Fundamentally, Marx and Willich differed on the issue of revolutionary temporality. Marx still advocated the teleological stage theory of the Communist Manifesto, in which capitalism would, necessarily, overthrow itself and generate communism. During the 1848-49 revolutions he accordingly insisted that workers ally with the allegedly ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie. Willich, by contrast, like the majority of the Communist League, held that capitalism could be overthrown whenever workers gained the strength and will to do so, and they rejected the studied patience of Marx and Engels in favor of a revolutionary immediatism.
But gender and sexuality were also at the heart of their conflict, between Marx’s straight temporality and Willich’s Queer temporality. In London, Marx set up a proper household with dutiful wife, beloved children, and hired servant, and spent his days studying in the British Library. Willich, meanwhile, shared his bed with comrades in a London barracks and spent his days training for the next revolution and lounging in German communist pubs. Marx attempted to ‘out’ Willich for what British law defined as “sodomy,” a crime punishable by death.
Willich and most of his comrades soon left London for the United States, where they threw themselves learned to make revolution alongside enslaved people, and formed an influential German communist bloc in the Union Army during the Civil War.
As a lover, communist, and revolutionary soldier, Willich embodied a Queer communism, eclipsed by the official Marxisms of the twentieth century, but as important for the twenty-first century as it was for the nineteenth.