page_title: Joseph Weydemeyer
section_title: A Marxist journalist
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Weydemeyer / Biography / New York / A Marxist journalist
caption_attribution_description: Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon publication in "Die Revolution", 1852.
context_page_description: Joseph Arnold Weydemeyer was a military officer in the Kingdom of Prussia and the United States as well as a journalist, politician and Marxist revolutionary.
  At first a supporter of "true socialism", Weydemeyer became in 1845–1846 a follower of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and a member of the League of Communists, heading its Frankfurt chapter from 1849 to 1851. He visited Marx in Brussels, staying there for a time to attend Marx's lectures. He participated in the 1848 Revolution. He was one of the "responsible editors" of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from 1849 to 1850. He acted on Marx's behalf in the failed publication of the manuscript of The German Ideology.
  Weydemeyer worked on two socialist periodicals which were the Westphälisches Dampfboot and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In 1851, he emigrated from Germany to the United States and worked there as a journalist. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written by Marx, was published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German-language monthly magazine in New York established by Weydemeyer.
  Weydemeyer took part in the American Civil War as a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army.
context_section_description: In December 1851, Weydemeyer issues a paper, named Die Revolution, a German-language revolutionary paper, which purpose was to make  picture of the class struggle in the Old World. The paper first appeared on January 6 but was suspended on January 13. In a letter to Marx at the end of January, he attributed his failure because of the corrupting effect on the people of the American soil. He also pointed out the dominance of the liberal bourgeois-nationalist ideology on the people, among them Gottfried Kinkel and Lajos Kossuth. German immigrants were simply not sensitive to Marx ideas and analyses of the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and of the triumph of European reaction. In spring 1852, Weydemeyer brought out Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as a final number of Die Revolution, after arranging for serial publication of Engels The Peasant War in Germany in the New York Turn-Zeitung between January 1852 and February 1853.
  He began to write for the Turn-Zeitung about different political issues, as the American aversion of the proletarian dictatorship, the calling of liberal American groups for free election in Europe and their silence about the conditions of the workers, the political immaturity of forty-eighters who raised money in the United States to foment revolution in Europe. To sum up, he wrote many articles which counterposed Marxism to liberalism for the German immigrants. In the July number of Turn-Zeitung, he began a discussion of American labor issues and the free trade versus protection debate, where he took a traditional Marxist stand for the industrial development.
  In the Turn-Zeitung of September 1, Weydemeyer analyzed the relationship between Australian cotton and American slavery. The development of American monopoly on the world market, in his point of view, promotes the rise of national economical development rather than regional and the rise of national parties in American politics rather than regional. He saw the shift from an agricultural dominance over the industrial to an industrial dominance over the former.
  In the Turn-Zeitung of November 15, Weydemeyer wrote a review of the election campaign of 1852, pointing the absence of labor issues in the platforms of the Whig and Democratic parties. In December, in a two-part Political-Economic Survey, he attempted to project a platform for American labor. He stands for organizations of the workers on a large scale political as well as economical, and urged the workers to adopt internationalism.
caption: Die Revolution
exif: {}