Wilhelm Weitling

Independent activity Early socialism 1808–1871 ○ Natural causes

Tailor who led the League of the Just, counted as the first German theorist of communism

Born in Magdeburg in 1808 to a household maid, he became a tailor. In Paris he joined the League of the Just in 1837, published his first work, The Human Race as It Is and as It Should Be, in 1838 and joined the street fighting of 1839. Moving to Switzerland, he published Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom in 1842, which Marx called the "vehement and brilliant literary debut of the German workers". Arrested in Zurich, he was held for ten months and expelled. In 1846 he clashed with Marx over leadership and the course of revolution and broke with him. He returned to Germany in the revolution of 1848 and published Der Urwähler in Berlin, but played only a minor part, and at the end of 1849 went back to the United States, where he published Die Republik der Arbeiter (1850–1855). In later life he took out nine sewing-machine patents. He died in New York in 1871.

Also known as: Wilhelm Christian Weitling