Marx-Engels Collected Works. Volume 19 (October 1859 - March 1860)

Author: Central Committee of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute of Translation
Publisher:
Publishing Date: Not Available
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 working-class 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 reality, the history of Europe 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 raised on the agenda. The working-class movement in Germany became active again, 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 electoral 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 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 numerous vicious lies about Marx and his comrades and maliciously slandering their activities within the Communist League. German bourgeois newspapers and prominent figures in the working-class movement also used this pamphlet to undermine the Communist Party and the proletarian revolutionaries.