The fact that Marx participated in the International from the beginning was of decisive importance for its character and its role in history. The English trade unionists and the working-class leaders in France, who came together to establish the International, had the most modest expectations; Marx on the other hand saw in its very existence an important instrument in the workers' struggle for emancipation. For this reason, and although he was hard at work completing the first volume of Das Kapital, he had no hesitation in throwing himself into the task of building up the new organization.
After the dissolution of the Communist League in 1852, Marx had withdrawn from political activity.[1] The defeat of the revolution in 1848–9 had not shaken his faith in its return and eventual triumph. But he could see no sign of a revolutionary situation during the 1850s. He recognized quite clearly, as his writings reveal,[2] the social reasons for the defeat of the revolution: it had foundered in the conflict between the middle and working classes. The 'undeveloped frame of the proletariat' had been overpowered by the robust bourgeoisie before the revolution could accomplish its historical task. Its defeat had for the time being crippled the forces making for a new revolution.
By the beginning of the 1860s, Europe was once again in ferment. In Prussia the liberal middle class was involved in a decisive struggle for power against the ruling feudal aristocracy. The Poles had risen in armed revolt against the Tsar. Garibaldi, at the head of republican guerrilla forces, had stormed through Naples and Sicily, demolishing in a brilliant campaign the decrepit feudal monarchy. In France the elections of 1863 had thrown the Empire into crisis; a revived Labour movement had appeared for the first time since Napoleon III's coup d'état. Ireland was seething with revolt. In England, the 'frame of the proletariat' had gained stature and maturity. By the end of the 1850s the large number of tiny trade associations had begun to merge into powerful amalgamated unions. The tremendous struggle of the building workers had made them a more cohesive force, and at the beginning of the 1860s they resumed the campaign for the right to vote. The condition of semi-paralysis into which the democratic and labour movement of Europe had fallen since 1849 had begun to wear off. Marx interpreted these events as symptoms of an approaching revolution which, he assumed, would break out first in France. The revival of the International as an instrument for building in a number of countries a working-class movement, which would be ready for the coming revolution, now seemed to have point and purpose.
The new International rested, moreover, on a different and stronger basis than any of its predecessors. The Society of Fraternal Democrats was based on the Chartist movement, and when the movement declined the society declined along with it. Its successor, the International Association, found no possibilities of growth in the condition of political apathy to which the workers of England and France had been reduced in the mid-1850s. Now, the atmosphere was very different. The International which began life in St Martin's Hall had sprung from the initiative of leaders of British trade unions and French workers' organizations conscious of their governing power. It seemed therefore that the International would establish itself on the firm foundation of an organized working-class movement.
In the new conditions Marx saw great possibilities for the International. 'The Association, or rather its Committee, is important,' he wrote to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann, 'because the leaders of the London trade unions are in it, the same people who prepared such a tremendous reception for Garibaldi and who thwarted Palmerston's plan for a war with the United States by "monster meetings" in St James's Hall. The leaders of the Parisian workers are also connected with it.'[3]
Marx knew perfectly well that he would be co-operating in the International with workers who, however class-conscious, in no way shared his own conception of Socialism. The men who according to the Press responded with greater enthusiasm to the St Martin's Hall decision to found an International were, as Professor Beesly confirmed, 'the most intelligent elements of the working class; but only a few, perhaps not one amongst them, belonged to any Socialistic school. Most of them, I think,' he added, 'would have hesitated to accept the name of Socialist.…They joined the International because they felt carried away by a warm fraternal feeling for their working-class comrades on the Continent, with whom they felt themselves more closely united than with the wealth classes in their own country.'[4]
The English workers in fact, while comparatively indifferent to political theories, recognized in a practical, common-sense spirit the need for political struggle, particularly for the right to vote which would give them influence over legislation. The French workers, by contrast, viewed the state and politics with mistrust, seeking to supplant capitalism by the development of co-operative societies which, as expressions of collective working-class self-help, would come to pervade the whole of society.
Their apostle was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), a fertile if not very profound thinker. If his attacks on the social system were enhanced by a brilliant literary style combined with considerable powers of analysis, his constructive ideas were often confused and contradictory. Born into a poor family in Besançon, Proudhon spent his childhood driving cows to pasture in the vicinity of his home town. He first earned his living as a typesetter, and from adolescence onwards acquired his tremendous knowledge entirely through self-education. With all their defects, his abundant writings made an important contribution to the development of Socialist thinking in France.
Fame came to Proudhon with the publication in 1840 of his first book, Qu'est-ce que la propriété? In reply to his own question Proudhon supplied the memorable answer, 'Property is theft'. And since property was, as he had shown, the outcome of theft, violence and injustice, he demanded its abolition. But Proudhon's thinking was dominated by Hegelian dialectics, and in his system, common property or Communism, as the antithesis of private property, was condemned along with its thesis. The synthesis which Proudhon derived from these dialectical contradictions was an even distribution of small property. His was a society of property-owning peasants and craftsmen, with the working class enjoying common property in the form of co-operative societies for production, consumption, mutual aid and insurance, financed by a People's Bank lending money on the basis of 'free credit'. Proudhon advanced the idea of reciprocal services—'Mutualism', as he called it—as a basis for solving the social problem. He rejected every form of Socialism involving state control, since he saw the state was merely a great 'gendarme and executioner'.[5]
Marx had analysed the contradictions and fallacies of Proudhon with pitiless rigour in his Das Elend der Philosophie of 1847. Proudhon's system, he showed, left no room for the development of modern industrial society and was a form of utopian Socialism bearing the distinctive trade-mark of the lower middle class. But a large number of French workers who were quite unresponsive to Proudhon's dialectics, which they hardly understood, were fascinated by his scheme for reorganizing France and the whole world on the basis of Mutualism.
Admittedly among the workers of Paris the revolutionary traditions of Blanqui had not been entirely destroyed. In 1859 Blanqui had been released after more than ten years in prison. HE gathered round himself from every stratum of society a hard corps of embittered and suffering men for whom his name had become a symbol of emancipation. But police repression prevented the growth of a revolutionary party. In the spring of 1865 Blanqui's follower, Tridon, founded the weekly paper, Candide, but it was closed down by the police after its eighth issue. Blanqui managed to avoid arrest only by escaping to Belgium, and did not return to Paris until after the outbreak of the Franco-German War. From Brussels he kept in touch with small groups of supporters whom he tried to organize into a party. But it was not until the Paris Commune of 1871 that his ideas were to have any significant influence. At the time of the International's foundation, the organized workers of France were represented solely by disciples of Proudhon.
The Italian members of the General Council—G. P. Fontana, D. Lama, Aldrovandi, M. Sassinari, C. Setacci and Luigi Wolff (the latter being exposed as a police spy when the French government archives were opened after the fall of Napoleon III)[6]—were, like all the workers' organizations in Italy, completely under the influence of Mazzini, and he, while a fervent revolutionary nationalist, republican and democrat, was strongly opposed to Socialism as Karl Marx conceived it.
The German working-class movement, which had begun to revive at the beginning of the 1850s, was not directly represented on the General Council until 1868, although Marx in the meantime was acting as corresponding secretary for Germany. On 31 August 1864, a few weeks before the foundation of the International, Lassalle, whose agitation had had a considerable effect on the working class, was killed in a duel. He had established the General German Workers' Association, the first independent and viable workers' party in the country, in 1863. After the death of Lassalle it became known that he had conducted secret negotiations with Bismarck, and had considered supporting him against the middle-class opposition in Germany in return for universal franchise and a measure of social reform. J. B. von Schweitzer (1833–75), who succeeded Lassalle in the leadership of the party, openly advocated an alliance between the workers and the feudal nobility in his journal, Der Sozial-Demokrat. This proposition, which Marx repudiated with horror, led to a complete break between himself and Lassalleans in February 1865, and relations were not restored for another three years.[7]
For Marx, however, the importance of the International lay not so much in ideology or even in policy, but in its very existence as an international centre of the Labour movement, and he took good care not to endanger it by allowing ideological differences to obtrude. When he drafted the declaration of principles for the International, he was careful to avoid all demands and formulations which might offend any one of the disparate tendencies represented in the new organization. Consequently we do not find, either in the 'Inaugural Address' or in the 'Rules', any statement calling for the nationalization of the means of production, a demand which would have been unacceptable to the Proudhonists. 'It was very difficult,' he told Engels in the letter already quoted (p. 92), 'to frame the thing so that our view should appear in a form acceptable from the present standpoint of the workers' movement.…It will take time before the reawakened movement allows the old boldness of speech.'[8]
The proposed declaration of principles was discussed as early as the first meeting of the central committee, in what the Minutes described as 'a very long and animated discussion'.[9]
Before the discussion began, the General Council (as the central committee was later to be called) was formally constituted. George Odger was elected chairman; W. R. Cremer, general secretary; and G. Wheeler, treasurer. It was decided to meet every Tuesday evening at eight o'clock. The membership subscription was fixed at 1s. a quarter. Later this was found to be too high, and the rate agreed was 1s. a year for individual members and 3d. a year for members of affiliated organizations. As a temporary measure, the sum of three guineas was collected from the members of the General Council present at the meeting, to defray immediate expenses. With this modest sum in hand, the International began its historic career.
The discussion on the principles of the International ended with the election of a sub-committee, instructed to present a draft statement at the next meeting. The sub-committee consisted of the Englishmen E. Whitlock, John Weston and Pidgeon; the Frenchman Le Lubez; Mazzini's secretary Luigi Wolff; the Pole J. E. Holtorp; and Marx, representing Germany. Odger as chairman and Cremer as secretary were members ex officio.
The sub-committee held its first meeting three days later. Marx, who was suffering from carbuncles and in great pain, was unable to attend. Wolff read out in English his translation of the Statutes of Mazzini's Italian Workers' Societies, suggesting them as a basis for the statutes of the International. John Weston, an old Owenite—'a very amiable and worthy man', as Marx described him in his letter to Engels—submitted a declaration of principles which he had drafted. But the General Council at its meeting on 11 October referred back both documents to the sub-committee for re-drafting.
Marx had not been notified of the sub-committee's second meeting until too late, and was absent when the documents were duly revised. He learned of the new version only at the General Council meeting on 9 October, and was terrified by what he heard. It was, as he told Engels, an 'appallingly wordy, badly written and utterly undigested preamble, pretending to be a declaration of principles, in which Mazzini could be detected everywhere, the whole being crusted over with the vaguest tags of French Socialism'. The draft contained no fewer than forty paragraphs, and these 'apart from all their faults, aim at something which is in fact utterly impossible, a sort of central government of the European working classes, with Mazzini in the background, of course'.[10] The General Council was also unhappy about the revised version, and referred it back once again to the sub-committee.
Marx was determined, as he explained to Engels, 'that if possible not one single line of the stuff should be allowed to stand'. He replaced the forty paragraphs of the Statutes y ten, wrote a new preamble, and drafted 'An address to the Working Classes', which went down to history as the 'Inaugural Address of the Working Men's International Association'.
After two further meetings the sub-committee accepted both the documents drafted by Marx, with a few trivial additions. The second clause in the General Rules, as Marx wrote them, said 'that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for the abolition of all class rule'. At the sub-committee's request, the words 'fore equal rights and duties, and' were inserted after 'but'. Moreover, to the paragraph in the preamble dealing with the rules of conduct for societies and individuals who joined the International, there was added a phrase stating that 'truth, justice and morality' would be the basis of their relationship to each other. On 1 November the General Council met to consider the 'General Rules' and the 'Inaugural Address'. In the debate which followed Marx's reading of the documents, objection was raised solely to the use of the word 'profitmongers' in the 'Address', and an amendment moved by Worley and Wheeler secured its deletion. After that, both documents were unanimously endorsed and, as Marx proudly reported to Engels, 'with great enthusiasm'. On a motion from Wheeler and Dell the General Council expressed its gratitude for 'so admirable an Address'.[11] Le Lubez undertook to translate the documents into French, Fontana into Italian and Marx, who had written them in English, into German.
In force and in the splendour of language the Inaugural Address bears no comparison with the Communist Manifesto. It lacks the overpowering vitality of the Manifesto with its eloquence and wide-ranging intellectual grasp, embracing at one and the same time a philosophy of history, a critical analysis of Socialist thought and a stirring appeal to revolutionary action.
It opens with a sober account of the blatant contrast between the intoxicating growth of England's wealth and the desperate impoverishment of its working class. It goes on to describe the crippling effects of the defeat of the revolution in 1848, after which 'the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasmus and political reaction' and the masses sank into an unprecedented apathy.
Despite all this, the period from 1848 to 1864 was not, in Marx's view, 'without its compensating features'. In particular, working-class progress had been notable for 'two great facts'. The first of these was the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which Marx welcomed in the 'Address', not only because of the 'immense physical, moral and intellectual benefits' which greater leisure brought to the factory workers, but also as 'the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class'.
Marx went on to describe 'a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property', in the growth of the co-operative movement, particularly the co-operative factories. He explained that 'the value of these great social experiments cannot be overstated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production in a large scale and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands'; and that 'like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind and a joyous heart'. But co-operation, he went on, could be successful as a means for emancipating the working class 'only if it were developed to national dimensions…to be fostered by national means'. For this, political power would be needed, and therefore, 'to conquer political power has become the great duty of the working classes'.
Marx then turned to the struggle of the working class for political power. Of the workers, he pointed out that 'one element of success they possess—numbers; but numbers weigh only in the balance if united by combination and led by knowledge'. But past experience had shown too often and too clearly 'how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts'. That thought, Marx was sure, had moved the meeting in St Martin's Hall to found the International Association.
If the working classes of the various countries were dependent on each other for success in their common struggles, an important political conclusion followed. 'If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence,' Marx asked, 'how are they to fulfil that great mission, with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs playing upon national prejudices and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure?' He reminded his readers of how the danger of a British war against the northern states of America had been averted by the resistance of the working class, and in contrast, of the 'idiotic indifference with which the upper classes of Europe have witnessed…heroic Poland being assassinated by Russia…that barbarous power whose head is at St Petersburg and whose hands are in every Cabinet of Europe.'
These experiences, concluded Marx, reverting a little to the 'old boldness of speech' of the Communist Manifesto, 'have taught the working classes the duty to master for themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective Governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in simultaneous denunciation, and to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice which ought to govern the relations of private individuals as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations'. He closed the Address with the same slogan with which he had ended the Communist Manifesto of 1848—'Proletarians of all countries, unite!'
The principles of the International were formulated by Marx in the preamble with which he introduced the 'General Rules', the basic proposition being 'that the emancipation of the working classes must be won by the working classes themselves' and would never be obtained, as the utopians liked to delude themselves, from the enlightenment and benevolence of the ruling class.
Marx then identified the central aim of the working-class struggle for freedom. It was not a struggle 'for class privileges and monopolies' but for the total 'abolition of all class rule'. This was derived from Marx's vision of the historical outcome of class struggles in the contemporary world. Since the workers were impelled by their social position to fight for a social order which would rest on the common ownership of the means of production, free, therefore, from exploitation and servitude, they would overcome the division of society into classes and the domination of one class by another.
The next principle enunciated in the preamble embodies the essence of Marx's social philosophy. He explained that since 'the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopolizer of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation and political dependence…the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means'.
Finally, the preamble referred to the universal character of the working-class struggle. Up to that time all attempts at emancipation had been foiled by lack of solidarity between the working classes of the world 'and from the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries'. But the emancipation of the workers was neither a local nor a national but a social problem which embraced all nations where modern society existed. From this there followed the necessity of a workers' International.
Up to this point the principles of the International, as expounded in the preamble to the Rules, while implying revolutionary aims had avoided a direct appeal for revolutionary action. After the preamble the Rules went on to stipulate, in ten paragraphs, the aims of the International and its forms of organization. Its name was the International Working Men's Association. Its aim was to serve as a central medium of communication and co-operation between workers' organizations in different countries. Its supreme authority was to be the annual congress, at which all affiliated bodies would be represented by delegates—one for each body, irrespective of its strength, up to 500 members, with additional delegates for each further 500 members.
The first congress was to meet in Belgium in 1865 to 'proclaim the common aspirations of the working class'. The congress was to elect the General Council and decide on its place of residence. The General Council would elect from among its own members the president, treasurer, general secretary and corresponding secretaries and could add to its numbers through co-option. It had to submit to Congress an annual report of its activities.
The International Working Men's Association was intended to be a genuine brotherhood of toil, and the two concluding paragraphs of the Rules referred to its members as 'united in a perpetual bond of fraternal co-operation' and undertook to provide every member, on removing his domicile from one country to another, with 'the fraternal support of the Associated Working Men'.[12]
1. In a letter (of 29 February 1860) to the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, Marx wrote: '… since November 1852 when, on my suggestion, the [Communist] League was dissolved, I have not belonged to any secret or open society, and thus, the party, in this ephemeral meaning, has not existed for me for the past eight years.…I am convinced that my theoretical work benefits the working classes more than participation in any sort of league for which the time is past on the Continent.…If you are a poet, I am a critic, and I really have enough of the experiments carried out between 1849 and 1852. The League, just like the Société des Seasons of Paris, like the hundreds of other societies, was an episode in the history of the party which is growing spontaneously everywhere on the soil of contemporary society'—Fr. Mehring, 'Freiligrath und Marx in ihrern Briefwechsel', in supplement to Die Neue Zeit (1911–12), pp. 42–3.
2. Karl Marx, Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848–50 and Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.
3. Karl Marx, Briefe on Kugelmann, 29 November 1864 (London, 1936), p. 26.
4. Quoted in D. Riazanov, op. cit., p. 192.
5. Karl Diehl, 'P.-J. Proudhon, seine Lehre und sein Leben', Part II, in Sammlung nationalókonomischer und statistischer Abhandlungen (1890), vol. VI.
6. Minutes of the German Council, 4 July 1871.
7. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: the Story of his Life (1936), pp. 330–44, 396–400. For a detailed investigation of the frictions between Marx and the General German Workers' Association, led by Schweitzer, see Robert Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International 1864–1872 (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 43–57.
8. The demand for the common ownership of the means of production had been made explicit by Marx in the Communist Manifesto as part of a programme which is still of considerable interest. A number of proposals which must have seemed utopian when they first appeared, have since been realized. It reads: 'The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by decrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.…These measures will of course be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries, the following will be fairly generally applicable:
9. Minutes of the General Council, 5 October 1864.
10. Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, vol. III, p. 236.
11. Professor Beesly considered the Inaugural Address as 'probably the most striking and powerful defence of the case of the workers against the middle class' (Fortnightly Review, November 1870).
12. The Provisional Rules endorsed by the General Council were discussed in detail by the first congress of the International in Geneva (September 1866) and approved with minor changes. The final form of the Rules was decided by the London Conference in September 1871. For the text, see Appendix One.