The Communists and Karl Heinzen

Articles written by Engels to elaborate on the political stance and theoretical claims of communism. Written on 26 September and 3 October 1847. Published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, Nos. 79 and 80, October 3 and 7, 1847.

Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, a German language newspaper founded in Brussels in January 1847 by a German expatriate Adelbert von Bornstedt, German political exiles were its main readers. In September 1847, Marx and Engels became editors of this newspaper, and the newspaper began to spread mainly revolutionary-democratic and communist ideas. Karl Heinzen, a German petty-bourgeois democrat, published a statement in the Polemics column of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on September 26, 1847, in the No: 77 issue: wherein he fabricated facts and accused the communists in an attempt to split the German revolutionary movement and attempted to distort and slander the theory of communism. In response to this statement, Engels wrote two articles titled The Communists and Karl Heinzen, which criticized Karl Heinzen’s slander of communism.

In The Communists and Karl Heinzen, Engels criticized the narrow and incomplete nature of petty-bourgeois democracy theory advocated by Heinzen. Heinzen regarded the princes as the chief authors of all poverty and social distress and argued that as long as the monarchy was eliminated and the German Republic was established all social problems will be solved, a viewpoint which Engels found extremely harmful and ridiculous. Because, with such a view, the evil of exploitation of the people by landlords and capitalists is passed on to the princes, attributes to them fantastic, preternatural, daemonic omnipotence. Engels also refuted Heinzen’s erroneous views on the nature of the proletarian party press, pointing out that the party press is “to debate, first and foremost, to explain, to expound, to defend the party’s demands, to rebut and refute the claims and assertions of the opposing party”, and at the same time, it is also a means to explore and discuss the specific working tactics of the party. Engels also refuted Heinzen’s attack on communism. He pointed out that because of his ignorance of the social nature of private property, Heinzen did not realize that private property was the inevitable product of the development of capitalist large-scale industry, thus held that communism was simply equivalent to “abolition of private property” and “communal utilisation of the earth’s riches”. In this regard, Engels emphasized that communism, as a theory, is the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat, the inevitable result of the development of capitalist large-scale industry, the formation of the world market, the deepening of the economic crisis, and the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In that era of Germany, Engels advocated that the proletariat should first fight side by side with the bourgeoisie to carry out a democratic revolution to overthrow the feudal absolutist rule, while maintaining its political independence. Of course, this was only a transitional stage, but the ultimate purpose was to carry out a proletarian socialist revolution and establish the political rule of the proletariat. “In all civilized countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence: that is the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.” Hence, Engels put forth some concrete measures for the transition from democratic revolution to communism, including restriction of the free competition and concentration of large capital, all organization of labor by the state, so forth.

The Communists and Karl Heinzen is an important literature in the development history of Marxism. In this article, Engels refuted the distortion and slander of the theory of communism by the petty-bourgeois democrats, expounded the theory of communism and the fundamental principles of communists, defended and developed the theory of scientific socialism.