“Marx considered Weitling’s Utopianism “a dogmatic abstraction”. 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 theorists such as Fourier and Saint-Simon, and English industrialism. In the hands of an inflexible theorist, it was developed into one of the greatest orthodoxies of the modern world (10). Engels was quite ready to admit this derivation of Marxism socialism, and he expressed great pride in its ancestry (11). According to “scientific communism” à la Marx and Engels, the economic structure of society was decisive for all social institutions, moral, legal, political and religious; and even “moral theories” were the product of “the economic stage which society has reached” at a particular time. In short, even morality and religion were determined by the processes of production and the exchange of goods. In view of the ideological conflicts, the break between Weitling and Marx was inevitable. It represented the clash between a master of economics, scientific abstractions, and Hegelian dialectics, and a simple-minded prophet of the brotherhood of man who had no other formula for world betterment. It marked the collision between a champion of the class struggle determined by scientific economic laws, and a new Messiah who had faith in a kingdom of love and science. Marx discoursed on scientific concepts and concrete doctrine; Weitling dismissed such cold “closet analysis with contempt”. “I see nothing in Marx’ head except a good encyclopedist, but no genius”, he once wrote to Hess (12)” [(10) Mehring, ‘Deutsche Sozialdemokratie’, 3; (11) F. Engels, ‘Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft’, Zurich, 1882; (12) Quoted in Joho, Wilhelm Weitling, 112] [Carl Wittke, ‘The Utopian Communist. A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer’, Baton Rouge, 1950]
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- Articolo pubblicato:20 Settembre 2016