The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling

WEITLING AND MARX 111

ability of man to build a better world according to the principles
of Christian self-sacrifice and brotherhood.
Marx, a Hegelian since 1837, became a communist half a dozen
years later. At a time when Moses Hess, who joined Weitling in
opposition to "Jupiter Marx," already had made the transition
from Hegelianism to communism, Marx was still a bourgeois
democrat. In the fall of 1843 he and his young wife had moved to
Paris to help edit Arnold Ruge's Deutsch-Französische Jahr-
bücher. Here he read the French radical literature and became
familiar with the writings of Fourier, Proudhon, Cabet, and Weitling.^9 Marx had attended meetings of the League of the Just when
Weitling was a prisoner in Switzerland. He belonged to the group
of literati in Paris which included Herwegh, Heine, Ruge, Hess,
Grün, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and others who, "armed with
Hegel" and Feuerbach, favored an intellectual alliance between
Germany and France. In the end, Marx poured a lot of old French
socialism into new German-Hegelian bottles.

Marx considered Weitling's Utopianism "a dogmatic abstrac­

tion." He rejected the state of nature, primitive Christianity, and

even social ethics as appropriate bases for communism. He wished

to divorce the labor movement altogether from the ritual and

pattern of secret societies and instead to weld the workers into a

political movement. With the able collaboration of Friedrich

Engels, son of a well-to-do manufacturer and a sympathetic and

keen student of the condition of the working class in England, he

slowly evolved a scientific basis for his philosophy of economic

determinism, materialism, the class struggle, and the ultimate and

inevitable proletarian revolution. Between 1843 and 1847, Marx

mixed his Hegelianism with large doses of Feuerbach's materialism.

Thus Marxism was derived from the French Revolution, great

German philosophers such as Hegel and Feuerbach, French theo­

rists such as Fourier and Saint-Simon, and English industrialism.

(^9) In the 1840's, one of the few differences between communism and socialism
was that the former was primarily a proletarian reform movement, the latter,
bourgeois. See also Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., "The Evolution of the Socialist Vo­
cabulary," Journal of the History of Ideas, IX (June, 1948), No. 3, pp. 259-302.