Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol V. Hal Draper

The Marxologists almost universally allege that Marx and Engels ignored the reactionary tendencies in the national movement of these two countries. Some go so far as to accuse them of deviating from Marxism in this respect.* The allegations are unfounded and, as is often the case, ignore the explicit statements of Marx and Engels themselves. In the Polish case, one of the explicit statements is found in the Communist Manifesto. While terse, like much else in the Manifesto, the statement ought to at least tempt the researcher to look a little further.

      It so happens that the question of Polish independence and its relation to the class struggle in Poland was on everyone’s mind while Marx was writing the Manifesto. This was just before the outbreak of the revolution in 1848. The question had been put on the agenda by the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince von Metternich who, in his own way, was one of the leading revolutionaries of the day. It was Metternich who, in 1846, faced with an insurrection of the Polish gentry and the urban classes, demagogically, and successfully, appealed to the class and religious hostility of the mostly Ukrainian peasantry in Galicia towards their Polish lords. His skillful playing of this card isolated the radical, democratic insurrection in Cracow. Even in 1848, the politics of this defeated insurrection continued to preoccupy the left. The relatively minor contemporary disturbances in Poland raised no comparable political questions concerning the internal politics of Poland.

      As early as 1830, when a Polish uprising also coincided with a revolution in France and jeopardized the international order constructed in 1815, the class question forced itself on the nationalist movement. In that year, the landowning classes who led the insurrection promised an end to feudal obligations; in particular, the hated obligation to provide free labor at the landowners’ demand. But, hard pressed to meet the needs of the population under war time conditions, they reinstituted the system “temporarily” until the foreign armies were defeated. After this temporary sacrifice to ensure the defeat of the common enemy, the reforms would certainly be reintroduced. The peasants found the argument unconvincing and the insurrection was defeated.

      In 1846, this precedent weighed on the minds of all parties. The Polish emigration was split on several lines but the main division was between the partisans of the old Poland—the patrimony of the powerful families who hoped to restore the old kingdom intact including its rule over non-Polish minorities and its exploitation of Polish peasants—and the partisans of a new, democratic Poland. The latter were organized in the Polish Democratic Association which was loosely allied with other Democratic Associations including that of Brussels in which Marx was active. One of their most prominent representatives was Joachim Lelewel who was also a member of the Brussels Democratic Association. Lelewel, a personal and political friend of Marx in 1846, had been a former Deputy in the Polish Diet in 1828 and a member of the Provisional Government during the insurrection of 1830.

      In 1846 there were three centers of revolutionary activity in Poland. Perhaps, it would be better to say two centers of revolutionary activity and one of counterrevolutionary activity. The more conservative wing of the emigration hoped to use the conflicts between the occupying powers to maneuver their way back to power. Their hopes centered on organizing an insurrection against the Russians based in Prussian occupied Posen (present day Poznan.) However, when the representative of the insurrectionaries, Ludwik Mieroslawski arrived in Posen he was arrested.²⁴ The Prussian monarchy was willing to flirt with the Poles to gain a little diplomatic leverage but anything serious was out of the question.

      The real insurrection took place in Cracow which had been granted the status of free city under the terms of the Congress of Vienna. It was organized by the democratic wing of the emigration and held the city against overwhelming odds for ten days. Its program was one of agrarian reform, which meant the abolition of all feudal obligations without compensation, separation of church and state, which meant the emancipation of the Jews, and a democratic constitution, which meant the abolition of the old Poland. It enjoyed enormous popular support in the town and the surrounding countryside and it required some effort on the part of the Austrian and Russian forces to retake the city. Cracow was subsequently incorporated into the Austrian occupied sector of Poland.²⁵

      The third front was opened, not by the revolutionaries but by Metternich, in Galicia. In November of 1846, a new Conservative Party with an advanced program of agrarian reforms was formed with Metternich’s support. And when the Polish gentry revolted against the empire, they were met by a counter-revolt of the peasantry. There were charges made and countered that Metternich paid and organized peasant agitators to spread rumors that the plans of the government for reform were being frustrated by the Polish gentry and to organize the subsequent pogroms against the gentry. The facts behind these charges and countercharges are still a matter of controversy.²⁶ What is not in dispute is that what followed was a jacquerie of particularly brutal character 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