Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 15: The End of the Communist League

The more desperate the situation in Germany became the greater hopes did the revolutionaries entertain of France. 'In France the battle will start again in the spring,' Marx wrote at the beginning of 1849. The 'revolutionary volcano' in France seemed on the eve of an eruption, and it seemed to him that its flames must inevitably overflow into Germany, Austria and Hungary. The German counter-revolution could only be, must only be an incident in the European revolution. What did Baden and the Palatinate matter? If Paris rose the whole of Europe would be in flames.

Marx went to Paris. But Paris viewed from within was different from Paris viewed from without. Cholera was rampant in the city. 'The air was sultry,' wrote Alexander Herzen, the Russian revolutionary, who was in Paris at the time. 'A sunless heat oppressed mankind. Victims of the contagion fell one after another. The terrified population, and the procession of hearses dashing to the cemeteries as if they were racing, seemed in keeping with events'--i.e. the political events of June, 1849. The irony of history had once more placed revolutionary warfare upon the order of the day, but it was very different from what it had been a year before. At the end of May an expeditionary force of the French Republican Army, sent to Italy for the official purpose of defending Italy's freedom and independence, had stormed Rome, the last stronghold of Italian liberty, and delivered its Republican defenders into the hands of the Papal Inquisition. The French Constitution still contained the fine phrase: 'The Republic never employs its forces against the liberty of any people.'1

On June 11, only a few days after Marx's arrival in Paris, Ledru-Rollin, leader of the Montagnards, proposed in the Chamber that the President, Louis Bonaparte, and the cabinet be arraigned for violation of the constitution. To quote Marx's words in his Class Struggles in France, his words were 'plain, blunt, unpretentious, matter-of-fact, pithy and powerful.' The Chamber postponed the debate on this proposal, but its fate was not destined to be settled in the Chamber.

In the evening a meeting took place between the leaders of the Montagnards and the delegates of the workers' secret societies. Marx's account of the meeting indicates that he either was present himself or was given detailed information by one of the principals at the meeting. He very successfully fulfilled the task entrusted to him by the German Democrats, namely that of making contact with the French revolutionaries. There is some evidence that would seem to indicate that he actually became a member of one of the secret Communist organisations in Paris. As he wrote to Engels, he came into contact with the whole of the revolutionary party and had good grounds for hoping that within a few days he would have every revolutionary journal in Paris at his disposal. But a week later no revolutionary journals were left.

The Montagnards were not one whit behind the German Parliamentarians of the 'Left' in indecision. They rejected the proposal of the workers' delegates that they should strike that very night. True, the chances of a successful rising were no longer very great, but the refusal to act cost the Montagnards their last chance. For when they summoned a demonstration to the streets on June 13 the Government had long completed its preparations. It was a simple matter for their dragoons and riflemen to drive the unarmed masses from the streets. Some of the Montagnard deputies were arrested, others escaped. From that day on the National Assembly was 'nothing but a committee of public safety of the Party of Order.'

The last resistance of the revolutionaries in Central Europe collapsed at the same time. In the Danube basin the army of independent Hungary capitulated to the Russian troops, which were far superior in numbers and equipment. Those of its leaders who fell into the hands of the counter-revolution were hanged. Those who managed to escape to Turkey lived in fear of being handed over to the Austrian hangmen by the Sublime Porte. In dismembered Germany the revolution died piecemeal. Even to the very last everything was done to make the victory of the counter-revolution as easy as possible. The risings in the spring of 1849 broke out one after another, each outbreak coinciding with the suppression of its predecessor. There was brave fighting in Dresden and on the Rhine, and many hundreds, most of them workers, left their lives on the barricades. The words 'artisan,' 'miner,' 'day-labourer,' etc., constantly recur in the lists of dead.

Many of them were members of the Communist League. Only the extreme Left wing of the workers' movement, the group that followed Gottschalk and Weitling, opposed the rising. The organ of Gottschalk's followers warned the workers against participation in a movement which was not the immediate concern of the proletariat but of the bourgeoisie. This was but a consequence of an attitude which started out from extreme revolutionism and necessarily ended in complete passivity. Whatever their position may have been in 1848 and 1849, the overwhelming majority of the members of the League flung themselves headlong into the struggle and fought to the bitter end. Joseph Moll, who was unable to return to London after his German journey, helped in the preparations for the rising in Baden. With characteristic courage he even managed to enlist in the insurrectionary army under the fire of the Prussian guns. Then he went to Baden, where he fought bravely and fell in the fighting on the Murg, shot in the head by a Prussian bullet.

Engels took part in the campaign, first as a simple infantryman, later as an adjutant to Willich, who was in command of a corps of volunteers. His was one of the best units of the revolutionary army and consisted almost entirely of workers. The sober, clear-thinking, sceptically inclined Engels entered the struggle without any great expectations, for the weak sides--and it had practically nothing but weak sides--of the whole enterprise did not escape his keen intelligence; but he could not deny himself the pleasure of heartily and unceremoniously laughing at the mixture of excitement and alarm manifested by the petty-bourgeois revolutionary statesmen. During the course of the expedition he drew nearer to Willich, the 'one practical officer' who took part in it, and he praised him as bold in action, cool-headed, clever and quick in decision. Engels took part in four engagements, two of which were fairly important. 'I have discovered,' he wrote to Frau Marx soon afterwards, 'that the much-lauded quality of impetuous courage is one of the most ordinary properties that man can have.' He fought to the very end and marched into Swiss territory with his corps, which was one of the very last units of the revolutionary army to survive.

That was the end of the revolution of 1848, the beginning of which had been so full of promise; moreover, it was the end of the period of European history which culminated in it. But those who had been in the thick of the fray did not believe it, could not and would not believe it. The more fervently they identified themselves with the world that had departed, that world in comparison with which the new and greater world which it had engendered dwindled practically into non-existence in their eyes, the greater was their difficulty in acknowledging the existence of the new. The whole thing could not be over. To-morrow or the day after it would all break out again and everything would be altered. He who in such a situation thought anything else would have been no revolutionary. But he who remained subject to this mood too long, unable to shake it off and reconcile himself sternly to the fact that a new historical epoch had begun, was no true revolutionary either.

Marx had battled so ardently that for a time he too was subject to these inevitable illusions. He was dominated by them for a whole year. A letter he wrote to Weydemeyer on August 1, 1849, gives some clue to the extent to which his analytical intelligence, generally so accurate, could err. Disagreeable as the situation was at the moment, he belonged nevertheless to those who were satisfaits. 'Les chose marchent très bien, and the Waterloo of official Democracy is to be regarded as a victory. The governments by the grace of God have taken over the task of revenging us on the bourgeoisie and are chastising them for us.'

Marx searched for the weakest point in the enemy's front. England attracted his particular attention, and he began to hope that the next blow might come from there, and that England would be the scene of the 'beginning of the next dance.' England seemed to him to be on the eve of a tremendous economic crisis, and not long afterwards he confidently predicted its outbreak for August, 1850.

In spite of the hopes he had of England in the immediate future he had no intention of going there. At the beginning of July, 1849, his wife and children came to Paris. Marx rented a small flat and settled down as if for a long stay. He was an optimist. From June 13 the Reaction was the undisputed master of Paris; and it was not to be expected that the police would allow a man like Marx to remain completely unmolested for long.

The police devoted great attention to refugees from Germany, who were said to be playing the leading part in an 'international revolutionary committee' which did not exist outside the police imagination. One prominent émigré after another was arrested and expelled. Marx's turn was not long postponed. His expulsion order was signed on July 19. Quite possibly the police learnt of his presence in Paris from the German Press, which was indulging at the time in 'sketches from emigrant life.' The police were not very well informed, and some weeks passed before they discovered his address.

'We stayed one month in Paris,' Frau Marx wrote in her diary, 'but we were not allowed to stay there long either. One fine morning the familiar figure of a police-sergeant appeared, to inform us that Karl et sa dame must leave Paris within twenty-four hours. They were kind enough to offer us permission to stay at Vannes, in Morbihan.'

Frau Marx was expecting her fourth child and Marx was in desperate financial straits. Morbihan was considered one of the unhealthiest departments of France, the 'Pontic Marshes' of Brittany. Banishment to such a place was 'equivalent to a disguised attempt at murder,' as Marx wrote to Engels. Marx did not accept it. He tried hard to have the expulsion order revoked, but in vain. He stated in an open letter to the Press that he was staying in Paris purely for purposes of scientific research. The only concession he obtained was a respite for his wife. He had no choice but to leave France. If he attempted to return to Belgium he was certain to be turned back at the frontier. In Switzerland a regular hue-and-cry after the German émigrés was beginning, and England alone remained. Marx crossed the Channel on August 24, 1849, and his wife followed on September 15. Fate cast him into the land in which he believed the 'next dance was going to begin,' perhaps to cure him of his illusions the more quickly.

When Marx came to England for the third time in his life in the summer of 1849, he did not believe his visit would be much longer than the two previous ones. It might last a few weeks, possibly months, at the very most a year; but instead of the short visit he anticipated, he spent the second half of his life in England, which became his second home.

A great deal had changed in England since his last visit to London two years before. The Chartist Movement had not recovered from its serious defeat in April, 1848, and the whole political landscape had undergone a profound alteration. Marx nevertheless met some old acquaintances. The Fraternal Democrats, at whose meeting on November 29, 1847, he had hailed the approaching revolution, still existed, and so did the German Communist Workers' Educational Union, with whose leaders Marx had discussed the programme and statutes of the Communist League. Not a few of the old members had answered the call of the revolution in their native land, but many were too deeply rooted in England to be able to tear themselves away. They had shared Germany's hopes, exhilarations and disappointments. The Union was the obvious centre for the new refugees to gather in.

When Marx came to London very few of them had yet arrived. But every Channel boat brought a fresh influx. At first they were almost exclusively workers and artisans. The 'great men of the emigration,' of whom Marx was destined to have such unpleasant experiences, made their appearance gradually. The refugees arrived in a state of pitiful distress. Many had not a penny in their pockets. The continuation of the crisis meant that even the most highly skilled workers had difficulty in finding work, and often had to be content if the pittance they could pick up as day-labourers sufficed to enable them to stave off the pangs of hunger with a loaf of bread. 'Many of these unfortunates,' a newspaper recorded, 'consider themselves fortunate in finding a job the nature of which makes one recoil. The work is stamping raw pelts at a German fur factory in East London. Imagine a big barrel in a very warm room, filled to the very top with ermine and sable skins. A man climbs into the barrel stark-naked and stamps and works with his hands and feet from morning till night. The perspiration pours from his body in streams. This soaks into the skins and gives them their suppleness and durability, without which they would be useless for more elegant purposes. Thus our rich ladies, with their boas and muffs, though they do not suspect it, are literally clothed in the sweat of the Democrats.' Most of them, however, could not even find work of this kind.

To help the hungry was the first and most important task. Marx was among the founders of the London Assistance Committee. Similar relief societies came into being wherever German refugees were gathered. The difference between the London committee and the rest was that it was controlled by Communists from the start. Of the five leading members three were Communists, with Marx at their head. This was in accordance with the social composition of the London refugees. It was a period of wearing and exhausting work, involving dozens of interviews every day, dashing from one end of London to the other, collecting money and distributing it. Marx had an enormous amount of work to do. He succeeded in inducing the Fraternal Democrats to co-operate in the work of relief, but the results were meagre. The total receipts of a fund the Fraternal Democrats kept open for three months amounted only to £1 14s.

Marx's active participation in the relief work was a matter of course, but however urgent and necessary the work of relief might be, to him political work in the Communist League was incomparably more urgent.

The London branch, which Moll had used in his efforts to resuscitate the League at the beginning of the year, had survived the revolution. The central office Marx found in London was the only one that had any sort of contacts, though not very close ones, with Germany and other refugee centres abroad. Marx at once got in touch with the branch and soon joined it. The central office was reorganised and completed in the months that followed. Willich, who had come to London with a recommendation from Engels, was at once elected to the central office. Although Engels considered him 'a "true" Socialist and a more or less tedious ideologist,' he was of the opinion that he would be useful at the central office. Engels soon appeared 'on the scene himself. Three of the members--Heinrich Bauer, Eccarius and Pfänder--survived from the committee of November, 1847. A fourth, Schapper, arrived in the summer of 1850, and a number of new members were elected as well. There were altogether ten members of the central office in the summer of 1850, more than had ever been known in the history of the League.

The election of Willich was the event that had the most lasting consequences. He was a personal friend of Gottschalk and shared many of his views, though he had not gone so far as Gottschalk and Weitling in refusing to take part in the democratic insurrections. Willich was the representative of the 'Left' wing of the Communist movement. Willich's presence at the central office was an indication of Marx's and his friends' political compromise with the 'Lefts.' This compromise was the natural consequence of Marx's new estimate of the European situation, of which mention has been made above. It found its expression in the so-called first circular of the central office of March, 1850, which was drafted by Marx and Engels. Whether the document in all its details really represents Marx's ideas is difficult to decide. There is a good deal that points to the fact that at this period Marx once more considered it necessary to warn his followers against extreme maximalism. But in any case Marx believed that he could achieve a compromise with the 'Lefts' on the basis of this circular.

The document criticised Marx's own tactics of 1848 and 1849, and in particular the decision to dissolve the League and not put up workers' candidates of their own. 'A large number of members who took part in the revolutionary movement believed that the time for secret societies was past and that activity in the open was adequate by itself. ... While the organisation of the Democratic Party in Germany, the party of the petty-bourgeoisie, constantly improved, the working class lost its one firm hold, remained at best organised for purely local aims in single localities and thus came completely under the domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois Democrats in the general movement.' In these phrases Marx and Engels criticised themselves and admitted to the 'Lefts' that they had been wrong on a very definite issue.

But the point of the document lay not in its liquidation of the past but in its statement of the movement's future tasks.

The fundamental assumption, on which all the rest depended, was the firm expectation of a new revolutionary outbreak in the immediate future. Marx, while engaged in drafting this document, was also busy writing the article in which he prophesied that there would be a crisis in England in August, 1850, a crisis with which the renewal of the revolution would coincide. He assured Engels that the English would take it up just at the point at which the February revolution had interrupted it. And in France and Germany it could not be otherwise. In England and France the proletariat would be engaged in the direct struggle for the state power. In Germany the revolution had suffered a defeat. The bourgeoisie had been forced once more to relinquish the power to the party of feudal absolutism, but 'all the same they had assured the conditions which meant in the long run that, because of the Government's financial embarrassments, the power would fall into their hands and all their interests would be safeguarded; it was possible that from now on the revolutionary movement might assume a so-called peaceful development.' The bourgeoisie had ceased to play a revolutionary rôle. Only two revolutionary classes were now left in Germany; the petty-bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There was not the least doubt that there would be a moment in the further development of the revolution when petty-bourgeois democracy would have the predominant influence in Germany. It was therefore imperative that the relations of the proletariat with this petty-bourgeois democracy be accurately determined. They must strive for a democratic state, whether it be constitutional or republican, which would give them and their allies, the peasants, the majority. They must fight for a change in social conditions which would render the existing state of society as tolerable and as comfortable as possible for the petty-bourgeoisie. But democracy was far from being disposed to revolutionise the whole of society for the benefit of the revolutionary proletariat. Therefore the proletariat must rise together with the petty-bourgeoisie, but it must not for one moment forget the treacherous rôle which democracy would continue to play in the future. 'While the democratic petty-bourgeoisie will be inclined to bringing the revolution to as speedy a conclusion as possible, it is our interest and our duty to make the revolution permanent, until all the more or less possessing classes are forced from power, the state-power is seized by the proletariat and the partnership of the proletarians of the world has advanced to such an extent that competition between the proletariats has ceased, not just in one country but in all the principal countries of the world, and at least the vital forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the proletariat.'

In the forthcoming German revolution the proletariat must in all circumstances preserve the independence of their organisations. 'Next to the new official government they must set up their own revolutionary workers' governments, whether in the form of local committees, branch councils, workers' clubs or workers' committees, so that the bourgeois democratic government not only be promptly deprived of the workers' support but also be supervised and threatened from the very outset by organisations which have the whole mass of workers behind them.' The immediate consequence of the downfall of existing governments would be the election of a National Assembly. The proletariat--here once more the criticism of Marx's own activities in 1848 and 1849 is particularly significant--must see to it that 'workers' candidates are put up everywhere beside the democratic candidates, even where they have no prospect whatever of being elected. The progress which the proletarian party is bound to make by coming forward independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantage of a few reactionaries being elected.'

Henceforward the necessity of establishing contacts with related revolutionary parties in England and France was urgent. The Fraternal Democrats were an open propaganda society, they were capable of doing something in the way of putting workers' educational unions in touch with one another, but they were not adequate to the new tasks of the times. It was necessary to create an association of secret societies for simultaneous action in the revolution which might break out any day. The circular was issued to the branches of the League in March 1850, and an international militant alliance was formed in April. It was called the 'Société Universelle des Communistes Révolutionnaires.' Its statutes bore the signatures of Vidil and Adam, representing the London Blanquist 'emigrant' organisations, Marx, Engels and Willich representing the Communist League and Harney representing the Chartists. These six men also constituted the central committee of the new society.

Their programme and organisational structure are of great interest. 'The aim of the association,' paragraph one of the statutes reads, 'is to make an end of the privileged classes, to submit these classes to the dictatorship of the proletariat by maintaining a permanent revolution until the realisation of Communism, which shall be the last form of constitution the human family.'2

This goal, to which the members of the association swore an oath of loyalty, was to be attained by 'bonds of solidarity between all sections of the revolutionary Communist Party by breaking down the barriers of nationality in conformity with the principle of republican fraternity.'3

The rank and file of the secret societies did not themselves become members of this secret society, which was restricted to their leaders. Thus it was a secret society of higher degree. An essential feature of this organisation was that it should not come out into the open. What appears to be an allusion to it is the statement in the second circular, issued by the central office in June, 1850, to the effect that delegates of the secret Blanquist societies were in permanent contact with the delegates of the League and that the League delegates had been entrusted by the Blanquists with important preparatory work in connection with the next French revolution. Who these delegates were and the nature of their duties is unknown. But what the Blanquists were occupied with during the years 1850 and 1851 is known. They were engaged in preparations for an armed rising, just as they had been before 1848 and just as they continued to be afterwards. They were engaged in plotting, devising schemes to gain the political power by simple surprise attacks. Their confident assumption was that a comparatively small number of resolute, well-organised men, given a favourable moment, would be capable not only of seizing the rudder of the ship of state, but, by the exercise of great and unflinching energy, of maintaining their position until such time as they had brought over the whole of the people to the revolution and caused them to adhere to the small leading group. The fact that Marx accepted this kind of revolutionism, which he condemned so violently both before and afterwards, and was 'so utterly foreign in every way to the essential nature of the proletarian revolution, the fact that he formed an alliance with the Blanquists, proves better than anything else the extent to which his judgment had been affected by the breakdown of his immeasurable hopes. In later years Marx by no means excluded co-operation with the Blanquists as a matter of principle to be adhered to rigidly in all circumstances. However violently he was opposed to their methods, he valued their determination highly. But after 1851 it would have been inconceivable for him to have encouraged the members of any organisation which he led to join a Blanquist group. It should be observed, however, that the rules of the super-secret society assured the existence of the Communist League and--a highly important consideration in Marx's eyes--preserved it from the danger of being outvoted by the other organisations. A two-thirds majority was needed to pass a resolution and new members could only be elected unanimously.

However greatly Marx's outlook as indicated in the first circular differed from his attitude in 1848 and 1849, the same fundamental ideas were at the heart of both. Sooner or later these ideas were bound to part him from the ultra-Lefts again. Marx was in the first place convinced that the development of the revolution in one country was closely bound up with its development in all other countries; in the second place he was convinced that the revolution had quite definite phases to go through and that the various classes must necessarily come into power in a definite order conditioned by economic facts. It was at these points in the Marxian doctrine that Gottschalk had directed the spearhead of his attack. Gottschalk had criticised Marx for the 'heartlessness' with which he asked the workers to 'wait,' for his 'deviation' from action in his own country by referring to the coming revolution in France, England, etc. Marx still firmly maintained that the democratic petty-bourgeoisie must become the ruling class before the proletariat could follow in its shoes. He yielded to his former opponents, now his colleagues, in their estimate of the time that must intervene. In Cologne he had talked of decades, but now the process of development seemed concentrated into an incomparably briefer period, though he still avoided defining it more closely than that.

Marx was in error He had impatiently anticipated a process of development. He leapt across the years--and who at that time would not have wished to have done so? But in his fundamental attitude to the revolutionary process he took back nothing of what he had maintained in 1848 and 1849.

If the new revolution was at hand the Communist League must do everything in its power to be forearmed. Marx was intensely active in the spring and summer of 1850. Heinrich Bauer was sent to Germany as an emissary and had a successful journey through North Germany, Saxony, Württemberg and the Rhineland. Bauer was a skilful organiser and an excellent judge of men, and he was able to bring once more into the League organisation ex-members who had either lapsed into inactivity or started working independently on their own. In the summer of 1850 the League had as many as thirty branches. Karl Schurz, the subsequent American statesman, who was travelling in Germany at the time on behalf of a democratic organisation founded in Switzerland for the purpose of reviving broken contacts, was forced to admit that 'all the usable forces were already in the hands of the Communist League.'

The League was far bigger, stronger and better organised than at the time of the revolution of 1848. The revolution had come too soon for it, but the next revolution, contrary to expectations, seemed to be tarrying. Marx was convinced that an economic crisis was due in the autumn of 1850. But summer passed and autumn came and the crisis failed to appear. There was not even the slightest indication of its approach. In June Marx obtained admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum and made an intense study of the economic history of the past decade, and the economic history of England in particular, His notebooks of this period are full of long columns of figures, tables, statistical information of every kind. The more Marx mastered his material, the more plainly did he see the vanity of his hopes. Europe was not on the verge of a crisis but on the threshold of a new era of prosperity. 'To him who had eyes to see and used them,' Engels wrote later, 'it was obvious that the revolutionary storm of 1848 was gradually dying away.'

At the beginning of 1850 Marx once more had his own paper. He had a great deal of difficulty in raising the money for it, in spite of the help of Engels and friends in Germany. 'The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a politico-economic review, edited by Karl Marx,' appeared in Hamburg in February, 1850. It started as a monthly, but was intended to develop as soon as possible into a fortnightly or if possible a weekly, so that as soon as conditions permitted a return to Germany, it could promptly emerge as a daily again.

The first three numbers contained Engels's description of the rising in the Palatinate of Baden, as well as Marx's analysis of the revolution in France from February, 1848, to November, 1849. Marx ended his survey with an estimate of the prospects of the imminent revolution: 'The result (of Bonaparte's fight with the Party of Order) is postponed, the status quo is upheld, one section of the Party of Order is compromised, weakened, made impossible by the other, and repression of the common enemy, the great mass of the nation, is extended and stretched to the breaking-point, at which economic conditions will once more have reached the point of development at which a new explosion will blow the whole of these quarrelsome parties into the air, together with their constitutional republic.'

The last double number of the review appeared at the end of November. Marx summarised the result of his studies as follows: 'In view of this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society are flourishing as exuberantly as they possibly can under bourgeois conditions, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible at periods when the two factors, modern forces of production and bourgeois forms of production, come into conflict. The incessant squabbles in which the representatives of the individual fractions of the continental Party of Order are now indulging and compromising one another are remote from providing an opportunity for a new revolution. On the contrary, they are only possible because conditions for the time being are so secure and--what the Reaction does not know--so bourgeois. All attempts of the Reaction to put a stop to bourgeois development will recoil upon themselves as certainly as all the moral indignation and enthusiastic proclamations of the Democrats. A new revolution is only possible as the result of a new crisis. But it is just as inevitable as a new crisis.'

To have clung any longer to a policy which had been correct as long as a crisis and with it a revolution had Seemed imminent would have meant being guided by 'sheer wish' instead of by 'real circumstances.' At first it was by no means easy for Marx to reconcile himself to acknowledging that the years that followed would belong to the bourgeoisie. Willich and his supporters simply ignored the altered situation. In their view real circumstances might be what they would. If they were adverse, all that was required was the will to change them.

Willich's immediate reaction to Marx's analysis of the class-struggle, of the position of the classes in the revolution, and of the necessary phases of the revolution was that it was nothing but a lot of intellectual theorising. He felt Marx's view of historical development was false. That the classes--capitalists, middle class and proletariat--that is to say the victory of their class-interests--must necessarily follow one another in succession seemed to him entirely absurd. He hated the middle classes and shrank from the thought that the petty-bourgeoisie would ever rule in Germany. They would smash all the big factories and there would be 'a hue-and-cry after the loot and a demoralisation that would be all the greater the more proletarians managed to grab a share of it for themselves.' Willich only admitted the existence of two social classes. One was opposed to oppression of every kind, whether on ideal or practical grounds. The other was the class of the selfish oppressors. With men of the first class he was convinced the proletariat could work together towards bringing about the downfall of the political powers-that-be. By these men the proletariat would not be betrayed.

From this simplified view of society he deduced practical consequences. Just as at night all cats are grey, political exiles are always inclined completely to deny the very power which has driven them abroad. The German exiles of the fifties were no exception. Practically all of them accused their enemies of 'every kind of oppression' and were, at least according to their words, determined to struggle relentlessly against their oppressors. Willich found in them the colleagues he sought, not just as companions for a portion of the way, as the Democrats had been for Marx in 1848 and 1849, but as comrades in the activity he was pining for. The only form this activity could take was that of conspiracy. He hatched every conceivable kind of plot with' every conceivable clique of exiles. As Marx later wrote, Willich and his friends demanded, 'if not real conspiracies, at least the appearance of conspiracies, and hence direct alliance with the Democratic heroes of the day.' The more such alliances with other groups of exiles led to adventurous conspiracies the more violently Marx repudiated them.

Marx had become associated with some conspirators himself, the Blanquists. But in France conspiracy had a historical tradition. It had become an essential part of the revolutionary movement and it had to be reckoned with. Marx knew its negative sides only too well. He signed an agreement with the Blanquists in April and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue appeared in the same month, with book-reviews by A. Chenu and Lucien de la Hodde. Marx's judgment of the professional conspirators was annihilating. 'To begin with their social position conditions their social character,' he wrote. 'Proletarian conspiracy, of course, offers them only a very limited and uncertain means of existence. They are therefore perpetually forced to lay their hands on the conspiratorial purse-strings. Many of them, of course, fall foul of bourgeois society and make more or less of a good show in the police-courts. ... It goes without saying that these conspirators by no means confine themselves to organising the revolutionary proletariat. Their business consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary development, spurring it on to artificial crises, making revolutions extempore without the conditions for revolution. For them the only condition required for the revolution is a sufficient organisation of their own conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution, and they share in every way the limitations and fixed ideas of the alchemists of old. ... The police tolerate the conspiracies, not merely as a necessary evil. They tolerate them as centres, easy to keep under supervision, uniting the most powerful revolutionary social, elements, as workshops of insurrection, which in France have become just as necessary a means of government as the police itself, and finally as recruiting grounds for their own political spies. ... Espionage is one of the chief occupations of the conspirator. No wonder, therefore, that the small jump from routine conspirator to paid police spy is made so frequently, encouraged as it is by distress and imprisonment, threats and promises. Hence the huge ramifications of suspicion within these organisations, suspicion which so blinds its members that they end by taking the best among their colleagues for spies and accept the real spies as reliable men.'

The conspirator, Marx continues, busy with his scheming and plotting and having no other aim before his eyes but that of the immediate downfall of the existing régime, has the most profound contempt for the theoretical enlightenment of the workers concerning their class-interests. At a moment when, in their opinion, it behoved every revolutionary to act, i.e. plot and prepare risings, Willich and his followers certainly regarded the lectures Marx delivered to the workers as a senseless waste of time. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had come to London in the summer of 1850 and attached himself to Marx, writes vividly of Marx's lectures in his memoirs.

'In 1850 and 1851 Marx gave a course of lectures on political economy,' he says. 'He had been very unwilling to give them, but after addressing a small circle of friends a few times he allowed himself to be persuaded by us to address a larger audience. In this course ... Marx laid bare all the broad outlines of the system which lies before us in Das Kapital. In the hall of the Communist Workers' Educational Union, which was full to overflowing ... Marx manifested a remarkable talent for popularisation. No one hated the vulgarising, the devitalising, the falsifying, the watering down of science more than he, but no one possessed in a higher degree the capacity for clear exposition. Clarity of speech is the result of clarity of thought. Clear thought demands a clear form of expression.

'Marx's method was methodical. He would lay down a proposition as briefly as possible, and then elucidate it at greater length, taking extreme care to avoid using expressions unintelligible to the workers. Then he would invite questions from his audience. Should there be none, he would subject them to an examination, exhibiting such pedagogic skill that no loopholes or misunderstandings escaped. ... Marx had the qualifications of a first-class teacher.'

Liebknecht only heard the lectures on economics. Marx also dealt with other questions, more concrete ones, dealing with the situation as it had developed in the Communist League. In a letter he wrote in July, 1850, to P. G. Röser, a member of the League in Cologne, Marx mentions that he lectured on the Communist Manifesto at the London Workers' Union in the winter of 1849-50. Röser remembered the details of this letter four years later. In the course of an interrogation by the police Röser said that Marx demonstrated in these lectures that Communism could not be attained for a good many years yet, that Communism itself would have to go through a number of phases and that it could not be attained at all except by the way of education and gradual development. But Willich opposed him violently with his 'rubbish,' as Marx called it, and said that Communism must be introduced by the next revolution, if necessary by the power of the guillotine. Marx was afraid that the idea of advancing at the head of his bold Palatinate troops and imposing Communism by force, if necessary against the will of the whole of Germany, had become so firmly rooted in 'General' Willich's head that it would lead to a split in the Communist League.

Every word of this letter, which Röser repeated from memory, need not be weighed too carefully in the balance. But it throws light once more on the conflict between Marx and Willich. Marx assigned the Communist League one task, the task of propaganda. He repudiated conspiracy, rash adventure, insurrection. All Willich's meditations and aspirations were concentrated on insurrection. Marx saw in revolution a historical process as the result of which the proletariat could only seize the power after passing through quite definite phases, which could not possibly be skipped. Willich's attitude was: now or never. In all essentials Marx returned to his views of 1848 and 1849. One thing he stood out for, now and in the future--the absolute necessity of an independent party.

Willich regarded the theoretical discussions in the Communist League with contempt. He considered himself 'a man of action,' and when he started to act Marx was forced to break with him. The danger that Willich might involve the Communist League in his insurrectionary adventures had become too great.

The situation in the League was a complicated one. Marx had a majority at the central office. Of the four members who had been elected at the Communist Congress of November, 1847, three, Heinrich Bauer, Pfänder and Eccarius, supported Marx. The minority supported Willich, Schapper alone of the 'old' members of the central office among them. But Willich had a majority in the London branch, as well as in the London Workers' Educational Union. There were several reasons for this. Willich's crude revolutionism was bound to appeal to the hungry, desperate workers assembled in both organisations. Moreover, Willich was closer to them as a man. While Marx, 'scholar' and 'theorist,' lived his own life and only came to the Union to lecture, Willich, who had no family, shared in the joys and sorrows of the exiled proletarians. He had created co-operative society and lived with the workers, ate with them and addressed them all in the familiar second person singular; Marx was respected but Willich was popular.

Marx proposed to the members of the central office that the headquarters of the League be transferred to Germany and that the central office transfer its authority to the central office at Cologne, the headquarters of the most important branch of the League, both by reason of its activity and its numerical strength. Marx's majority at the central office accepted his proposal, which was viewed with favour at Cologne. Willich's minority declared it to be contrary to the statutes and founded a new central office of its own. Part of Marx's speech is recorded in the minutes of the meeting at which the decision was made. 'In place of a critical attitude the minority set up a dogmatic one,' he said, 'in place of a materialistic attitude an idealistic one. They make sheer will instead of real conditions the driving-wheel of the revolution. While we say to the workers: you have fifteen or twenty or fifty years of bourgeois and national wars to go through, not just to alter conditions but to alter yourselves and qualify for political power--you on the contrary say: we must obtain the power at once or we might as well lay ourselves down to sleep. While we specifically draw the German workers' attention to the undeveloped state of the German proletariat, you outrageously flatter the national sentiment and social prejudices of the German artisan, a course which, of course, is far more popular. Just as the Democrats make a sacred entity of the word "people," so do you do the same with the word "proletariat."' The meeting took place on September 15, 1850. Willich believed that the revolution would break out at any moment, and went on believing it even when the crisis, and with it the basis for the revolution, came to an end. On September 6 the Bank of England met banknotes with gold for the first time for a long period. The crisis was over.

The split in the League took place just in time, for Willich plunged into activities that were henceforward entirely quixotic. He was positive that things were going to happen quite soon, and sent off letter after letter to Germany. He had high hopes of the Cologne branch, whom he believed to be on his side, or at least hoped to bring over to his side. A conflict between Prussia and Austria was threatening, and the reserves had been called up. Willich believed the Communists should take advantage of the opportunity to seize Cologne, confiscate all private property, ban all newspapers but one, and establish a dictatorship. Thereupon he, Willich, would arrive and march to Paris at the head of the revolutionary troops, turn Louis Napoleon out, and promptly return to Germany to proclaim a one and indivisible republic, etc. He circulated his crack-brained appeals to his followers, but fortunately no one took any notice of them. The Cologne branch did everything in its power to counteract all such wildcat schemes.

Three weeks after severing connection with Willich, Marx liquidated the Société Universelle. Nothing is known of the activities of this organisation, and it is doubtful if it was ever really active at all. The Blanquists had set up a fencing and shooting establishment in London, obviously intended for training and preparing plotters for a rising. Liebknecht relates that Marx went there to practise shooting and fencing, not so much with the aim of leading an attack on the Paris Hôtel-de-Ville within the next few weeks as in memory of his year at the university of Bonn. When the Blanquists invited Marx and Engels to a joint discussion with Willich of questions arising out of the Société Universelle, the answer given them was that Marx and his friends regarded the society as long since dead. From that time onwards the London Blanquists had the most intense hatred for Marx, and one of them, the adventurous Barthélemy, described Marx as a traitor, and 'traitors deserved death.' But the quarrel did not go farther than words.

The London Communists who stood by Marx after the split in the League were fairly regular at first in their attendance at the weekly meetings, but gradually started dropping out. Marx's own attendances became more and more infrequent. 'The public isolation in which you and I now find ourselves pleases me very much,' Marx wrote to Engels in February, 1854. 'It is entirely in accordance with our position and our principles. The system of mutual concessions and compromises, which one had to put up with for decency's sake, and the duty of bearing one's share of ridicule in common with all the other asses of the party has now ceased.' Marx had joined the revived Communist League on the assumption of the imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak, which made the League, with its secret organisations, its branches, emissaries and circulars, necessary, as it had been before 1848. The assumption had turned out to be false, and the League had lost the reason for its existence. There was no longer any necessity to make concessions to the Blanquists, compromises had become superfluous, the League itself had become superfluous. Soon after the rupture with Willich, and as soon as the danger of Willich's stirring up the branches in Germany to senseless insurrection had been eliminated, or at any rate notably diminished, Marx 'postponed' his further activities in the League 'indefinitely.' He only had occasion to busy himself with League affairs once more, but the occasion was a highly important one. It arose out of the trial of the leaders of the Cologne branch.

The Communists in Cologne, which was now the centre of the movement in Germany, had little experience of illegal work, and they worked with incredible carelessness, sometimes to the point of naïveté. The Prussian police were not very clever either. They themselves did not get on to the track of the 'conspirators,' but had to be given a fillip from outside. In May, 1851, the Saxon police arrested an emissary of the League, a tailor named Nothjung, in Leipzig, and discovered from his papers the existence of the organisation in Cologne and the names of its most important members. The Prussian police took no steps whatever until practically the whole of the essential facts had been communicated to them. What they lacked in professional skill they made up for by brutal treatment of prisoners under arrest and shameless provocation.

The genuine documents which came to light in the course of the house-searches in Cologne were quite sufficient to bring the members of the Cologne branch before a court of justice. But under the Code Napoléon, which was in force in the Rhineland, the accused would have to appear before a jury, and police and public prosecutor, not without reason in view of past experience, feared that the accused, charged as they were with activity as part of an organisation which stood for Marx's point of view and was concerned with propaganda, might be acquitted. Therefore more substantial material must be produced. If there were none, it was necessary to create it. The authorities were aware of the existence of Willich's crack-brained letters to the Cologne Communists, and although the Cologne branch had specifically repudiated his plans for an insurrection, their repudiation made no difference. According to the police, they and Willich were all the same, and no distinctions were recognised. In the eyes of the police no such thing as a rupture because of fundamental political differences existed. Willich and Marx were the same, and the quarrel between them was a purely personal one, arising out of rivalry for the leadership of the secret society. The police made promises to all sorts of people, including convicts and prisoners on remand. They promised them every sort of favour--withdrawal of proceedings against them, quashing of their convictions--if they would agree to give suitable evidence. Not content with that, they sought for documents--evidence in writing that would compromise Marx and implicate him personally.

The Cologne police even spread their net to London, where most of the better-known refugees, above all the leaders of the 'Marx Party,' and the 'Willich Party' were living. An army of spies was set to watch the political refugees. The Germans were trailed not only by the police agents of Austria, Prussia and other German states but also by French spies, Belgian spies, Dutch spies and Danish spies. A regular trade in information about the German refugees sprang up, with a veritable market at which information was bartered or paid for in cash. Information was anxiously sought by diplomats, who used it to curry favour with the German potentates, and the agents formed rings or engaged in fierce competition with each other. It was a dirty and lucrative business.

In many reports Marx appeared as a desperate terrorist who used London as a base for organising attempts on the crowned heads of Europe. The Prussian ambassador in Brussels reported in December, 1848, that there were rumours in Belgium that Marx was preparing an attempt on the King of Prussia. Consequently, when a good royalist non-commissioned officer made an attempt on the life of Frederick William IV in the spring of 1850, special agents were sent to London who naturally confirmed the fact that Marx was the organiser of the outrage. The chief of the Belgian police passed on to the Prussians his own agents' report that Marx forgathered every evening at a tavern with a group of desperadoes, to whom he made inflammatory speeches--'he teaches his partisans whom he one day counts on sending individually to Germany on missions the nature of which may easily be guessed.'4

The police also discovered that Marx, not satisfied with the assassination of German princes, had aims on the lives of Queen Victoria and the Prince Regent. The Prussian policeman who sent this sensational report to Berlin asked whether it might not be advisable, in view of the tremendous importance of the matter, to seek a personal audience of the Queen. The audience was not granted, but on May 24, 1850, Manteuffel, the Prussian Prime Minister, sent copies of the report to the British Foreign Office. Verbal representations seem also to have been made to the British authorities, for in the summer of 1850 Marx feared he was going to be expelled from England. The English police were more intelligent than the Prussians believed them to be, for they soon discovered what lay behind the Prussian denunciations.

During the preparations for the Cologne trials police activities were redoubled. Their agents, having unlimited resources at their disposal, got busy among the starving refugees and succeeded in buying several of them. One of the most important refugee-spies was the Hungarian Colonel Bangya, who was in the confidence of Kossuth and in the pay of the French, Austrian and Prussian police at the same time. The police dossiers of the time are full of reports of his having attended a refugee meeting yesterday, of having read certain letters the day before, and having gained the friendship of this leader or the other. These bought ex-revolutionaries were able to give information about Marx, and sometimes their reports were very well informed. Bangya supplied particularly detailed reports, for he enjoyed Marx's friendship for several months and was a frequent visitor at his house.

The reports of the properly informed agents did not help the police, for they tended rather to vindicate than incriminate the Cologne accused. They were unanimous in stating that Marx repudiated armed risings and plots. So the police had recourse to other methods. They had the house of one of Willich's followers broken into, and the records of the 'Willich-Schapper Party' fell into their hands almost complete. They rounded these off with letters they forged themselves. The 'Marx Party' documents were in the possession of Marx and Engels and were better looked after, but the police managed to get at them too. They manufactured a minute book with forged reports of meetings that never took place. And now the case was ready to begin.

For months Marx did practically nothing but work for the accused, to whose defence he devoted all his energies, both before and during the trial, which lasted for weeks. At the end of October, 1852, Frau Marx wrote to a friend in America:

'You will have followed the Communist monster trial in the Kölnische Zeitung. On October 23 the whole thing took such a splendid and interesting turn, and one so favourable to the accused, that our spirits began to revive a little again. You can imagine that the "Marx Party" is active day and night, and is working with head, hands and feet.

'The whole of the police case is lies. They steal, they forge, they break desks open, they commit perjury and give false evidence, and consider they have a perfect right to do so in the case of the Communists, who are beyond the pale. This and the blackguardly way the police have of taking over all the functions of the public prosecutor and producing as proof, as legally proved fact, unverified documents, sheer rumours, reports and hearsay evidence is really hair-raising. My husband has to work all day and far into the night, for all the proofs of forgery have to be elaborated in London. Whole documents have to be copied six or eight times over and sent to Germany by the most various routes, via Frankfurt, Paris, etc., for all letters addressed to my husband, and all letters from here to Cologne are intercepted and opened. The whole thing is now a struggle between the police on the one side and my husband on the other, for everything, the whole revolution and now the whole conduct of the defence, has been thrust upon his shoulders.

'Forgive my confused writing, but I have been somewhat immersed in the plot myself, and I have been copying so much that my fingers ache. Hence the confusion. Whole masses of business addresses and fake business letters have just arrived from Weerth and Engels to enable us to despatch documents, etc., safely. A regular office has been established here. Two or three of us write, others run messages, still others scrape pennies together to enable the writers to keep themselves alive and furnish proofs of the scandalous behaviour of the official world. At the same time my three merry children sing and whistle and their papa keeps on losing patience with them. Such a hustling and bustling.'

Marx's efforts resulted in the unmasking of some of the chief forgeries and four of the eleven accused were acquitted, but the pressure of the police and the Government on the jury was so great that the other seven were convicted. They were sentenced to from three to six years' imprisonment in a fortress.

That was the end of the Communist League. After the arrests in Cologne in 1851 it ceased to exist. In England it only continued as an organisation to help the accused. Sentence was pronounced in Cologne on November 12, 1852. Five days later the League, at Marx's proposal, was declared dissolved. Marx's reason for this decision was that the League was 'no longer opportune.'

Marx never again belonged to a secret organisation. General political grounds and private grounds united in causing him to refrain. Some American Communists proposed to reorganise the League at the end of the fifties, but he would have nothing to do with it. He told them he was convinced he could do more good to the working classes by his theoretical labours than by participation in organisations the time for which had gone by. He refused to join any secret organisations, 'if only on the ground that such organisations might endanger human beings in Germany.' The conviction of his Cologne comrades was a terrible blow to him. Roland Daniels, the man for whom Marx had more affection than for any other, succumbed early to illness contracted in prison. 'His was a delicate, finely organised, thoroughly noble nature,' Marx wrote in his letter of condolence to Frau Daniels. 'In him character, talents and aesthetic vision were in unusual harmony. Daniels stood out among the people of Cologne like a Greek statue thrust by some whimsical mischance among a lot of Hottentots.' Marx never got over the fact of men like Daniels dying a sacrifice to Prussian police infamy. He was convinced that the time for the workers' movement in Western Europe to organise itself into secret societies had gone.

Marx wrote his pamphlet, Revelations of the Communist Trial in Cologne, in November and December, 1852. He exposed all the abominable practices of the police, produced documentary evidence of their forgeries, utterly demolished the web of lies that they had spun. But the pamphlet did not reach Germany. A fairly large edition of two thousand copies was printed in Switzerland, but was confiscated when an attempt was made to smuggle it over the frontier.

Another of Marx's works had not fared much better shortly before. Joseph Weydemeyer had founded a weekly paper in America, where he emigrated in the autumn of 1850. It was the only German paper at Marx's disposal after the death of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue. Marx started writing for The Revolution, as it was called, an essay on The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, referring to the Bonapartist coup d'état of December 2, 1850. But Weydemeyer was not able to proceed with his first number, and the most brilliant of Marx's shorter historical works, in which, as Engels said, he gives a magnificent example of how the materialist interpretation'of history can explain an event which remains baffling from all other viewpoints, might have remained unpublished had a German worker not given Weydemeyer forty dollars, the whole of his savings, to enable him to print it. The 18th Brumaire appeared as the first number of the monthly The Revolution. Although several hundred copies found their way to Germany not a single one appeared in any bookshop.

After the dispersal of the Communist League Marx resigned from the Workers' Educational Union and the refugees' assistance committee. He shared in none of the busy inactivity with which the more or less well-known Democratic leaders in London, 'the great men of the emigration' as Marx called them, filled their time waiting for the outbreak of the revolution which they believed to be imminent. He had nothing but bitter sarcasm and contempt for their empty pathos, their cliques and their factions, the whole of the hollow motions through which they went. They regarded him as a mischief-maker, a proud, unsociable man who went his own way alone. They hated him for being an obstinate Communist. An example will suffice to show what excesses the bourgeois 'emigrants' were capable when they wanted to make Marx appear contemptible.

In the summer of 1851 a rumour was spread in London that Marx had become a contributor to the Neue Preussische Zeitung, the paper of extreme Reaction. It was partly under the control of Ferdinand von Westphalen, the Minister of the Interior of whom Marx had said to his wife in jest in 1848 that her brother was so stupid that he was sure to become a Prussian minister one day. Neither Marx nor his wife had had the slightest contact with him for many years. An obscure German paper published in London eagerly took up the slander and surpassed itself in innuendoes about the excellent relations existing between the red revolutionary and the minister of state. At that Marx, who granted the Press the right to insult politicians, comedians and other public figures, but not to slander them, lost patience and challenged the editor to a duel. The editor was frightened out of his life and printed in his next issue the apology that was dictated to him and thus the incident was closed.

Since Engels had gone to live in Manchester, Marx was practically alone in London. Material needs became more and more pressing. In 1848, when the German revolution began to peter out, Engels looked back with a smile of regret to the 'sleepless night of exile' during the years that led up to the Revolution. The real and 'dreadful 'sleepless night of exile' started now.

Chapter 15 notes

1: 'La République française n'emploie jamais ses forces contre la liberté d'aucun peuple.'

2: 'Le but de l'association est la déchéance de toutes les classes privilégiées de soumettre ces classes à la dictature des prolétaires en maintenant la révolution en permanence jusqu' à la réalisation du communisme, qui doit être la dernière forme de constitution de la famille humaine.'

3: 'des liens de solidarité entre toutes les fractions du parti communiste révolutionnaire en faisant disparaître conformément au principe de la fraternité républicaine les divisions de nationalité.'

4: 'il endoctrine ses séides qu'il compte lâcher un jour individuellement en Allemagne avec une mission déterminée facile à deviner.'