CENTRAL AUTHORITY TO THE LEAGUE
Brothers!
In our last circular letter,[3] brought to you by the emissary of the League,(1) we gave you an account of the position of the workers' party and, in particular, the League, both at the present time and in the event of a revolution.
The chief purpose of this letter is to report on the present state of the League.
The defeats of the revolutionary party last summer brought for a moment the League to the point of almost total disorganisation. The most active League members who had taken part in the various movements were scattered; contact was lost, addresses were unreliable, and this together with the danger of letters being opened made correspondence impossible for a time. So until towards the end of last year the Central Authority was condemned to complete inactivity.
As the first effects of the defeat suffered wore off, the need for a strong secret organisation of the revolutionary party throughout Germany made itself felt. In the Central Authority this need gave rise to the decision to send an emissary to Germany and Switzerland. On the other hand it led to an attempt to organise a new clandestine group in Switzerland and to an attempt by the Cologne community to reorganise the League in Germany on their own initiative.
In Switzerland, early in the year, a number of refugees who had made a more or less distinguished name for themselves in the various movements formed themselves into a group whose aim was when the opportunity arose to participate in the overthrow of the governments and to keep men in readiness to lead the movement and even take over the government.[271] The group did not belong to any particular party — the motley character of its adherents did not permit this. For they represented every political shade of the movement and ranged from resolute Communists and even former League members to the most timorous petty-bourgeois democrats and ex-members of the Palatinate Government.
At the time a large number of people from Baden and the Palatinate seeking positions or with lesser ambitions were in Switzerland. For them this group offered desirable opportunities for self-advancement.
Nor were the instructions which the group sent to its agents and which are in the possession of the Central Authority of a kind to inspire confidence. The.absence of a definite party point of view as well as the attempt to bring all the available oppositional elements into a specious unity were poorly concealed under a mass of detail about industrial, agricultural, political and military conditions in the different localities. The strength of this group was likewise very insignificant. According to the complete list of members in our possession the whole society at its zenith consisted of barely 30 members in Switzerland. It is noteworthy that among these there were hardly any workers. From the start it was an army consisting exclusively of N.C.O.s and officers without soldiers. It included people like P. Fries and Greiner from the Palatinate, Körner from Elberfeld, Sigel, etc.
They sent two agents to Germany. The first, Bruhn, was a League member from Holstein. He contrived by false pretences to induce a number of League members and communities to join the new group for a time, in the belief that it was the resurrected League. At the same time he sent a report on the League to the Swiss Central Authority in Zurich and another on the Swiss group to us. Not content with this ambiguous position, while he was still in correspondence with us, he wrote direct libels to the above-named people in Frankfurt, who had been won for the Swiss affairs, and instructed them to have nothing to do with London. Because of this he was at once expelled from the League. The matter in Frankfurt was settled by the League emissary. For the re§t Bruhn's labour on behalf of the Swiss Central Authority remained without effect. The second agent was a student named Schurz from Bonn. He too achieved nothing because, as he wrote to Zurich, "he found that the League already controlled all useful forces". He then left Germany suddenly and is now drifting around Brussels and Paris, where the League keeps an eye on him. That the Central Authority did not regard the new group as a danger to the League was due to the fact that a quite trustworthy League member3 belonged to its central committee and had been instructed to watch and keep us informed about the plans and measures resolved upon by these people insofar as they were directed against the League. The Central Authority has also sent an emissary to Switzerland to assist the above-mentioned League member to attract useful people to the League and in general* to organise the League in Switzerland. All this information is based on quite reliable documentary evidence.
Another attempt of the same sort was made earlier by Struve, Sigel and others, who were united in Geneva at the time. These people were impertinent enough to pretend that the organisation they had tried to form actually was the League and to misuse the names of the League members for this purpose. Of course, their lies deceived no one. Their attempt was so futile in all respects that the few remaining members of this abortive organisation in Switzerland were finally forced to join the group already mentioned. But the more impotent this coterie became the more imposing were the titles they gave to themselves — like "Central Committee of European Democracy", etc. Here in London, too, Struve continued his efforts in this direction together with other disillusioned great men. Manifestos and invitations to join the "Central Bureau of the United German Emigration" and the "Central Committee of European Democracy"[2 2] were sent all over Germany, but once more without the slightest response.
The alleged connections between this coterie and French and other non-German revolutionaries simply do not exist. All its activities are confined to a number of petty intrigues among the local German refugees. They have no direct effect on the League and represent no threat. It is easy to keep an eye on them.
All attempts of this sort either have the same goal as the League, i. e. the revolutionary organisation of the workers' party. In this case they destroy the centralisation and strength of the party by fragmenting it and so they are definitely to be regarded as harmful separatism. Or they can only aim at misusing the workers' party for purposes alien or directly opposed to it. The workers' party can use other parties and party factions for its own purposes on occasion but must never subordinate itself to any other party. But those people who were in the government during the last movement0 and who used their position to betray the movement and to suppress the workers' party wherever it wanted to act independently must be kept at a distance under all circumstances.
We have the following to report about the state of the League.
I. Belgium
The organisation of the League as it existed among the Belgian workers in 1846 and 1847 has, of course, disappeared since 1848, when the chief members were arrested, condemned to death and had their sentences commuted to imprisonment for life.[273] In general the League in Belgium has lost much of its strength since the February Revolution and the expulsion of most of the members of the German Workers' Society[274] from Brussels. The present policy of the police has not permitted it to reorganise. Despite this a community has managed to survive in Brussels to this day and it functions to the best of its ability.
II. Germany
It had been the intention of the Central Authority to give in this circular a special report on the situation of the League in Germany. But this is not possible at the present time as the Prussian police is investigating a widespread organisation among the revolutionary party.[3] This circular will be sent to Germany by a safe route but copies may possibly fall into the hands of the police here and there in the course of distribution within Germany. It must therefore be so formulated that its content will not give the police any evidence that could be used against the League. For the moment then the Central Authority confines itself to the following remarks.
The chief centres of the League in Germany are Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Hanau, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Hamburg, Schwerin, Berlin, Breslau, Liegnitz, Glogau,(2) Leipzig, Nuremberg, Munich, Bamberg, Würzburg, Stuttgart and Baden.
The following are appointed leading districts: Hamburg for Schleswig-Holstein; Schwerin for Mecklenburg; Breslau for Silesia; Leipzig for Saxony and Berlin; Nuremberg for Bavaria; Cologne for Rhineland and Westphalia.
For the time being the communities in Göttingen, Stuttgart and Brussels shall remain in direct communication with the Central Authority until they have extended their influence to the point where new leading districts can be formed.
The position of the League in Baden will not be determined until receipt of the report from the emissary sent there and to Switzerland.[3]
Where, as in Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg, there are peasants' and labourers' associations, League members have been able directly to influence them and in part to gain complete control. The workers' and labourers' associations in Saxony, Franconia, Hesse and Nassau are also for the most part under the leadership of the League. The most influential members of the Workers' Fraternity[275] also belong to the League. The Central Authority would point out to all communities and League members that such influence on the workers', sport, peasants' and labourers' associations, etc., is of the very greatest importance and should be achieved wherever possible. The Central Authority requests the leading districts and the communities which correspond directly with it to make special mention of what has happened in this respect in their next reports.
The emissary to Germany,(3) who has received a commendation from the Central Authority for his efforts, has everywhere admitted only the most reliable people as members to the League and has left the further expansion of the League in their hands, relying on their greater knowledge of local conditions. Whether it will be possible to recruit resolute revolutionaries to the League will depend on the situation in the various localities. Where this is not possible a second class of League members should be formed from among people who do not yet understand the communist consequences of the present movement but who are useful and reliable. This second class must be told that their organisation is purely local or provincial and it must constantly be under the supervision of the actual League members and authorities. For with the aid of these additional contacts it will be possible to gain a firm grip on the peasants' and sport associations. The detailed organisation can be left to the leading districts and the Central Authority looks forward to their reports on these matters as soon as possible.
One community has proposed to the Central Authority that a League congress be convened immediately on German soil. The communities and districts will realise themselves that in the present circumstances it is not advisable to convene even provincial congresses of the leading districts everywhere. A general League congress is quite out of the question at the present time. But as soon as circumstances permit the Central Authority will convene a congress of the League in a suitable place.—Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia have recently been visited by an emissary[3] of the Cologne leading district. The report on this tour has not yet been received in Cologne. We request all leading districts likewise to send out emissaries to tour their regions as soon as possible and to report back on the results. Lastly, we report that in Schleswig-Holstein contacts have been established with the army; we are awaiting an account of what influence the League may hope to gain there.
III. Switzerland
We are still awaiting the report of our emissary[13] and so we shall return to this in greater detail in our next circular.
IV. France
Contacts with the German workers in Besançon and other places in the Jura will be re-established from Switzerland. In Paris, Ewerbeck, the League member who has been the leader of the communities there, has announced his resignation from the League as he thinks that his literary activities are more important. In consequence, contact has been disrupted for the time being and must be re-established with all the more caution as the Parisians have admitted a number of people who are quite useless and who in the past have even been directly hostile to the League.
V. England
The London district is the strongest in the whole League. It has distinguished itself above all by the fact that for some years now it has financed the League and in particular the emissaries' journeys almost unaided. It recently strengthened itself still further by admitting new elements and it continually provides leadership for the local German Workers' Society[276] as well as the most energetic section of German refugees here.
The Central Authority maintains contact with the resolutely revolutionary parties among the French, English and Hungarians through a few members delegated for the purpose.
Of the French revolutionaries the really proletarian party, led by Blanqui, has joined forces with us. The delegates of the Blanquist secret societies are in regular and official contact with the League delegates whom they have entrusted with important tasks in preparation for the next French revolution.
The leaders of the revolutionary Chartist party are also in regular close contact with the delegates of the Central Authority.[277] Their journals are at our disposal. The breach between this revolutionary . independent workers' party and the more conciliatory faction led by O'Connor was substantially hastened thanks to League delegates.
Similarly the Central Authority is in contact with the most progressive party of the Hungarian refugees. This party is important as it boasts a number of excellent military leaders whose services would be available to the League in a revolution.
The Central Authority requests the leading districts to distribute this circular among their members as quickly as possible and to report soon. All members are urged to make the greatest possible efforts, especially at this moment when the situation is so critical that the outbreak of a new revolution can no longer be very far away.
Distributed in manuscript copies
Published by Engels in the Appendices to the book: K. Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-prozess zu Köln, Hottingen-Zürich, 1885
Endnotes
[270] The June Address of the Central Authority to the League was written while the League was in the final stages of being reorganised. It was based on information contained in reports submitted by the emissaries of the Central Authority (among others, by Heinrich Bauer who had distributed the March Address of the Central Authority in Germany, returning to London in mid-May 1850) and in letters sent by League members from various European countries. Handwritten copies of the Address were carried to Germany by Karl Wilhelm Klein, emissary of the League's Central Authority, and other confidential agents and to Switzerland by Ernst Dronke to be distributed secretly. Somewhat later, extracts from the Address or summaries of it were published by a number of newspapers, such as the Leipziger Zeitung No. 192 (special supplement), July 11, 1850; the Karlsruher Zeitung No. 172, July 24, 1850; the Norddeutsche Correspondent, Rostock, No. 177, July 31, 1850. In their letters written in 1850 and 1851, the members of the Communist League, Stumpf, Dronke and Weydemeyer, informed Marx and Engels that the Address was published in other newspapers as well. It was also published in the Bill of Indictment against the League members at the Cologne trial of Communists—Anklageschrift gegen 1) P.G.Roeser, 2) J. H. G. Bürgers... [Köln, 1852] and in Die Communisten-Verschwörungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Th. 1, Berlin, 1853, by Wermuth and Stieber. In the USA part of the Address was published by Karl Heinzen in Der Pionier, Boston, Jg. 17, No. 17, April 24, 1870. In 1885 Engels published the June Address as a supplement to a new edition of the pamphlet: Karl Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln, Hottingen-Zürich, 1885. This publication is the most reliable of all those extant and has usually been taken as the basis for subsequent publications.
[271] The reference is to the Revolutionary Centralisation, a secret organisation founded at the beginning of 1850 by German refugees in Switzerland, most of whom were petty-bourgeois democrats. Its Central Committee, based in Zurich, was headed by Tzschirner, a leader of the Dresden uprising in May 1849; prominent members were Fries, Greiner, Sigel, Techow, Schurz and J. Ph. Becker, all participants in the 1849 Baden-Palatinate uprising. Members of the Communist League, d'Ester, Bruhn and others, as well as Wilhelm Wolff also belonged to this organisation. In July and August 1850 the leaders of the Revolutionary Centralisation approached the representatives of the Communist League Central Authority with a proposal to amalgamate. On behalf of the League's Central Authority, Marx and Engels rejected their proposal as detrimental to the class independence of the proletarian party. By the end of 1850, the Revolutionary Centralisation had disintegrated due to the mass expulsion of German refugees from Switzerland. Marx and Engels drew information concerning the activities of the Revolutionary Centralisation and the intrigues of its agents against Communist League leaders (referred to in the Address) from Wilhelm Wolff's letter of May 9, 1850. They later received similar information from Dronke, the emissary of the League's Central Authority in Switzerland.
[22] This expression is from the speech from the throne made by Frederick William IV at the opening of the First United Diet in Berlin on April 11, 1847 (Allgemeine Preussische Zeitung No. 101, April 12, 1847).
[273] Early in 1846 Marx and Engels, who were living in Brussels at the time, organised a Communist Correspondence Committee there to rally the more progressive German and Belgian socialists. In August 1847 this Committee served as the basis on which the communities of the Communist League were organised. Following the February 1848 revolution in France, the Belgian Government started repressions against Karl Marx, Wilhelm Wolff and other German revolutionary refugees and expelled them from Belgium. Tedesco and other Belgian members of the Communist League were prosecuted in connection with the so-called Risquons-Tout trial, which was a fabrication by the Government of Leopold, the King of the Belgians, against the participants in the revolutionary movement. The pretext was a clash, which took place on March 29, 1848, between the Belgian Republican Legion bound for its home country from France and a detachment of soldiers near the village of Risquons-Tout, not far from the French border. The trial was held in Antwerp from August 9 to 30, 1848. Mellinet, Ballin, Tedesco and other principal accused were sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to 30 years imprisonment, and still later they were pardoned.
[274] The German Workers' Society in Brussels was founded by Marx and Engels at the end of August 1847, its aim being to provide a political education for German workers living in Belgium, and to spread the ideas of scientific communism among them. With Marx, Engels and their followers at its head, the Society became the legal centre rallying German revolutionary proletarian forces in Belgium, and maintained direct contact with Flemish and Walloon workers' clubs. Its most active members belonged to the Brussels community of the Communist League. The Society played an important part in founding the Brussels Democratic Association. Its activities ceased soon after the February 1848 revolution in France, when its members were arrested and deported by the Belgian police.
[275] The Workers' Fraternity, founded at the Workers' Congress which met in Berlin between August 23 and September 3, 1848, united many workers' associations. Under the influence of Stephan Born, the Fraternity at first limited its activities to implementing narrow craft-union demands. Towards the end of 1848, however, its leaders were drawn into the revolutionary events and admitted the necessity for the workers to take an active part in the political struggle. Voices were raised for setting up an all-German workers' organisation. In the spring of 1849 the Workers' Fraternity and several regional congresses of workers' associations put forward a proposal to convene a national workers' congress in Leipzig to found a General Workers' Union. However, these plans were frustrated by a counter-revolutionary offensive. The Fraternity was suppressed in 1850-51, though some of its branches survived for a number of years.
[13] On May 28, 1849, the Prussian Government appealed to the German governments to join the Three-Kings'-League. The appeal, together with a new draft of the Imperial Constitution, revised in a counter-revolutionary spirit, was published in the German press at the end of May and the beginning of June 1849. p g
[276] See Note 61.
[277] In mid-April 1850, with a view to consolidating the international unity of the revolutionary representatives of the working class in the context of the expected new revolutionary tide, Marx and Engels concluded an agreement with the French Blanquist refugees then residing in London and with the leaders of the revolutionary wing of the Chartist movement to set up a Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists. The parties to this agreement signed a special treaty of 6 articles, written in Willich's hand and signed by Marx, Engels and Willich on behalf of the Communist League, by Adam and Vidil for the Blanquists, and by Harney for the Chartists (see this volume, pp. 614-15).
[3] In May 1849, when the counter-revolution was on the upsurge, the Prussian Government issued an order expelling Marx and the other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from Prussia. This measure, prepared well in advance, was applied when the main uprisings in the Rhine Province had been virtually suppressed. On his return to Cologne in April 1848, Marx applied for Prussian citizenship which he had been forced to renounce in 1845 when he was living in Belgium as an emigrant. Despite the Cologne Magistrate's favourable reply to his application, however, the Cologne royal district authorities and the Minister of the Interior refused to grant it, and Marx remained a "foreigner", who could at any moment be accused of abusing hospitality and expelled. The royal district authorities' note to this effect followed on May 11, 1849, and on May 16 Marx was given 24 hours to leave Prussia. Weerth and Dronke, who did not enjoy Prussian citizenship either, received similar orders. Legal proceedings were instituted against Engels for his part in the Elberfeld uprising. The last issue, No. 301, of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on May 19, 1849.