Seidel-Höppner’s Wilhelm Weitling
Waltraud Seidel-Höppner, Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871). Eine politische Biographie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2004. 2 vols. and supplementary volume (containing index etc.)
Since the establishment of the mass labor movement from the late 19th century, the earlier socialist and communist movements have often been perceived either as historical dead ends or – at best – as preludes to later, bigger, and more ‘genuine’ social movements.1 Friedrich Engels himself codified such views in his polemics against Eugen Dühring; a long extract was published separately in 1880 as Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft and swiftly disseminated throughout the Second International as a textbook of Marxist self-perceptions. Its abbreviated English title, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, replaced the crucial noun development (Entwicklung) of the German original with a straightforward contrast, but the essential message was retained: Whatever merits the ideas of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc or their supporters might have had during the 1830’s and 1840’s were now incorporated into superior, ‘scientific’ forms within Second International Marxism and, later, Marxist-Leninism.
Today, the decline of self-assured modernist ideologies, including traditional versions of ‘scientific socialism’, has largely undermined the previous approaches to early socialism and communism as mere preludes to allegedly higher forms of thought. At the same time, such developments have liberated such studies from the previous constraints of dogmatism and political jargon, making it possible to approach early socialist and communist currents as historical phenomena in their own right, situating them in their proper contexts. We may even discern a relevance of the experimental, often frail, attempts of early socialists and communists to discover modes of thought and action appropriate for challenging bourgeois society along with its ability to appear as ‘natural’ and eternal. While the eccentricity of many of their ideas, and the very different social contexts against which they were conceived obviously makes it challenging to attempt a straightforward transfer of their ideas or specific strategies to our own times, the very creativeness of their approaches to some of the main pillars of capitalist society and the ideologies of modernity may call for dialogue and historical ‘translations’ across the epochal differences.
Wilhelm Weitling, labor leader and communist writer, provides an important, yet oft-neglected case in point. Born in 1808 as the son of a poor, unmarried woman in Magdeburg and a French captain passing through, Weitling trained as a tailor. Traveling around Europe as was customary for artisans at that time, he settled in Paris in 1835. There he encountered burgeoning republican and communist opposition circles and gradually rose to be the most prominent non-French labor leader and communist. Combining elements of several strands of oppositional political thought with his own experience of working-class life and organization, he soon disseminated such principles, in writing as well as in political activity, to other parts of Europe. From the late 1840’s, in less politically advantageous circumstances, he continued this unity of political thought and organizational practice for about a decade in the United States, then practically retreated from the public scene only to reappear briefly as a speaker at a few workers’ meeting shortly before his death in 1871.
Possessing neither the remarkable social imagination of a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, nor the theoretical and analytical powers of Marx and Engels, Weitling’s expressly Christian lectures on the evils of modern society and the communist salvation were difficult to accept, or even to pin-point, from the perspective of later labor movements dominated by secular ideas. As a result, Weitling was subjected to habitual ridicule for more than a century and a half. Innumerable accounts of the early labor movements or Marx’ life have recounted Pavel Annenkov’s eyewitness account of an irreconcilably harsh debate between Weitling and Marx in 1846, during which the latter slammed his fists onto the table and bellowed, “Ignorance never helped anyone!”2 The ritual repetitions of this anecdote has left generations of readers with an impression of Weitling as something of a simple-minded messianic communist or a ‘Blanquist’ believer in the ever-present urgency of straightforward revolutionary initiative.
Of course, it only took an earnest study of Weitling’s life and thoughts to prove him anything but simple-minded. Yet, for a very long time, no account (including the main biography in English, written by Carl Wittke seven decades ago) provided any real sense of his achievements.3 During recent decades, however, several German historians have contributed crucially to more nuanced and contextually informed analyses of Weitling, along with general revaluations of the early socialism and communism of the 1830’s and 1840’s.4
Waltraud Seidel-Höppner’s recent magisterial, 1900-page biography (in two volumes, later supplemented by a separate volume containing a detailed chronology of his life) is the crowning achievement of this collective endeavor, of which the author has been an important part for all of her long life as a professional historian.5
The background of the author itself reflects the dramatic turns in the history of reception of early socialist and communist ideas. A life-long leftist, born in 1928, Waltraud Seidel-Höppner was educated and worked as a historian in the GDR for the main part of her life. Her first book-length manuscript on Weitling was written in 1956, published five years later, marking the beginning of her life-long studies of pre-Marx socialism and communism, often conducted in collaboration with her now deceased husband Joachim Höppner.6 For the GDR, of course, such studies were mainly relevant as forays into the prehistory of scientific socialism and were, to that extent, congruent with the official ideological coordinates. But while the Höppners remained loyal to a broadly leftist and socialist agenda, their choice of study area as well as the results of their analyses was increasingly at odds with not only the conventional truths of state-sanctioned Marxism-Leninism, but also with the germanocentric concerns of GDR historiography in the service of nation-building. Their detailed studies of Fourierism, Saint-Simonianism, neo-Babouvism, and the utopian communism of Etienne Cabet all tended to make socialism much less of a strictly German creation.
Seidel-Höppner’s basic anti-capitalist commitment is still noticeable in her two tomes on Weitling. The author is obviously sympathetic to Weitling’s political project, energetically defending his thoughts and writings against the claims of numerous detractors, debunking myths and correcting numerous factual errors in previous writings on Weitling and his times.
The Weitling we become acquainted with in the pages of Seidel-Höppner’s book is much more than just a preacher of a revolutionary communist gospel. Rather, he emerges as a fierce and creative intellect committed to a dialogue between practical experience and political possibilities on the one hand, and critical reflections on a wide range of theoretical ideas on the other.
Seidel-Höppner argues this through painstakingly detailed intellectual-historical reconstructions of his writings. The main elements of his approach, she holds, was already evident in the earliest extensive summary of his ideas written as the program of the new organization of German communist artisans: the Bund der Gerechtigkeit – which, as the author emphasizes, was named exactly thus, that is, the League of Justice, not Bund der Gerechten, the League of the Just, as it has mostly been termed in retrospect. The text was Die Menschheit. Wie sie ist und wie sie sein wollte (Humanity as it is and as it should be).7 Here Weitling characterized the abolition of private property, the creation of social equality, cosmopolitan community, and universal suffrage as expressions of “natural law and the teaching of Christ”.8 Unlike the pacifist, harmony-seeking Icarian communism of Étienne Cabet on the one hand, and the Neo-Babouvist conceptions of struggle led by small, militant, illegal vanguard groups, Weitling’s teaching pointed towards a general revolutionary struggle with the workers’ own social interest as the main driving force.
His rhetoric was often religious: “A new Messiah shall come to make the teachings of the first Messiah a reality. He shall destroy the rotten construction of the old-world order, lead the sources of tears into the lake of oblivion, and transform Earth into Paradise.”9 Like many others among the early socialists, the grown-up Weitling channeled the simplified Christianity of his childhood into a new critique of capitalism.
Subsequently, many commentators have emphasized Weitling’s religious language, describing him as a successor to millennia-long Chiliasm or Millennialism, in particular the ideas of Thomas Müntzer from the 16th Century, and of the Catholic priest Félicité de Lamennais’ blazing impeachment of modern capitalism from the 1830s. However, Seidel-Höppner stresses that to Weitling, Christianity primarily provided a repertoire of ideals and language communicating his experience-based and practice-oriented thoughts. What he gained from Müntzer was an interpretation of Christianity as sympathetic to the poor. What he gained from Lamennais had little to do with theological doctrines, but consisted, rather, in the very act of protesting social power by invoking Christian dogma. And in Weitling’s writings, biblical expressions always mingled with scraps of democratized concepts of history, neo-Jacobin and neo-Babouvist ideas of civil rights as well as Fourierist ideas of human beings as a highly differentiated community governed by variant combinations of urges and passions.10 In his most explicitly religious work, Das Evangelium eines armen Sünders (The Poor Sinner’s Gospel) Weitling distanced his doctrine from 18th-century Enlightenment arguments and contemporary Young Hegelian atheists: “Religion is not to be destroyed, but may be used to liberate human beings. Christianity is the religion of liberty, modesty, and enjoyment. (…) Christ is the prophet of freedom, his teaching is liberty and love.”11 In other words, his religiousness was anchored in a materialist worldview and inextricably linked to social emancipation.
Similarly, Seidel-Höppner emphasizes Weitling’s essentially worldly approach to the interplay between communist theory and workers’ practice. Well-meaning people among the educated and property-owning bourgeoisie of the 1830’s and 1840’s regarded themselves as the sole able spokesmen of the cause of the workers. Even the main currents of early socialism, the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists, tended to echo such class arrogance by approaching workers with ready-made blueprints of their future liberation. By contrast, Weitling and his supporters held that only the workers themselves were truly capable of formulating workers’ views. To be sure, intellectuals of the bourgeoisie possessed crucial knowledge and expertise. However, workers’ politics had to express their own class-specific experience: “Those who want to assess workers’ conditions correctly need to be workers themselves, otherwise they can have no notion of the kind of toil that it entails”.12
Thus, labor politics was not only politics for workers, but also politics by workers – a view which, during the last few weeks of Weitling’s sojourn in Paris was chiefly propounded by the people surrounding the workers’ paper l’Atelier.13 Yet, Weitling’s approach to this was different. L’Atelier did in fact identify its labor politics with elements of its anti-intellectualism and with a moderate brand of social reforms which would make it possible for workers to acquire full access to bourgeois society, Weitling’s objective was much more radical. And he insisted that attaining this goal would require a close alliance between the workers themselves and the radical intellectuals whose abilities he appreciated very much.
What, then, were Weitling’s societal objectives? The fullest presentations of Weiting’s views in this matter are to be found in his main work, Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom) from 1842. Unlike Fourier, Cabet, and the entire ‘classic’ Utopian tradition, he did not provide a blueprint of his ideal society. Like Marx and Engels, he stressed that the exact forms of communist society would have to be the result of lengthy historical developments as well as of immediate class struggles. Only the broadest contours of communism might be projected in advance. Thus, to Weitling, communism implied a society beyond private property of the means of production and beyond the monetary tyranny of present society. It was also to be a characterized by harmony.
Once again, this synthesized the views of earlier leftists, but in a specific manner. To Weitling, the term harmony did not signify any scrupulously calculated pay as advocated by the Saint-Simonians and several of the socialist schools of thought, nor the kind of ascetic equality preached by other early communists. Weitling’s vision of a harmonious society entailed a guarantee of equal opportunities to freely exercise all the different human abilities and inclinations beyond the constraints of ownership urges or monetary power. Further, contrary to the assumptions of nineteenth-century liberalism, such equal opportunities could not thrive in a competitive society based on private property and the atomization of individuals. Only in a society based on communal ownership would it be possible to promote the “natural feeling of harmony between desire and ability” regarded by Weitling as a prerequisite for happiness.14 Harmony between desire and ability did not imply that everything should be scrupulously apportioned or immediately available to everybody, but rather that everybody was entitled to enjoy the prospect of achieving satisfaction by means of his or her own efforts. Weitling’s brand of communism was, as Seidel-Höppner puts it, a communism of freedom rather than a communism of equality.
Alongside Lorenz von Stein’s critical reflections on French socialism and communism as responses to social problems inherent to bourgeois society, Weitling’s Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit was crucial in transforming socialism and communism from a specifically French phenomenon to an integral part of the political discourse of continental Europe. It was widely discussed among German left-wingers, and it was translated into both Hungarian and Norwegian. That book, more than anything else, made Weitling “the founding father of German communism,” as Friedrich Engels put it in 1843.15 The young Marx was at least as jubilant. In Weitling’s “immeasurable and brilliant debut,” the German proletariat had found its first crucial voice, Marx wrote in the summer of 1844, during his Parisian exile.16
Despite the affinities between Weitling’s approach and that of Marx and Engels demonstrated by Seidel-Höppner, important differences remained. Differences between Weitling’s religious discourse and the atheism of many left-Hegelian students in left-wing circles, including Marx and Engels, was a contributing issue, but not the decisive one. More important was the fact that, despite his brilliance and appeal to workers, Weitling’s brand of communism was still a far cry from conception of scientific analysis expounded by Marx and Engels. This also involved crucial questions of temporality: while Weitling proceeded from the workers’ experience of his own time, Marx and Engels were looking ahead to workers’ future experience under the conditions of a developed industrial capitalism.17 This made some conflict between the two independent-minded and proud figures Weitling and Marx almost inevitable – even if the above-mentioned episode of Marx slamming the table and shouting in Brussels in 1846 was the result of an internal smear campaign led by Karl Schapper within the Bund der Gerechtigkeit, and even if they patched up some of the differences afterwards.
Nevertheless, the dominant parts of the Bund der Gerechtigkeit now leaned towards Marx and Engels rather than Weitling, and under the auspices of the former, the association was now remodeled in a more stringent direction under the name of Bund der Kommunisten in 1847. Weitling was effectively marginalized in the German communist movement as well as in the emerging European labor movement. A disappointed man, Weitling moved to New York, organizing some hundreds of German workers in a newly established Befreiungsbund, only returning to Europe for a few months of largely unsuccessful attempts at intervening in the revolutionary wave of 1848, before finally settling permanently in the US.
There he continued his endeavors to organize German-American workers. But the defeat of the revolution in Europe also affected many of the strategic prescriptions Weitling had entertained since the 1830s. Seidel-Höppner describes his move towards a more “syndicalist” stance, i.e. he distanced himself from the ‘political’ labor movement to the benefit of labor union organizations.18 Whereas previously he had been highly critical of Fourierist and Icarian communist colonization endeavors, he now joined forces with the colonialists – even to the point of living with them for a time, and finally becoming the head of the colony Communia in Iowa until he left it in 1854 following fierce internal conflicts.19 He founded both a cooperative loan bank for artisans and a health insurance society for workers, which, to some extent, were able to survive the general decline that afflicted the labor movement in the 1850s.
By and large, however, it turned out to be far more difficult to organize workers in the USA than Weitling had hoped. From the mid-1850s he virtually gave up involving himself in public matters, he married, had children, and settled down to work as an industrious tailor. From then on he applied his intellectual surplus to studying languages, nature, and astronomy, none of which, however, yielded any success or recognition for him. Not until 1871, when the labor movement experienced renewed growth, did he reestablish contact with the movement, being featured as a speaker at a labor meeting in New York shortly before his passing in the same year. Obituaries in the new labor press were respectful, but few.
Seidel-Höppner’s detailed exposé of Weitling’s life, thoughts, and activities settles innumerable questions about early socialism and communism. The book is not an easy read, however, and not just because of its forbidding size. Despite the reportedly long and reportedly tortuous process of editing this massive work, large amounts of sizable repetitions and explanatory lapses remained in the text, occasionally leaving it somewhat difficult to navigate. Also, the author has refrained from – or, perhaps, due to personal circumstances has been prevented from – integrating the results of several recent studies in the intellectual history of the early workers movement and the political thoughts of Weitling’s times. Despite all its qualities as a close contextualising study of Weitling, the author still devotes a lot of energy to a settling of accounts with past GDR orthodoxies. This appears somewhat ambiguous at times: While defending Weitling against Marxist-Leninist conventional truths, the author also seems to defend Weitling’s materialist communism as a legitimate and relevant research topic within such ideological parameters. This, perhaps, makes her interpretation of the religious elements of Weitling’s thought a bit too cavalier and dismissive, lacking in the contextualization she devotes to the secular elements of his thought. She compares Weitling’s religious expressions to the radical Protestantism of Thomas Müntzer 300 years earlier and, briefly, to the philosophy of hope in Ernst Bloch a century after Weitling, but she does very little to situate Weitling in the contexts of proletarian, oppositional religiosity of the 19th century – a topic which, unfortunately, remains to be adequately mapped or analyzed.
Nonetheless, sincere tribute must be paid to Seidel-Höppner for having explored his life, thoughts and actions so profoundly and in such a broad perspective that once again he can be allowed to assume his important place in the history of the early labor movement. This is not just a monument to “the founding father of German communism”, but also an important demonstration that even the early labor movement was an international and proactive movement.
If, over several decades after his death, a tendency existed to ridicule Weitling’s dreams, we are today perhaps so far removed from any temptation to adopt all specifics his views that we may be able to discern another, more essential feature of his ideas: the insistence that political action is not locked into short-term, tactical measures, but must primarily be linked to long-term aspirations for happier lives in better communities.
Footnotes
1 The reviewer wishes to thank Lena Fluger Callesen for her translation of an earlier version of this review, and Gerd Callesen for encouraging the process and establishing the connection to Social and Democracy.
2 Cf. for instance, David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, New York: Harper Colophon 1977, pp. 155-58.
3 See Carl Wittke, The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1950.
4 See, among others, Hans-Arthur Marsiske, ”Wider die Umsontsfresser”: Der Handwerkerkommunist Wilhelm Weitling, Hamburg: Ergebnisse 1986; Lothar Knatz & Hans-Arthur Marsiske (eds.), Wilhelm Weitling, ein deutscher Arbeiterkommunist, Hamburg: Ergebnisse 1989; Lother Knatz, Utopie und Wissenschaft im frühen deutschen Sozialismus. Theoriebildung und Wissenschaftsbegriff bei Wilhelm Weitling, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1984.
5 Waltraud Seidel-Höppner, Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871). Eine politische Biographie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2014, 2 vols.; Wilhelm Weitling 1808-1871 auf zwei Kontinenten in Daten, published 2017 without bibliographic information, available on amazon.com. Supporting website: www.wilhelm-weitling.de,
6 See, especially, Joachim Höppner & Waltraud Seidel-Höppner (eds.). Von Babeuf bis Blanqui, 2 vols., Leipzig: Reclam 1975; idem, Theorien des vormarxistischen Sozialismus und Kommunismus, Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein 1987; and idem, Etienne Cabet und seine ikarische Kolonie (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2002.=
7 Wilhelm Weitling: Die Menschheit wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte, 2nd edition, Bern: Jenni 1845 (originally1838-39). Available at https://archive.org/details/diemenschheitwie00weit and https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/referenz/weitling/1838/mensch/index.htm
8 Weitling Die Menschheit, p. 19.
9 Wilhelm Weitling: Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit, Vivis: published by the author 1845 (originally 1842), p. 260.
10 Seidel-Höppner Wilhelm Weitling, pp. 129-53 & 677ff.
11 Wilhelm Weitling: Das Evangelium eines armen Sünders, Bern: Jenni 1845, p. 17 (http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10777308_00005.html)
12 ’Aufruf’ (1841), quoted from Seidel-Höppner Wilhelm Weitling, p. 239.
13 Armand Cuvillier : Un journal d’ouvriers : L’Atelier 1840-1850, Paris: Éditions Ouvrières 1954.
14 Weitling Garantien, p. 2.
15 Friedrich Engels: "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent" (1843), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/11/18.htm
16 Karl Marx 'Kritische Randglossen zu dem Artikel "Der König von Preußen und die Sozialreform. Von einem Preußen"', (Vorwärts! Nr. 60), Marx Engels Werke, Berlin: Dietz 1960ff, vol. 1, p. 405.
17 Cf. Seidel-Höppner Wilhelm Weitling, p. 1032.
18 Seidel-Höppner Wilhelm Weitling, pp. 1425 ff.
19 Seidel-Höppner Wilhelm Weitling, pp. 1425 ff. Cf. also Wittke, Utopian Communist, pp. 237-275.