Notes

Introduction to the
Communist Manifesto

1Worth recalling that the powerful English fleet itself was the creation of the Commonwealth and the English revolution. Trade routes needed protection and the merchants of the City were happy to fund a strong maritime force that could challenge both pirates and the Dutch. Reminiscing on its history during the Second World War, Churchill acknowledged the debt owed to Cromwell and recalled that, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had wanted to name a battleship Cromwell, but was overruled by George V. In WW2 he was of course in a stronger position, but the C-class destroyer was not completed before the end of the war, and sold the next year to Norway.

2There was no nineteenth-century equivalent of the Treuhandanstalt, set up after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 to privatize state property in the former German Democratic Republic and return estates to Junker families. National properties in France after 1815 had not been returned to their former owners, and though some were unfairly distributed to the nouveau riche, many revolutionary advances were safeguarded. The contrast with Eastern Europe today could not be more striking.

3‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London 1974), p. 243.

4The British General who defeated Tipu Sultan in 1799 was Arthur Wellesley. In a later reincarnation (as the Duke of Wellington), he would also settle accounts with Napoleon in 1815.

5He did not do so for contingent reasons, confiding to his diary on 21 February 1848, ‘A majority of one branch of the Congress is opposed to my administration. They have falsely charged that the war was brought on and is continued by me with a view to the conquest of Mexico, and if I were now to reject a treaty made upon my own terms as authorised in April last, with the unanimous approbation of the Cabinet, the probability is that Congress would grant neither the men nor the money to prosecute the war. Should this be the result, the army now in Mexico would be constantly wasting and diminishing in numbers, and I might at last be compelled to withdraw them, and then lose the two provinces of New Mexico and Upper California which were ceded to the US by this treaty.’ It was a semi-Hegelian interpretation of the dialectic of imperial conquests: should we go further knowing full well there is a serious possibility that we might lose what we have already conquered? The gold rush of 1849 vindicated Polk’s decision. Had the borders been taken any further the 100,000 would-be gringo gold miners might have found the mines already occupied.

6London and New York 1998.

Manifesto of
the Communist Party

1Clemens Lothar, Prince Metternich, was the leading Austrian statesman from 1809 to 1848 and the architect of the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance.

2François Guizot was a French historian and de facto Prime Minister from 1840 to 1848 under the Orleanist ‘July’ monarchy of Louis Phillipe.

3By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live [Engels].

4That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State) [Engels].

5Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild [Engels].

6‘Commune’ was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had conquered, from their feudal lords and masters, local self-government and political rights as the ‘third estate’. Generally speaking, for the economic development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France [Engels].

7In Marx’s later theory of surplus value, he concluded that it is the worker’s labour power, not his labour, that is sold to the capitalist as a commodity. See ‘Wages, Prices and Profit’ in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence & Wishart (London 1968).

8In 1846. See Engels’s article ‘The English Ten Hours Bill’, Marx-Engels, Articles on Britain, Progress Publishers (Moscow 1971), pp. 96–108.

9That is, the lumpenproletariat of casual labourers and unemployed, which was very extensive in the cities of nineteenth-century Europe.

10Of 1830–1832.

11Not the English Restoration 1660–1689, but the French Restoration 1814–1830 [Engels].

12The supporters of the restored Bourbon monarchy of 1814–1830, representing the landed aristocracy.

13A literary circle attached to the Tory party. Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil: or The Two Nations, and Thomas Carlyle’s pamphlets, were among its typical expressions.

14This applies chiefly to Germany where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters of more or less shady joint-stock companies [Engels].

15Sismondi’s Principles of Political Economy first appeared in 1803.

16In the German editions of the Manifesto there is an additional sentence here which reads (1872): ‘It was bound to appear as idle speculation about the realization of the essence of man.’

17That is, the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844.

18It was in reply to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty (1846) that Marx wrote his Poverty of Philosophy (1847).

19Here, as in other writings of the 1840s, Marx and Engels still used ‘science’ in a now archaic sense of the term, roughly equivalent to the modern ‘doctrine’. Although the substance of their argument remained the same, the change in usage led them later to refer to their own theory as ‘scientific’, in contrast to the utopianism of their predecessors. See, for example, Marx’s Preface to the first German edition of Capital, and Engels’s ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, both in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence & Wishart (London 1968).

20Phalanstères were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his utopia and, later on, to his American communist colony [Engels].

21This seems to be reference to the Free Soil movement, which demanded the free distribution of uncultivated land to small farmers.

22The party then represented in parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc, in the daily press by La Réforme. The name ‘Social-Democracy’ signified, with these its inventors, a section of the democratic or republican party more or less tinged with socialism [Engels].

23Kleinbürgerei in the original. ‘Petty-bourgeois conditions’ would be a more accurate translation.

Preface to the English
Edition of 1888

1The preceding translation of the Communist Manifesto was made by Samuel Moore in 1888, and edited by Engels. His notes are identified in this edition by [Engels]. Besides printer’s errors, inconsistent and old-fashioned punctuation and orthography, a very few linguistic archaisms have also been amended.

2That is, the Central Committee, as it is referred to elsewhere.

3Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto. But in his public agitation, 1862–1864, he did not go beyond demanding cooperative workshops supported by state credit [Engels].

4In fact the International was not officially wound up until 1876, although it effectively ceased to function when the General Council was transferred to New York in 1872.

5W. Bevan, in his address to the TUC Congress, reported in the Commonweal, 17 September 1887.

6This paper was published by two American feminists, Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, whose campaign Marx considered ‘middle-class humbug’ and who were eventually expelled from the International. See International Working Men’s Association, Documents of the First International, Lawrence & Wishart (London 1964–1966), pp. 223–32. It carried an abridged translation of the Manifesto on 30 December 1871.

7Alexander Herzen was a Russian philosopher and revolutionary democrat. His paper Kolokol (The Bell) was the leading organ of the Russian emigration in the 1860s. Bakunin’s translation of the Manifesto was in fact published in 1869.

8Engels celebrates Vera Zasulich for her attempted assassination of the governor of St Petersburg, General Trepov, in 1878. The translation was in fact by George Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism.

Introduction to
the April Theses

1V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21 (Moscow 1975), p. 146.

2I intend to develop this and related themes further in The Dilemmas of Lenin (forthcoming 2017).

The Tasks of the Proletariat
in the Present Revolution
(‘The April Theses’)

1Published in Pravda, No. 26, for 7 April 1917, over the signature N. Lenin, this article contains Lenin’s famous ‘April Theses’ read by him at two meetings held at the Tauride Palace on 4 (17) April 1917 (at a meeting of Bolsheviks and at a joint meeting of Bolshevik and Menshevik delegates to the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies).

2Popular Socialists: members of the petty-bourgeois Labour Popular Socialist Party, which separated from the right wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1906. Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs): a petty-bourgeois party formed in Russia at the end of 1901 and beginning of 1902 through the amalgamation of various Narodnik groups and circles. The SRs, together with the Mensheviks and Cadets, were the mainstay of the counter-revolutionary Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie and landowners, and the leaders of the party (Kerensky, Avksentyev, Chernov) were members of that government. Organizing Committee (OC): set up in 1912 at the August conference of the liquidators. During World War I the OC justified the war on the part of Tsarism, and advocated the ideas of nationalism and chauvinism.

3Lenin’s note: That is, the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people.

4Lenin’s note: That is, a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype.

5Lenin’s note: Instead of ‘Social-Democracy’, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the ‘defencists’ and the vacillating ‘Kautskyites’), we must call ourselves the Communist Party.

6Lenin’s note: The ‘Centre’ in the international Social-Democratic movement is the trend which vacillates between the chauvinists (= ‘defencists’) and internationalists, i.e. Kautsky and Co. in Germany, Longuet and Co. in France, Chkheidze and Co. in Russia, Turati and Co. in Italy, MacDonald and Co. in Britain, etc.

7Yedinstvo (Unity): a daily published in Petrograd from March to November 1917, and then under another name from December 1917 to January 1918. Edited by G. V. Plekhanov, it united the extreme right of the Menshevik defencists, gave unqualified support to the Provisional Government, and carried on a fierce struggle against the Bolshevik Party.

8Interpolations in square brackets (within passages quoted by Lenin) were introduced by Lenin himself. —Ed.

9Russkaya Volya (Russian Freedom): a daily founded and run by the big banks. It appeared in Petrograd from December 1916 to October 1917 and carried on a riot-provoking campaign against the Bolsheviks.

Letters from Afar

1The first four ‘Letters from Afar’ were written between 7 and 12 (20 and 25) March; the fifth, unfinished letter was written on the eve of Lenin’s departure from Switzerland, on 26 March (8 April) 1917. The first letter appeared in Nos 14 and 15 of Pravda, 21 and 22 March (3 and 4 April), with considerable abridgements and certain changes made by the editorial board, which included L. B. Kamenev and J. V. Stalin. The second, third and fourth letters were not published in 1917.

2The Pravda editors deleted about one fifth of the first letter. The cuts chiefly concerned Lenin’s characterization of the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders as conciliators and flunkeys of the bourgeoisie, their attempts to hide from the people the fact that representatives of the British and French governments helped the Cadets and Octobrists secure the abdication of Nicholas II, and also Lenin’s exposure of the monarchist and imperialist proclivities of the Provisional Government, which was determined to continue the predatory war.

3Lenin here refers to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, which emerged in the very early days of the February Revolution. Elections to the Soviet began spontaneously at individual factories and within a few days spread to all the factories in the capital.

4Octobrists: members of the Union of October Seventeen, a counter-revolutionary party formed after promulgation of the tsar’s Manifesto of 17 (30) October 1905. It represented and upheld the interests of the big bourgeoisie and of the landlords who ran their estates on capitalist lines. Cadets: the name derives from the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the chief party of the Russian liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie. Founded in October 1905, it was composed chiefly of capitalists, landlords and bourgeois intellectuals.

5Peaceful Renovation Party: a constitutional-monarchist organization of the big bourgeoisie and landlords that took final shape in 1906 following the dissolution of the First Duma.

6Trudovik: member of the Trudovik group in the State Dumas formed in April 1906 by petty-bourgeois democrats. The group wavered between the Cadets and the revolutionary Social-Democrats. After the October Revolution the Trudoviks sided with the counter-revolutionary forces.

7The first Provisional Government, or the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, was formed on 27 February (12 March) 1917. On that day the Duma Council of Doyens sent a telegram to the tsar drawing his attention to the critical situation in the capital and urging immediate measures ‘to save the fatherland and the dynasty’. The tsar replied by sending the Duma President, M. V. Rodzyanko, a decree dissolving the Duma. By this time the insurgent people had surrounded the Duma building, the Tauride Palace, where Duma members were meeting in private conference, and blocked all the streets leading to it. Soldiers and armed workers were in occupation of the building. In this situation the Duma hastened to elect a Provisional Committee to ‘maintain order in Petrograd and for communication with various institutions and individuals’.

8This refers to the Manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party to All Citizens of Russia, issued by the Central Committee and published as a supplement to Izvestia of 28 February (13 March) 1917 (No. 1). Lenin learned of the Manifesto from an abridged version in the morning edition of the Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 (22) March 1917. On the following day he wired Pravda in Petrograd via Oslo: ‘Have just read excerpts from the Central Committee Manifesto. Best wishes. Long live the proletarian militia, harbinger of peace and socialism!’

9The reference is to the agreement concluded on the night following 1 (14) March 1917 between the Duma Provisional Committee and the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee. The latter voluntarily surrendered power to the bourgeoisie, and authorized the Duma Provisional Committee to form a Provisional Government of its own choice.

10Le Temps: a daily paper published in Paris from 1861 to 1942. It spoke for the ruling element, and was the factual organ of the French Foreign Ministry.

11The Manifesto of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was published in Izvestia on 3 (16) March 1917 (No. 4), simultaneously with the announcement of the formation of a Provisional Government under Prince Lvov. Drawn up by the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik members of the Executive Committee, it declared that the democratic forces would support the new government ‘to the extent that it carries out its undertakings and wages a determined struggle against the old regime’.

12The foreign press reported the appointment by the Petrograd Soviet of a special body to keep a check on the Provisional Government. On the basis of this report, Lenin at first welcomed the organization of this control body, pointing out, however, that only experience would show whether it would live up to expectations. Actually, this so-called Contact Committee, appointed by the Executive on 8 (21) March to ‘influence’ and ‘control’ the work of the Provisional Government, only helped the latter exploit the prestige of the Soviet as a cover for its counterrevolutionary policy.

13Lenin’s note: In the rural districts a struggle will now develop for the small and, partly, middle peasants. The landlords, leaning on the well-to-do peasants, will try to lead them into subordination to the bourgeoisie. Leaning on the rural wage-workers and rural poor, we must lead them into the closest alliance with the urban proletariat.

14Lenin’s note: In one of my next letters, or in a special article, I will deal in detail with this analysis, given in particular in Marx’s The Civil War in France, in Engels’s preface to the third edition of that work, in the letters: Marx’s of 12 April 1871, and Engels’s of 18–28 March 1875, and also with the utter distortion of Marxism by Kautsky in his controversy with Pannekoek in 1912 on the question of the so-called ‘destruction of the state’.

15Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was written in the first half of 1916 and finally published in mid-1917, with a preface by Lenin dated 26 April. Parus (Sail) and Letopis (Annals) were the publishing house and magazine founded by Gorky in Petrograd.

16The agrarian programme of the ‘104’ was a land reform bill submitted by the Trudovik members to the thirteenth meeting of the First State Duma on 23 May (5 June) 1906. The land would belong to the entire people, and farmlands would be allowed only to those tilling them by their own labour.

17The manuscript breaks off here.—Ed.