CHAPTER VIIWEITLING AND MARX
T
HE controversy in London between Weitling and Schap
per foreshadowed the inevitable break with Marx in
Brussels in 1846. Weitling was then far better known in
communist circles than the young man who was destined to be
come a world figure as the oracle of modern scientific communism.
As yet, Marx had been relatively unproductive and some of his
best friends had accused him of laziness. Weitling, on the other
hand, had published three major works in the field of Utopian
communism, and had edited a journal for a brief period. His name
was well known among the workers in Germany, Switzerland,
France, and England.
Two years before their encounter in Brussels, Marx had re
ferred to Weitling's Garantieen as superior in theory to the writ
ings of Proudhon and as the "brilliant, literary debut of the Ger
man working class." "Where can the bourgeois, including their
philosophers and literary leaders, point to a similar work?" he
wrote in the Paris Vorwärts in comparing "the giant baby shoes of
the proletariat" with "the pigmy, well-worn shoes of the bourgeoi
sie." Engels probably learned about Weitling from Gutzkow, who
had seen copies of the Hilferuf and the Junge Generation in Paris.
By the summer of 1842, Weitling's publications had penetrated the
literary circles of Berlin, and Gutzkow reprinted an article from
the Junge Generation in his own paper. We know that Engels read
the Garantieen of the "social-democratic tailor," as he called him,
and considered it worthy of translation into English for the Brit-