Covenant of the Righteous

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The Union of the Just , also known as the Union of Justice as a self-designation , was a forerunner and the nucleus of the later socialist and communist parties in Europe and the world. 1836 he went of communism at the initiative of the tailors and the first German theorist Wilhelm Weitling in Paris from there since 1834 existing covenant of outlaws out. In 1840 its headquarters were relocated to London under the aegis of Karl Schapper . There, under the influence of the new members Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , the Bund was renamed the Bund der Kommunisten in 1847 .

history

The League of the Righteous was composed primarily of early socialist German emigrants in France and committed itself to the goal of “liberating Germany from oppression ” and “de-slaving mankind ”.

The forerunner of the League of the Righteous, the League of Outlaws led by Jacob Venedey , was a strictly hierarchical secret society . Dominated by intellectuals from the petty bourgeoisie , he denied "simpler" members, especially artisans join and workers to have a say in the management. The dissatisfied workers and journeymen built up the new, politically much more radical organization of the League of the Just between 1836 and 1838.

Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871)

One of the most influential members and formative theoreticians of the federal government was the tailor Wilhelm Weitling. He propagated not only a political, but also a social revolution in the sense of overturning the prevailing property relations. Only through such a social upheaval could the proletariat be liberated, whereas a mere political revolution would only change the state constitution . With his theses Weitling turned away from the humanitarian socialism of the French early socialists , who, for example, represented the cooperative ideas of Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier . Weitling, on the other hand, maintained that the interests of the working class (cf. proletariat) and bourgeoisie (cf. bourgeoisie ) are incompatible. He saw one of the tasks of the League of the Righteous in enlightening the workers politically so that they could fight independently for their own interests. Other important members were the shoemaker Heinrich Bauer and the former student Karl Schapper .

Although the Union of the Righteous at times succeeded in setting up some groups in the German states, the influence of the Union remained rather small. In 1839 the federal government, together with the “Society of the Seasons” headed by Auguste Blanqui , tried to organize an uprising against the monarchy under the citizen king Louis-Philippe, which had ruled France since the July Revolution in 1830 . After its failure, the headquarters of the federal government was moved from Paris to London in 1839. Under the influence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the League of the Righteous was renamed in 1847 as the " League of Communists ".

The second congress of the Communist League, who until December 8, 1847 with participants from 30 local groups from November 29, France , the Netherlands , Belgium, the states of the German Confederation , Sweden , the Switzerland , the United Kingdom and the United States met , commissioned Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto .

This manifesto was finally published in London at the end of February 1848 and distributed throughout Europe. The Communist Manifesto did not influence the bourgeois revolutions in France, Germany and other European states that were triggered in the same year, but it did form the programmatic basis for the later emergence of left-wing revolutionary socialist and communist parties.

literature

  • Otto Büsch: The early socialist leagues in the history of the German labor movement. Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1975, ISBN 3-7678-0386-0 .
  • Werner Kowalski : Prehistory and emergence of the League of the Just. With a source attachment. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1962.
  • Werner Kowalski: From petty-bourgeois democracy to communism. Magazines from the early days of the German labor movement (1834–1847). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1967 (archival research on the history of the German labor movement 5.1).
  • Werner Kowalski (ed.): From petty-bourgeois democracy to communism. The main reports of the federal central authority in Frankfurt am Main from 1838 to 1842 on the German revolutionary movement. Akademie-Verlag 1978 (archival research on the history of the German labor movement 5.2).
  • Hans-Joachim Ruckhäberle : Early Proletarian Literature. The leaflets of the German journeyman's craft associations in Paris 1832–1839 . scriptor, Kronberg i. Ts. 1977.
  • Joachim Höppner, Waltraud Seidel-Höppner: The covenant of outlaws and the covenant of justice. In: Helmut Reinalter (Ed.): Political associations, societies and parties in Central Europe 1815–1848 / 49. Series of publications by the International Research Center “Democratic Movements in Central Europe 1770–850”, vol. 38. Frankfurt / Main u. a. 2005, ISBN 3-631-54138-4 , pp. 89-153. (The article first appeared in the Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume III / 2002.)
  • Waltraud Seidel-Höppner : Under a false name. The covenant of justice and its name change. In: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement, Issue I / 2013, NDZ Verlag, Berlin 2013, pp. 47–57.

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