ABSTRACT
Marxist historians have tended to interpret the subsequent endeavours of the WillichSchapper League as a haphazard and ill-considered groping at any chance whatsoever at revolution through ‘all kinds of quixotic acts of the bourgeois-democratic emigration’.1 Yet it is admittedly perplexing that a group regarding itself as the true proletarian core of the communist party could so quickly-and apparently unquestioningly, after long fulminating at any such strategy-join forces with their erstwhile enemies around Kinkel. But this the Willich-Schapper group did in 1851.
