Christian Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871)

Activist of the German workers’ movement, leader of the League of the Just; theorist and propagandist of utopian egalitarian communism.

Weitling was born in Magdeburg, Kingdom of Prussia in October 1808. From 1828, he took tailoring as his profession, peregrinated from town to town, and paid attention to the observation and study of social problems, and initially formed the concept of equality. In 1835, he came to Paris, France, and participated in the activities of the semi-public and semi-secret group League of the Outlaws, which was renamed the League of the Just in 1836, and Weitling became a leader on par with Karl Schapper and Bruno Bauer. In the early stage of the League of Just, Weitling played an important role. In 1838, the League of Just discussed its own programme for the first time in Paris, France, and commissioned by the League, Weitling wrote the report, Mankind As It Is and As It Ought To Be, pointing out “the road to a new order of society” for the proletariat. He exclaimed: “Do not believe that you are going to achieve anything by negotiating with your enemies. Your hope lies solely in your swords.” On May 12, 1839, 500 members of the League of the Just took part in the uprising of the Blanquist Société des Saisons. After the failure of the uprising, Weitling stayed in Paris and reunited the scattered members of the League. In 1841, Weitling moved to Switzerland to carry out propaganda activities, and in September of the same year, he published the monthly magazine The Cry for Help of German Youth (renamed The Young Generation in the following year) in Geneva. Weitling wrote many editorials for it and dissected the grievances of capitalist society. In 1842, Weitling wrote his representative work, Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom). During his stay in Brussels, due to his insistence on erroneous views and sectarian stance, he did not agree with the Circular Against Kriege drafted by Marx and Engels, defended Kriege, thus publicly broke with Marx and Engels, and was finally expelled from the League of the Just in 1847. In 1849, he was exiled to the United States and approached the International Workers’ Association in his later years. In January 1871, Weitling died in New York, USA.

Wilhelm Weitling’s chief representative works are Mankind As It Is and As It Ought To Be (1838) and Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842). In these works, Weitling worked out his social and political views and his visionary programme for the future society in a concentrated manner. Weitling sharply attacked the private property system of capitalist society, holding that private property was the root of all evils; he held that capitalist society was divided into classes, i.e., workers and those who reaped without sowing, and advocated that the production and distribution of society be organized according to the principle of universal equality, however, he did not reveal the fundamental contradictions of capitalist society, and solely attributed all social evils to money and currency; he advocated the destruction of the old system by violent revolution, but he did not pin revolutionary hopes to the industrial proletariat, but to the lumpenproletariat, and even preached theft as a means for the poor to oppose the rich; he held that the future society would be a “harmonious and free society”, consisting of a league of families from all places, with the duty of all those who are capable of labor to participate in labor, and introducing a combination of the rules of equal distribution and distribution according to contribution. As one of the representatives of “utopian egalitarian communism”, Weitling’s theory was a crude theory of egalitarian communism, which played a positive role in the early German workers’ movement, but later became an obstacle to it.