This condemnation of communist leaders as lazy cheats, living off the workers, has been a classic of anti-communism from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Marx’s use of such vivid rhetoric to denounce his rival was of a piece with his other deployments of anti-communism for communist purposes.
These factional conflicts also included legal actions that had a certain farcical quality. Willich and Schapper sued Marx’s followers for control of £16 from the Workers’ Educational Association, only to have the court reject their claims. The two convinced Karl Göhringer, an innkeeper and Communist League member whose London pub was a favorite watering hole of German exile radicals, to let one of Willich’s followers take Marx to court over the £5 tab Marx had run up. But the feud had its darker, more violent side as well. Conrad Schramm, one of Marx’s adherents, challenged Willich to a duel. Fought in Belgium to evade English legal disapproval, the encounter at twenty paces ended with Schramm bleeding on the ground. He was lucky to survive the exchange of shots with a soldier and experienced marksman. Recovering from his wounds, Schramm, along with Pieper, attended a London banquet in February 1851, sponsored by British and Continental exile radicals. Willich and Schapper’s working-class adherents, who were present at the banquet, spotted Marx’s followers. They chased them out into the winter night, beating and kicking them, to screams of “Spy, spy,” and “Haynau, Haynau” (a reactionary Austrian general, who had been beaten up by workers when touring a London brewery), and angry recriminations about the funds of the Workers’ Association. Pieper turned up at Marx’s apartment at midnight, disheveled and bleeding.67
This internecine conflict became an obsession for Marx and Engels. It pervaded their correspondence and increasingly outweighed their hostility toward the reactionary governments actually in power in post-revolutionary Europe. The exile radicals were “thieving scum,” Marx told Engels, adding, “I prefer the existing governments to the provisional ones [proclaimed by the London radical exiles] in every respect. . . .” Marx successfully placed a spy on the committee administering the revolutionary loan, one of his new young followers, Peter Immandt, who provided him with compromising details. Gathering all sorts of hostile accounts from his adherents, Marx was busy preparing a polemical pamphlet to be directed against his enemies. “The Great Men of Exile,” a collection of scurrilous stories and nasty anecdotes, focused particularly on Gottfried Kinkel. Both he and Engels were aware that such a publication would provide aid and comfort to conservatives, but they planned to go ahead anyway.68
The projected pamphlet was a last-ditch attempt to win the battle for public opinion among the German political refugee community in Europe and North America, but attacking its two most popular leaders, Kinkel and Willich, was a losing proposition. By the summer of 1851, a story circulated in London’s refugee circles that following a renewed political upheaval in Germany, the first act of any new revolutionary government would be to have put Marx up against the wall and shot. “Miasmas of the pestilent democratic sewer,” Marx called this and similar tales. He was appalled that visitors incautiously repeated them in front of Jenny, still reeling from the death of her son, the recent birth of her daughter, and constant harassment by the family’s creditors. “The tactlessness of some people,” Marx wrote Weydemeyer, “is in this respect often colossal.”69
It is hard to miss a strong element of pettiness and exaggerated egos in these controversies. This frequently leads historians to reject the spats as trivial and unimportant compared to Marx’s writing and ideas, while others see them as examples of his arrogance and intolerance of different points of view. There is something to that, although the accusation arguably fits Engels more closely than his friend. Yet Marx’s personality did not prevent him from working with leftists of different viewpoints in 1848, in the New Rhineland News, the Cologne Democratic Society, and the democratic provincial directory. Rather, personal clashes developed in the difficult circumstances of political exile and as a result of the evolution of Marx’s views on revolution.
Marx was not alone in factional pettiness. The hothouse atmosphere pervading the émigré world in London contributed to political clashes resulting from personal hypersensitivity. The united German democrats, whom Marx opposed, did not remain united very long. Two mutually hostile factions—one led by Kinkel, the other by Arnold Ruge—emerged in the course of 1851–52, and they fought each other bitterly with hyperbolic denunciations.70
The factional differences within the Communist League followed from another element of refugee life. The leaders of the anti–Marx and Engels majority, Schapper, and especially Willich, were examples of the social type of professional revolutionary. Marx’s sarcastic remarks about Willich hanging around pubs all day, talking politics, underscore the latter’s commitment to constant agitation. Such agitation was a twenty-four-hour matter, since Willich, generally wearing a red sash instead of a belt, resided in collective housing with German artisans in London, in a barrackslike paramilitary atmosphere, befitting the former Prussian officer’s conception of a budding revolutionary army. He was a political bachelor, announcing that he would only marry and have a family following the victory of a communist revolution.71
Reconciling his political convictions with his physical desires proved difficult for Willich. He shared his bed in the barracks with a succession of strapping, blond journeymen artisans. His homosexuality was an open secret, but no one objected or tried to exploit it politically. When Willich misinterpreted the friendly gestures of a London salon hostess, the Baroness von Brüningk, as a sexual advance, and was bodily thrown out of her house by the servants, this heterosexual transgression became the talk of the German exiles. Willich sent an emissary to Marx, begging him not to mention the indiscretion in his pamphlet on exile scandals, rather a far cry from planning to shoot Marx should he make jokes about Willich’s communist revolution.72
This incident proved that the Spartan Prussian revolutionary was human, too. It also highlighted the difference between the two groups. Although both were led by intellectuals of affluent backgrounds, Schapper and Willich shared a common lifestyle with the artisans who made up a substantial majority of the Communist League, and the German émigrés in London more generally. Their representation of themselves as men of the people proved politically much more appealing to the large majority of German artisans in London than Marx and Engels’s as bourgeois Hegelian intellectuals; and their attacks on Marx and Engels for being arrogant and condescending to the workers, for being “literati and semi-scholars,” struck home.73
Marx and Engels would not have denied Willich’s attacks on them. Even before the 1848 Revolution, they had made a distinction between the German artisans—politically immature, socially and economically underdeveloped—and the future working class in whose name they claimed to speak. Broader popularity was something they specifically rejected. Gustav Adolf Techow, a former Prussian army officer they attempted to recruit into the Communist League as a counterweight to Willich, remembered a conversation he had with them:
I said to them, I recognized what they said about forming a political group was correct, but . . . the personal poison, that they put into these attacks, the base motives which they always assumed [in others] when as a rule, it was just errors or weakness—all this must . . . increase the ranks of their deadly enemies, let their group appear to the public purely under the aspect of personal struggles and weaken within the group itself the necessary trust in the selflessness of its leaders. . . . [Since the New Rhineland News] they had emancipated themselves from the boring, stupid, good-natured German phrase-making and chosen French sharpness and clarity for their form of expression. . . . They had never striven for cheap popularity, quite the opposite!74
Marx and Engels were making a virtue of their inability to gain supporters. Yet their failure to do so rankled. At that same meeting, Marx told Techow that he and Engels were headed for America, “and it was a matter of indifference, if this miserable Europe perishes.”75 As
a result of their alienation, the two friends clung to each other even more firmly. The first contemporary observations of Marx and Engels as a political duo appear in descriptions of their complete isolation from the other German political exiles in London during the early 1850s.76
If the isolation of the early 1850s sealed their partnership, it also transformed Marx’s thinking about the onset of revolution. Belief in an imminent revolutionary upheaval, one in which he could play an influential role, was increasingly difficult to maintain, given the ever greater strength of political reaction in continental Europe and Marx’s beleaguered position among the political exiles. It was then that Marx developed the idea that a revolution would occur in the wake of a cyclical capitalist economic crisis. Since this idea has appeared throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first as the quintessence of Marxism, it may be surprising to realize that Marx himself had not always advanced it. The Communist Manifesto, for instance, discussed economic crises and the workers’ revolution, but did not assert that one was the origin and precondition of the other. Marx’s plans for reviving the 1848 Revolution, as counterrevolutionary forces gained the upper hand, turned on a new working-class uprising in France and the revolutionary government emerging from it becoming involved in a great war against the counterrevolutionary powers. As late as the spring of 1850, he was continuing to think along those lines.77
In the last issue of The New Rhineland News: Review of Political Economy, written after Marx’s political and personal isolation had become complete, he first developed an explicit connection between economic crisis and revolutionary upheaval. A revolution would only be possible “when both factors, the modern forces of production and the bourgeois form of production come into contradiction with each other.” Until this happened, “the manifold petty strife of the different elements of the continental party of order,” as well as the “moral outrage and the enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats,” would have no effect. “A new revolution is only possibly in the wake of a new crisis. The former, however, is just as certain as the latter.” Written about the time Engels moved to Manchester to work in his father’s business, this passage initiated a central theme of the two friends’ correspondence over the following years: speculation about the outbreak of the next economic crisis and the revolution it would bring about in its wake.78 This belief in waiting for the crisis became so central to the thought of Marx’s followers that its origin in the politics and exigencies of the early years of Marx’s exile has quite vanished from view.
AT THE PUBLIC BANQUETS and private meetings of the London exiles’ political committees, or in their overheated pub conversations, secret agents of the Prussian and Austrian government were present, constantly listening in. The clandestine contacts of exiles with their followers back in continental Europe were not at all clandestine to the political police of the German states. These agents were not just passively eavesdropping; they were actively engaged in shaping the exiles’ political positions, manipulating them to fight with each other and to take positions favorable to the counterrevolutionary governments. London political refugees were vaguely aware of the presence of police spies; Marx himself received several warnings. But the exiles’ constant practice of denouncing their factional rivals as police spies desensitized them to the very real presence of such people in their midst. These agents’ ability to infiltrate exile groups, and to manipulate them and their conflicts, turned out to be far greater than the exiles imagined.79
One of the denizens of Willich’s barracks was a certain Charles Fleury—real name Carl Krause—a Prussian agent who introduced Willich to two other spies in the guise of radical refugees, Cherval—real name Joseph Crämer—and Wilhelm Hirsch. By 1852, it was evident to Willich himself that these men were spies, but he kept up relations with them, hoping to employ them as double agents, and part of their role as police spies involved convincing Willich that they really were double agents. A more distant associate of Marx, Julius Hentze, had been recruited by the Prussians, but in contrast to his communist rival, Marx himself was primarily the object of agents of the other central European great power. Two of these Austrian agents, Hermann Ebner and Jànos Bangya, had close ties to Marx, and were able to steer him in directions politically amenable to their government.
Ebner was a Frankfurt literary agent, a relative of Ferdinand Freiligrath, who introduced Marx to him. Claiming that he could find a publisher for Marx’s planned book on political economy, Ebner implored Marx, in flattering language, to send him “little stories” about the “conditions of the emigration in London,” perhaps “something spicy” about Lajos Kossuth, the exiled leader of the Hungarian nationalists. A publisher never emerged; but Marx, his ego already stroked, and trusting Ebner, did send him hostile accounts of the émigrés in London, early versions of his planned pamphlet, which the agent duly sent on to his masters in Vienna. In a particularly charming piece of historical irony, the government of the Austrian Republic made a present of the report to the government of the USSR in 1955, after the Soviets agreed to end their occupation of Austria and to recognize its neutrality during the Cold War.80
Bangya, a colonel in Kossuth’s revolutionary Hungarian army who was forced to flee to Western Europe following its defeat by Austrian and Russian forces in 1849, was a much more active and influential Austrian government agent. Rather entrepreneurial in his espionage, he also reported to the Prussians, and had connections with French monarchists as well. Charming and amiable, on his return to London from Paris at the beginning of 1852 he contacted Marx and quickly gained his confidence. Bangya never expressed anything but the highest regard for Marx, praising him as the “sole capable German man.” Marx responded by offering to induct Bangya into the Communist League. A friendly face to the family in their isolated London life, Bangya invited Karl and Jenny to dinner and paid calls on Jenny when Karl was in Manchester with Engels. Bangya’s promise to provide some funds to help with the family debts was one of the few glimmers of hope for Jenny in the depths of her financial despair.81
Presenting himself as a militant revolutionary, Bangya collaborated with Marx politically, feeding him derogatory inside information about exile democrats such as Kossuth and Kinkel, which Marx was always willing to believe. The colonel exploited differences between the communist factions, telling Marx, quite untruthfully, that the Willich-Schapper group had sent an emissary to Magdeburg to attack Marx’s views among the radical workers there. Bangya promised to raise money for Marx and to find a publisher for “The Great Men of Exile.” Neither materialized, and suspicions about Bangya grew among Marx’s circle in the fall of 1852. Both Ernst Dronke and Wilhelm Wolff became convinced that Bangya was a police spy; even Jenny had her doubts. But Marx remained loyal, infuriating his closest friends. “Marx won’t hear of anything” against Bangya, Dronke informed Engels, and “recently made a big scene, because of my lack of belief in Bangya.” Wilhelm Wolff, agreeing with Dronke, told Engels that “The Moor is struck with blindness and acts positively insulted that I, Dronke, etc. [think] differently and express our opinions.”82
It was Bangya’s promise to procure a publisher that did him in. His excuses for not doing so became less and less convincing, and when he supposedly found one in Berlin for whom there was no entry in a publishers’ directory—a nice piece of detective work by Dronke, duly reported to Engels—his falsehoods caught up with him. Even so, it took months before Marx ceased believing Bangya’s efforts to lie his way out of the situation and recognized him as a police spy. The incident was a lesson in Marx’s personality: the same supreme self-assurance that made it possible for him to continue on his path in spite of everything alienated most of his peers and isolated him, making him vulnerable to the clever spy’s flattery.83
The Austrian government cultivated Marx because he despised the “petit-bourgeois” democrats of the exile European Democratic Central Committee in London. The leading figures in this pan-European radical group were the radical Italian
nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and the Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth, both of whom wanted to break up the Austrian Empire by excising its Italian and Hungarian territories for respective nation-states. Contemporaries were quite well aware of the convergence of Marx’s and the Austrians’ opponents; accusations that Marx was a paid agent of the Austrians dogged him through the 1860s, and have been repeated recently by historians.84 Ironically, the point is that Marx was not a paid agent. Austrian spies promised him benefits in the form of book contracts and publishers’ advances, but were unable to deliver. Had the Austrian authorities been a little less cheap, and willing to fund the publication of Marx’s collection of scandals about the democratic émigrés, they could have produced disarray among their enemies and gained Marx’s closer collaboration. That a militant revolutionary, a lifelong opponent of authoritarian rule, came so close to working for one of the most reactionary of the post-1850 European governments was a lesson in how the unbearable circumstances of life in exile exacerbated the most difficult elements in both Marx’s personality and his political orientation.
MARX’S TRANSFER OF THE Communist League’s Central Authority to Cologne in 1850 was not an entirely happy decision. Earlier the same year he had been quite critical of the passivity and inaction of the Cologne communists, to their considerable annoyance. But Cologne was Marx’s last bastion, the one place he still commanded an admiring following. His adherents there rebuffed Willich and Schapper’s emissaries, telling them they trusted Marx, yet another example of how the conflict between the two factions of the Communist League was carried out in personal terms.85
The Cologne communists did become more active in the fall of 1850 and the winter of 1851, primarily because of a new adherent, Hermann Becker, a radical Cologne democrat. Nicknamed “Red Becker” (a reference to both his hair color and his politics), he was a popular and dynamic speaker and political agitator who had been distant from Marx during the 1848 Revolution. Marx, in turn, had rejected Becker’s claims that his newspaper, the West German News, was the successor to The New Rhineland News. But Becker’s successful newspaper, the only democratic voice in western Germany during a period of growing reaction, provided favorable coverage of Marx and the communists. The plans of Heinrich Bürgers, Marx’s veteran Cologne supporter, to join the newspaper’s editorial board were thwarted by the Prussian authorities, who suppressed the publication in July 1850. After that, the Cologne communists were Becker’s chief opportunity to engage in radical politics.
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