Please note that this passage comes pretty close to saying that it doesn’t matter whether the Polish peasant is exploited by a foreign lord or a domestic one. In terms of the later debates over this question it would appear that Marx is anticipating the position of Rosa Luxemburg. But that would be overstating the case. That is not the point Marx is trying to make. What we have here is a sharp attack on the “pure and simple” nationalists in the Polish emigration. It is also an anticipatory repudiation of the paranoid anti-Russian position often attributed to Marx.
The adherents of the pro-aristocratic wing of the Polish independence movement in the audience would not have found much to cheer in Engels’ speech either. After a salute to the fallen heroes and a lament for suffering Poland, Engels, ever the optimist, goes on to announce that the defeat of the Cracow insurrection is also a victory that the meeting should celebrate! A victory over whom? It is the “. . . victory of young democratic Poland over the old aristocratic Poland.”
Yes, the latest struggle of Poland against its foreign oppressors has been preceded by a hidden struggle, concealed but decisive within Poland itself, a struggle of oppressed Poles against Polish oppressors, a struggle of democracy against the Polish aristocracy.29
As he warms to the subject, Engels claims that the Cracow revolution was “even more hostile to Poland itself than to the foreign oppressor.” What was this old Poland? Engels spells it out in a passage pillorying the aristocratic revolutionaries of 1830.
What did the Polish aristocracy want in 1830? To safeguard its own acquired rights with regard to the Emperor. It limited the insurrection to the little country which the Congress of Vienna was pleased to call the Kingdom of Poland; it restrained the uprising in the other Polish provinces; it left intact the degrading serfdom of the peasants and the infamous condition of the Jews. If the aristocracy, in the course of the insurrection, had to make concessions to the people, it only made them when it was too late, when the insurrection had failed.30
Yet, this was an insurrection which Engels supported! He makes that clear by holding up as an example Lelewel (who was in the audience.) This was the one man, according to Engels, who, in 1830, fought for the emancipation of the Jews and peasants and for restoring all of Poland thus “turning the war of Polish independence into a European war.”
These two speeches have to be read in their entirety to get a real feel for the way the Polish independence movement was linked in Marx and Engels’ mind to the struggle to free Europe from the Holy Alliance and how both were seen as dependent on a democratic and social revolution internationally.
In the Manifesto, whose analysis of the relationship of the various national movements to the social revolution we will look at later, the Polish question is reduced to the following sentence:
In Poland they [the Communists] support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection in Cracow in 1846.31
Today, this is an obscure reference. It probably was already obscure in 1888 when Engels and Samuel Moore translated the Manifesto into what has become the standard English version. In that translation (quoted above) the original German phrase Unter den Polen appears as “in Poland.” Literally, it means “among the Poles.” At the time the Manifesto was written, this paragraph was practically a declaration of war on the right wing of the Polish emigration. In Engels’ 1888 translation this point is lost.
8. Revolutionary Cattle Dealers
The revolt of the Hungarians, like that of the Czechs and Poles, divided left from right in Germany. Throughout 1849 coverage of this rebellion of the Hungarian people against the Austrian Empire dominated the columns of the NRZ. Prior to the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, however, there are only scattered references to Hungary by Engels and none by Marx.32 Certainly, the country had not played a role in the politics of the European left comparable to that played by Poland.
In early 1847, Engels did write two articles for the Deutscher-Brüsseler-Zeitung, by this time the semi-official voice of the Democratic Association, in which he mentioned, very briefly, revolutionary developments in Hungary. In the first of these, “The Movements of 1847,”33 an overview of the political and social movements that were pushing Europe toward revolution, Hungary is mentioned in a passage summarizing the revolutionary effects of bourgeoisification in previously backward areas:
Even in quite barbarous lands the bourgeoisie is advancing. . . . In Hungary, the feudal magnates are more and more changing into wholesale corn and wool merchants and cattle dealers, and consequently now appear in the Diet as bourgeois.
In a second article in the same paper, “The Beginning of the End in Austria,”34 Engels describes the Habsburg Empire as a patchwork of “A dozen nations whose customs, character, and institutions were flagrantly opposed to one another.” They have clung together “on the strength of their common dislike of civilization.” The geographical position of these “patriarchal” peoples in the middle of Europe, isolated from one another and from the more civilised peoples to the north and south by impassable mountains and lack of accesses to the sea or great rivers, made possible the rule of the House of Austria, “the representative of barbarism, of reactionary stability in Europe.” Engels concludes:
Hence the House of Austria was invincible as long as the barbarous character of its subjects remained untouched. Hence it was threatened by only one danger—the penetration of bourgeois civilization.
Engels then lists the disruptive effects of this inevitable penetration. His sole mention of Hungary is to the Diet which “is preparing revolutionary proposals and is sure of a majority for them.” What these “revolutionary proposals” are is not made explicit but the rest of the article would indicate that Engels is referring to proposals to eliminate the remaining feudal obligations, in particular corvée labor. The Hungarian landowners-turned-bourgeoisie who, according to Engels’ earlier article, dominated the Diet were presumably the driving force behind these “revolutionary proposals.” However, when Engels uses the word “revolutionary” in this article he is referring to the objective consequences of these measures and not a conscious or organized subversive political movement. In the next sentence he states that “Austria, which needs Hungarian Hussars in Milan, Moderna and Parma, Austria itself puts forward revolutionary proposals to the Diet although it knows very well that these are its own death warrant.” The Hungarian landlords in this article are a revolutionary force willy-nilly, like the Hapsburg monarchy itself.
The next mention of Hungary by either Marx or Engels is in January of 1849. This is a major analytical article in which Engels announces that the Hungarian revolution is as important for 1849 as the Paris revolt was for 1848.
For the first time in the revolutionary movements of 1848, for the first time since 1793, a nation surrounded by superior counterrevolutionary forces dares to counter the cowardly counterrevolutionary fury by revolutionary passion, the terreur blanche by the terreur rouge. For the first time after a long period we meet with a truly revolutionary figure, a man who in the name of his people dares to accept the challenge of a desperate struggle, who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person—Lajos Kossuth.35
Did the feudal magnates turned bourgeois corn dealers and wool merchants suddenly become Jacobins? Engels did not think so. There was no doubt that the Hungarian rebellion began as a defense of the traditional rights of the Magyar* nobility against the centralizing tendency of the Hapsburgs. Like Poland, Hungary had been for centuries a kind of feudal democracy. The king was elected and responsible to a Diet of the Magyar nobility. But “nobility” in Hungary as in Poland was a relative term. Engels undoubtedly went too far in describing “the greater part of the Hungarian nobility” as “mere proletarians