Address Central Committee, 1850
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Address Central Committee, 1850
International Communist Party
The Unitary and Invariant Body of Party Theses
Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League
London, March 1850
Brothers!
During the two revolutionary years of 1848-1849, the League proved itself in two
ways: firstly, because its members intervened energetically in the movement
everywhere; because in the press, on the barricades, and on the battlefields,
they were always at the forefront of the ranks of the only resolutely
revolutionary class, the proletariat. Secondly, the League proved itself because
its conception of the movement, as set forth in the circulars of the congresses
and of the Central Committee in 1847 and in the Communist Manifesto, proved to
be the only correct one; because the expectations expressed in those documents
have been completely fulfilled, and the conception of the present state of
society, previously propagated by the League only in secret, is now on
everyone’s lips and is openly preached in the streets. At the same time, the
previously solid organization of the League has slackened considerably. A large
part of the League’s members, who participated directly in the revolutionary
movement, judged that the era of secret societies was over and that public
action alone was sufficient. The circles and individual communities allowed
their relations with the Central Committee to slacken and gradually suspended
them. Thus, while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, was
becoming increasingly organized in Germany, the workers’ party was losing its
only firm foothold, remaining organized at most only in a few places for local
purposes, and thus entered the general movement completely under the domination
of the petty-bourgeois democrats. This state of affairs must be brought to an
end; the independence of the workers must be reestablished.
The Central Committee understood this necessity and therefore sent an emissary,
Joseph Moll, to Germany in the winter of 1848-49 to reorganize the League.
However, Moll’s mission did not have lasting results, both because the German
workers did not yet have sufficient experience at that time and because the
uprising of last May interrupted it. Moll himself took up arms, joined the
Baden-Palatinate army, and fell on June 29 in the battle of Murg. The League
lost one of its oldest, most active, and most loyal members, who had actively
participated in all the congresses and meetings of the Central Committee and had
already completed a series of highly successful missions. After the defeat of
the revolutionary parties in Germany and France, almost all the members of the
Central Committee met in London in July 1849, were joined by new revolutionary
forces, and pursued the reorganization of the League with renewed zeal.
The reorganization can only be carried out by an emissary, and the Central
Committee considers it of the utmost importance that the emissary [Heinrich
Bauer, ed.] should leave right now, as we are on the eve of a new revolution in
which the workers’ party must present itself as organized, as unanimous, and as
independent as possible, if it does not want to be exploited and kept in tow by
the bourgeoisie again, as in 1848.
Already in 1848, we told you, brothers, that the German liberal bourgeoisie
would come to power as soon as possible and would immediately turn the newly
conquered power against the workers. You have seen how this came to pass. It was
in fact the bourgeoisie who, after the movement of March 1848, immediately
seized State power and used it to push the workers, their allies in the
struggle, back into their original position of subjugation. And although the
bourgeoisie could not achieve this goal without allying itself with the feudal
party, which had been defeated in March, indeed, although it could not achieve
it without finally ceding power to this absolutist feudal party, it nevertheless
secured conditions which, given the government’s financial difficulties, would
in the long run place power in its hands and guarantee all its interests, if it
were possible for the revolutionary movement to transform itself now into a
so-called peaceful evolution. The bourgeoisie would not even need to make itself
hated by the people with violent measures to secure its rule, because all these
measures have already been taken by the feudal counterrevolution. But the
evolution will not take this peaceful course. On the contrary, the revolution
that will hasten it is very near, whether it is provoked by an independent
uprising of the French proletariat or by the invasion of revolutionary Babel by
the Holy Alliance.
And the role that the German liberal bourgeoisie played in 1848 against the
people, this role of such great traitors, will be assumed in the coming
revolution by the democratic petty bourgeoisie, who now take the same position
in the opposition that the liberal bourgeoisie had before 1848. This party, the
democratic party, which is much more dangerous to the workers than the previous
liberal party, consists of three elements:
I. The most progressive strata of the upper bourgeoisie, who set themselves the
goal of immediately and completely overthrowing feudalism and absolutism. This
faction is represented by the advocates of compromise and those who proposed not
to pay taxes.
II. Constitutional-democratic petty bourgeois, whose main aim during the
movement that has taken place so far has been the establishment of a more or
less democratic federal State, as pursued by their representatives, by the left
wing of the Frankfurt Assembly, and later by the Stuttgart parliament and by
themselves in the campaign for the Constitution of the Empire.
III. Republican petty bourgeois, whose ideal is a German federal republic along
the lines of Switzerland, and who now call themselves “democratic socialists”
and “reds” because they cherish the pious desire to abolish the pressure of big
capital on small capital, of the big bourgeoisie on the petty bourgeoisie. The
representatives of this faction were the members of democratic congresses and
committees, the leaders of democratic associations, and the editors of
democratic newspapers.
All these factions now call themselves, after their defeat, “Republicans” or
“Reds,” just as the petty bourgeois Republicans in France now call themselves
Socialists. Wherever the opportunity still arises, as in Württemberg, Bavaria,
etc., to pursue their aims by constitutional means, they seize the opportunity
to maintain their old phraseology and to prove by their actions that they have
not changed in the least. It is clear, on the other hand, that the change of
name of this party does not in the least alter its position towards the workers,
but simply proves that it must now turn against the bourgeoisie linked to
absolutism and instead rely on the proletariat.
The petty-bourgeois democratic party is very strong in Germany; it not only
embraces the vast majority of the bourgeois inhabitants of the cities, small
industrial traders, and artisans; it also counts among its followers the
peasants and the agricultural proletariat, insofar as the latter has not yet
found support in the independent proletariat of the cities.
The position of the revolutionary workers’ party towards petty-bourgeois
democracy is as follows: it acts in agreement with the latter against the
faction whose downfall it seeks; it opposes the petty-bourgeois democrats in all
matters through which they seek to consolidate themselves on their own behalf.
The petty-bourgeois democrats, far from wanting to overthrow the whole of
society for the revolutionary proletarians, tend toward a transformation of
social conditions, so that the present society becomes as tolerable and
comfortable for them as possible. Therefore, they demand, first of all, a
reduction in State expenditure by limiting bureaucracy and shifting the burden
of taxation onto large landowners and the big bourgeoisie. They also demand the
elimination of the pressure of big capital on small capital, through public
credit institutions and laws against usury, so that they and the peasants can
receive advances on favorable terms from the State instead of from the
capitalists; finally, they want the application of bourgeois property relations
in the countryside, through the complete elimination of feudalism. In order to
carry out all this, they need a democratic constitution of the State, whether
constitutional or republican, which gives them and their allies, the peasants, a
majority; and a democratic constitution of the municipalities which gives them
direct control over municipal property and places in their hands a series of
functions currently exercised by the bureaucracy.
According to them, the domination and rapid growth of capital must also be
countered, in part by limiting the right of inheritance and in part by
transferring as much work as possible to the State. As far as the workers are
concerned, it is first of all established that they must remain wage earners as
before; the democratic petty bourgeoisie only want workers to have better wages
and a secure existence, and hope to achieve this through partial employment of
workers by the State and through charitable measures; in short, they hope to
corrupt the workers with more or less covert handouts and to break their
revolutionary strength by making their situation temporarily bearable. The
demands of petty-bourgeois democracy that we have summarized here are not
advanced by all factions of it at the same time, and only very few people of
petty-bourgeois democracy present them as a definite goal. The more advanced the
groups and individuals of petty-bourgeois democracy are, the greater the number
of these demands they make their own, and the few who see their own program in
the above may even believe that they have thereby proposed the maximum that can
be demanded of the revolution. But these demands can in no way suffice for the
party of the proletariat. While the petty-bourgeois democrats want to bring the
revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and at most to realize the
above demands, it is in our interest and our task to make the revolution
permanent until all the more or less propertied classes are driven from power,
until the proletariat has conquered State power, until the association of
proletarians, not only in one country, but in all the dominant countries of the
world, has developed to such an extent that competition between the proletarians
of these countries ceases, and until at least the decisive productive forces are
concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us, it cannot be a question
of transforming private property, but of destroying it; not of mitigating class
antagonisms, but of abolishing classes; not of improving the present society,
but of founding a new society. There is no doubt that during the further
development of the revolution, petty-bourgeois democracy will gain a
preponderant influence in Germany for a certain time. The question therefore
arises as to what the position of the proletariat, and especially of the League,
will be in relation to it:
1. as long as the present state of affairs lasts, in which the petty-bourgeois
democrats are equally oppressed;
2. in the coming revolutionary struggle, which will give them the upper hand;
3. after this struggle, during the period of petty-bourgeois democracy’s
dominance over the defeated classes and the proletariat.
1) At the present moment, when petty-bourgeois democrats are oppressed
everywhere, they preach unity and reconciliation to the proletariat in general;
they offer them their hand and tend towards the formation of a large opposition
party representing all shades of the democratic party, that is, they tend to
involve the workers in a party organization dominated by generic
social-democratic phrases behind which the specific interests of the petty
bourgeoisie are hidden, and in which the specific demands of the proletariat,
for the sake of peace, should not be put forward. Such a union would only
benefit them and completely disadvantage the proletariat. The proletariat would
completely lose its hard-won independent position and once again be reduced to
being an appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This union must therefore be
resolutely rejected. Instead of lowering themselves once again to serve as a
cheering chorus for the bourgeois democrats, the workers and above all the
League must strive to establish, alongside the official democrats, an
independent, secret and public organization of the workers’ party, and to make
every community of the League the central point and core of workers’
associations, in which the interests and position of the proletariat are
discussed independently of bourgeois influences. How little the bourgeois
democrats seriously consider an alliance in which the proletarians stand
alongside them with equal power and equal rights is shown, for example, by the
democrats of Breslau, who in their organ, the
Neue Oder-Zeitung,
furiously
attack the independently organized workers, whom they call socialists. In the
case of a battle against a common enemy, there is no need for any special union.
As soon as this enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of the two
parties coincide momentarily, and, as has been the case so far and will continue
to be so in the future, this connection, calculated only for that moment, will
re-establish itself spontaneously. It is natural that in the bloody conflicts
that are imminent, as in all previous ones, it will be mainly up to the workers
to win victory with their courage, their determination, and their
self-sacrifice. As has been the case until now, in these struggles too, the
petty bourgeoisie will, as long as possible, be slow, irresolute, and inactive,
but once victory is won, it will try to claim it for itself, urge the workers to
calm down and return home and to work, try to prevent so-called excesses, and
exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It is not in the power of
the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from acting in this way,
but it is in their power to make it more difficult for them to turn against the
armed proletariat; it is in their power to dictate conditions such that the rule
of the bourgeois democrats carries within itself from the outset the germ of its
own dissolution, and thus makes it easier to supplant it later with the rule of
the proletariat. First of all, the workers must, during the conflict and
immediately after the struggle, as long as possible, oppose the attempts of the
bourgeoisie to maintain calm, and force the democrats to put their current
terrorist rhetoric into action. They must strive to ensure that the immediate
revolutionary excitement is not stifled again immediately after victory. On the
contrary, they must strive to keep it alive as long as possible. Far from
opposing so-called excesses, cases of popular revenge on hated persons or on
public buildings connected with nothing but hateful memories, not only must such
examples be tolerated, but their direction must be taken over. During and after
the struggle, the workers must present their own demands at every opportunity,
alongside the demands of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees
for the workers as soon as the bourgeois democrats prepare to take the
government into their own hands. If necessary, they must force the others to
give them these guarantees, and above all ensure that the new rulers commit
themselves to all possible concessions and promises, which is the surest way to
compromise them. Above all, they must curb as much as possible the intoxication
of victory and the enthusiasm for the new order of things that follows every
successful insurrection, interpreting the situation coolly and calmly and
showing open distrust of the new government. Alongside the new official
governments, they must at the same time establish their own revolutionary
workers’ governments, either in the form of municipal councils and committees or
through workers’ circles and committees, so that the bourgeois democratic
governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers, but also find
themselves from the outset watched and threatened by organizations behind which
stands the entire mass of workers. In a word: from the first moment of victory,
mistrust must no longer be directed against the defeated reactionary party, but
against yesterday’s allies, against the party that wants to exploit the common
victory on its own.
2) But in order to be able to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers
will begin with the first hour of victory, energetically and menacingly, the
workers must be armed and organized. The arming of the entire proletariat with
rifles, shotguns, pistols, and ammunition must be carried out immediately; the
reestablishment of the old civil guard directed against the workers must be
opposed immediately. But where this latter goal cannot be achieved, the workers
must try to organize themselves independently into a proletarian guard, with a
leader and staff elected by them, and place themselves under the orders not of
the State powers, but of the municipal councils formed by the workers. Where
workers are employed by the State, they must arm and organize themselves into a
special corps, with leaders chosen by them, or as part of the proletarian guard.
Under no pretext should weapons and ammunition be surrendered, and any attempt
at disarmament must be opposed by force if necessary. Destruction of the
influence of the bourgeois democrats over the workers, immediate independent and
armed organization of the workers, and assurance of conditions that make the
momentary and inevitable domination of bourgeois democracy as difficult and
compromising as possible; these are the main points that the proletariat and the
League must keep in mind during and after the imminent insurrection.
3) As soon as the new governments have consolidated themselves to some extent,
their struggle against the workers will begin immediately. In order to be able
to effectively oppose the petty-bourgeois democrats, it is first of all
necessary for the workers to be organized and centralized independently, in
circles. As soon as possible after the overthrow of the present governments, the
Central Committee of the League will move to Germany, immediately convene a
congress, and make the necessary proposals to centralize the workers’ circles
under a single leadership, established at the movement’s headquarters. The rapid
organization of at least a provincial connection between the workers’ circles is
one of the most important points for strengthening and developing the workers’
party. The first consequence of the overthrow of the current governments will be
the election of a National Assembly. In this regard, the proletariat must
ensure:
I. That no local authorities or government commissioners use any technicalities
to exclude a certain number of workers under any pretext.
II. That everywhere, alongside the bourgeois democratic candidates, there are
workers’ candidates, who should as far as possible be chosen from among the
members of the League and for whose election every effort must be made. Even
where there is no hope of success, the workers must present their candidates in
order to safeguard their independence, to gauge their strength, and to publicly
manifest their revolutionary position and the party’s point of view. In this,
they must not be seduced by the platitudes of the democrats who, for example,
claim that doing so divides the democratic party and gives the reactionaries a
chance of victory. All these phrases boil down to one thing: that the
proletariat will be cheated. The progress that the proletarian party will make
by maintaining such an independent course is infinitely more important than the
disadvantage that the presence of a few reactionaries among the elected
representatives might produce. If democracy fights reaction from the outset with
determination and measures of terror, the influence of the latter in the
elections will be destroyed from the outset.
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 bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the
peasants as free property, that is, they will want to allow the agricultural
proletariat to continue to exist and create a class of petty-bourgeois peasants
who will have to go through the same cycle of impoverishment and indebtedness in
which the French peasant is still caught today.
The workers, in the interests of the agricultural proletariat and in their own
interests, must oppose this plan. They must demand that the confiscated feudal
property remain the property of the State and be transformed into workers’
colonies, cultivated by the associated agricultural proletariat, with all the
advantages of large-scale agriculture, so that the principle of common ownership
immediately receives a strong foundation amid the faltering relations of
bourgeois property. Just as the democrats ally themselves with the peasants, so
the workers must ally themselves with the agricultural proletariat. Furthermore,
the democrats will work directly for a federal republic or, at least, if they
cannot avoid a single and indivisible republic, they will try to paralyze the
central government with every possible independence and autonomy of the
municipalities and provinces. The workers must oppose this plan and work not
only for a single, indivisible German republic, but also, within it, for a very
decisive centralization of power in the hands of the State. They must not be
deceived by democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, local
self-government, and so on. In a country like Germany, where so many remnants of
the Middle Ages still need to be eliminated and so many local and provincial
particularisms need to be broken down, it must not be tolerated in any way that
every village, every city, every province should place a new obstacle in the way
of revolutionary activity, which can only spread in all its strength from the
center. We must not tolerate a renewal of the current state of affairs in which
Germans must fight separately, in each city and each province, to achieve a
single, always the same, progress. And even less can it be tolerated that a form
of property that is even more backward than modern private property and is
necessarily dissolving everywhere into the latter – common property – and the
conflicts that arise from this between rich and poor communes, as well as
municipal public law, existing alongside State public law, should be perpetuated
through a so-called free constitution of the communes, with its quibbles against the workers. As in France in 1793, the implementation of the strictest centralization
(
*
)
of power is today the task of the truly revolutionary party in Germany.
We have seen how the democrats will come to power in the next revolutionary
movement, how they will be forced to propose more or less socialist measures.
Now the question will be asked: what measures will the workers propose in turn?
Of course, at the beginning of the movement, the workers will not yet be able to
propose directly communist measures. But they can:
1. Force the democrats to intervene in as many areas as possible in the current
social order, to disrupt its regular course, to compromise themselves, as well
as to concentrate in the hands of the State as many productive forces, means of
transport, factories, railways, etc. as possible.
2. They must push to the extreme the measures proposed by the democrats, who in
any case will not present themselves as revolutionaries, but only as reformers,
and transform them into direct attacks on private property. Thus, for example,
when the petty bourgeoisie proposes to purchase the railways and factories, the
workers must demand that these railways and factories be confiscated by the
State purely and simply, without compensation, as the property of reactionaries.
If the Democrats propose proportional taxation, the workers will propose
progressive taxation; if the Democrats themselves propose a moderate progressive
tax, the workers will insist on a tax so rapidly progressive that big capital
will be ruined; if the Democrats demand that the State’s debts be settled, the
proletarians will demand that the State go bankrupt. The demands of the workers
must always be adjusted to the concessions and measures of the Democrats.
Although the German workers cannot come to power and satisfy their class
interests without going through a long revolutionary development, they are at
least aware this time that the first act of the impending revolutionary drama
will coincide with the direct victory of their class in France, and therefore
the process will be hastened.
But they themselves must do what is essential for their final victory by clarifying their own class interests, assuming an independent party position as soon as possible, and not allowing the hypocritical phrases of the petty-bourgeois democrats to distract them even for a moment from the independent organization of the proletarian party. Their battle cry must be:
The Permanent Revolution
.
(
*
) Note by Engels to the 1885 edition
It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849.
International Communist Party
The Unitary and Invariant Body of Party Theses
Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League
London, March 1850
Brothers!
During the two revolutionary years of 1848-1849, the League proved itself in two
ways: firstly, because its members intervened energetically in the movement
everywhere; because in the press, on the barricades, and on the battlefields,
they were always at the forefront of the ranks of the only resolutely
revolutionary class, the proletariat. Secondly, the League proved itself because
its conception of the movement, as set forth in the circulars of the congresses
and of the Central Committee in 1847 and in the Communist Manifesto, proved to
be the only correct one; because the expectations expressed in those documents
have been completely fulfilled, and the conception of the present state of
society, previously propagated by the League only in secret, is now on
everyone’s lips and is openly preached in the streets. At the same time, the
previously solid organization of the League has slackened considerably. A large
part of the League’s members, who participated directly in the revolutionary
movement, judged that the era of secret societies was over and that public
action alone was sufficient. The circles and individual communities allowed
their relations with the Central Committee to slacken and gradually suspended
them. Thus, while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, was
becoming increasingly organized in Germany, the workers’ party was losing its
only firm foothold, remaining organized at most only in a few places for local
purposes, and thus entered the general movement completely under the domination
of the petty-bourgeois democrats. This state of affairs must be brought to an
end; the independence of the workers must be reestablished.
The Central Committee understood this necessity and therefore sent an emissary,
Joseph Moll, to Germany in the winter of 1848-49 to reorganize the League.
However, Moll’s mission did not have lasting results, both because the German
workers did not yet have sufficient experience at that time and because the
uprising of last May interrupted it. Moll himself took up arms, joined the
Baden-Palatinate army, and fell on June 29 in the battle of Murg. The League
lost one of its oldest, most active, and most loyal members, who had actively
participated in all the congresses and meetings of the Central Committee and had
already completed a series of highly successful missions. After the defeat of
the revolutionary parties in Germany and France, almost all the members of the
Central Committee met in London in July 1849, were joined by new revolutionary
forces, and pursued the reorganization of the League with renewed zeal.
The reorganization can only be carried out by an emissary, and the Central
Committee considers it of the utmost importance that the emissary [Heinrich
Bauer, ed.] should leave right now, as we are on the eve of a new revolution in
which the workers’ party must present itself as organized, as unanimous, and as
independent as possible, if it does not want to be exploited and kept in tow by
the bourgeoisie again, as in 1848.
Already in 1848, we told you, brothers, that the German liberal bourgeoisie
would come to power as soon as possible and would immediately turn the newly
conquered power against the workers. You have seen how this came to pass. It was
in fact the bourgeoisie who, after the movement of March 1848, immediately
seized State power and used it to push the workers, their allies in the
struggle, back into their original position of subjugation. And although the
bourgeoisie could not achieve this goal without allying itself with the feudal
party, which had been defeated in March, indeed, although it could not achieve
it without finally ceding power to this absolutist feudal party, it nevertheless
secured conditions which, given the government’s financial difficulties, would
in the long run place power in its hands and guarantee all its interests, if it
were possible for the revolutionary movement to transform itself now into a
so-called peaceful evolution. The bourgeoisie would not even need to make itself
hated by the people with violent measures to secure its rule, because all these
measures have already been taken by the feudal counterrevolution. But the
evolution will not take this peaceful course. On the contrary, the revolution
that will hasten it is very near, whether it is provoked by an independent
uprising of the French proletariat or by the invasion of revolutionary Babel by
the Holy Alliance.
And the role that the German liberal bourgeoisie played in 1848 against the
people, this role of such great traitors, will be assumed in the coming
revolution by the democratic petty bourgeoisie, who now take the same position
in the opposition that the liberal bourgeoisie had before 1848. This party, the
democratic party, which is much more dangerous to the workers than the previous
liberal party, consists of three elements:
I. The most progressive strata of the upper bourgeoisie, who set themselves the
goal of immediately and completely overthrowing feudalism and absolutism. This
faction is represented by the advocates of compromise and those who proposed not
to pay taxes.
II. Constitutional-democratic petty bourgeois, whose main aim during the
movement that has taken place so far has been the establishment of a more or
less democratic federal State, as pursued by their representatives, by the left
wing of the Frankfurt Assembly, and later by the Stuttgart parliament and by
themselves in the campaign for the Constitution of the Empire.
III. Republican petty bourgeois, whose ideal is a German federal republic along
the lines of Switzerland, and who now call themselves “democratic socialists”
and “reds” because they cherish the pious desire to abolish the pressure of big
capital on small capital, of the big bourgeoisie on the petty bourgeoisie. The
representatives of this faction were the members of democratic congresses and
committees, the leaders of democratic associations, and the editors of
democratic newspapers.
All these factions now call themselves, after their defeat, “Republicans” or
“Reds,” just as the petty bourgeois Republicans in France now call themselves
Socialists. Wherever the opportunity still arises, as in Württemberg, Bavaria,
etc., to pursue their aims by constitutional means, they seize the opportunity
to maintain their old phraseology and to prove by their actions that they have
not changed in the least. It is clear, on the other hand, that the change of
name of this party does not in the least alter its position towards the workers,
but simply proves that it must now turn against the bourgeoisie linked to
absolutism and instead rely on the proletariat.
The petty-bourgeois democratic party is very strong in Germany; it not only
embraces the vast majority of the bourgeois inhabitants of the cities, small
industrial traders, and artisans; it also counts among its followers the
peasants and the agricultural proletariat, insofar as the latter has not yet
found support in the independent proletariat of the cities.
The position of the revolutionary workers’ party towards petty-bourgeois
democracy is as follows: it acts in agreement with the latter against the
faction whose downfall it seeks; it opposes the petty-bourgeois democrats in all
matters through which they seek to consolidate themselves on their own behalf.
The petty-bourgeois democrats, far from wanting to overthrow the whole of
society for the revolutionary proletarians, tend toward a transformation of
social conditions, so that the present society becomes as tolerable and
comfortable for them as possible. Therefore, they demand, first of all, a
reduction in State expenditure by limiting bureaucracy and shifting the burden
of taxation onto large landowners and the big bourgeoisie. They also demand the
elimination of the pressure of big capital on small capital, through public
credit institutions and laws against usury, so that they and the peasants can
receive advances on favorable terms from the State instead of from the
capitalists; finally, they want the application of bourgeois property relations
in the countryside, through the complete elimination of feudalism. In order to
carry out all this, they need a democratic constitution of the State, whether
constitutional or republican, which gives them and their allies, the peasants, a
majority; and a democratic constitution of the municipalities which gives them
direct control over municipal property and places in their hands a series of
functions currently exercised by the bureaucracy.
According to them, the domination and rapid growth of capital must also be
countered, in part by limiting the right of inheritance and in part by
transferring as much work as possible to the State. As far as the workers are
concerned, it is first of all established that they must remain wage earners as
before; the democratic petty bourgeoisie only want workers to have better wages
and a secure existence, and hope to achieve this through partial employment of
workers by the State and through charitable measures; in short, they hope to
corrupt the workers with more or less covert handouts and to break their
revolutionary strength by making their situation temporarily bearable. The
demands of petty-bourgeois democracy that we have summarized here are not
advanced by all factions of it at the same time, and only very few people of
petty-bourgeois democracy present them as a definite goal. The more advanced the
groups and individuals of petty-bourgeois democracy are, the greater the number
of these demands they make their own, and the few who see their own program in
the above may even believe that they have thereby proposed the maximum that can
be demanded of the revolution. But these demands can in no way suffice for the
party of the proletariat. While the petty-bourgeois democrats want to bring the
revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and at most to realize the
above demands, it is in our interest and our task to make the revolution
permanent until all the more or less propertied classes are driven from power,
until the proletariat has conquered State power, until the association of
proletarians, not only in one country, but in all the dominant countries of the
world, has developed to such an extent that competition between the proletarians
of these countries ceases, and until at least the decisive productive forces are
concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us, it cannot be a question
of transforming private property, but of destroying it; not of mitigating class
antagonisms, but of abolishing classes; not of improving the present society,
but of founding a new society. There is no doubt that during the further
development of the revolution, petty-bourgeois democracy will gain a
preponderant influence in Germany for a certain time. The question therefore
arises as to what the position of the proletariat, and especially of the League,
will be in relation to it:
1. as long as the present state of affairs lasts, in which the petty-bourgeois
democrats are equally oppressed;
2. in the coming revolutionary struggle, which will give them the upper hand;
3. after this struggle, during the period of petty-bourgeois democracy’s
dominance over the defeated classes and the proletariat.
1) At the present moment, when petty-bourgeois democrats are oppressed
everywhere, they preach unity and reconciliation to the proletariat in general;
they offer them their hand and tend towards the formation of a large opposition
party representing all shades of the democratic party, that is, they tend to
involve the workers in a party organization dominated by generic
social-democratic phrases behind which the specific interests of the petty
bourgeoisie are hidden, and in which the specific demands of the proletariat,
for the sake of peace, should not be put forward. Such a union would only
benefit them and completely disadvantage the proletariat. The proletariat would
completely lose its hard-won independent position and once again be reduced to
being an appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This union must therefore be
resolutely rejected. Instead of lowering themselves once again to serve as a
cheering chorus for the bourgeois democrats, the workers and above all the
League must strive to establish, alongside the official democrats, an
independent, secret and public organization of the workers’ party, and to make
every community of the League the central point and core of workers’
associations, in which the interests and position of the proletariat are
discussed independently of bourgeois influences. How little the bourgeois
democrats seriously consider an alliance in which the proletarians stand
alongside them with equal power and equal rights is shown, for example, by the
democrats of Breslau, who in their organ, the
Neue Oder-Zeitung,
furiously
attack the independently organized workers, whom they call socialists. In the
case of a battle against a common enemy, there is no need for any special union.
As soon as this enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of the two
parties coincide momentarily, and, as has been the case so far and will continue
to be so in the future, this connection, calculated only for that moment, will
re-establish itself spontaneously. It is natural that in the bloody conflicts
that are imminent, as in all previous ones, it will be mainly up to the workers
to win victory with their courage, their determination, and their
self-sacrifice. As has been the case until now, in these struggles too, the
petty bourgeoisie will, as long as possible, be slow, irresolute, and inactive,
but once victory is won, it will try to claim it for itself, urge the workers to
calm down and return home and to work, try to prevent so-called excesses, and
exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It is not in the power of
the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from acting in this way,
but it is in their power to make it more difficult for them to turn against the
armed proletariat; it is in their power to dictate conditions such that the rule
of the bourgeois democrats carries within itself from the outset the germ of its
own dissolution, and thus makes it easier to supplant it later with the rule of
the proletariat. First of all, the workers must, during the conflict and
immediately after the struggle, as long as possible, oppose the attempts of the
bourgeoisie to maintain calm, and force the democrats to put their current
terrorist rhetoric into action. They must strive to ensure that the immediate
revolutionary excitement is not stifled again immediately after victory. On the
contrary, they must strive to keep it alive as long as possible. Far from
opposing so-called excesses, cases of popular revenge on hated persons or on
public buildings connected with nothing but hateful memories, not only must such
examples be tolerated, but their direction must be taken over. During and after
the struggle, the workers must present their own demands at every opportunity,
alongside the demands of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees
for the workers as soon as the bourgeois democrats prepare to take the
government into their own hands. If necessary, they must force the others to
give them these guarantees, and above all ensure that the new rulers commit
themselves to all possible concessions and promises, which is the surest way to
compromise them. Above all, they must curb as much as possible the intoxication
of victory and the enthusiasm for the new order of things that follows every
successful insurrection, interpreting the situation coolly and calmly and
showing open distrust of the new government. Alongside the new official
governments, they must at the same time establish their own revolutionary
workers’ governments, either in the form of municipal councils and committees or
through workers’ circles and committees, so that the bourgeois democratic
governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers, but also find
themselves from the outset watched and threatened by organizations behind which
stands the entire mass of workers. In a word: from the first moment of victory,
mistrust must no longer be directed against the defeated reactionary party, but
against yesterday’s allies, against the party that wants to exploit the common
victory on its own.
2) But in order to be able to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers
will begin with the first hour of victory, energetically and menacingly, the
workers must be armed and organized. The arming of the entire proletariat with
rifles, shotguns, pistols, and ammunition must be carried out immediately; the
reestablishment of the old civil guard directed against the workers must be
opposed immediately. But where this latter goal cannot be achieved, the workers
must try to organize themselves independently into a proletarian guard, with a
leader and staff elected by them, and place themselves under the orders not of
the State powers, but of the municipal councils formed by the workers. Where
workers are employed by the State, they must arm and organize themselves into a
special corps, with leaders chosen by them, or as part of the proletarian guard.
Under no pretext should weapons and ammunition be surrendered, and any attempt
at disarmament must be opposed by force if necessary. Destruction of the
influence of the bourgeois democrats over the workers, immediate independent and
armed organization of the workers, and assurance of conditions that make the
momentary and inevitable domination of bourgeois democracy as difficult and
compromising as possible; these are the main points that the proletariat and the
League must keep in mind during and after the imminent insurrection.
3) As soon as the new governments have consolidated themselves to some extent,
their struggle against the workers will begin immediately. In order to be able
to effectively oppose the petty-bourgeois democrats, it is first of all
necessary for the workers to be organized and centralized independently, in
circles. As soon as possible after the overthrow of the present governments, the
Central Committee of the League will move to Germany, immediately convene a
congress, and make the necessary proposals to centralize the workers’ circles
under a single leadership, established at the movement’s headquarters. The rapid
organization of at least a provincial connection between the workers’ circles is
one of the most important points for strengthening and developing the workers’
party. The first consequence of the overthrow of the current governments will be
the election of a National Assembly. In this regard, the proletariat must
ensure:
I. That no local authorities or government commissioners use any technicalities
to exclude a certain number of workers under any pretext.
II. That everywhere, alongside the bourgeois democratic candidates, there are
workers’ candidates, who should as far as possible be chosen from among the
members of the League and for whose election every effort must be made. Even
where there is no hope of success, the workers must present their candidates in
order to safeguard their independence, to gauge their strength, and to publicly
manifest their revolutionary position and the party’s point of view. In this,
they must not be seduced by the platitudes of the democrats who, for example,
claim that doing so divides the democratic party and gives the reactionaries a
chance of victory. All these phrases boil down to one thing: that the
proletariat will be cheated. The progress that the proletarian party will make
by maintaining such an independent course is infinitely more important than the
disadvantage that the presence of a few reactionaries among the elected
representatives might produce. If democracy fights reaction from the outset with
determination and measures of terror, the influence of the latter in the
elections will be destroyed from the outset.
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 bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the
peasants as free property, that is, they will want to allow the agricultural
proletariat to continue to exist and create a class of petty-bourgeois peasants
who will have to go through the same cycle of impoverishment and indebtedness in
which the French peasant is still caught today.
The workers, in the interests of the agricultural proletariat and in their own
interests, must oppose this plan. They must demand that the confiscated feudal
property remain the property of the State and be transformed into workers’
colonies, cultivated by the associated agricultural proletariat, with all the
advantages of large-scale agriculture, so that the principle of common ownership
immediately receives a strong foundation amid the faltering relations of
bourgeois property. Just as the democrats ally themselves with the peasants, so
the workers must ally themselves with the agricultural proletariat. Furthermore,
the democrats will work directly for a federal republic or, at least, if they
cannot avoid a single and indivisible republic, they will try to paralyze the
central government with every possible independence and autonomy of the
municipalities and provinces. The workers must oppose this plan and work not
only for a single, indivisible German republic, but also, within it, for a very
decisive centralization of power in the hands of the State. They must not be
deceived by democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, local
self-government, and so on. In a country like Germany, where so many remnants of
the Middle Ages still need to be eliminated and so many local and provincial
particularisms need to be broken down, it must not be tolerated in any way that
every village, every city, every province should place a new obstacle in the way
of revolutionary activity, which can only spread in all its strength from the
center. We must not tolerate a renewal of the current state of affairs in which
Germans must fight separately, in each city and each province, to achieve a
single, always the same, progress. And even less can it be tolerated that a form
of property that is even more backward than modern private property and is
necessarily dissolving everywhere into the latter – common property – and the
conflicts that arise from this between rich and poor communes, as well as
municipal public law, existing alongside State public law, should be perpetuated
through a so-called free constitution of the communes, with its quibbles against the workers. As in France in 1793, the implementation of the strictest centralization
(
*
)
of power is today the task of the truly revolutionary party in Germany.
We have seen how the democrats will come to power in the next revolutionary
movement, how they will be forced to propose more or less socialist measures.
Now the question will be asked: what measures will the workers propose in turn?
Of course, at the beginning of the movement, the workers will not yet be able to
propose directly communist measures. But they can:
1. Force the democrats to intervene in as many areas as possible in the current
social order, to disrupt its regular course, to compromise themselves, as well
as to concentrate in the hands of the State as many productive forces, means of
transport, factories, railways, etc. as possible.
2. They must push to the extreme the measures proposed by the democrats, who in
any case will not present themselves as revolutionaries, but only as reformers,
and transform them into direct attacks on private property. Thus, for example,
when the petty bourgeoisie proposes to purchase the railways and factories, the
workers must demand that these railways and factories be confiscated by the
State purely and simply, without compensation, as the property of reactionaries.
If the Democrats propose proportional taxation, the workers will propose
progressive taxation; if the Democrats themselves propose a moderate progressive
tax, the workers will insist on a tax so rapidly progressive that big capital
will be ruined; if the Democrats demand that the State’s debts be settled, the
proletarians will demand that the State go bankrupt. The demands of the workers
must always be adjusted to the concessions and measures of the Democrats.
Although the German workers cannot come to power and satisfy their class
interests without going through a long revolutionary development, they are at
least aware this time that the first act of the impending revolutionary drama
will coincide with the direct victory of their class in France, and therefore
the process will be hastened.
But they themselves must do what is essential for their final victory by clarifying their own class interests, assuming an independent party position as soon as possible, and not allowing the hypocritical phrases of the petty-bourgeois democrats to distract them even for a moment from the independent organization of the proletarian party. Their battle cry must be:
The Permanent Revolution
.
(
*
) Note by Engels to the 1885 edition
It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849.