[110] A Congress of Co-operative Societies and Trades Unions, presided over by Owen, was held in London in October 1833. This Congress formally founded the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, the Charter of which was adopted in February 1834. It was Owen's intention that this Union would take over the management of production and remake society peacefully. This utopian plan collapsed very soon. In the face of strong opposition from employers and the state, the Union ceased to exist in 1834.
[111] Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaars were founded by workers' co-operatives in various towns of England; the first of these bazaars was founded by Owen in London in September 1832and existed until mid-1834.
[112] The reference is to Proudhon's idea of organising an exchange bank, first put forward in his pamphlet Organisation du Crédit et de la Circulation et Solution du problème sociale , which was published in early April 1848. This idea was developed in detail in his other works. Proudhon's main idea was to replace gold and silver as a means of circulation, with bank-notes, which were, in fact, impersonal bills. These bank-notes of the exchange bank were secured by products of labour and, in this, according to Proudhon, lay their principal difference from other paper money issued by banks and secured by precious metals, landed property, etc.
To put this idea into practice, the Banque du peuple was founded in Paris on January 31, 1849. It went bankrupt, however, and closed in early April 1849.
[113] Harmon , Hall --
the name of the communist community founded by English utopian socialists, led by Owen, at the close of 1839 in Queenwood, Hampshire, England. It existed until 1845.
[114] In Socialism Utopian and Scientific , Engels gives a note referring to his work The Mark (see MECW , Vol. 24).
[115] This refers to the wars between the major European powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for control of trade with India and America and for seizure of colonial markets.
The principal rivals were initially England and Holland, later England and France. England won these wars and, towards the close of the eighteenth century, almost all world trade was concentrated in her hands.
[116] The reference is to the Prussian Royal Maritime Company, which was founded as a commercial and banking company in 1772 and granted a number of important privileges by the state. It advanced big loans to the government and, in fact, became its banker and broker.
[117] The slogan "a free people's state" -- is criticised in section IV of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme , Engels' letter to August Bebel of March 18-28, 1875, and Lenin's The State and Revolution , Chapter 1, Paragraph 4, and Chapter IV, Paragraph 3 (Collected Works Vol. 25, pp. 395-401 and 439-42).
[118] These figures are from Robert Giffen's paper "Recent Accumulations of Capital in the United Kingdom", read at the Statistical Society on January 15, 1878 and printed in the London Journal of the Statistical Society in March 1878.
[119] Speaking about the "German Empire of the Prussian nation", Engels underlines, on the one hand, that the country's unification under Prussian supremacy was completed by Bismarck on a militaristic basis and, on the other, alludes to the name "the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation" which, from the end of the fifteenth century until its formal liquidation in 1806, was part of the archaic state formation, the mediaeval feudal empire, founded in 962 by the German king Otto I and embracing the territory of Germany and several other Central European states. The empire was a precarious unity of feudal principalities and free towns recognising the supreme power of an emperor.
[120] Engels had in mind a speech delivered by Bismarck in the Lower Chamber of the Prussian Landtag on March 20, 1852, stating that, if there were another upsurge of the revolutionary movement, large towns, as centres of the revolutionary movement, ought to be wiped out from the face of the earth.
[121] The ledger (Kommerzbuch) is described by Wilhelm Weitling in Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit , Section II, Ch. 10, Vivis, 1842. According to Weitling's utopian plan, in the future society, every able-bodied person would have to work a certain number of hours a day and, in return, would receive the necessary means of subsistence. Every person would have the right to work several "commercial hours" over and above this time and, in return, to receive luxury items, different entertainments, theatre and concert tickets, etc. These additional working hours and the products received for them would be recorded in a ledger.
[122] Non olet (it {money} does not stink): these words were spoken by the Roman Emperor Vespasian (69-79A.D.) in reply to his son, who reproached him for introducing a tax on lavatories.
[123] Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaars were founded by workers' co-operatives in various towns of England; the first of these bazaars was founded by Owen in London in September 1832and existed until mid-1834.
[124] A detailed criticism of the Lassallean slogan of "full" or unlimited "proceeds of labour" is given in Section 1 of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme .
[125] In the original "Zarucker" -- from the German zuruck ( zaruck -- in Berlin dialect), meaning "retrograde person", "reactionary" ("Ruckschrittler", "Reaktionar").
See A. Glafbrenner, Herr Buffe , in der Zaruck-Gesellschaft in: Berlin wie es ist und -- trinit , Leipzig, 1848, pp. 14-15.
[126] An expression from the resolution written by Prussian King Frederick II on July 22, 1740 in reply to an inquiry from Minister von Brand and President of the Consistory Reichenbach as to whether Catholic schools might be permitted in a Protestant Prussian state.
