In the Franco-Prussian War and in the Paris Commune the International had proved itself not, indeed, as a political power, since it had not the strength to influence the course of events, but as an ideological fraternity whose members had remained true to their principles through one of the crises of history. The Socialists of France and Germany had resisted the flood of chauvinism which the war had unleashed in both countries. They had fraternized across the fighting lines—a 'great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past'. And, after the defeat of the French Empire, the German Socialists had been proud to incur the charge of being 'traitors' by their attitude to the Peace Treaty. They had called openly in Parliament, at mass meetings, in published manifestoes and in their Press for an honourable peace with France, and had protested against the seizure of her territory. A delegate conference of the International, meeting in London at the beginning of September 1871, declared in a resolution that 'the German workers had done their duty during the Franco-German War'.
The Paris Federation of the International had no part in the rising of the workers, who seized power against the advice of the General Council. But once the Commune had been proclaimed, the General Council made its cause their own. In the middle of the fight between the Paris Commune and the Versailles government, the International co-operated with other organizations in arranging a mass meeting in Hyde Park on 12 April 1871 to send greetings to the Commune from the workers of London. And after the fall of the Commune, the International had proudly identified itself with its cause, undeterred by the host of enemies which this inevitably provoked.
This spontaneous act of solidarity evoked a tremendously sympathetic response in many sections of the International, particularly in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany. After the Belgian Minister of Justice had insulted the defenders of the Commune in Parliament, and had called for the extradition of the refugees, the Belgian Federation of the International declared on 5 June 1871: 'We solemnly greet the Paris Commune in its hour of temporary defeat.…We recognize that the Commune served the cause of all mankind, and that those who fought for it deserve the sympathy and respect of all men of good will.' And when Bismarck derided the Commune in the German Parliament, Bebel, the only Social Democratic representative in the first Parliament of the new-born German Reich, replied: 'You may rest assured that the entire working class of Europe, as well as all those who still care anything for freedom and independence, see, in Paris, their symbol of hope.' That Bebel was expressing the view of his entire party was made clear when, a few days after the defeat of the Commune, while the bourgeois Press of Germany was demanding from the Social Democrats a formal repudiation of the 'outrage', the Volksstaat wrote: 'We declare our complete solidarity with the Commune and are prepared to defend its actions at any time, against anybody.' After an expression of 'mourning for our fallen brothers', the Volksstaat replied to the 'naïve impertinence' of the bourgeois Press by printing Freiligrath's 'Song of Triumphant Revolution':
Once more will I appear before the nations, Stand on your necks, your heads, your crowns; Liberator, avenger and judge, with sword unsheathed I raise a mighty arm to save the world.
But hopes of a speedy return of the revolution were doomed to disappointment. With the defeat of the Paris Commune, the only centre of revolutionary power from which the initiative for European revolution could spread had been destroyed. When, after the Lausanne Congress of September 1867, Marx had written to Engels about 'the next revolution, which is perhaps nearer than it appears',[1] it was France which he had mainly in mind. Anticipation of a revolution in France was not at that time a fond illusion of revolutionary dreamers. Many respectable members of the middle class also thought it inevitable. In vain had Louis Bonaparte tried to enlist the sympathies of the workers and the middle class. Workers and bourgeois, Orléanists and Legitimists, despised him as a usurper and detested his regime as the embodiment of corruption and police tyranny. The adventurous foreign policy in which the emperor indulged in his neurotic craving for glory was bound one day to involve his regime in crisis. It was widely believed in Paris that when that happened it would bring with it the chance of overthrowing him.
At that time Marx saw other signs of reviving revolutionary pressures. Ireland, in the 1860s, was undergoing a nationalist ferment. In that country the national and social revolutions seemed indissolubly linked. The land—the sole source of livelihood for most of its people—was in the hands of the absentee English aristocracy. Year after year thousands of impoverished and land-hungry Irishmen emigrated to America, or as sweated labour to England. In addition, British sovereignty in Ireland represented the domination of a Protestant ruling class over a Catholic nation. The Irish revolution, for which the Fenians, a secret society of revolutionary nationalists, worked, was intended to free the people from the political as well as the economic domination of foreign heretics.
An uprising had been planned for 1865, but the British government struck first with mass arrests of the Fenians. In spite of this, revolutionary outbreaks occurred in 1866 and 1867. When they were suppressed, the Fenians responded with terrorist activities in England. In September 1867, a few days after the Lausanne Congress, armed Fenians in Manchester attacked in broad daylight a police van carrying two Fenians. They shot the policemen and freed the prisoners. In December, Fenians tried to break into Clerkenwell prison in London by blowing up the walls. Twelve people were killed and over a hundred injured. England was seized by panic. As the real culprits could not be found, some of the large number of arrested Fenians were charged with murder and three of them, despite the lack of any conclusive evidence, were executed.
Marx spoke on the General Council of the need to support the Irish struggle, in spite of the unpopularity which this would inevitably incur. At his suggestion, the General Council called a meeting in London which protested in the name of justice and political wisdom against the intention of executing the Fenians. Marx also proposed an address to the Irish people in which the International would declare its solidarity with their struggle.
Marx's Irish policy was the subject of a vehement debate on the General Council, extending over three sessions.[2] Thomas Mottershead spoke strongly against Irish independence. An independent Ireland, he argued, owing to its geographical position between England and France, would threaten the security of England. An English withdrawal from Ireland would be followed by a French occupation. At a subsequent meeting, a letter from the Chartist veteran, George Julian Harney, who had emigrated to Boston, was read out, in which he protested against the attitude of the International to the Irish Question: 'Ireland,' he wrote, 'is an integral part of the British Empire.'
Marx, however, convinced the General Council that the English working class must in its own interest support the Irish cause. In order to further the socialist revolution in England, it was in Ireland that the decisive blow had to be struck. Ireland provided the main bulwark for English landlordism; it could not be overthrown in Ireland without succumbing in England too. Such a development would deprive the English landlords not only of substantial revenues but also of considerable prestige as the visible representatives of English domination. On the other hand, by helping to maintain the landlord's power in Ireland, the English workers were making them invulnerable at home. Marx reminded his audience that the English Republic had foundered on Cromwell's Irish policy. 'Finally, what ancient Rome demonstrated on an enormous scale is being repeated in our day in England. The people which oppresses another people forges its own chains.'[3]
Marx did not of course expect any immediate repercussions in the British Labour movement, of Ireland's national struggle. What he did hope for was that the Irish revolution would undermine the power of the English landed aristocracy and that a union of the British working class with the revolutionary Irish would revive the fighting spirit of the British workers, as during the Chartist days. He saw as the immediate task of the British trade-union movement the setting-up of an independent workers' party which, like the Chartists, set its sights on the conquest of political power. The struggle for electoral reform seemed to him most important, since it 'galvanized' the British workers once more and opened the way for their entry through Parliament into the key positions of political power. The revolutionary initiative would, he wrote, be taken by France. But he saw in England the only great power which could serve 'as a lever for a serious economic revolution', because it was the only country in which landed property was concentrated into large units, where capitalist production was completely dominant and where the workers constituted a majority of the population.
After the fall of the Commune, however, it was clear that there could be no new revolutionary initiative in France for a considerable time. True, the Commune, in going down to defeat, had not involved the International in its ruin. But the terrible bloodshed which the revolutionary movement had suffered in France—its best members killed in battle, executed, deported or compelled to flee the country—and the reign of terror which followed the triumph of the counter-revolution, had destroyed organized Socialism in France, which had been one of the mainstays of the International.
Nevertheless, reaction was powerless to extirpate the idea of the International from the minds of the workers. On 20 July 1872, for example, the Paris correspondent of the Swiss Revue reported on the mood of the French workers following their defeat: 'The workers are quiet. They are rebuilding their trade unions, revising the rules in conformity with the law. But their hearts are with the International, in the graveyards [of the Commune's martyrs] with the departed'. In the same month, the Paris correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse reported:
An active movement is going on in working-class circles. The workers are forming trade-union circles in place of the branches of the International which have been dissolved. They meet diligently in cafés, with room for several thousand people, which are still too small for the numbers present.…The speakers display a liveliness, and even a passion, which justifies one in thinking that the optimism which used to prevail among the people of Paris has by no means given way to quiescence.[4]
It was, indeed, the Paris Commune which provided the impetus for the expansion of the International in Italy. Before the proclamation of the Commune, the movement in that country had been feeble. It is true that as early as 1866 Bakunin had gathered round him a circle of young revolutionary idealists—Carlo Gambuzzi, Alberto Tucci, Saverio Friscia, Guiseppe Fanelli and Stefano Caporusso—but Mazzini still controlled the working-class movement. The advent of the Commune shattered the workers' faith in Mazzini. That heroic struggle had fired their enthusiasm; they regarded the cause of the Commune as their own. But Mazzini condemned it in a furious attack in the columns of La Roma del Popolo, and condemned the International along with the Commune, for which he held it responsible. With this, Garibaldi ended his long association with Mazzini. Garibaldi had offered his sword to the Commune, and he now paid tribute to the International as the 'sun of the future'. At the same time, Bakunin, in two vigorously worded leaflets,[5] shattered Mazzini's influence over the working-class organizations in northern Italy which transferred their alliance to the International, constituting its Italian federation.
Bakunin saw in the rapid expansion of the International in Italy the sure signs of an early revolution. He was, as Alexander Herzen had pointed out, always prone to mistake 'the second month of pregnancy for the ninth'. He now regarded Italy as the leading revolutionary country. In April 1872 he wrote to his Spanish friend, Francisco Mora: 'In Italty they have what other countries lack, a younger generation bursting with energy, without position, without career, without hope, a generation which, despite its bourgeois origins, is not yet drained of its intellectual and moral fibre.…Today it is throwing itself head over heels into the revolutionary Socialist movement.'[6]
In Spain, which had been in a state of chronic revolution since the end of the 1860s, laws against the International remained ineffective. The organization continued to grow. According to a report delivered at its Córdoba Congress in December 1872, the Spanish Federation embraced 101 local federations, with 332 trade-union branches, 66 other affiliated local groups and 10 sections consisting of individual members.
In Germany, the party's courageous opposition to the Franco-German War had been unpopular with the mass of the people and had led to a decline in membership. When the Eisenach party held its third congress at Dresden in August 1871, it had only 6,225 members from 81 localities. A year previously, at its second congress held in Stuttgart in June 1870, its membership had been 13,147, organized in 113 local branches. Admittedly, the German workers' movement was still suffering from the split between Eisenachers and Lassalleans. Yet both sections united for the elections to the Reichstag called by Bismarck, fresh from the triumph of his Peace Treaty with France, for 3 March 1871. The combined list secured about 100,000 votes—roughly three per cent of the total poll. At the second elections to the Federal Parliament, held in January 1874, the Socialist vote was over 350,000.
On the position in Austria after the fall of the Commune, we have already referred to the memorandum by Schmidt-Zabierow, head of the Civil Service, in June 1872. It said that the 'more decisive attitude of European governments against the entire Labour movement', and the prosecutions of its leaders, had caused it to proceed with 'far more caution'. 'In spite of this,' the memorandum continued, 'it cannot be claimed that the Social Democratic Workers' movement had ceased or declined in Austria.' The memorandum recorded a total of 197 Social Democratic organizations consisting of educational associations, craft societies and trade unions.[7] At the same time, four Social Democratic papers were appearing: Der Volkswille in Vienna, Die Gleichheit in Wiener Neustadt, Die Freiheit in Graz and the Delnické Listy in Prague.
Switzerland was hardly touched by the wave of reaction which swamped other European countries after the fall of the Commune. The Labour movement welcomed the establishment of the Commune, followed its struggle with enthusiasm, and after its fall gave hospitality to all refugees who reached Switzerland. They answered Thiers's demand that all Communard refugees be handed back to France as common criminals with mass demonstrations defending the right of asylum. The events in France, and in particular the influx of French refugees, revived the local sections of the International, especially in French-speaking Switzerland.
In Holland the International had been expanding steadily since the end of the 1850s. Its first section, founded in Amsterdam in August 1869, provided it with an organ, De Standaart des Volks, and soon afterwards sections were formed in Rotterdam, Arnhem, Haarlem and Utrecht. Two other papers were soon established—De Werkman in Amsterdam and Die Volksblad in Rotterdam. The white terror unleashed by the counter-revolution in France helped to radicalize the working class of Holland, where the International soon took hold.
In Denmark the fall of the Paris Commune precipitated the formation of the first section of the International. In July 1871 there appeared the first number of a Socialist paper, the Social-Demokraten, and a month later the 'International Workers' Association' constituted itself a section of the International.
In only two countries, however, was there evidence of an active mass movement of the working class following the fall of the Commune. These were Belgium and Britain. In Belgium the number of workers who sympathized with the aims of the International ran into tens of thousands, though the number of regular members was of course much smaller. But even these were by no means negligible, since the Social Democratic papers being published at the time in Belgium included L'Internationale and Liberté in Brussels, De Werker in Antwerp, Le Mirabeau in Verviers, Voorruit in Bruges and Le Devoir in Liège.
In England both the number of local branches of the International and its individual membership were small. Its strength, however, rested on its affiliated trade-union membership. Some of the leading trade unionists in Britain had served on the General Council, a fact which brought it considerable political prestige. As early as 1866, a conference of trade unions had recommended organizations affiliated to it to join the International. At the Basle Congress in 1869, Applegarth gave the number of trade-union affiliations as twenty-eight. In November 1870, a meeting of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council declared its solidarity with the International and its support for 'all their actions in all countries of the world'. In January 1871, the Birmingham Trades Council also affiliated to the International, declaring in a resolution that it was 'convinced that the realization of the principles of the International would lead to lasting peace among the nations of the world'. The Minutes of the General Council for this period show some evidence that trade-union interest in, and support for, the International might be increasing.
The British trade unions had not as yet set up a working-class political party, and there was no organized Socialist movement. Moreover, organizations affiliated to the International in Britain did not, as in other countries, form their own national federation until the autumn of 1871. Up to that time, the General Council functioned as the executive of both the British section and the world movement. In Britain, therefore, the General Council had fulfilled a political function of the kind which in other countries was performed by federal councils or, as in the case of Germany, by Social Democratic parties. The General Council had helped to initiate the campaign for electoral reform in Britain. After the congress at Basle had come out in favour of the public ownership of land, the General Council in London helped to establish the Land and Labour League in October 1869, to campaign for the Basle decisions. It had also taken the initiative in organizing mass meetings to demand the recognition of the French Republic and the release of the Fenian prisoners, and to oppose the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine.
Above all, the General Council gave world-wide publicity to the struggles of the British trade unions. Many of these episodes have already been described. Perhaps the most outstanding was the strike of the Newcastle engineers for a nine-hour day in 1871 which led directly to the establishment of the Nine-Hour League. At first the employers had tried to bring in workers from Dundee and London. When both English and Scottish workers refused to act as strike-breakers, the employers' organization sent agents to the Continent. Hundreds of German, Norwegian, Danish and Belgian workers, knowing nothing of the strike, accepted work in Newcastle. The Nine-Hour League approached the General Council, asking it to make use of international connections to stop the influx of foreign labour. The General Council at once sent two of its members, Cohen and Eccarius, to the Continent. With the help of the International's European sections and of their newspapers they stopped the enrolment of foreign strike-breakers. The foreign workers who had already arrived in Newcastle agreed to return home as soon as they learned the facts about the strike.
The struggle of the Newcastle engineers became a national issue. At mass meetings the workers protested against the import of foreign strike-breakers, while the manufacturers defended in the Press their right to employ whom they pleased. The dispute lasted for nearly three months—from 25 May to 11 August 1871—and ended with the complete success of the strikers, who won their nine-hour day. Never again was it possible to bring foreign strike-breakers into England—a success to which the International had powerfully contributed.
This brief survey of the state of the International after the fall of the Commune is sufficient to show that the defeat, and even the government prosecutions which followed, had not destroyed its vitality. Admittedly, it had suffered heavy losses, since with the destruction of the movement in France it had lost one of its main centres of power. But in the other continental centres its influence had hardly declined; in England it had actually gained in strength and importance and to the bourgeois world in general it still seemed a formidable power.
However, the impression of strength and unity which the International presented was deceptive, and the organization was soon to be undermined by internal schism. In itself, the fact that the General Council's 'Address on the Civil War in France' had started an embarrassing personal conflict on the Council which led to the resignation of George Odger and Benjamin Lucraft, two of its most important members, was of little consequence. The incident was well publicized in the British Press and has been described by many historians as a major crisis. But the Minutes of the General Council for the period do nothing to confirm this. Nor do they confirm the contemporary legend that Marx had tricked the General Council over the Address by adding the signatures of its members without their knowledge.
As the Minutes make clear, the General Council, together with Marx, had taken full responsibility for the document. On 28 March, ten days after the proclamation of the Commune, the Council had instructed Marx to draft an Address to the French People; it had elected an editorial committee—Milner for England, Serraillier for France and Junge for Switzerland—to finalize the Address, and it resolved that the final document was to be signed by all its members. Marx's prolonged illness delayed the draft, which the editorial committee had to discuss at his bedside. It was only on 30 May that Marx was able to submit the Address to the General Council. Moved by Weston and seconded by Robin, it was carried unanimously and the secretary was instructed to have it printed immediately and to send copies to M.P.s and the Press.
The Address, which hailed the defenders of the Commune as martyrs, provoked a storm of protest in the newspapers. Many of them accused Odger and Lucraft of making common cause with the 'vagabonds and incendiaries' of the Commune. The two trade-union leaders were absent when the Address was discussed on the General Council, but they had been told about it, had approved its general line and had agreed that their names should be included among the signatories. In face of the Press attacks, however, they decided to abandon both the Commune and the General Council. Appearing at the Council's meeting on 20 June, in which Odger and Lucraft were opposed by all the other English members, they announced their resignation from the Council. Nobody else followed their example. Robert Applegarth, who wrote apologizing for his absence from the meeting, expressed the view that 'the names of the General Council's members are the property of the General Council' and that it was entitled to publish statements in the name of all its members.[8]
After this episode, the General Council continued with its normal agenda. Although the resignation of these two prominent leaders inevitably lessened the International's prestige in trade-union circles, it remained an isolated event. Trade unions continued to avail themselves of the General Council's services as before. When, a few months later, in the autumn of 1871, an English Federal Council was established, a number of branches appeared in some of the main towns of England, Scotland and Ireland.[9] Despite the attacks on the 'Address' from Odger and Lucraft, and widespread denunciations in the Press, the General Council continued to push its sales. The first edition of a thousand copies, published at the beginning of June, was soon sold out. At the end of the month, a second edition of 2,000 copies, and at the end of July, a third edition of a further 1,000, were ordered. The 'Address' was also translated into German, Flemish, French, Dutch, Spanish and Russian and published in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the United States. The German translation appeared in the Volksstaat as well as in a pamphlet of 8,000 copies.
The crisis to which the International eventually succumbed originated neither in the tragedy of the Commune nor in the resignation of Odger and Lucraft but in the conflict between Anarchism and Marxism, a conflict over the aims of Socialism, the methods of achieving the social revolution and the organizational forms of the International. Moreover, like other ideological conflicts in the history of social and religious movements, this soon degenerated into a bitter personal antagonism between the members of the two wings and became personalized in the form of a struggle between Marx and Bakunin.
It was a battle of Titans, each expressing a powerful messianic urge. In temperament, the protagonists were poles apart. Marx was methodical and realistic, Bakunin exuberant, romantic and an idealist. Marx based his theory of Socialism on the facts of history and on the actual development of capitalist society. Bakunin's Anarchism seemed to him a farrago of muddled utopian fantasy.[10]
For Marx, Socialism was the outcome of highly developed capitalism, which produced, in the form of an intellectually mature and highly organized working class led by a Socialist party, the prerequisites of social revolution. Bakunin, on the other hand, saw even in the semifeudal economic institutions of Italy, Spain and Russia the ever-present conditions for a social revolution which would germinate out of the poverty and desperation of the agricultural masses in particular. It seemed to him therefore a comparatively simple matter to unleash revolution almost anywhere and at almost any time. He wrote of the Russian people, for example, as being 'in such a desperate state that it would cost no effort to organize an uprising in any selected village'. He did not consider the culturally advanced workers to be good revolutionary material, since they were 'infected with a bourgeois outlook'. He placed his hopes on the declassed sons of bourgeois parents, on the mass of the peasantry and on that section of the working class which lived in the most degrading poverty in the slums of great cities—the lazzaronis in Naples, the gamins in Paris—that section of society which Marx called the Lumpenproletariat, 'the passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society', as he had defined it in the Communist Manifesto. Like Blanqui, Bakunin was 'a revolutionary of the previous generation'.
The technique of revolution advocated by Bakunin was the armed coup or the armed riot. He rejected the political struggle of the workers for state power, as he rejected all political action which did not directly and immediately serve the revolution. He saw the aim of the social revolution as being not the conquest, but the destruction, of state power, and its final outcome as Anarchism, the stateless federation of communes free from all outside coercion and authority.
Marx also envisaged a free, untrammeled community without any form of state power as the ultimate outcome of the class struggle. In the future, he was convinced, there would be no coercive power of the state but only a free, self-governing people enjoying all the benefits of communal freedom, 'an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all'. But this ideal society could not be established by any sudden dramatic act of revolution on Bakuninist lines. Marx saw the political power of the state as a function of a social system based on private property in the means of production, the outcome of a society divided into classes, an instrument of domination wielded by the exploiting classes. 'Political power, properly so-called,' he had written in the Communist Manifesto, 'is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.' The state, he argued, would therefore 'wither away' in a classless society, since it would lose its function as an instrument of class domination. 'When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.' The working class must therefore, he explained, wrest state power from the ruling classes and then use it as an instrument for destroying class rule before finally dispensing with the state as a political mechanism. When once the working class 'makes itself the ruling class, and as such sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class'. Later, during his controversy with Bakunin, Marx wrote that 'when once the aim of the proletarian movement to abolish all classes has been realized, there must then disappear the power of the state, which serves to keep the great productive majority under the yoke of a tiny minority of exploiters. The function of government will then change into one of simple administration.'[11]
The conflict between Marx and Bakunin, however, flared up not on these theoretical disagreements but on the question of how the International was to be organized. When as early as 1847 Marx had discussed with his fellow members of the Communist League the idea of an International, he had thought of it as an integral part of the Labour movement in the various countries, and as a democratic party rather than as a secret society or an insurrectionary conspiracy. He applied the same idea in his work on the General Council. He saw the International as a body which would unite the Labour movements of the world as a federation of regional Socialist and workers' organizations affiliated as sections to the International. On this the General Council based its claim to act as the executive of the world movement.
At first Bakunin had raised no objection to this centralization of authority within the International. At the Basle Congress in 1869 he had even supported an extension of the General Council's authority, voting in favour of its right to suspend sections of the International, subject to ratification by the following congress. But even at this time, Bakunin had already decided to try to use the International as an instrument of his own ideas, and to wrest the leadership from Marx. He made this clear in a letter which he wrote to Alexander Herzen a month after the Basle Congress. Even here he acknowledged the 'vast services' which Marx had given to the 'cause of Socialism, which he has served for more than twenty-five years with intelligence, energy and integrity'. If now, as seemed likely, he began a struggle with Marx, this was certainly 'not to attack him personally, but only as a matter of principle, because of the State Communism which he advocates and which the English and Germans, under his leadership, are supporting. This would make it a life-and-death struggle.'
Although Marx can never have seen this letter to Herzen, he did not need it to be convinced of Bakunin's intention to dominate the International. Bakunin's entire attitude to the organization made this only too clear. Soon after its foundation, Bakunin had joined on Marx's invitation and promised to work for it in Naples, when he arrived there from London in the autumn of 1864. Instead of this, however, Bakunin proceeded to found an independent, revolutionary and secret 'International Brotherhood' under his personal control. After moving to Geneva in 1867, he refrained from joining the local section of the International, but instead affiliated, together with his secret society, to the League for Peace and Freedom and tried to use it to further his ideas. Failing there, he founded in the autumn of 1868 a new organization, the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which he intended to affiliate to the International as a distinct branch. It would perhaps be unfair to Bakunin to suggest that he founded the Alliance with the deliberate intention of using it as an instrument for controlling the International. When the Alliance formally applied to the General Council for affiliation in December 1868, Bakunin wrote to Marx: 'My fatherland is now the International, of which you are among the most prominent members. You see therefore, my dear friend, that I am your disciple, and proud to be one.'[12]
But the organizational form which Bakunin had given his Alliance increased Marx's misgivings. According to its Rules it was intended to be an International within the International, with its own sections, national officers, central committee and congress. An International which consisted of two rival groups, each with its own separate machinery and structure, could not for long remain a united body. Marx felt justified in concluding that the real object of the Alliance was to enable Bakunin to seize control of the International.
Bakunin's own views on the purpose of the Alliance were expressed in a letter which he wrote to his Spanish supporters in the spring of 1872. The organization was to serve as the General Staff in future revolutions. He did not believe that the International 'was capable of organizing and leading the revolution'. If the aim of the International was to set the army of the revolution in battle-order, the task of the Alliance was 'to provide the International with a revolutionary organization'. To fulfil this role, the Alliance was necessarily organized by Bakunin as a secret society. Its members were to act 'as invisible pilots amid the storm of popular emotion'. The revolution could not be 'led by any visible power; leadership could come only from the collective dictatorship of all members of the Alliance'. Its members must be prepared, said Bakunin, to subordinate their personal freedom to a strict discipline modelled on that of the Jesuits in which 'the individual is lost in the collective will, in the life and activity of the organization'.[13]
In the eyes of the General Council, any Alliance built on lines envisaged by Bakunin could encompass only the ruin of the International. It therefore refused to allow that body to affiliate. Whereupon the Alliance declared itself ready to dissolve as an independent international organization, and to transform its branches into sections of the International. To this, the General Council raised no objection, and the affiliation of the Geneva section, led by Bakunin himself, was agreed to unanimously. In this way, Bakunin was able to attend the Basle Congress as a fully accredited delegate of the Geneva section.
It is pointless to speculate as to whether the Alliance was in fact dissolved, as stated by Bakunin's followers, or whether it continued in secret, as asserted by Marx and his supporters. It was a simple matter for Bakunin, with his magnetic personality, to gather round him at any time a flock of fervent disciples with whom he naturally remained in close personal contact. Bakunin, in effect, came to control the International's sections in Italy through Andrea Costa, in Spain through Francisco Mora and in French Switzerland through James Guillaume.[14] Bakunin's ideas were also disseminated through a number of journals—Progrès in Le Locle, edited by Guillaume, Égalité in Geneva, which had J. P. Becker on its editorial staff, Confédération in Barcelona, Equalità in Naples and Il Fascio operaio in Bologna.
Bakunin opened his attack on the General Council soon after the Basle Congress in September 1869. Égalité and Progrès subjected the activities of the General Council to a highly unfavorable examination, while at the same time Bakunin's supporters in French Switzerland were organizing with a view to taking over the Federation. In the course of this struggle the French Federation split at its congress at La Chaux-de-Fonds in April 1870 and, as Égalité had turned against him, Bakunin founded a new paper, Solidarité, in Neuchâtel, under the editorial control of Guillaume.
The split in the French Federation would, without doubt, have been one of the main subjects for discussion at the congress which had been arranged at Mainz for September 1870. But the opening of the Franco-German War prevented the International from holding its congress, and the persecution to which it was subjected after the defeat of the Commune in France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Austria, gave the General Council good reasons for postponing the congress for a further year. Instead, a private conference was called in London for September 1871.
The London Conference was attended by twenty-three delegates, including six Belgians, one Spaniard and thirteen members of the General Council. It was faced with problems much more serious than the quarrels in the French-Swiss Federation, particularly with the problem of what to do in the face of 'untrammelled reaction'. The resolution on this question—which was later to be violently opposed by the Bakuninists—stated that the workers could act against 'the combined power of the ruling classes' only by establishing a political party of their own which would oppose the entire complex of parties defending the interests of property. Such a party was indispensable for the social revolution, and for its final aim: the abolition of all classes.
The resolution, an important document of the First International which emphasized the imperative necessity of the political struggle of the working class for political power, stated the antithesis of the Bakuninist conception of 'abstention' from political struggle. Engels, who had submitted the resolution to the conference, exposed the contradiction in the Bakuninist theory. 'We want the abolition of classes,' he said. 'What are the means to this end? The political power of the proletariat.' Yet the 'abstentionists, who call themselves revolutionaries, refuse to recognize that revolution is', he said, 'the supreme action of policy, and if you want it, you must want also the means to achieve it, that is, the political action in preparation of the revolution—the education of the workers for the revolution': political freedom, the rights of assembly and association, the freedom of the Press. These are, he said, 'our weapons, and shall we fold our arms and apply the method of abstention', he concluded, 'if we are to be deprived of them?'[15]
The principle of the resolution—the need of an independent working-class party and its struggle for political power—was incorporated as Article 7a of the Statutes by the Hague Congress.
Another resolution adopted at the London Conference was indicative of the new political situation confronting the working class of Europe. It was decided to transfer responsibility for the movement in England from the General Council to a new Federal Council to be elected by the English sections. This move had first been broached in 1869[16] and the idea of it had also been raised in the columns of Égalité. At the time, Marx had still believed that the crisis in the French Empire could lead to a revolutionary situation in Europe. He convinced the General Council that it would be foolish to forfeit the influence over the English working class which the General Council possessed in its capacity as head of the English section. In a circular to the Federal Council of French Switzerland on 1 January 1870, the General Council replied to the proposal by Égalité which had provoked a lively discussion in that section. The circular maintained that England 'cannot be treated simply as one country among a number of other countries. She must be treated as the metropolis of capitalism.' Owing to its dominant position in the world market, England was 'the only country where every revolution in its economic conditions must react directly on the entire world'. She was, in short, the 'lever of a serious economic revolution' and it would be folly to let control of the lever slip from the hands of the General Council.[17]
By September 1871, however, when the London Conference assembled, the international Labour movement faced a very different situation. In France, counter-revolution had triumphed, and in Germany and Austria the workers' movement was paralysed. For the foreseeable future, no new revolutionary initiative could be expected anywhere in Europe. In England, too, the political development of the Labour movement had belied Marx's hopes of a new revolutionary situation. In the circular to the French-Swiss Federation already quoted, Marx, speaking for the General Council, had maintained that the English possessed all the material prerequisites for a social revolution. 'What they lack,' he added, 'is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour', and it was the task of the General Council to supply the deficiency.
The English workers had shown often enough, and most notably during the Chartist movement of the 1840s, that they were indeed capable of developing along revolutionary lines. After the great defeat of 1848, however, they began to abandon hope of revolution. They tried, by no means without success, to improve their conditions through trade-union pressure. By the 1860s, the struggle for parliamentary reform had galvanized them once again, but it had not turned them back to revolutionary paths. The English ruling class had also learned, from the history of revolutionary movements both in Europe and at home, that the danger of revolution might be averted by reform. To this consideration the English workers owed, in no small measure, their success in the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1867. From this experience, trade-union leaders drew the conclusion that it was possible to raise working-class living standards continuously through trade-union struggles, and that by exerting pressure on middle-class members of Parliament, further concessions could be secured. The Reform Bill gave the franchise to the working class in the towns, and with it an instrument with which they could bring pressure to bear on Parliament. And as the first General Election under the new franchise in 1868 resulted in the defeat of all working-class candidates, the trade-union leaders placed their hopes in an alliance with the progressive sections of the middle class—an alliance which was to last for more than thirty years. Since now and for the foreseeable future England could no longer be considered 'a lever of the proletarian revolution', it was hardly relevant to consider whether, in a revolution which was no recognized to be a long way off, the movement in Britain was to be led by the General Council or an English Federal Council.
Towards the end of the London Conference, some other important decisions were taken on organizational matters. In countries where the International had been made illegal, supporters were recommended to reorganize themselves under another name; at the same time it was strongly emphasized that secret societies were to remain excluded from the International. Conference recommended its supporters in France to organize themselves on a factory basis, while both sections of the French-Swiss Federation were urged to heal the split. The resolution remarked that 'considering the persecution to which the International is at present being subjected, the Conference appeals to the spirit of solidarity and unity which should now more than ever prevail among the workers'.
The appeal of the London Conference found no response among Bakunin's supporters. On 12 November 1871, six weeks after the conference, those sections of the French-Swiss Federation which Bakunin controlled—in fact, the old Alliance which was now calling itself the Jura Federation—called a congress of its own in Souvillier. A circular drafted by Guillaume was issued to all sections of the International's Federations in France, Belgium, Spain and Italy, accusing the General Council of exercising usurped and dictatorial powers. The General Council, it declared, had come to consider itself the 'legitimate head' of the International, and some people regarded their membership of the General Council as their 'personal property', giving them the right to force their personal opinions on the entire movement. 'As they constitute, in their own eyes,' the circular continued, 'a kind of government, it is only natural that their personal views are presented as the official theory of the International, and that the ideas of others appear not as equally legitimate expressions of opinion but as complete heresy.' The General Council was also trying to transform a free association of autonomous sections into a hierarchical organization subject to authoritarian powers. Hence, the circular proceeded with the charge: 'We accuse the members of the General Council of trying to introduce the principle of authority into the International, so as to bring about the triumph of their personal point of view.' It called on the Federations to reduce the status of the General Council at the next congress to that of a mere administrative office and 'to achieve such unity as we may by a free association of autonomous groups instead of by centralization and dictatorship'.
This resolution did not go far enough for the Italian section. At its congress at Rimini, held on 6 August 1872, it called for a complete break with the General Council and for a boycott of the congress of the International which was being called at The Hague in the following month. This resolution repudiated the appeal to the workers, made by the London Conference, to set up their own political party. This was merely an attempt 'to force on the International an authoritarian doctrine, the doctrine of the German Communist Party'. But, continued the Rimini resolution, the doctrine of the 'authoritarian Communists' could only 'injure the revolutionary spirit of the Italian proletariat'. The resolution went on to accuse the General Council of 'fraud and slander' and declared 'solemnly, before the workers of the world, that the Italian Federation of the International Working Men's Association renounces from this moment all solidarity between itself and the London General Council'.
The Anarchists in Switzerland and Italy were proposing in effect that the International, beleaguered by the forces of European reaction, should break up into its component parts. Marx's comment on the proposals was that 'they declare that anarchy on the proletarian side is the means of destroying that might concentration of political and social power in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext they demand that the International, at a time when the old world is striving to destroy it, should replace its organization with anarchy.'
After the London Conference, Bakunin, as we have seen, declared 'war to the knife' on Marx and Engels. Even before the conference he had declared his intention in a letter to Alexander Herzen of waging a fight 'against their false theories, their dictatorial presumptions and all kinds of underground intrigues, the idle plots of wretched individuals, foul insults and infamous slanders, so characteristic of the political struggles of almost all Germans and which they have now, unfortunately, dragged into the International'. Marx, he believed, was 'as a German and a Jew, an authoritarian from top to toe', while the General Council was a 'pan-German agency', a 'German committee guided by a brain like Bismarck's'.
Although Bakunin's complaints against the methods of his antagonists were not without foundation, he was not entirely free from the sins he attributed to Marx and Engels. This rather unpleasant episode in the war of the Titans belongs to the biographies of the main protagonists rather than to a history of the International. It is sufficient to say that Marx and Engels, with the full agreement of the General Council, stated their full case against Bakunin and Guillaume in the pamphlet already referred to, Les Prétendues Scissions dans l'Internationale, in time for the Hague Congress to pass its final verdict.[18]
The congress which opened at The Hague on 2 September 1872 had been anticipated with a good deal of tension by the Federations of the International. It was on the advice of the Belgian Federation that the General Council selected The Hague as the place in which to hold the congress, although the local section there was the most recently formed and the smallest in the International; according to Maltman Barry, a congress delegate, it had no more than twenty members. Hardly a centre of industry, The Hague was then a small and rather sleepy town, best known as the seat of the Dutch Court, Parliament and Ministries. The meeting of the 'terrible International', therefore, caused something of a sensation in the town.[19] According to Barry, the children had been warned 'not to go into the streets with articles of value upon them' as 'the International is coming and will steal them'. As the delegates arrived in groups, crowds followed them from the station to the hotel, 'the figure of Karl Marx attracting special attention, his name on every lip'. Barry described the huge attendance at the public meeting which concluded the congress:
An immense crowd blocked the street outside, making the ingress of members a work of no slight difficulty; and whenever the doors were opened it poured in like a flood. Soon every available spot was occupied, and some even that could not legitimately be expected to afford accommodation. Windowsills were not despised, and some lads clustered round the supporting iron pillars. The galleries also were crammed to suffocation.[20]
More countries were represented at The Hague than at any previous congress, the delegates arriving from Germany, Britain, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland and Ireland; there were also four delegates, including F. A. Sorge, from the United States. In accordance with the resolutions passed at Rimini, the Italian Federation boycotted the proceedings. The Hague was the first congress in which the Blanquists participated as delegates, and Vaillant, Ranvier, Cournet and Armand, all of them Communard refugees, were there as co-opted members of the General Council. Altogether, the congress accepted the credentials of sixty-one delegates.
To Marx, it seemed that the decision which the congress would have to make on the conflict between the Alliance and the General Council would be decisive for the entire future of the International. He told his friend Kugelmann that it would 'be a matter of life or death for the International; and before I retire I want at least to protect it from disintegrating elements'.[21] Marx himself went as delegate to The Hague—the first congress he had attended since the foundation of the International. Bakunin did not appear, his case being presented by a number of his followers under the leadership of Guillaume.
The debate on the conflict opened with a motion from Marx to expel the Alliance from the International. Congress elected a committee of five—three Frenchmen, a German and a Belgian—to examine his charges in detail. There followed discussions on the powers of the General Council, which had submitted a motion empowering it to suspend sections and federations between congresses. A Belgian, Désiré Brimée, was the first to oppose, on behalf of his delegation. He announced that a number of sections in Belgium had gone on record in favour of abolishing the General Council; others wanted to curtail its powers, but none wanted to increase them. Guillaume denied that the International needed any kind of 'head'. 'Has the General Council,' he asked rhetorically, 'ever led a class struggle, or built barricades? And is it likely to do so in the future?' The General Council, he concluded, was useless. Sorge reminded him of the solidarity actions which the General Council had organized in support of the French strikers, and pointed out that an International without a head would belong to a very low class of organism. Morgan then threatened that the Spanish section, on whose behalf he was speaking, would withdraw from the International if congress decided to strengthen the General Council's powers. Its function should be limited to dealing with correspondence.
Marx, replying for the General Council, said that it would be better to abolish the General Council than to degrade its status to that of a 'letter-box'. The General Council's powers of suspending sections and even federations were essential, since police informers and agents provocateurs could take control of branches. This had actually happened in France and Austria, and Bismarck was quite capable of doing the same thing in Germany. Since the General Council had no soldiers or armed forces at its disposal, said Marx, it had to rely on moral power based on the confidence of the membership. Even if the General Council were given complete and despotic powers, they would be useless if this confidence were lacking.
By a majority of thirty-two votes to six, with sixteen abstaining, the General Council was voted its extended powers. The German delegation voted solidly in favour, as did six out of the seven French delegates and a majority of the General Council. The Belgian, Durtch, Spanish and most of the English delegates voted against, while the Swiss were evenly divided, with two on each side.
Then Engels, in the name of Marx, Longuet, Serraillier, Dupont, Lessner and other members of the General Council, moved that the seat of the Council be moved to New York. Barry reported the consternation among the delegates as Engels read out his proposal.[22] 'It was some time before anyone rose to speak. It was a coup d'état, and each one looked to his neighbour to break the spell. At length Vaillant rose.' The International, he declared, had prospered exceedingly under the existing leadership and he saw no reason for changing it. Moreover, the seat of the General Council should be close to the fighting-line, that is, within easy reach of France and Germany. If it were moved to the other side of the Atlantic, that could only weaken its influence. Vaillant implored the members of the General Council, whose leadership had 'made the International Society the dread of kings and emperors', to add this one further sacrifice to those they had already made in the cause. When the question as to whether the General Council might move at all was put to the vote, there were twenty-six in favour, twenty-three against and nine abstentions. After that, thirty-one voted for the seat to be in New York, fourteen for remaining in London, and one each for Brussels and Barcelona.
Before the debate on the report by the Commission of Inquiry which had been looking into the affairs of the Alliance, Vaillant spoke strongly in support of the London Conference resolution on the necessity for the working class to set up its own parties and conduct its own independent political activities. The question had gained a certain poignancy from the fate of the revolutionary movement in France. Guillaume, speaking for the Anarchist delegates, protested against political activity by the workers and particularly against their struggling for state power. His characteristic remark on this was: 'We demand the complete destruction of the state as the embodiment of political power.' Longuet replied that if on 4 September 1870 the French workers had been politically organized, Thiers would not have been able to seize power. After that, the resolution was carried by twenty-four votes to four, with nine abstentions.
Next came the report of the Commission of Inquiry on the Alliance. It confirmed—by four votes, with the Belgian delegate as the sole dissenter—that a secret organization had existed, though it could not be conclusively proved that it still did so. It did establish, however, that Bakunin had tried to organize a secret society inside the International. Bakunin was also charged with fraud—unjustifiably, as later research was to show. On a motion by the Commission, Bakunin and Guillaume were expelled from the International. One member of the Commission of Inquiry, van Heddeghem, who had wormed his way into the International in France under the name of Walter, was later exposed as a police spy, as was the delegate d'Entragues, alias Swarm.
The Hague Congress was the last to be held by the First International, and in fact prepared the way for its dissolution. Since 1869 the International had been showing symptoms of disintegration. Its Federations in French Switzerland, Spain and Italy were won over to Bakunin and Anarchism, while the Belgian and Dutch Federations were clearly tending in the same direction. The movement in France was destroyed, and most of the Communard refugees who came to represent the French Federation were Blanquists. The triumph scored by the General Council in the voting at the Hague Congress demonstrated weakness rather than strength. It was secured mainly by the sixteen votes of its own members, who had come to the Hague Congress, together with the Germans and the French Blanquists. Even the English section could no longer be relied on for support. And if the Italian Federations had not decided to boycott the congress, it seems likely that the General Council would have lost.
Marx could now count merely on the support of Germany, German Switzerland and the Blanquist refugees from Paris; and even in Germany it was only the Eisenach party which supported him: the Lassalleans did not belong to the International and tended to sympathize with Marx's opponents. In England, where up to now Marx had been able to rely on solid support, first against the Proudhonists, then against Bakunin, an opposition was beginning to develop. Part of the English Federal Council which had been set up after the London Conference in the autumn of 1871, while not going over to the Anarchists, had come out against the centralism in the International's organization for which Marx stood. Moreover, Hales, for a time the secretary of the English Federation, had broken with Marx irreparably.[23]
The crisis in the International was basically a crisis of growth in the European working-class movement. As the Labour movement gained confidence and strength in one country after another, it began to resent the leadership of the General Council as an unwarrantable encroachment on its autonomy. Marx saw the International as the party of the working class in all countries, and the General Council as its leadership. But each of the individual Labour movements began to consider itself an independent party and to develop its own outlook and policy.
Some time before the congress at The Hague, Marx had made up his mind to retire from the General Council. The International had involved him in a tremendous amount of work, over and above the immense effort he put into finishing Das Kapital. He wrote innumerable letters on behalf of the International and drew up memoranda, circulars and addresses. Except when he was prevented by illness he attended all the weekly meetings of the General Council, and was available at all times to anyone wishing to discuss with him the affairs of the International. 'Apart from the boils, which tormented me hellishly, I got to bed last night, for instance, only at 4 a.m. …, the International takes up an enormous amount of time,' he remarked in a letter to Engels. The International, he complained in another letter, 'weighs on me like an incubus'. In other respects, too, the first five years of the International were among the most gloomy in Marx's life. He suffered painfully from carbuncles and was constantly harassed by financial worries. Work on his book and for the International allowed him scarcely any time or energy for earning a living. 'For two months already I have been living in fact on the pawnbroker and therefore with constantly heavier and daily more unbearable demands and pressures on me,' he wrote to Engels; and several months later he complained that 'the pawnshop—and my wife has pawned so much already that she can hardly go out herself—reminds me of its existence only through continual demands for interest. I therefore had to borrow left and right in London to meet even the barest expenditure. On the other hand the suppliers are threatening, and some have stopped credit and are threatening legal action.' In letter after letter to Engels, Marx repeated the same heart-breaking story. Engels was always ready to help and the friendship between the two men constituted also in this respect, as Mehring said, 'a bond without equal'. But for Marx it was 'indeed depressing to remain dependent half one's life'.[24] Despite all this, Marx did not spare himself and never thought of casting off the 'incubus' so long as there was the hope of doing useful work for the International.
After the Hague Congress this no longer seemed possible. The last task Marx set himself was to protect the International from the 'disintegrating elements', as he put it in his letter to Kugelmann, already quoted. As he saw it, the 'disintegrating elements' were the Blanquists and the Anarchists. Both groups stood for the conspiratorial approach to working-class politics that Marx abhorred, but they took a diametrically opposite view of the General Council. The Blanquists, seeing the Council as the centralized leadership of future revolutions, voted for an expansion of its powers, while the Anarchists would have liked to abolish it. What both groups had in common was a belief in conspiracies and coups as a substitute for sustained political activity. Both were equally 'revolutionaries of the previous generation'.
The first necessity for Marx was therefore to remove the General Council from London. Had he not done so, it would without doubt have been taken over, first by the Blanquists—those honoured heroes of the Commune who, after taking refuge in London, had been co-opted on to the General Council—and subsequently in all probability by the Anarchists. Under the direction of either of these groups, Marx feared, the International would be transformed into a conspiratorial clique and discredited for all time. From this fate he was determined to save the International at all costs. But it was far from easy to find a substitute for London as the seat of the General Council. Brussels, Amsterdam and Geneva were out of the question, as their Federal Councils had all opposed the authority of the General Council. In Italy, the Federation had gone further and broken with the Council completely. In France, Spain, Germany and Austria, the International was legally proscribed as a 'danger to the State'. Thus, New York remained the only feasible headquarters for the General Council. It was also Marx's view that the rapid industrial growth which he foresaw taking place in the United States, would create a powerful centre of the International Labour movement.
Some historians have assumed that in arranging for the General Council to move to New York, Marx deliberately planned the International's destruction. But this does not square with his solemn statement to a mass meeting in Amsterdam the day after the conclusion of the Hague Congress. He stressed solidarity as the 'fundamental principle' on which the International was based. 'The revolution must embody the principle of solidarity,' he said, 'and the great example of this is the Paris Commune, which fell because in Berlin, Madrid and the other great European capitals, there was no corresponding revolutionary outbreak to save the proletariat of Paris.' And he ended with the undertaking that 'so far as I am concerned, I shall continue with the task of building this fruitful solidarity of the working class for the future. I have no intention of retiring from the International, and for the remainder of my life, as in the past, I shall dedicate all my efforts to the triumph of those social ideas which will one day, we can be perfectly confident, inaugurate the rules of the working class.'[25]
However, the process of disintegration which had already set in was to prove irreversible. The Blanquist delegates had left The Hague as soon as the vote was taken to remove the General Council to New York. 'Challenged to do its duty, the International failed. To escape from the Revolution, it fled across the Atlantic,' was how the Blanquists justified their secession. And on 15 September, scarcely a week after the Hague Congress, the Anarchists called their own congress at Saint-Imier in Switzerland, which was attended by representatives of the Italian, Spanish and Jura Federations. The delegates included Bakunin, Guillaume, Costa, Malatesta and Cafiero. They unanimously repudiated the decisions of the Hague Congress, refused to recognize the General Council it had elected and declared themselves the legitimate representatives of the International Working Men's Association. They were recognized by the Belgian and Dutch Federations and by one of the two groups into which the British Federation had split.
The New York General Council which had been elected at the Hague Congress disavowed the dissident federations and called a congress at Geneva for September 1873. It was, as Marx admitted, a 'fiasco'. The General Council was unable to raise the travelling expenses for even one delegate, and among the twenty-eight who met in Geneva, only two represented foreign parties—an unnamed delegate from the Eisenachers and Heinrich Oberwinder from the Austrian party. The rest were either Swiss or Germans and Frenchmen resident in Switzerland. F. A. Sorge, who had accepted the post of secretary with some reluctance and only out of friendship to Marx, resigned in the following year. At a conference in Philadelphia in July 1876, with only the American Federation represented, the International was formally dissolved. The Philadelphia Conference was the last conference of the Marxist International.[26]
In the 'anti-authoritarian' International the process of disintegration was prolonged.[27] It held its first congress in Geneva at the beginning of September 1873, a week before the Marxist congress opened in the same city. Its claim to be the sixth congress of the International (the Hague Congress had been the fifth) was not without foundation, since most of the federations had come out in support, and it had representatives from England (Hales and Eccarius), Spain, France (including Paul Brousse, and L.-J. Pindy, a member of the Paris Commune), Belgium, Holland, Italy (including Andrea Costa) and French Switzerland. Even the Lassallean General German Workers' Association, though it could not affiliate for legal reasons, was favourably inclined. The congress provided the International with a new, 'anti-authoritarian' set of rules; replaced the General Council by a Bureau which had no power and confined its activities to dealing with correspondence; and abolished membership subscriptions.
The 'anti-authoritarian' International was a loose organization, 'without a head' as Guillaume had demanded, without leadership and, it can fairly be said, without a programme. Though created by the Anarchists—in particular by James Guillaume, together with the Spanish and Italian Federations—it contained federations which were not Anarchist but which had revolted against the authority of the General Council. The English, and of course the Lassalleans (who were represented at the second congress of the International by Fromme and Kersten), could be classified as Social Democrats, and the Belgians and Dutch were moving increasingly away from Anarchism towards a Social Democratic outlook. Even Guillaume, who had supported Bakunin so strongly against Marx, while he rejected political and parliamentary activity, was also against the Anarchist tactic of armed uprisings and political coups. Guillaume saw the trade unions as the effective instruments of working-class struggle and, at the same time, as the bodies through which the workers could take over the means of production. He was in fact rather a forerunner of syndicalism than an exponent of Bakuninist ideology.
The anti-authoritarian International held three further congresses—at Brussels in 1874, at Berne in 1876 and at Verviers in 1877. Without doubt it represented what was left of the international working-class movement. Its Italian and Spanish sections had become mass organizations; its Belgian section had through bitter and prolonged struggles brought thousands of workers into activity. Even the German Social Democrats, united at their Gotha Congress in 1875, were represented by Julius Vahlteich—at Berne. But once the 'honeymoon period' was over, it became apparent that the leaderless International could satisfy none of its affiliated bodies. The Belgians were soon demanding the re-establishment of the old International, and de Paepe, supported by the Dutch and French, proposed at Berne that a Socialist World Congress should be convened to consider the revival of the International. Against the opposition of the Anarchist Italian and Spanish Federations, the proposal was carried by a majority at the congress.
The Socialist World Congress, which met at Ghent on 9 September 1877, aroused keen hopes and was welcomed by an impressive demonstration of Belgian workers. A procession of 'at least 10,000' marched through the town to celebrate the opening of the congress. At its conclusion, a public meeting was called in the Parnass, which could hold 1,800 people. The assembly rooms and galleries were 'packed to suffocation well before the appointed time'.[28] In the Socialist World Congress at Ghent the Belgian workers saw a reincarnation of the old International.
This was in fact the first congress since the Hague Congress which was in any way representative of international labour. It was attended by delegates from Germany, Hungary and Greece, and by leaders of the stature of Liebknecht, Greulich, de Paepe, Bertrand, Anseele, Hales, Frankel and the Anarchists Costa, Brousse, Guillaume, and Kropotkin, the spiritual leader of Anarchism since the death of Bakunin in the previous year. Unfortunately, however, the main object of the congress, which was to revive an all-embracing International, was thwarted by disagreements between Anarchists and Social Democrats—disagreements concerning both ideology and the tactics of class struggle. The Social Democrats called for a 'pact of solidarity' as a first step towards reviving an International which would represent all sections of the movement. The pact would have put an end to the fratricidal conflicts in the Socialist movement and committed all the factions to working amicably together. The Anarchists saw this as a betrayal of their principles and the congress duly voted down the proposal.
On the same evening the delegates of Germany, Denmark, Belgium, German Switzerland, England, France and Italy, with the Anarchists deliberately excluded, met to consider ways of reviving the International, despite Anarchist obstruction. The result, however, was only a pious declaration about the necessity of unity, the exchange of information, and the moral solidarity of working-class organizations in all countries in their world-wide struggle against the reign of the ruling classes.
Now the 'anti-authoritarian' International was split, with the surviving rump consisting solely of Anarchists. Its last congress met in London in 1881. None of the leading members of the post-Hague International—Guillaume, Costa, Laurent, Verrycken, T. G. Morago—took part. The main actors on this stage were Peter Kropotkin, Malatesta, Most, Peukert, Francesco Saverio Merlino, J. Neves, L. B. Goldenberg, and Louise Michel, heroine of the Paris Commune. The congress received strong support from La Révolution sociale, a Paris paper edited by a French police agent. One of its resolutions, which was particularly welcomed by agents provocateurs, recommended the organizations and their members to learn chemistry in the interests of the revolution, and to become proficient in forwarding the class struggle by means of the bomb. After London, the Anarchist International held conferences in Paris (1889), Chicago (1893), Zurich (1896) and a congress in Amsterdam (1907). But the effective existence of the Anarchist International ended after the London Congress. All that remained were a few small groups scattered over a number of countries. The ideological heritage of Anarchism—the concepts of a federal social order without a state, the technique of the general strike, 'direct action' instead of political action by the working class—passed to the revolutionary syndicalists in the trade-union movements of France, Italy and Spain.
Meanwhile, the Belgian Socialist party had continued its efforts to revive the old International. In the summer of 1880 it issued an appeal 'to all Socialists in the Old World and the New', suggesting a congress to discuss 'practical steps for the revival of the International Working Men's Association'. The now unified German Social Democratic party welcomed the proposal, and both parties called an International Congress at Chur in Switzerland, for October 1881. It was not, however, a very representative congress, and delegates came only from Belgium, Germany, France, Denmark and the United States. After long discussions, it too was forced to the conclusion that the time for restoring the International had not yet arrived. The manifesto adopted by the congress declared that working-class parties in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Spain, Denmark and the United States were still at their formative stage, while those in Germany, Italy and Austria were still under legal threats from their own governments. A vigorous International, however, required lively, responsible parties organized on a national basis and capable of effective action.
These conditions became fulfilled during the 1880s. It was a decade in which, in both Europe and America, old Socialist parties became consolidated and new ones emerged. The Second International, founded at the Paris Congress in 1889, rested on the solid foundation of an international movement now organized firmly in national parties.
The First International represented a phase in the historic emergence and development of a movement capable of representing the working class in all countries. It had evolved the principles which were to serve the working-class movements as a guiding light when the time came for them to be re-formed. It had inspired and stimulated the growth of the Labour movement by giving it a clear, ultimate aim, too daring and ambitious for any previous movement in history: the aim of a rejuvenated humanity living in a classless society, free from all forms of servitude and of the exploitation of man by man. It planted the concept of solidarity firmly in the minds of the workers. It bequeathed to the Labour movement in all countries enthusiasm for a great cause. All this was mainly the work of Karl Marx.
1. Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, vol. III, p. 500; Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, op. cit., p. 227.
2. Minutes of the General Council, 16, 26 and 30 November 1869. For a survey of the General Council's debate on the Irish question, see Collins and Abramsky, op. cit., pp. 113–4, 165–70.
3. Briefe an Kugelmann, p. 108; also pp. 95–6.
4. Rudolf Meyer, Der Emanzipationskampf des-vierten Standes, vol. II, p. 734.
5. Michael Bakunin, Antwort eines Internationalisten an Mazzini and Die politische Theologie Mazzinis und die Internationale. Both leaflets were printed simultaneously in Italian and French in 1871.
6. Meyer, op. cit., vol. II, p. 192.
7. Ludwig Brügel, Geschichte der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie, vol. II, pp. 142–3.
8. For the debate on the Address, see the Minutes of the General Council, 30 May and 13 June 1871; for the debate with Odger and Lucraft, see the Minutes of 20 and 27 June, 18 July; for Applegarth's letter, see the Minutes of 8 August 1871. At the meeting of 20 June, at which Odger and Lucraft announced their resignation, the English members present were: Boon, Bradnick, Buttery, Hales, Harris, Lucraft, Mottershead, Odger, Robin, Townshend and Weston. Continental members present were: Cohen, Eccarius, Engels, Jung, Kolb, Lessner, Marx and Pfänder.
9. Henry Collins, 'The English Branches of the First International', Essays in Labour History, edited by Asa Briggs and John Saville (London, 1960).
10. His programme, Marx wrote on 19 April 1870 to Paul Lafargue, rested 'on a superannuated idealism which considers the actual jurisprudence as the basis of our economical state, instead of seeing that our economical state is the basis and source of our jurisprudence'—Letters and Documents of Karl Marx, ed. Bottigelli (Milan, 1958), pp. 172ff., quoted in George Lichtheim, Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study (London, 1961), p. 231. Lichtheim's brilliant book is the most stimulating discussion of the complex of ideas current in the First and Second International and beyond.
11. General Council Circular, Les Prétendues Scissions dans l'Internationale (Geneva, 1872). In a letter which Engels wrote to Philipp von Patten on 18 April 1883, he explained the attitude of Marx and himself to the Anarchists as follows: 'Since 1845 Marx and I have held the view that one of the ultimate results of the future proletarian revolution will be the gradual dissolution of the political organization known by the name of State. The main object of this organization has always been to secure by armed force the economic oppression of the labouring majority by the minority which alone possesses wealth. With the disappearance of an exclusively wealth-possessing minority there appears also the necessity for the power of armed oppression, or state power. At the same time, however, it was always our view that in order to attain this and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organized political power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organize society anew.…The Anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But after its victory the sole organization which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune'—Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence (1936), pp. 416–17.
12. Franz Mehring, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart, 1898), vol. III, pp. 430 and 410.
13. E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (1937), pp. 422ff.
14. James Guillaume has left in his four-volume L'Internationale, documents et souvenirs, 1864–78 (Paris, 1905–10), a source of information on the International which, though strongly hostile to Marx, is of considerable value to historians.
15. Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Werke, vol. XVII, pp. 416–17. Engels had joined the General Council only after he had sold his share of the family business and had moved from Manchester to London in 1870. He became Corresponding Secretary for Italy. See Minutes of the General Council, 20 September 1870.
16. Minutes of the General Council, 5 and 19 October 1869. For the history of the English Federation, see Collins, op. cit.
17. For the circular, see Marx, Briefe an Kugelmann, pp. 102–10.
18. For a balanced and impartial account of the episode, see Mehring, op. cit., ch. XII: 6, and ch. XIV: 5 and 7. For a criticism of Mehring's approach, see N. Riazanov, 'Sozial-demokratische Flagge und anarchistische Ware', in Die Neue Zeit, 32nd year, vol. I, nos. 5, 7–10 and 13. See also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Alliance of the Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association (London, 1873).
19. The French secret police, which had closely shadowed Karl Marx, suspected, as it reported on 14 September 1872, that he had come to The Hague 'to instigate riots in Holland in order to prepare her for annexation by Germany'. The dossier of the Paris police concerning Marx, covering the period 1871–83, contains about twenty-five items on the Hague Congress. The dossier is deposited in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. For a brief survey of its contents, see Helmut Hirsch, Denker und Kämpfer (1855), pp. 123–8.
20. The best account of the congress is in the Minutes and the reports of Sorge and Barry, from the English and American delegations respectively. These have been published with a number of other documents in The First International—Minutes of the Hague Congress of 1872, with related documents, edited by Hans Gerth (Madison, 1958). There is an English translation of the German documents. The volume also contains the facsimile of the Minutes, written in German.
21. Karl Marx, Briefe an Kugelmann, p. 132.
22. The proposal also made some impact on the general public. 'This,' said the Liberal Manchester Guardian, reporting the congress on 7 September 1872, 'was at first sight almost as strange as if the Pope had proposed to send the Holy Congregation and the College of Cardinals away from Rome.' See Collins, op. cit., p. 264.
23. For the political and personal background to the split in the English section, see the detailed analysis by Collins, op. cit.
24. Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, vol. III, pp. 304, 357, 332 and 435.
25. For the full text of the speech containing Marx's views on the role of the Revolution, and other important topics, see Meyer, op. cit., vol. I, p. 159.
26. For the report, see Internationale Arbeiter-Assoziation—Verhandlungen der Delegierten-Konferenz zu Philadelphia, 15 Juli 1876 (New York, 1876) and Schlüter, Die Internationale in Amerika (1918), p. 353. For the state of the International's membership, see the General Council's Circular, 25 June 1876, in Schlüter, op. cit., p. 351. At the time, only two Federations of the International survived, one in North America and one in the canton of Geneva. The General Council had no contact with Spain and Italy, and only loose connections with Germany, Austria, Hungary, France and the Scandinavian countries.
27. For a comprehensive account of the congresses following that at The Hague, see G. M. Steklov, History of the First International (London, 1928), Part II.
28. Daily reports of the Vienna police for 18 and 19 September 1877, from the archives of the Ministry of the Interior (Brügel, Geschichte der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie, vol. II, pp. 344 and 338).