Classic :
On the Histcry of the Communist League
Frederick Engels
We are publishing here an article written by Frederick Engels, “On the History of the
communist League”. Engels wrote the article as an introduction to the German edition of
Marx’s pamphlet “Revelations about the Cologne Trial”. Engels felt it necessary that the
German proletariat should learn from the revolutionary experience of that period (1849-
52). That was the period in which the reactionary forces unleashed onslaught on the rising
struggles of the German working class.
In this article Engels showed the role played by the working class struggles as a prelude
tot eh formation of first international working class organization. Then Engels highlighted
the role played by the Communist League in declaring the scientific socialist in the place of
utopian socialism as the ideological weapon of the proletariat.
Engels showed the Communist League was an important stage in the struggle for the
creation of a proletarian party as it had waged struggles against various sectarian trends.
These sectarian trends since then used to raise their ugly heads frequently in the international
as well as Indian communist movement causing enormous harm.
In this article Engels explained at length the triumph of Marxism over the sectarian
trends was due to its ability to recognize the needs of the revolutionary struggle of the
proletariat and recognize the fact that theory was an inseparable part of the practice that
is revolutionary class struggle.
We are reprinting this article that it would help our readers to understand and struggle
against the petty bourgeois trends prevailing in the present day Indian communist movement.
- Editor
With the sentence of the Cologne Communists in
1852, the curtain falls on the first period of the
independent German workers’ movement. Today this
period is almost forgotten. Yet it lasted from 1836 to
1852 and, with the spread of German workers abroad,
the movement developed in almost all civilised
countries. Nor is that all. The present-day international
workers’ movement is in substance a direct
continuation of the German workers’ movement of that
time, which was the first international worker’s
movement of all time, and which brought forth many
of those who took the leading role in the International
Working Men’s Association. And the theoretical
principles that the Communist League had inscribed
on its banner in the Communist Manifesto* of 1847
constitute today the strongest international bond of
the entire proletarian movement of both Europe and
America.
Up to now there has been only one main source
for a coherent history of that movement. This is the
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so-called Black Book, The Communist Conspiracies
of the Nineteenth Century, by Wermuth and Stieber,
Berlin, two parts, 1853 and 1854. This crude
compilation, which bristles with deliberate falsifications,
fabricated by two of the most contemptible police
scoundrels of our century, today still serves as the
final source for all non-communist writings about that
period.
What I am able to give here is only a sketch, and
even this only in so far as the League itself is
concerned; only what is absolutely necessary to
understand the Revelations. I hope that someday I
shall have the opportunity to work up the rich material
collected by Marx and myself on the history of that
glorious period of the youth of the international
workers’ movement.
In 1836 the most extreme, chiefly proletarian
elements of the secret democratic-republican Outlaws’
League, which was founded by German refugees in
Class Struggle