were Schapper, who was jailed in Wiesbaden but
came after his acquittal, in the spring of 1850, and
Moll, who, after he had accomplished a series of most
dangerous missions and agitational journeys—in the
end he recruited mounted gunners for the Palatinate
artillery right in the midst of the Prussian army in the
Rhine Province—joined the Besancon workers’
company of Willich’s corps and was killed by a shot in
the head during the encounter at the Murg in front of
the Rotenfels Bridge, On the other hand Willich now
entered upon the scene. Willich was one of those
sentimental Communists so common in Western
Germany since 1845, who on that account alone was
instinctively, furtively antagonistic to our critical
tendency. More than that, he was entirely the prophet,
convinced of his personal mission as the predestined
liberator of the German proletariat and as such a
direct claimant as much to political as to military
dictatorship. Thus, to the primitive Christian
communism previously preached by Weitling was
added a kind of communist Islam. However, the
propaganda of this new religion was for the time being
restricted to the refugee barracks under Willich’s
command.
Hence, the League was organized afresh; the
Address of March1850 was published in an appendix
(Bd. IX, No.1), and Heinrich Bauer sent as an emissary
to Germany. The Address, composed by Marx and
myself, is still of interest today, because petty-
bourgeois democracy is even now the Party which
must certainly be the first to come to power in
Germany as the saviour of society from the communist
workers on the occasion of the next European
upheaval now soon due (the European revolutions,
1815, 1830, 1848-52, 1870, have occurred at intervals
of fifteen to eighteen years in our century). Much of
what is said there is, therefore, still applicable today.
Heinrich Bauer’s mission was crowned with complete
success. The trusty little shoemaker was a born
diplomat. He brought the former members of the
League, who had partly become laggards and partly
were acting on their own account, back into the active
organisation, and particularly also the then leaders
of the Workers’ Brotherhood. The League began to
play the dominant role in the workers’, peasants’ and
athletic associations to a far greater extent than before
1848, so that the next quarterly address to the
communities, in June 1850, could already report that
the student Schurz from Bonn (later on American ex-
minister) , who was touring Germany in the interest of
petty-bourgeois democracy , “had found all fir forces
already in the hands of the League.” The League was
undoubtedly the only revolutionary organisation that
had any significance in Germany.
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But what purpose this organisation should serve
depended very substantially on whether the prospects
of a renewed upsurge of the revolution were realised.
And in the course of the year 1850 this became more
and more improbable, indeed impossible. The
industrial crisis of 1847, which had paved the way for
the Revolution of 1848, had been overcome; a new,
unprecedented period of industrial prosperity had set
in; whoever had eyes to see and used them must have
clearly realised that the revolutionary storm of 1848
was gradually spending itself.
“With this general prosperity, in which the
productive forces of bourgeois society develop as
luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois
relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution.
Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when
both these factors, the modern productive forces and
the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with
each other. The various quarrels in which the
representatives of the individual factions of the
continental party of order now indulge and mutually
compromise themselves, far from providing the
occasion for new revolutions, are, on the contrary,
possible only because the basis of the relationships
is momentarily so secure and, what the reaction does
not know, so bourgeois. From it all attempts of the
reaction to hold up bourgeois development will
rebound just as certainly as all moral indignation and
all enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats.” Thus
Marx and I wrote in the “Revue of May to October
1850” in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politischo-
konomische Revue, Nos. V and VI, Hamburg 1850,
p.153.
This cool estimation of the situation, however, was
regarded as heresy by many persons, at a time when
Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Mazzini, Kossuth and,
among the lesser German lights, Ruge, Kinkel, Gogg
and the rest of them crowded in London to form
provisional governments of the future not only for their
respective fatherlands but for the whole of Europe,
and when the only thing still necessary was to obtain
the requisite money from America as a loan for the
revolution to realise at moment’s notice the European
revolution and the various republics which went with
it as a matter of course. Can anyone be surprised
that a man like Willich was taken in by this, that
Schapper, acting on his old revolutionary impulse, also
allowed himself to be fooled, and that the majority of
the London workers, to a large extent refugees
themselves, followed them into the camp of the
bourgeois-democratic artificers of revolution? Suffice
it to say that the reserve maintained by us was not to
the mind of these people; one was to enter into the
game of making revolutions. We most decisively
refused to do so. A split ensued; more about this is to
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