the banner of the Cracow insurrection. In Cracow – and this was obvious – the people no longer had much to lose. There were no aristocrats there; there every step that was taken bore the stamp of that democratic, I might almost say proletarian, boldness that has nothing to lose but its misery and a whole fatherland, a whole world to gain. No hesitation there, no scruples; they attacked the three powers simultaneously; they proclaimed the freedom of the peasants, agrarian reform, the emancipation of the Jews, without bothering for a single moment about whether this might injure this or that aristocratic interest.

The Kraków Revolution wanted neither to restore the old Poland nor to preserve what the foreign governments had allowed to remain of the old Polish institutions; it was neither reactionary nor conservative.

No, it confronted Poland even more hostilely than the foreign oppressors: the old, barbaric, feudal, and aristocratic Poland, which was built upon the bondage of the majority of the people. Far from wanting to restore this old Poland, it wanted to overthrow it root and branch and on its ruins, with an entirely new class, with the majority of the people, to erect a new, modern, civilised, and democratic Poland, worthy of the nineteenth century, a true outpost of civilisation.

The difference between 1830 and 1846 – the tremendous progress which took place in the bosom of the unhappy, bleeding, torn country; the Polish aristocracy, completely isolated from the Polish people, throwing itself into the arms of the oppressors of the fatherland; the Polish people irrevocably deciding for the cause of democracy; and finally we see in Poland as here at home the class struggle (the struggle of class against class) as the driving force of every social advance – therein lies the victory of democracy confirmed by the Kraków Revolution, that is the result which will yet bear fruit when the defeat of the insurgents has long been avenged.

Yes, gentlemen, thanks to the Kraków insurrection, the originally national cause of Poland has become the cause of all peoples, the original question of sympathy has become a question that interests all democrats. Until 1846 we had a crime to avenge; from now on we have allies to support, and we shall act accordingly.

And in particular our Germany must congratulate itself on this outbreak of democratic passions in Poland. We stand immediately before a democratic revolution; we shall have to fight against the barbaric hordes of Austria and Russia. Before 1846 we could harbour doubt as to which side Poland would take in the event of a democratic revolution in Germany. The Kraków Revolution has removed every doubt. From now on the German and the Polish people are irrevocably allied. We have the same enemies, the same oppressors, for the Russian government weighs just as heavily upon us as upon the Poles. The first condition for the liberation both of Germany and of Poland is the overthrow of the present political state of affairs in Germany, is the overthrow of Prussia and Austria, is the pushing back of Russia beyond the Dniester and the Dvina.

The alliance of the two nations is therefore by no means a beautiful dream, an alluring illusion; no, gentlemen, it is an indispensable necessity, arising from the common interests of both nations and made a necessity by the Kraków Revolution. The German people has so far brought its own cause to almost nothing but words; for its Polish brothers it will perform deeds. And just as we, the German democrats assembled here, extend our hand to the Polish democrats, so the whole German people will celebrate its alliance with the Polish people on the field of the first battle that we shall win together against our oppressors.