This is the fifth in a projected six volume exposition of Marx and Engels’ political views which they never reduced to a coherent, all encompassing, work on the lines ofCapital; although Marx had intended a final volume on the State which, unfortunately, he never got around to starting.

The first three volumes, plus an addendum onThe“Dictatorship of the Proletariat”from Marx to Lenin, were the work of Hal Draper. The fourth volume,Critique of Other Socialismswas, with the exception of one appendix, in the form of a complete final draft on Hal Draper’s death in 1990....

The subject of this volume is Marx and Engels’ views on therelationbetween war and revolution. Its thesis is that, over the course of decades, their views on this question changed—evolved is a better word—although, in this case as in others, they wrote no definitive statement of their views. Instead, we have a considerable corpus ofad hocresponses to the events of the hour, many of them politically explosive, from which we have to reconstruct, not a line, but an approach. To complicate things further, many of these crises, while they were the news of the...

What strikes the modern reader who turns to the speeches, pamphlets and articles of Marx and Engels of the period surrounding the revolution of 1848 is their bellicose, “prowar” tone. In the twentieth century, the rivalry of the great powers led to brutal and exhausting world wars which ground up the smaller countries and ended in the collapse of one or more of the major contestants. Winners were often difficult to distinguish from losers. Revolutionaries, revolted by the slaughter, were antiwar almost by instinct. The only alternatives they saw were opposition to war on principle—from either a revolutionary or...

From the time of its first issue in April of 1848 until its suppression in July of 1849, theNRZmade the liberation of the Poles, and later the Hungarians, from their German rulers a central feature of its propaganda. It was a vital task for the German national movement. Far more attention has been paid, however, to theNRZarticles in 1849 which appear to justify German (and Hungarian) suppression of the Czechs and South Slavs. Engels, and it was he who wrote these articles, seems to be contradicting everything else he wrote in 1848-49 and in the period...

By 1914, perhaps the best known of Marx and Engels’ writings on war and its relation to revolution were the articles and pamphlets on the “Eastern Question.”* While this “question” had many ramifications, it mainly concerned Tsarist Russia’s imperialist designs in the Balkans and Central Asia where the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire created an opportunity. It was Russia’s aggressive attempts to take advantage of the decline of the Ottomans and exploit the national revolts of the mostly Slavic and orthodox subjects of the European section of that empire that led to the Crimean War. And since that same Balkan...

Marx wrote these words in an article for theNew York Tribuneon the war crisis provoked by Louis Bonaparte in 1859. He goes on to describe the obsequious flattery addressed to this upstart adventurer and make-believe Napoleon by all the representatives of theancien régimeincluding the Pope and a French-hating British aristocracy. They thought they were using him. But then, at a stroke, Louis Bonaparte plunged this whole world, whose stability he had seemingly guaranteed by crushing the French Republic in 1852, into economic and political panic.

Seemingly out of the blue, with no provocation whatsoever, he deliberately...

The prevailing view, you might even call it the unopposed view, is that Marx and Engels together with the majority of the German socialist movement were at least reluctant, and often enthusiastic, prowar patriots during the Franco-Prussian war.² If you were to ask what is the single most important work in the literature, the one that did the most to entrench this view in the history books, the answer would have to be a brilliant Lassallean anti-Marx polemic that masqueraded as a sympathetic biography of Karl Marx. The polemic was calledKarl Marx, The Story of His Lifeand the...

Engels’ writings on war and its relation to revolution in the 1880s and 90s are best considered as his contribution to the dispute that split the Socialist International in World War I. This is not just because all sides in that dispute appealed to his authority. Engels himself was obsessed with the danger this threatening war presented for the socialist movement and practically everything he wrote from the late 1880s on touched on the question. After some rethinking, he ended by definitively burying the “Russian Menace” in his writings on two controversies with the leadership of the Social Democratic Party...

In the last years of his life Engels was concerned to work out a political response to the impending war danger. He effectively worked out an approach that revolutionary socialists had to reinvent during the course of World War I because the leadership of the Social Democracy did their best to bury Engels’ politics after he himself was cremated. What Engels came to realize was that, in an era of universal suffrage and universal conscription, the key to revolution was a military mutiny.

In March of 1893,Vorwärts, the official organ of the German Party printed a series of articles...