Both Willich and Schapper were very popular.
Much more popular than Marx and Engels.
Willich built a so-called 'barracks' in Long Acre, a sort of commune
and Marx suspected that this would be the army of the future.
And that is how they understood it.
They understood revolution as a military enterprise,
as something that could be conspiratorially prepared in London,
as something which by uniting forces, including with democratic immigrants,
could be strengthened.
"While this general prosperity lasts,
enabling the productive forces of bourgeois society to develop
to the full extent possible within the bourgeois system,
there can be no question of a real revolution.
Such a revolution is only possible at a time
when two factors come into conflict: the modern productive forces
and the bourgeois forms of production.
A new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis;
but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself."