An extraordinary missive from Marx as he looks back on the Year of Revolutions, summing up 1848 as he hazards a looks into the future. Translated by Ernest Untermann, translator of all three volumes of Capital into English.

‘New Year’s Day, 1849’ by Karl Marx from The Worker (New York). Vol. 16 No. 22. September 1, 1906.

COLOGNE, December 31, 1848. Never was any revolutionary movement inaugurated with such edifying ceremonies as the revolutionary movement of 1848. The pope blessed it officially, Lamartine’s Aeolian harp thrilled with soft philanthropic melodies, whose text was fraternity, the brotherhood of the members of societies and nations.

Be embraced, you millions.
This kiss for all the world.

At the present moment, the pope sits in Gaeta, driven from Rome, under the protection of the bloodthirsty idiot Ferdinand, the iniciatore of Italy, weaving intrigues against Italy with its traditional and implacable enemy, Austria, which he had threatened with the bans during his period of prosperity. The last presidential election in France furnished the statistical proof of the unpopularity of Lamartine, the traitor. Nothing more philanthropic, humane, weak, than the February and March revolutions. Nothing more brutal than the necessary consequences of this humanitarian weakness. Witness Italy, Poland, Germany, and last, not least, the defeated June revolutionists.

However, the defeat of the French laborers in June turned out to be a defeat for the victors of June themselves. Ledru Rollin and the other men of the Mountain were crowded aside by the bourgeois republicans, the party of the nationalists, these in turn had to give way to the dynastic opposition, Thiers-Barrot, and these would now have to yield to the legitimists, if the cycle of the three restorations were not exhausted, and if Louis Napoleon were more than an empty urn, in which the French peasants deposited the testimony of their first entry into the revolutionary movement and the French laborers their vote of condemnation against all the leaders of the completed epochs, Thiers-Barrot, Lamartine, and Cavaignac-Marrast. But let us take note of the fact that the defeat of the revolutionary French laborers carried in its wake as an inevitable consequence the defeat of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie, who had vanquished them but a moment ago.

The crushing of the working class In France, the victory of the French bourgeoisie, were at the same time the forging of new manacles for the different nationalities, who had hailed the crowing of the Gallic cock with heroic attempts to free themselves. Poland, Italy, Ireland were once again pillaged, degraded, murdered by Prussian, Austrian and English police bands. The crushing of the working class in France, the victory of the French bourgeoisie, were at the same time the defeat of the middle classes in. all European countries, in which these classes, uniting for a moment with the people, had answered the crowing of the Gallic cock by a bloody uprising against feudalism. Naples, Vienna, Berlin! The crushing of the working class in France, the victory of the French bourgeoisie, were at the same time the victory of the East over the West, the defeat of civilization by barbarism. In the Walachlan provinces the oppression of the Romanic races was inaugurated by the Russians and by their tools, the Turks; in Vienna German freedom was strangled by Croatians, Pandours, Tsechs, Sereshanians, and other scum, and at present the Tsar is omnipresent in Europe. The downfall of the bourgeoisie in France, the triumph of the French working class, the emancipation of the working class in general, are therefore the slogan of the European emancipation.

That country, however, which transforms entire nations into its proletarians, which grips the whole world with giant arms, which once before paid the expenses of the European restauration out of its treasury, in whose womb the class-antagonisms have been pushed to their most acute and shameless form-England-seems to be the rock on which the waves of the revolution are shattered, which starves the new society even in its mother’s womb. England rules the world market. A revolution of the economic conditions in every country of the European continent, of the entire European continent without England, is but a storm in a glass of water. The conditions of industry and commerce within each nation are controlled by their intercourse with other nations, are conditioned on their connection with the world-market. It is England that rules the world market, and the bourgeoisie that rules England.

The emancipation of Europe, whether it signifies the uprising of oppressed nationalities for independence, or the overthrow of feudal absolutism, is conditioned on the victorious revolution of the French working class. Bur every social revolution in France is necessarily wrecked by the English bourgeoisie, by the industrial and commercial world rule of Great Britain. Every partial social reform in France and on the European continent in general is and remains but in the stage of pious desire, so far as anything final is expected. And the old England can be overthrown only by a world war, which alone can supply the Chartist party, the organized English working class party, with the requirements for a victorious uprising against their giant oppressors. The Chartists at the head of the English government-only from that moment will the social revolution step from the realm of utopia into that of reality. But every European war, in which England is implicated, is a world war. It will be fought in Canada the same as in Italy, in East India the same as in Prussia, in Africa the same as on the Danube. And the European war will be the first consequence of a victorious working class revolution in France. England will march at the head of the armies of the counter-revolution, as it did in the time of Napoleon, but the war itself will hurl it to the front of the revolutionary movement, and it will meet its obligation to the revolution of the eighteenth century.

A revolutionary uprising of the French working class, a world war that is the forecast for the year 1849!

The Worker, and its predecessor The People, emerged from the 1899 split in the Socialist Labor Party of America led by Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit, who published their own edition of the SLP’s paper in Springfield, Massachusetts. Their ‘The People’ had the same banner, format, and numbering as their rival De Leon’s. The new group emerged as the Social Democratic Party and with a Chicago group of the same name these two Social Democratic Parties would become the Socialist Party of America at a 1901 conference. That same year the paper’s name was changed from The People to The Worker with publishing moved to New York City. The Worker continued as a weekly until December 1908 when it was folded into the socialist daily, The New York Call.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/the-people-the-worker/060901-worker-v16n22.pdf