To the Chairman of the Slavonic Meeting, March 21st 1881, in Celebration of the Anniversary of the Paris Commune

Author(s) Karl Marx
Friedrich Engels
Written 21 March 1881


First published, in Russian, in Pravda, No. 308, November 7, 1933
Published in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45
Collection(s): Pravda

Note from MECW vol. 24 :

On March 21, 1881 Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbian socialists held a meeting in London to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Paris Commune. It was organised by the Russian revolutionary Narodniks Lev Gartman and Hermann Lopatin, with Gartman as the chairman.

Having been invited but unable to attend the meeting, Marx and Engels greeted it with an address to the chairman written in Engels' hand on March 21, 1881.

In English the address was published for the first time in: K. Marx and F. Engels, On the Paris Commune, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980, pp. 271-72.

Citizen,

With great regret we have to inform you that we are not able to attend your meeting.

When the Commune of Paris succumbed to the atrocious massacre organised by the defenders of "Order", the victors little thought that ten years would not elapse before an event would happen in distant Petersburg[1] which, maybe after long and violent struggle, must ultimately and certainly lead to the establishment of a Russian Commune;

that the King of Prussia[2] who had prepared the Commune by besieging Paris and thus compelling the ruling bourgeoisie to arm the people—that that same King of Prussia, ten years after, besieged in his own capital by Socialists, would only be able to maintain his throne, by declaring the state of siege in his capital Berlin[3] .

On the other hand, the Continental governments who after the fall of the Commune by their persecutions compelled the International Working Men's Association to give up its formal, external organisation—these governments who believed they could crush the great International Labour Movement by decrees and special laws—little did they think that ten years later that same International Labour Movement, more powerful than ever, would embrace the working classes not only of Europe but of America also; that the common struggle for common interests against a common enemy would bind them together into a new and greater spontaneous International, outgrowing more and more all external forms of association. Thus the Commune which the powers of the old world believed to be exterminated lives stronger than ever, and thus we may join you in the cry: Vive la Commune!

  1. ↑ On March 1, 1881 in pursuance of the sentence passed by the People's Will Executive Committee, Emperor Alexander II was assassinated in St. Petersburg. People's Will was a revolutionary Narodnik organisation formed in Russia in August 1879 after the split in the Land and Freedom. Its founders were professional revolutionaries, advocates of political struggle against the autocracy. People's Will was the largest and most important revolutionary organisation of the raznochintsi (bourgeois-democratic) period in Russia's emancipation movement. Its activity was at its greatest in the early 1880s.
  2. ↑ William I.— Ed.
  3. ↑ Using § 28 of the Anti-Socialist Law, on November 28, 1878 Bismarck introduced the so-called minor state of siege in Berlin and its environs. In the spring of 1880 the operation of the Anti-Socialist Law was extended for another five years.