CHAPTER XIIBANKS, CO-OPERATIVES, AND
RAILROADS
O
N MANY occasions, Weitling emphasized that the heart
of all his reforms was the Tauschbank (Bank of Ex
change), or the Arbeiterbank, as he sometimes called it.
He regarded the Arbeiterbund as a means of organizing labor for
this ultimate objective; and though Die Republik der Arbeiter dis
cussed many things, it never failed to stress that a new method of
exchange was the center of its entire propaganda. Essentially,
Weitling's plan involved substituting a new ticket system of ac
counting between creditors and debtors for existing currency and
methods of exchange. Without abolishing the existing system of
production, he would abolish the monopoly power of the capital
ists by means of a bank of exchange. The plan in itself involved a
striking deviation from pure communism.
Weitling's program proposed the establishment of workers'
warehouses in which all raw materials and finished products
would be deposited. In return for their deposits, the workers
would receive a new kind of paper money based solely on the la
bor value of the products involved. Henceforth this would serve as
their medium of exchange in all transactions. Obviously, if
workers and farmers would deposit all their products in exchange
for paper certificates of this kind, the middleman would be elimi
nated and the profit motive would disappear from the capitalist
system. Furthermore, by this device, producers who were mem
bers of the bank of exchange could fix prices and control markets,