Communist League

The Communist League (German: Bund der Kommunisten) was an international political party established on 1 June 1847 in London, England. The organisation was formed through the merger of the League of the Just, headed by Karl Schapper, and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, Belgium, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the dominant personalities. The Communist League is regarded as the first Marxist political party and it was on behalf of this group that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto late in 1847. The Communist League was formally disbanded in November 1852, following the Cologne Communist Trial.

During the decade of the 1840s the word "communist" came into general use to describe those who supposedly hailed from the left wing of the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution. This political tendency saw itself as egalitarian inheritors of the 1795 Conspiracy of Equals headed by Gracchus Babeuf. The sans-culottes of Paris which had decades earlier been the base of support for Babeuf — artisans, journeymen, and the urban unemployed — was seen as a potential foundation for a new social system based upon the modern machine production of the day.

The French thinker Étienne Cabet inspired the imagination with a novel about a utopian society based upon communal machine production, Voyage en Icarie (1839). The revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui argued in favor of an elite organising the overwhelming majority of the population against the "rich," seizing the government in a coup d'état, and instituting a new egalitarian economic order.

One group of Germans in Paris, headed by Karl Schapper, organised themselves in the form of a secret society known as the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten) and participated in a May 1839 rebellion in Paris in an effort to establish a "Social Republic." Following its failure the organisation relocated its centre to London, while also maintaining local organisations in Zürich and Paris.

Revolution was in the air across many of the monarchies of Europe.

The year 1846 found Karl Marx and his close friend and co-thinker Friedrich Engels in Brussels, establishing a small political circle of radical German émigrés called the Communist Correspondence Committee and writing for the German-language Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung ("Brussels German Newspaper"). Also important in this early circle was Wilhelm Wolff, a talented and radical writer hailing from the Silesian peasantry who had been forced to emigrate due to his agitation against the Prussian autocracy.

The Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee had at the same time small counterparts located in London and Paris, composed of a handful of radical German expatriates living there. Relations between these small groups were not close, with petty jealousies and ideological disagreements preventing the participants from functioning as an effective political unit.

Be that as it may, in the latter part of January 1847 the disparate parts of the fledgling German Communist movement began to congeal in a single organisational entity when the London center of the League of the Just first broached the idea of organisational unity with the Communist Corresponding Committee. A letter of 20 January 1847 by Schapper requested that Marx join the League in anticipation of a scheduled London congress at which a new set of principles would be adopted based upon the ideas previously expressed by Marx and Engels. Both Marx and Engels were persuaded by the appeal and they both joined the League of the Just shortly thereafter, followed by other members of the Communist Corresponding Committee.