KARL MARX

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212 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Central Committee's June Address 14 stated that '... the failure of
the revolutionary party in the previous summer for a time practically
dissolved the League's organisation.... The Central Committee was condemned
to complete inactivity until the end of the previous year.' This
was an exaggeration, and Marx stated later that on his arrival in London
'I found the operation of the Communist League there reconstituted and
the links with the rebuilt groups in Germany renewed.' ls But the general
confusion and dispersion in late 1849 certainly diminished the League's
activities. Ideologically, too, the 'secret propaganda society' (as Marx
described it 16 ) was far from homogeneous. Although it is true that not
every applicant was admitted to membership and that there were sometimes
even expulsions, there was no clear orthodoxy - nor would this
have been possible so long as contact was simply by letter and by the
occasional emissary bearing an Address from the Central Committee. In
what Marx - now as later - called his 'party' he certainly did insist on
ideological purity, but this 'party' was by no means coterminous with the
League, nor was it composed exclusively of League members: it was made
up of the comparatively few people who - to varying extents - knew
Marx personally, understood his views and respected their overriding
superiority.
In January 1850 Marx attempted to reorganise the League in Germany
and sent a letter to the cigar-maker Roser, the future Chairman of the
Cologne group who later turned King's evidence, urging him, in Roser's
words, '... to found a group in Cologne and do my best to found similar
ones in other Rhenish cities, since he too considered it necessary, now
that freedom of speech and of the press had in fact been suppressed, to
reorganise the League since future propaganda could only be carried on
in secret.' 17
Roser responded by asking for official statutes that would
preclude any conspiratorial tendencies. Marx replied that these would be
ratified by a future congress, but that for the moment they should adopt
the general guidelines laid down in the Communist Manifesto.
In an attempt to give some sort of unity to the League in Germany,
the Central Committee sent Bauer on an inspection tour in March with
a mandate signed by Marx and an instruction on tactics composed by
Marx and Engels. This famous Address demonstrated how far Marx had
changed his mind on tactics during the previous year. He now accepted
the necessity for 'organising both secredy and publicly the workers' party
alongside, but independent of, the official democrats' 18 , and now approved
of the Central Committee's previous attempts to reorganise the League
in Germany. Marx attacked all types of 'democratic party' whose interests,
because they represented the numerous German lower-middle class, were