Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

which eventually found its way to the British Foreign Office via the British Ambassador in Berlin:

One of the German Societies under Marx, Wolff, Engels, Vidil, meets at No. 20 Great Windmill Street on the first storey. It is divided again into three Sections. The Society B, is the most violent. The murder of Princes is formally taught and discussed in it. At a meeting held the day before yesterday at which I assisted and over which Wolff and Marx presided, I heard one of the Orators call out 'The Moon Calf will likewise not escape its destiny. The English Steel Wares are the best, the axes cut particularly sharp here, and the guillotine awaits every Crowned Head.' Thus the murder of the Queen of England is proclaimed by Germans a few hundred yards only from Buckingham Palace. The secret committee is divided again into two Sections, the one composed of the Leaders and the other of the so-called 'Blindmen' who are from 18 to 20 in number and are men of great daring and courage. They are not to take part in disturbances, but are reserved for great occasions and principally for the murder of Princes.10

That this report is remarkable chiefly for the imaginative capacities of its author is shown by the surviving minutes of such meetings.

In general the refugees were ignored by the British Government. In March 1851, for example, the Prussian Minister of the Interior pressed for a joint approach with Austria and Prussia to the British Government for 'decisive measures against the chief revolutionaries known by name' and for 'rendering them innocuous by transportation to the colonies'.11 The previous year the Austrian ambassador had already raised the question with Sir George Grey, the British Home Secretary, pointing out that 'the members of the Communist League, whose leaders were Marx, Engels, Bauer and Wolff, discussed even regicide', but got the reply: 'under our laws, mere discussion of regicide, so long as it does not concern the Queen of England and so long as there is no definite plan, does not constitute sufficient grounds for the arrest of the conspirators'.12 The most the Home Office was prepared to do in answer to these demands was to give financial assistance to those refugees wishing to emigrate to the United States.13

Although when still in Cologne Marx had rejected the advances of the London Central Committee of the Communist League (resurrected by Schapper and Moll early in 1849), he now began to devote great energy to the League's work. It is not entirely clear how Marx became a member of the Central Committee: official election is unlikely; probably he was co-opted by Bauer and Eccarius as later were Engels and Willich. At any rate he attended its fortnightly meetings and eventually became its President. The League had been far from inactive during 1849, although the

the revolutionary party in the previous summer for a time practically dissolved the League's organisation .... T h e Central Committee was condemned to complete inactivity until the end of the previous year.' This was an exaggeration, and Marx stated later that on his arrival in London 'I found the operation of the Communist League there reconstituted and the links with the rebuilt groups in Germany renewed.'ls But the general confusion and dispersion in late 1849 certainly diminished the League's activities. Ideologically, too, the 'secret propaganda society' (as Marx described it16) was far from homogeneous. Although it is true that not every applicant was admitted to membership and that there were sometimes even expulsions, there was no clear orthodoxy - nor would this have been possible so long as contact was simply by letter and by the occasional emissary bearing an Address from the Central Committee. In what Marx - now as later - called his 'party' he certainly did insist on ideological purity, but this 'party' was by no means coterminous with the League, nor was it composed exclusively of League members: it was made up of the comparatively few people who - to varying extents - knew Marx personally, understood his views and respected their overriding superiority.

In January 1850 Marx attempted to reorganise the League in Germany and sent a letter to the cigar-maker Roser, the future Chairman of the Cologne group who later turned King's evidence, urging him, in Roser's words, ' . . . to found a group in Cologne and do my best to found similar ones in other Rhenish cities, since he too considered it necessary, now that freedom of speech and of the press had in fact been suppressed, to reorganise the League since future propaganda could only be carried on in secret.'17 Roser responded by asking for official statutes that would preclude any conspiratorial tendencies. Marx replied that these would be ratified by a future congress, but that for the moment they should adopt

the Central Committee sent Bauer on an inspection tour in March with a mandate signed by Marx and an instruction on tactics composed by Marx and Engels. This famous Address demonstrated how far Marx had changed his mind on tactics during the previous year. He now accepted the necessity for 'organising both secredy and publicly the workers' party alongside, but independent of, the official democrats'1 8 , and now approved of the Central Committee's previous attempts to reorganise the League in Germany. Marx attacked all types of 'democratic party' whose interests, because they represented the numerous German lower-middle class, were

bound in the long run to be opposed to those of the proletariat. Marx's advice here was this:

. .. While the democratic petty-bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians."

Thus the workers should initially support any bourgeois democratic revolution while retaining their independent and, if possible, armed organisation; if this revolution were successful the workers should keep up the pressure by demanding nationalisation of land and a united and highly centralised Republic. T h e slogan that Marx proposed at the end of the Address - 'revolution in permanence' - did not imply that he believed in an imminent proletarian revolution in Germany, though he did think it likely in France and was much more sanguine now than later about the probability of an economic crisis. At the end of the Address Marx talked of a 'lengthy revolutionary development' and gave this final advice to the German workers:

. . . they themselves must do the utmost for their final victory by clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be seduced for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty-bourgeois into refraining from the independent organisation of the party of the proletariat.20

T h e Address was accepted and copied out by the Cologne group as they found no conspiratorial tendencies in it and Bauer proceeded to visit groups in all parts of Germany in a similar fashion. On his return he passed through Cologne where some criticism was expressed about the initiative taken by London, on the grounds that Marx had dissolved the League in 1848 and there had as yet been no official reconstitution. However, this was not the majority view of the Cologne group and Bauer's mission was in general deemed by the Central Committee to have been successful.

T h e precise influence of the Communist League in Germany is difficult to assess.21 T h e membership seems to have been composed mainly of middle-class intellectuals who often had a rather idealised picture of the

proletariat and whose only means of attaining practical influence was contact with workers' associations on the model of the London group. These associations - a response to direct social needs - held open elections, exerted strict control over elected representatives, and concentrated on practical activities such as mutual aid and formal education. Although in some towns - Cologne and Frankfurt, for example - the influence of League members on the associations was considerable, the grandiose claims made in the June Address of the London Central Committee should not be taken at their face value.

Although this second Address still stated 'that the early outbreak of a new revolution could not be far away',22 its tone and purpose was different from that of the March Address: it asserted the supreme authority of the London Central Committee when confronted with the claims to a separate autonomy made, for example, by a German refugee organisation in Switzerland, as well as by other groups all of which were active in Germany itself. The Address gave a rather optimistic account of the state of the League in Belgium, Germany, France and England, and also postponed the General Congress which had been requested by Cologne. Its bombastic style, lack of realism and excessive optimism concerning contacts with workers' organisations and the army make it doubtful that Marx and Engels played a large part in drawing it up, though they must have acquiesced in its final form as they never disavowed it - and it was even reprinted by Engels. The Address did not entirely achieve its purpose for there were still disagreements between London and the Cologne group: the latter had always viewed itself as no more than a propaganda society and angrily accused Marx of 'unbrotherly conduct' when he charged them with 'lack of energetic activity'.2' A General Congress was to be held in London in September, but the split in the Central Committee in September 1850 prevented it taking place.

The Address also announced to the German groups the Central Committee's contacts with French and English revolutionary parties. At the end of 1849 Marx had attended a dinner organised by the left wing of the disintegrating Chartist movement, known as the Fraternal Democrats, whose leader (George Harney) Marx knew from his previous stay in London. At this dinner Marx made the acquaintance of exiled leaders of Blanqui's party and in April 1850 the Universal Society of Communist Revolutionaries was formed. The signatories were Marx, Engels and Willich for the Germans, Harney for the English and Vidil and Adam for the French. The first of the six statutes, couched in the spirit of the March Address, read:

The aim of the society is the overthrow of all the privileged classes,

L O N D O N

and to submit these classes to the dictatorship of the proletariat by maintaining the revolution in permanence until the realisation of communism, which will be the last organisational form of the human family.24

The statutes were written in French and drawn up by Willich. The Universal Society also began to issue revolutionary propaganda: Bar-

the measures that the people will have to take immediately after the revolution.'25 The Society did not survive the split in the Communist League when most of the Blanquists sided with Willich. It did, however, achieve a temporary unification of the European Left after 1848 and as such was a forerunner of the First International.

A key factor in all Marx's political activities in 1849 and 1850 was his effort to establish a newspaper that would continue the role played by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the 1848-49 revolutions. Before he left Paris he already had specific plans for a journal which would act as a rallying point for his scattered 'party'. Its title of Neue Rheinische Zeitung - Politisch-Oekonomisch Revue indicated, firstly, the continuity with the previous paper, secondly, the intention to transform it into a daily as soon as 'circumstances allow its return to Germany'26 and, finally, the close link that Marx saw between socio-economic investigation and political activity.

The last months of 1849 were taken up in the search for contributors and a publisher. In December Theodor Hagen, a member of the Communist League, informed Marx that the Hamburg publisher Schuberth was willing to take on the review. Schuberth took fifty per cent of all the income to defray the cost of publication while the rest of the arrangements, including that of distribution (through agents who took a commission), were left to Marx, who bore the cost of them. Shares were advertised in the hope of raising £500 and Conrad Schramm was to go to the United States with the support of the Chartists and Blanquists to raise money there: but neither scheme was realised. There were also delays in publication: the intended date was 1 January, but Schuberth received no manuscript at all during the whole of January, partly owing to Marx's illness at the end of the month. The manuscript did arrive in early February but with the printer's lack of paper and his difficulty in deciphering Marx's 'frightful handwriting'27 publication was further delayed. In addition, Schuberth was also worried by the possibility of prosecution and thought that Marx, as editor, should tone down the