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KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY LONDON 217main square and invaded the session of the Town Council where Gotts-
chalk and Willich presented their demands: universal suffrage, freedom
of the Press and association, a people's militia, and state responsibility for
work and education. The army was called in and, after some casualties,
Gottschalk, Willich and Anneke were all arrested - to be released three
weeks later after the successful revolution in Berlin. Four days before
Marx's arrival, Gottschalk had founded a Workers' Association (which he
viewed as an extension of the Communist League),^14 recruiting 8000
members in a few months. The current business was transacted in a
Committee of fifty elected members. Gottschalk was immensely popular
with the Cologne workers, more than a quarter of whom were unem-
ployed. The Association, organised in sections according to the different
professions, persuaded the municipality to initiate a public works pro-
gramme and negotiated with employers on wages and hours. It is, of
course, important to remember that factory workers were still only a
small proportion of Cologne's working population: the number of artisans
and traders was much greater.^15 Thus Marx entered a situation in Cologne
in which the working-class movement was already well under way, and
there were suggestions that he would do better to go on to Berlin or
even run as a parliamentary candidate from Trier.^16
Differences between Marx and Gottschalk were inevitable. Gottschalk
was a close friend of Moses Hess and a thoroughly 'true' socialist in his
outlook, taking a conciliatory attitude to religion and rejecting notions of
class struggle; he also supported a federalist solution to the problem
of German unification. Soon after his arrival Marx attacked Gottschalk's
organisation of the Workers' Association,^17 no doubt because he con-
sidered its activities too limited to purely economic demands. But the
immediate quarrel between Marx and Gottschalk was over tactics: whether
or not to participate in the elections (at the beginning of May) to the
Prussian Assembly and the National Parliament at Frankfurt. Although
Gottschalk's immediate demands were moderate (he thought that the
workers should agitate on the basis of 'monarchy with a Chartist base'^18 )
he could not approve of participation in elections based on an indirect
voting system, which in some states came near to disenfranchising the
workers completely; he also thought that elections could only be successful
when the working-class movement had developed considerably further,
and wished to dissuade the workers from taking part in a struggle for a
bourgeois republic in which the fruits of victory would not go to them.
Marx strongly criticised this isolation of the workers from the political
process, and himself helped to found and preside over a Democratic
Society in Cologne which successfully sponsored Franz Raveau as candi-
date for the Frankfurt Parliament. There was a further open clash between