Marx-Engels Collected Works - (19)

Author: None
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: This volume includes the works of Marx and Engels written from October 1859 to March 1860. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Europe passed through a period of political reaction after the failure of the 1848-1849 revolution, as worker movements and national democratic movements began to rise to a new height. The world economic crisis of 1857-1858 played a role in this surge. As Marx said, "In fact, European history only took on an urgent, revolutionary nature after the crisis of 1857-1858." In Germany and Italy, the task of achieving national unification was sharply brought to the forefront. In Germany, the worker movement became active again, and the Italian people launched armed uprisings against Austrian rule. In France, public dissatisfaction with the Bonapartist reactionary autocracy grew increasingly intense. In Britain, trade union movements expanded further, and the British working class renewed its movement for electoral reforms. In Russia, the struggle of the peasant class against feudal serfdom flared up. During this period, the struggle for European hegemony among Russia, France, Prussia, Austria, and other countries intensified. The main part of this volume is Marx's critical work "Mr. Vogt." The direct reason for writing this work was to counter the slanderous pamphlet "My Lawsuit Against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung" published by Karl Vogt in December 1859. Vogt was a German petty bourgeois democrat and a member of the left wing of the Frankfurt National Assembly and one of the five regents of the empire during 1848-1849. In this pamphlet, he distorted facts and spread lies without hesitation, spreading malicious lies about Marx and his comrades and slandering their activities in the Communist League. German bourgeois newspapers and prominent figures in the worker movement used this pamphlet to undermine the Communist Party and the proletarian revolutionaries.