Organisational history
Background
During the decade of the 1840s the word "communist" came into general use to describe those who supposedly hailed from the left wing of the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution. [1] This political tendency saw itself as egalitarian inheritors of the 1795 Conspiracy of Equals headed by Gracchus Babeuf. [1] The sans-culottes of Paris which had decades earlier been the base of support for Babeuf — artisans, journeymen, and the urban unemployed — was seen as a potential foundation for a new social system based upon the modern machine production of the day. [2]
The French thinker Étienne Cabet inspired the imagination with a novel about a utopian society based upon communal machine production, Voyage en Icarie (1839). [2] The revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui argued in favor of an elite organising the overwhelming majority of the population against the "rich," seizing the government in a coup d'état, and instituting a new egalitarian economic order. [2]
One group of Germans in Paris, headed by Karl Schapper, organised themselves in the form of a secret society known as the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten) and participated in a May 1839 rebellion in Paris in an effort to establish a "Social Republic." [3] Following its failure the organisation relocated its centre to London, while also maintaining local organisations in Zürich and Paris. [4]
Revolution was in the air across many of the monarchies of Europe.
Creation of the Communist League
The year 1846 found Karl Marx and his close friend and co-thinker Friedrich Engels in Brussels, establishing a small political circle of radical German émigrés called the Communist Correspondence Committee and writing for the German-language Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung ("Brussels German Newspaper"). [5] Also important in this early circle was Wilhelm Wolff, a talented and radical writer hailing from the Silesian peasantry who had been forced to emigrate due to his agitation against the Prussian autocracy. [6]
The Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee had at the same time small counterparts located in London and Paris, composed of a handful of radical German expatriates living there. Relations between these small groups were not close, with petty jealousies and ideological disagreements preventing the participants from functioning as an effective political unit. [6]
Be that as it may, in the latter part of January 1847 the disparate parts of the fledgling German Communist movement began to congeal in a single organisational entity when the London center of the League of the Just first broached the idea of organisational unity with the Communist Corresponding Committee. [7] A letter of 20 January 1847 by Schapper requested that Marx join the League in anticipation of a scheduled London congress at which a new set of principles would be adopted based upon the ideas previously expressed by Marx and Engels. [8] Both Marx and Engels were persuaded by the appeal and they both joined the League of the Just shortly thereafter, followed by other members of the Communist Corresponding Committee. [8]
In June 1847, the London congress took place and the League of the Just adopted a new charter formally changing the group's name to the Communist League. [8] The Communist League was structured around the formation of primary party units known as "communes," consisting of at least 3 and not more than 10 members. [8] These were in turn to be combined into larger units known as "circles" and "leading circles," governed by a central authority selected at regular congresses. [8] The League's programme called for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the rule of the proletariat and the construction of a new society free both of private property and social classes. [8]
The initial conference was attended by Engels, who convinced the League to change its motto to Karl Marx's phrase, Working Men of All Countries, Unite!. At the same conference, the organisation was renamed the Communist League and was reorganised significantly.
In particular, Marx did away with all "superstitious authoritarianism," as he called the rituals pertaining to secret societies. [9] The conference itself was counted as the first congress of the new League.
The Communist League had a second congress, at Great Windmill Street, London, in November and December 1847. Both Marx and Engels attended, and they were assigned the task of composing a manifesto for the organisation. This became The Communist Manifesto .
The League was not able to function effectively during the 1848 revolutions, despite temporarily abandoning its clandestine nature. The Workers' Brotherhood was established in Germany by members of the League, and became the most significant revolutionary organisation there. During the revolution Marx edited the radical journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung . Engels fought in the Baden campaign against the Prussians (June and July 1849) as the aide-de-camp of August Willich.
The Communist League reassembled in late 1849, and by 1850 they were publishing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue journal, but by the end of the year, publication had ceased amid disputes between the managers of the group. Willich and Schapper wanted to continue to focus on revolutions, while Marx and Engels wanted to focus on building an international workers' movement. This would divide the league in two. The Willich-Schapper Group would be located in France and become compromised by the Prussian police.
In 1850, the German master spy Wilhelm Stieber stole the register of the League's members from Dietz, who was a member of Willich-Schapper group, which he sent to France and several German states. This would help bring about the imprisonment of several members.
In November 1852, after the Cologne Communist Trial, the organisation immediately disbanded. The Willich-Schapper Group would disband a few months after.
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, representing his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic, and political history.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for widespread consumption the core historical materialist idea that, as stated in the text's opening words, "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published against the backdrop of the Revolutions of 1848 and their subsequent repression across Europe, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator.
The Rheinische Zeitung was a 19th-century German newspaper, edited most famously by Karl Marx. The paper was launched in January 1842 and terminated by Prussian state censorship in March 1843. The paper was eventually succeeded by a daily newspaper launched by Karl Marx on behalf of the Communist League in June 1848, called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
August Willich, born Johann August Ernst von Willich, was a military officer in the Prussian Army and a leading early proponent of communism in Germany. In 1847 he discarded his title of nobility. He later emigrated to the United States and became a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie was a German daily newspaper, published by Karl Marx in Cologne between 1 June 1848 and 19 May 1849. It is recognised by historians as one of the most important dailies of the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. The paper was regarded by its editors and readers as the successor of an earlier Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, also edited for a time by Karl Marx, which had been suppressed by state censorship over five years earlier.
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff, nicknamed "Lupus" was a German schoolmaster, political activist and publicist.
Carl Heinrich Pfänder was a German portrait painter and revolutionary who was part of the circle of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London.
August Hermann Ewerbeck, known by his middle name of Hermann, was a pioneer socialist political activist, writer, and translator. A physician by vocation and a German by birth, Ewerbeck is best remembered as an early political associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as a leader of the Parisian communities of the utopian socialist organization, League of the Just, and as the translator of the French writings of Étienne Cabet and Ludwig Feuerbach into German.
August Gebert was born in Mecklenburg, Germany and was a joiner by profession. He became a member of the Communist League while living in Switzerland. He continued to participate in the Communist League when he moved to London in 1850. There he became a part of the sectarian Willich-Schapper group within the Communist League, which is known for expelling Marx and Engels. In London he was the chair of the CABV Whitechapel branch.
Born in Germany, Albert Lehmann was a worker and a leading figure of the League of Just. Following the suppression of the uprising of 1848 and 1849, Lehmann fled Germany to settle in London, England. In London, he became a member of the German Workers Educational Society and a member of the Communist League. During the split in the Communist League, Lehmann joined the August Willich-Karl Schapper sectarian group as opposed to the Karl Marx and Frederick Engels group.
Joseph Arnold Weydemeyer was a military officer in the Kingdom of Prussia and the United States as well as a journalist, politician and Marxist revolutionary.
The German Workers Educational Association (GWEA) was a London-based organisation of radical German political émigrés established in 1840 by Karl Schapper and his associates. The organisation served during its initial years as the "above-ground" arm of the underground League of the Just and later as a mass organisation of the Communist League. The organisation continued to exist for more than 75 years, eventually terminating in 1917 due to the internment of Germans in Great Britain due to World War I.
Classical Marxism is the body of economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their works, as contrasted with orthodox Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, and autonomist Marxism which emerged after their deaths. The core concepts of classical Marxism include alienation, base and superstructure, class consciousness, class struggle, exploitation, historical materialism, ideology, revolution; and the forces, means, modes, and relations of production. Marx's political praxis, including his attempt to organize a professional revolutionary body in the First International, often served as an area of debate for subsequent theorists.
The Cologne Communist Trial took place in 1852 in Cologne, Germany, and was conducted by the Prussian government against eleven members of the Communist League who were suspected of having participated in the 1848 uprising. The trial lasted from October 4 to November 12, 1852, and when it was over the Communist League dissolved itself. Seven of the eleven were sentenced to prison terms of up to six years.
Principles of Communism is a brief 1847 work written by Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism. It is structured as a catechism, containing 25 questions about communism for which answers are provided. In the text, Engels presents core ideas of Marxism such as historical materialism, class struggle, and proletarian revolution. Principles of Communism served as the draft version for the Communist Manifesto.
Karl Friedrich Schapper was a German socialist and labour leader. He was one of the pioneers of the labour movement in Germany and an early associate of Wilhelm Weitling and Karl Marx.
The League of the Just or League of Justice was a Christian communist international revolutionary organization. It was founded in 1836 by branching off from its ancestor, the League of Outlaws, which had formed in Paris in 1834. The League of the Just was largely composed of German emigrant artisans.
Communism has been a part of French politics since the early 20th century at the latest. It has been described as "an enduring presence on the French political scene" for most of the 20th century.
The Communist Correspondence Committee was an association of communists founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with committees in Brussels, London, Cologne and Paris with the aim of politically and ideologically organising socialists of different countries to form a revolutionary proletarian party.
