Works of Marx and Engels (Volume 19)

Author: Compiled by the of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
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 the period of political reaction after the failure of the 1848-1849 Revolution, and the workers' movement and national democratic movement began to rise to a new height. The world economic crisis of 1857-1858 played a role in promoting this upsurge. 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 placed on the agenda. The workers' movement in Germany again became active, and the people of Italy launched armed uprisings against Austrian rule. In France, public dissatisfaction with the Bonapartist reactionary autocracy grew increasingly intense. In Britain, trade union movement achieved greater development, and the British working class once again launched a movement to demand reforms in the parliamentary election system. In Russia, the struggle of the peasant class against the feudal serfdom was in full swing. During this period, the struggle for European hegemony among Russia, France, Prussia, Austria, and other countries also intensified. The main part of this volume is Marx's critical work "Mr. Vogt." The direct reason for writing this work was to rebut 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 a large number of vicious lies about Marx and his comrades and maliciously slandering their activities in the Communist League. German bourgeois newspapers and prominent figures in the workers' movement also used this pamphlet to slander the Communist Party and the proletarian revolutionaries.