197 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
voluntarily into the purgatory of decrepit capitalist rule in order to
arrive at the cloudy heaven of your Communist Credo? ... You are not
serious about the liberation of the oppressed. For you the misery of
the worker, the hunger of the poor has only a scientific and doctrinaire
interest. You are elevated above such miseries and merely shine down
upon the parties as a learned sungod. You are not affected by what
moves the heart of man. You have no belief in the cause that you
pretend to represent. Yes, although every day you prune the revolution
according to the pattern of accomplished facts, although you have a
Communist Credo, you do not believe in the revolt of the working
people whose rising flood is already beginning to prepare the downfall
of capitalism; you do not believe in the permanence of the revolution,
you do not even believe in the innate capacity for revolution. ... And
now that we, the revolutionary party, have realised that we can expect
nothing from any class except our own, and thus our only task is to
make the revolution permanent, now you recommend to us people who
are known to be weaklings and nonentities.'^2Such was the tenor of Gottschalk's onslaught, echoing the previous views
of Weitling. Marx did not reply to this attack of which the majority of
the Association disapproved. Gottschalk returned to Cologne in the
summer but died of cholera in September while coping with an epidemic
in the poor quarters of the city.
It was not only Gottschalk who considered that Marx's policies were
not radical enough. Moll and Schapper had never really approved of
Marx's unilateral dissolution of the Communist League,^73 and the branches
outside Germany had continued to lead a (rather shadowy) existence. On
his flight from Cologne in September Moll had settled in London and
reinvigorated the group there. It was decided to re-establish the League
on a wider basis: a new Central Committee comprising Moll, Heinrich
Bauer and Eccarius was elected, and Schapper was invited to found a
group in Cologne 'even without Marx's agreement'.^74 Schapper called
a meeting of selected persons to whom he suggested that, after the events
of December 1848 , the existence of the Communist League was once
again a necessity. This meeting proved inconclusive and shortly afterwards
Moll appeared in Cologne with the specific object of winning over Marx
and Engels. A meeting was held on the premises of the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung at which Marx resolutely opposed the idea. Firstly, he maintained
that the relative freedom of speech and Press that still obtained rendered
the League superfluous. He was further opposed to its re-creation 'since
a "single, indivisible republic" was proclaimed as the goal to be achieved- and this made the proposed League statutes more socialist than com-
munist - and also since the statutes had a conspiratorial tendency.'^75 The