Schapper Karl (1 results)

8vo. 8 pp. Disbound; Japanese paper spine. Stored in custom-made red half morocco solander case. The only known copy of this founding document of communism, the final stepping stone towards the Communist Manifesto. The eight-page leaflet is a circular addressed to the "Bund der Kommunisten" ("Communist League") by the participants of its second and final congress. The League, a revolutionary, socialist secret society, had been formed but a few months previously as a successor to the "Bund der Gerechten" (the "League of the Just"). The pioneering new name was adopted under the guidance of its new members Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the League's first congress, held in London from June 2 through 9, 1847. Their ideas re-framed the League as an international organization with a coherent programme. Although the League would be formally disbanded in 1852, it is considered the precursor of the International Workingmen's Association, the first Marxist political party, and the nucleus of all later communist parties. - The League's second congress was held in Brussels from November 29 to December 8, half a year after the first. On both occasions the respective accounts were published under the heading "Der Congreß an den Bund": the former on June 9 and the present, latter one on December 15 ("1848" being a misprint for 1847). No copies of either of these two publications are recorded in library catalogues or in the usual bibliographical reference works. Only one or two copies of the circular of the First Congress are known: one in the estate of the Hamburg socialist and "Bund" member Joachim Friedrich Martens (SUB Hamburg, acquired in 1912); the other, apparently, in the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (formerly in the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED, but not currently listed in the SAPMO's catalogues). While this first circular was republished in 1969 (in Bert Andréas's collection "Gründungsdokumente des Bundes der Kommunisten"), the present circular of the Second Congress has so far remained unknown to scholarship. As the Bund was still a secret society, the first circular was pseudonymously signed "Heide (Sekretär)" and "Karl Schill (Präsident)", standing for Wilhelm Wolff and Karl Schapper, respectively. While the name of Schapper, the president, is given undisguised in the present second circular, it may therefore be more than a simple typographical error that the secretary's name is here rendered as "J. Engels". - In his article "On the History of the Communist League", written and published in 1885, nearly four decades after the event, Engels provides what has become the received version of the genesis of the Communist Manifesto: "[at the Second Congress Marx] expounded the new theory in a fairly long debate [.] All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto". It is reasonable that Engels's account should be a retrospective condensation of a more complicated process, albeit one of which few contemporary documents have survived. Interestingly, the use of the term "Manifest der kommunistischen Partei" is not entirely consistent throughout the circular: it is stated that a work so titled, which was to replace the "Communist Creed" passed at the First Congress, had already been compiled, drafted, translated into various languages, and even enacted (p. 1 f.), but had yet to be published. Also, it was decided at the Congress that such a "Manifesto" should appear annually in various languages (p. 7). The "Manifesto" of 1847 is said to have been drafted by taking into account all suggestions submitted by members of the League (p. 7); it is also said already to have given the Communist movement its proper expression (p. 2). The present circular as here published is referred to as the "organ of the League in its new appearance" (p. 8), and the f.