Joseph Weydemeyer (1818–1866)

Activist of the German and American workers’ movement; organizer of the American section of the First International; the earliest disseminator of Marxism in the United States.

Weydemeyer was born in February 1818, in Münster, Westphalia, Prussia, into a civil servant’s family. In 1839, Weydemeyer graduated from the Military Academy in Berlin and served as artillery lieutenant, and in early 1845, he resigned from the army and began to engage in journalism. In 1846, Weydemeyer participated in the work of the Communist Communications Commission in Brussels, joined the Communist League in 1847, and served as the leader of the Frankfurt section of the Communist League (1849–1851). When the German bourgeois revolution broke out in March 1848, Weydemeyer led the League section in Westphalia to carry out struggle, and founded workers’ associations and pushed forward the development of the revolution. After the defeat of the German revolution in the fall of 1849, he stayed in the country and persisted in the struggle regardless of his personal safety. In accordance with the spirit of the instructions of the Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League drafted by Marx and Engels, he rebuilt the secret organization of the League in Frankfurt, restored the workers’ association, organized mass gatherings, and then was wanted by the reactionary authorities and forced to go underground. In July 1851 he went into exile in Zurich, Switzerland, and in November 1851, he moved to New York, USA. In the United States, Weydemeyer fought relentlessly against all kinds of reactionary currents hostile to Marxism, upheld and disseminated Marxism in the struggle, and expanded the influence of Marxism in the United States. In January 1852, in response to the erroneous remarks made by Heinzen, a German petty-bourgeois exile, who denied the class struggle and attacked the dictatorship of the proletariat, he published an article, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the New York Turn-Zeitung. At the end of 1864, he received from Marx the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association and founded the American section of the Communist International (Comintern). After the end of the American Civil War, he did a lot of work to establish a nation-wide trade union organization in the United States. On August 26, 1866, the American Workers’ Congress opened in Baltimore, and the founding of the National Labor Union was proclaimed. It was on this day that he fell victim to cholera.

Weydemeyer actively pushed forward the combination of Marxism and the American workers’ movement, fought resolutely against all kinds of erroneous currents that distorted and denied Marxism, maintained the advanced nature and purity of Marxism, and made important contributions to the spread of Marxism in the United States and the development of the international workers’ movement.