37. From the Minutes of the Committee Meeting of the Cologne Workers’ Association on October 16, 1848. Entry of Marx’s Speech in Connection with His Assumption of the Presidency
The acting President, Citizen Röser, stated that Dr. Marx had acceded to the request of the deputation sent to him from the Association that he should put himself at the head of our Association, and he therefore asked him to take his seat.
Dr. Marx: His position in Cologne was precarious. The reply he had received from ex-Minister Kühlwetter to his request for renaturalisation[3] was tantamount to a concealed order for his expulsion. He would, of course, lodge a protest against it in the National Assembly. On the other hand, he was to be tried at the Assize Court for an alleged press offence. Moreover, owing to the temporary dispersion of the editorial board of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung he was overburdened with work. Nevertheless, he was ready, provisionally until Dr. Gottschalk was set free, to accede to the desire of the workers. The Government and the bourgeoisie ought to realise that, despite their acts of persecution, there were always persons to be found who would be ready to put themselves at the disposal of the workers.
Dr. Marx then spoke in some detail about the revolutionary activities of the German workers abroad, and in conclusion stressed their outstanding role in the recent Vienna revolution. He therefore proposed an address to the Vienna Workers' Association. (Adopted with acclamation.)...
The President's proposal (concerning the rules of procedure) was that the first hour should be devoted to the interests of the Association (i.e. to its internal and external affairs), that during the second hour social and political questions should be discussed, and that the meeting should begin at 8.30. (Adopted.)...
Endnotes
[3] At the end of 1848 or the beginning of 184-9 an abridged version of the "Demands" was published in pamphlet form by Weiler Publishers in Leipzig. The slogan at the beginning of the document, the second paragraph of point 9 and the last sentence of point 10 were omitted, and the words "The Committee" were not included among the signatories. In 1853, an abridged version of the "Demands" was printed, together with other documents of the Communist League, in the first part of the book Die Communisten-Ver schworungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, published in Berlin for purposes of information by Wermuth and Stieber, two police officials, who staged a trial against the Communists in Cologne in 1852. Later Engels reproduced the main points of the "Demands" in his essay On the History of the Communist League, published in November 1885 in the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, and as an introduction to the pamphlet: K. Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten Prozess zu Köln, Hottingen-Zürich, 1885. English translations of the "Demands of the Communist Party in Germany" appeared in the collections: The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with an introduction and explanatory notes by D. Ryazanoff, Martin Lawrence, London (1930); K. Marx, Selected Works, Vol. II, ed. V. Adoratsky, Moscow-Leningrad, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR (1936); ibid., New York (1936); Birth of the Communist Manifesto, edited and annotated, with an Introduction by D. J. Struik, International Publishers, New York, 1971, and in other publications. The letter to the editor of the Populaire and the Declaration are in Engels' handwriting. Both documents were drawn up at the end of March 1848 after Engels' arrival in Paris and reflect the struggle which the leaders of the Communist League were waging against those German petty-bourgeois emigrant leaders in Paris, Herwegh and Bornstedt among others, who intended to speed up revolution in Germany by moving in a volunteer legion organised by using private donations and subsidies from the Provisional Government of the French Republic. Appeals to enlist were accompanied by demagogic appeals to the patriotic and revolutionary sentiments of German emigrants. Marx, Engels and other members of the Central Authority of the Communist League spoke out against the adventurist nature of such plans to "export revolution" and advised German workers instead to return to their home country individually in order to take part in the revolutionary events that were brewing there. "We opposed this playing with revolution in the most decisive fashion," Engels later wrote in his work On the History of the Communist League. "To carry out an invasion, which was to import the revolution forcibly from outside, into the midst of the ferment then going on in Germany, meant to undermine the revolution in Germany itself, to strengthen the governments and to deliver the legionaries ... defenceless into the hands of the German troops." The letter and the Declaration were first published in English in the journal Science and Society, 1940, Vol. IV, No. 2. The first publication in the language of the original appeared in the collection Der Bund der Kommunisten. Dokumente und Materialien, Bd. I, 1836-1849, Berlin, 1970. The Cerman Democratic Society (below it is called the Society of German Democrats) was formed in Paris after the February revolution of 1848. The society was headed by petty-bourgeois democrats, Herwegh, Bornstedt (the latter expelled from the Communist League) and others, who campaigned to raise a volunteer legion of German emigrants with the intention of marching into