KARL MARX

LONDON 213
bound in the long run to be opposed to those of the proletariat. Marx's
advice here was this:
. .. While the democratic petty-bourgeois wish to bring the revolution
to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at
most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the
revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have
been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat
has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only
in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has
advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries
has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are
concentrated in the hands of the proletarians."
Thus the workers should initially support any bourgeois democratic
revolution while retaining their independent and, if possible,
armed
organisation; if this revolution were successful the workers should keep
up the pressure by demanding nationalisation of land and a united and
highly centralised Republic. The slogan that Marx proposed at the end
of the Address - 'revolution in permanence' - did not imply that he
believed in an imminent proletarian revolution in Germany, though he did
think it likely in France and was much more sanguine now than later
about the probability of an economic crisis. At the end of the Address
Marx talked of a 'lengthy revolutionary development' and gave this final
advice to the German workers:
... they themselves must do the utmost for their final victory by
clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are, by taking up
their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not
allowing themselves to be seduced for a single moment by the hypocritical
phrases of the democratic petty-bourgeois into refraining from
the independent organisation of the party of the proletariat. 20
The Address was accepted and copied out by the Cologne group as
they found no conspiratorial tendencies in it and Bauer proceeded to visit
groups in all parts of Germany in a similar fashion. On his return he
passed through Cologne where some criticism was expressed about the
initiative taken by London, on the grounds that Marx had dissolved
the League in 1848 and there had as yet been no official reconstitution.
However, this was not the majority view of the Cologne group and Bauer's
mission was in general deemed by the Central Committee to have been
successful.
The precise influence of the Communist League in Germany is difficult
to assess. 21 The membership seems to have been composed mainly of
middle-class intellectuals who often had a rather idealised picture of the