An Interesting Failure: Wilhelm Weitling’s Utopian Communism
Though communist ideology ultimately would become synonymous with its Jewish usurper, Karl Marx, several figures – Gracchus Babeuf, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Étienne Cabet among them – predated him as pioneers of European socialist thought during what became known as its utopian phase, before the Marxists would introduce pretensions to “scientific” rigor. Another trailblazing communist, one whose name has fallen into obscurity since the nineteenth century, is German labor agitator Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871). The sole English-language book on Weitling, Carl Wittke’s The Utopian Socialist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer , has long been out of print, and – as if to symbolically underline the subject’s neglect – the used copy I obtained was easily the mustiest-smelling book I ever purchased. A journeyman tailor and autodidact, Weitling was the son of a German servant girl and a French soldier who never returned from Napoleon’s Russia...
