On 28 September 1864, St. Martin’s Hall in the very heart of London was packed to overflowing with some two thousand workmen. They had come to attend a meeting called by English trade union leaders and a small group of workers from the Continent: the advance notices had spoken of a ‘deputation organized by the workmen of Paris’, which would ‘deliver their reply to the Address of their English brethren, and submit a plan for a better understanding between the peoples’.1 In fact, when a number of French and English workers’ organizations had met in London a year earlier, in July 1863, to express solidarity with the Polish people against Tsarist occupation, they had also declared what they saw as the key objectives for the working-class movement. The preparatory ‘Address of English to French Workmen’, drafted by the prominent union leader George Odger [1813–1877] and published in the bi-weekly The Bee-Hive, stated:
A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages; and we are sorry to say that this has been done, though not from any desire on the part of our continental brethren to injure us, but through a want of regular and systematic communication between the industrial classes of all countries. Our aim is to bring up the wages of the ill-paid to as near a level as possible with that of those who are better remunerated, and not to allow our employers to play us off one against the other, and so drag us down to the lowest possible condition, suitable to their avaricious bargaining.2
The organizers of this initiative did not imagine – nor could they have foreseen – what it would lead to shortly afterwards. Their idea was to build an international forum where the main problems affecting workers could be examined and discussed, but this did not include the actual founding of an organization to coordinate the trade union and political action of the working class. Similarly, their ideology was initially permeated with general ethical-humanitarian elements, such as the importance of fraternity among peoples and world peace, rather than class conflict and clearly defined political objectives. Because of these limitations, the meeting at St. Martin’s Hall might have been just another of those vaguely democratic initiatives of the period with no real follow-through. But in reality it gave birth to the prototype of all organizations of the workers’ movement, which both reformists and revolutionaries would subsequently take as their point of reference: the International Working Men’s Association.3
It was soon arousing passions all over Europe. It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of men and women to struggle for the most radical of goals: changing the world. Thus, on the occasion of the Third Congress of the International, held in Brussels in 1868, the lead writer of The Times accurately identified the scope of the project:
It is not […] a mere improvement that is contemplated, but nothing less than a regeneration, and that not of one nation only, but of mankind. This is certainly the most extensive aim ever contemplated by any institution, with the exception, perhaps, of the Christian Church. To be brief, this is the programme of the International Workingmen’s Association.4
Thanks to the International, the workers’ movement was able to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of its own strength, and to develop new and more advanced forms of struggle. The organization resonated far beyond the frontiers of Europe, generating hope that a different world was possible among the artisans of Buenos Aires, the early workers’ associations in Calcutta, and even the labour groups in Australia and New Zealand that applied to join it.
Conversely, news of its founding inspired horror in the ruling classes. The idea that the workers too wanted to play an active role in history sent shivers down their spine, and many a government set its sights on eradicating the International and harried it with all the means at its disposal.
The workers’ organizations that founded the International were something of a motley. The central driving force was British trade unionism, whose leaders – nearly all reformist in their horizons – were mainly interested in economic questions; they fought to improve the workers’ conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence they conceived of the International as an instrument that might favour their objectives, by preventing the import of manpower from abroad in the event of strikes.
Another significant force in the organization was the mutualists, long dominant in France but strong also in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they were opposed to any working-class involvement in politics and to the strike as a weapon of struggle, as well as holding conservative positions on women’s emancipation. Advocating a cooperative system along federalist lines, they maintained that it was possible to change capitalism by means of equal access to credit. In the end, therefore, they may be said to have constituted the right wing of the International.
Alongside these two components, which formed the numerical majority, there were others of a different hue again. The third in importance were the communists, grouped around the figure of Marx and active in small groupings with very limited influence – above all in a number of German and Swiss cities, and in London. They were anticapitalist: that is, they opposed the existing system of production and espoused the necessity of political action to overthrow it.
At the time of its founding, the ranks of the International also included elements that had nothing to do with the socialist tradition, such as certain groups of East European exiles inspired by vaguely democratic ideas. Among these were followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, whose cross-class conception, mainly geared to national demands, considered the International useful for the issuing of general appeals for the liberation of oppressed peoples.5
The picture is further complicated by the fact that some groups of French, Belgian and Swiss workers who joined the International brought with them a variety of confused theories, some of a utopian inspiration; while the General Association of German Workers – the party led by followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, which never affiliated to the International but orbited around it – was hostile to trade unionism and conceived of political action in rigidly national terms.
All these groups, with their complex web of cultures and political/trade union experiences, made their mark on the nascent International. It was an arduous task indeed to build a general framework and to keep such a broad organization together, if only on a federal basis. Besides, even after a common programme had been agreed upon, each tendency continued to exert a (sometimes centrifugal) influence in the local sections where it was in the majority.
To secure cohabitation of all these currents in the same organization, around a programme so distant from the approaches with which each had started out, was Marx’s great accomplishment. His political talents enabled him to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, ensuring that the International did not swiftly follow the many previous workers’ associations down the path to oblivion.6 It was Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International, and Marx too who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly class-based, political programme that won it a mass character beyond all sectarianism. The political soul of its General Council was always Marx: he drafted all its main resolutions and prepared all its congress reports (except the one for the Lausanne Congress in 1867, when he was totally occupied with the proofs for Capital). He was ‘the right man in the right place’,7 as the German workers’ leader Johann Georg Eccarius [1818–1889] once put it.
Contrary to later fantasies that pictured Marx as the founder of the International, he was not even among the organizers of the meeting at St. Martin’s Hall. He sat ‘in a non-speaking capacity on the platform’, as he recalled in a letter to his friend Engels. This is how he explained why he took part:
I knew that on this occasion ‘people who really count’ were appearing, both from London and from Paris, and I therefore decided to waive my usual standing rule to decline any such invitations. […] At the meeting, which was chock-full (for there is now evidently a revival of the working class taking place) […] it was resolved to found a ‘Workingmen’s International Association’, whose General Council is to have its seat in London and is to ‘intermediate’ between the workers’ societies in Germany, Italy, France and England. Ditto that a General Workingmen’s Congress was to be convened in Belgium in 1865.8
Despite the unpromising starting position, Marx immediately grasped the potential in the event and worked hard to ensure that the new organization successfully carried out its mission. Thanks to the prestige attaching to his name, at least in restricted circles, he was appointed to the 34-member standing committee,9 where he soon gained sufficient trust to be given the task of writing the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Statutes of the International. Marx realized that it was ‘impossible to make anything out of the stuff’ drafted during his absence, and he was determined that ‘not one single line should be allowed to stand’.10
In the two texts he wrote, Marx firmly linked economic and political struggle to each other, and made international thinking and international action an irreversible choice.11 The Inaugural Address states:
Everywhere the great mass of the working classes were sinking down to a lower depth, at the same rate at least that those above them were rising in the social scale. In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced mind, and only decried by those whose interest it is to hedge other people in a fool’s paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, not all these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that, on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms. Death of starvation rose almost to the rank of an institution, during this intoxicating epoch of economical progress, in the metropolis of the British empire. That epoch is marked in the annals of the world by the quickened return, the widening compass, and the deadlier effects of the social pest called a commercial and industrial crisis.
The workers should be clear that ‘the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour.’ Hence: ‘To conquer political power has become the great duty of the working classes.’12
It was mainly thanks to Marx’s capacities that the International developed its function of political synthesis, unifying the various national contexts in a project of common struggle that recognized their significant autonomy, but not total independence, from the directive centre.13 The maintenance of unity was gruelling at times, especially as Marx’s anticapitalism was never the dominant political position within the organization. He told Engels how ‘very difficult’ it had been ‘to frame the thing so that our view should appear in a form that would make it acceptable to the present outlook of the workers’ movement. […] It will take time before the revival of the movement allows the old boldness of language to be used. We must be fortirer in re, suaviter in modo.’14 But Marx’s thoughts on the possible electoral uses of the International were different. A few months after its foundation, he wrote with reference to the English radical Edmond Beales [1803–1881] – who was standing in the parliamentary elections – that ‘we cannot become the pedestal for small parliamentary ambitions’.15
Over time, however, partly through his own tenacity, partly through occasional splits, Marx’s thought became the hegemonic doctrine.16 It was hard going, but the effort of political elaboration benefited considerably from the struggles of those years. The character of workers’ mobilizations, the antisystemic challenge of the Paris Commune, the unprecedented task of holding together such a large and complex organization, the successive polemics with other tendencies in the workers’ movement on various theoretical and political issues: all this impelled Marx beyond the limits of political economy alone, which had absorbed so much of his attention since the defeat of the 1848 revolution and the ebbing of the most progressive forces. He was also stimulated to develop and sometimes revise his ideas, to put old certainties up for discussion and ask himself new questions, and in particular to sharpen his critique of capitalism by drawing the broad outlines of a communist society. The orthodox Soviet view of Marx’s role in the International, according to which he mechanically applied to the stage of history a political theory he had already forged in the confines of his study, is thus totally divorced from reality.17
During its lifetime and in subsequent decades, the International was depicted as a vast, financially powerful organization. The size of its membership was always overestimated, whether because of imperfect knowledge or because some of its leaders exaggerated the real situation or because opponents were looking for a pretext to justify a brutal crackdown. The public prosecutor who arraigned some of its French leaders in June 1870 stated that the organization had more than 800,000 members in Europe;18 a year later, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, The Times put the total at two and a half million; and Oscar Testut [1840–?], the main person to study it in the conservative camp, predicted this would rise above five million.19
In Britain too, with the sole exception of the steelworkers, the International always had a sparse presence among the industrial proletariat.20 Nowhere did the latter ever form a majority, at least after the expansion of the organization in Southern Europe. The other great limitation was the failure to draw in unskilled labour,21 despite Marx’s efforts in that direction beginning with the run-up to the first congress. The ‘Instructions for Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The Different Questions’ are clear on this:
Apart from their original purposes, they [trade unions] must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the non-society men into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as the agricultural labourers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.22
However, the International remained an organization of employed workers; the jobless never became part of it. The provenance of its leaders reflected this, since all but a few had a background as artisans or brainworkers.
The resources of the International are similarly complicated. There was talk of fabulous wealth at its disposal,23 but the truth is that its finances were chronically unstable. The sums collected were never higher than a few score pounds per annum;24 barely enough to pay the general secretary’s wage of four shillings a week and the rent for an office from which the organization was often threatened with eviction for arrears.
In one of the key political-organizational documents of the International, Marx summarized its functions as follows: ‘It is the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever.’25
Despite the considerable autonomy granted to federations and local sections, the International always retained a locus of political leadership. Its General Council was the body that worked out a unifying synthesis of the various tendencies and issued guidelines for the organization as a whole. From October 1864 until August 1872 it met with great regularity, as many as 385 times. In the room filled with pipe and cigar smoke where the Council held its sessions on Wednesday evening, its members debated a wide range of issues, such as: working conditions, the effects of new machinery, support for strikes, the role and importance of trade unions, the Irish question, various foreign policy matters, and, of course, how to build the society of the future. The General Council was also responsible for drafting the documents of the International: circulars, letters and resolutions for current purposes; special manifestos, addresses and appeals in particular circumstances.26
Britain was the first country where applications were made to join the International. In the first year of its existence, the General Council began serious activity to publicize the principles of the Association. This helped to broaden its horizon beyond purely economic questions, as we can see from the fact that it was among the organizations belonging to the (electoral) Reform League founded in February 1865.
In France, the International began to take shape in January 1865, when its first section was founded in Paris. Other major centres appeared shortly afterwards in Lyons and Caën. But it remained very limited in strength. Nevertheless, the French supporters of the International, who were mostly followers of Proudhon’s mutualist theories, established themselves as the second largest group at the first conference of the organization, held in London between 25 and 29 September and attended by thirty delegates from England, France, Switzerland and Belgium, with a few representatives from Germany, Poland and Italy. The original plan had been to set up a general congress forthwith. But Marx held that ‘the time was not yet ripe for it’,27 and in a letter to Engels he confessed that, with a still embryonic political structure, he could ‘only foresee a disgrace’.28 The delegates who assembled at the London Conference in September 1865 provided information about the first steps taken by the International, especially at an organizational level. And this conference decided to call the first congress for the following year and laid down the main themes to be discussed there.
On this basis, Marx proposed a draft agenda and cited the main points in a letter to Hermann Jung [1830–1901], the corresponding secretary of the International for Switzerland:
1.Questions relating to the Association: 1) Questions relating to its organisation. 2) The establishment of friendly societies for the members of the Association. – Moral and material support to be given to the Association’s orphans.
2.Social Questions: 1) Co-operative labour. 2) Reduction of the hours of labour. 3) Female and children’s labour. 4) Trades Unions: their past, their present, and their future. 5) Combination of efforts, by means of the International Association, in the struggle between capital and labour. 6) International Credit, foundation of international credit institutions, their form and their mode of operation. 7) Direct and Indirect Taxation. 8) Standing armies and their effects upon production.
3.International Politics: The need to eliminate Muscovite influence in Europe by applying the right of self-determination of nations, and the re-establishment of Poland upon a democratic and social basis.
4.A Question of Philosophy: The religious idea and its relation to social, political, and intellectual development.29
In the period between these two gatherings, the International continued to expand in Europe and established its first important nuclei in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. The Prussian Combination Laws, which prevented German political associations from having regular contacts with organizations in other countries, meant that the International was unable to open sections in what was then the German Confederation. The General Association of German Workers – the first workers’ party in history,30 founded in 1863 and led by Lassalle’s disciple Johann Baptist von Schweitzer [1833–1875] – followed a line of ambivalent dialogue with Otto von Bismarck [1815–1898] and showed little or no interest in the International during the early years of its existence; it was an indifference shared by Wilhelm Liebknecht, despite his political proximity to Marx. Johann Philipp Becker tried to find a way round these difficulties through the Geneva-based ‘Group of German-speaking Sections’.
While Liebknecht did not understand the centrality of the international dimension for the struggle of the workers’ movement, Marx also had deep theoretical and political differences with von Schweitzer. In February 1865 he wrote to the latter that ‘the aid of the Royal Prussian government for co-operative societies’, which the Lassalleans welcomed, was ‘worthless as an economic measure, whilst, at the same time, it serve[d] to extend the system of tutelage, corrupt part of the working class and emasculate the movement’. Marx went on to reject any possibility of an alliance between the workers and the monarchy:
Just as the bourgeois party in Prussia discredited itself and brought about its present wretched situation by seriously believing that with the ‘New Era’ the government had fallen into its lap by the grace of the Prince Regent, so the workers’ party will discredit itself even more if it imagines that the Bismarck era or any other Prussian era will make the golden apples just drop into its mouth, by grace of the king. It is beyond all question that Lassalle’s ill-starred illusion that a Prussian government might intervene with socialist measures will be crowned with disappointment. The logic of circumstances will tell. But the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.31
The critique of state socialism was a common theme in Marx’s political reflections during that period. A few days after the letter to Schweitzer, he suggested to Engels that the position of the Lassalleans in Germany was akin to the ‘alliance of the “proletariat” with the “government” against the “liberal bourgeoisie”,’ which the two of them had firmly opposed in 1847.32
The activity of the General Council in London was decisive for the further strengthening of the International. In spring 1866, with its support for the strikers of the London Amalgamated Tailors, it played an active role for the first time in a workers’ struggle, and following the success of the strike, five societies of tailors, each numbering some 500 workers, decided to affiliate to the International. The positive outcome of other disputes attracted a number of small unions, so that, by the time of its first congress, it already had seventeen union affiliations with a total of more than 25,000 new members. The International was the first association to succeed in the far from simple task of enlisting trade union organizations into its ranks.33
At any event, not everything went off smoothly. Frequent political conflicts on the General Council, together with the absence of Marx on several occasions for health reasons, encouraged the Mazzinians led by Luigi Wolff [?–1871] to rejoin battle with him. Marx had always been aware of their hostility, and in December 1865 he had written to Engels that ‘if [he] resigned tomorrow, the bourgeois element […] would have the upper hand’.34
In March 1866, at a particularly unfavourable moment, he added: ‘Everything is at sixes and sevens on the “International Council” […] and a great desire is being manifested to rebel aginst the absent “tyrant”, but at the same time to wreck the whole shop as well.’35 In the same month he wrote to his cousin Antoinette Philips [1837–1885]:
During my forced and prolonged absence from the Council of the International Association, Mazzini had been busy in stirring a sort of revolt against my leadership. ‘Leadership’ is never a pleasant thing, nor a thing I ambition. I have always before my mind your father’s saying [that…] ‘the mules always hate the muleteer’. But having once fairly embarked in an enterprise which I consider of import, I certainly, ‘anxious’ man as I am, do not like to give way. Mazzini, a most decided hater of freethinking and socialism, watched the progress of our society with great jealousy.36
Between 3 and 8 September 1866, the city of Geneva hosted the first congress of the International, with sixty delegates from Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland. By then the Association could point to a very favourable balance sheet of the two years since its foundation, having rallied to its banner more than one hundred trade unions and political organizations. Those taking part in the congress essentially divided into two blocs. The first, consisting of the British delegates, the few Germans and a majority of the Swiss, followed the directives of the General Council drawn up by Marx (who was not present in Geneva). The second, comprising the French delegates and some of the French-speaking Swiss, was made up of mutualists. At that time, in fact, moderate positions were prevalent in the International, and the mutualists, led by the Parisian Henri Tolain [1828–1897], envisaged a society in which the worker would be at once producer, capitalist and consumer. They regarded the granting of free credit as a decisive measure for the transformation of society; considered women’s labour to be objectionable from both an ethical and a social point of view; and opposed any interference by the state in work relations – including legislation to reduce the working day to eight hours – on the grounds that it would threaten the private relationship between workers and employers and strengthen the system currently in force.
Basing themselves on resolutions prepared by Marx, the General Council leaders succeeded in marginalizing the numerically strong contingent of mutualists at the congress, and obtained votes in favour of state intervention. On the latter issue, in the section of the Instructions for Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The Different Questions (1866) relating to ‘Juvenile and children’s labour (both sexes)’, Marx had spelled things out clearly:
This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts.37
Thus, far from strengthening bourgeois society – as Proudhon and his followers wrongly believed – these reformist demands were an indispensable starting point for the emancipation of the working class.
Furthermore, the ‘instructions’ that Marx wrote for the Geneva Congress underline the basic function of trade unions against which not only the mutualists but also certain followers of Robert Owen in Britain and of Lassalle in Germany38 had taken a stand:
This activity of the Trades’ Unions is not only legitimate, it is necessary. It cannot be dispensed with so long as the present system of production lasts. On the contrary, it must be generalized by the formation and the combination of Trades’ Unions throughout all countries. On the other hand, unconsciously to themselves, the Trades’ Unions were forming centres of organization of the working class, as the mediaeval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the Trades’ Unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule.
In the same document, Marx did not spare the existing unions his criticism. For they were ‘too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital [and had] not yet fully understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general social and political movements.’39
He had argued exactly the same a year earlier, in an address to the General Council on 20 and 27 June that was posthumously published as Value, Price and Profit (1865):
[T]he working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’40
One of the main resolutions adopted at the congress concerned a measure that Marx thought essential to free the working class from the yoke of capital: the shortening of the working day.
A preliminary condition, without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive, is the limitation of the working day. It is needed to restore the health and physical energies of the working class, that is, the great body of every nation, as well as to secure them the possibility of intellectual development, sociable intercourse, social and political action.41
As the delegates foresaw, their demand for ‘8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day’ would eventually become ‘the common platform of the working classes all over the world’.
Marx’s comments on the results of this congress were generally positive. He wrote to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann in Hannover:
By and large, […] it went off better than I expected. […] I was unable to attend, […] but I did write the programme for the London delegates. I deliberately confined it to points which allow direct agreement and combination of efforts by the workers and give direct sustenance and impetus to the requirements of the class struggle and the organisation of the workers into a class. The Parisian gentlemen had their heads stuffed full of the most vacuous Proudhonist clichés. They prattle incessantly about science and know nothing. They spurn all revolutionary action, i.e. arising from the class struggle itself, every concentrated social movement, and therefore also that which can be achieved by political means (e.g., such as limitation of the working day by law). Beneath the cloak of freedom and anti-governmentalism or anti-authoritarian individualism these gentlemen, who for 16 years now have so quietly endured the most wretched despotism, and are still enduring it, are in actuality preaching vulgar bourgeois economics, only in the guise of Proudhonist idealism! Proudhon has done enormous harm. His pseudo-critique and his pseudo-confrontation with the Utopians (he himself is no more than a philistine Utopian) […] seized hold of and corrupted first the ‘gliuttering youth’, the students, then the workers, especially those in Paris. […] In my Report I shall give them a discreet rap over the knuckles.42
From late 1866 on, strikes intensified in many European countries. Organized by broad masses of workers, they helped to generate an awareness of their condition and formed the core of a new and important wave of struggles. The mobilizations did, however, usher in a period of contact and coordination with the International, which supported them with declarations and calls for solidarity, organized fundraising for strikers, and helped to fight attempts by the bosses to weaken the workers’ resistance.
It was because of its practical role in this period that workers began to recognize the International as an organization that defended their interests and, in some cases, they asked to be affiliated to it.43 For all the difficulties bound up with the diversity of nationalities, languages and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organizations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the absolute need for class solidarity and international cooperation, moving decisively beyond the partial character of the initial objectives and strategies.
In Britain, on the other hand, the labour movement was undergoing a process of institutionalization. The Reform Act, resulting from the battle first joined by the Reform League, expanded the franchise to more than a million British workers. The subsequent legalization of trade unions, which ended the risk of persecution and repression, allowed the fourth estate to become a real presence in society, with the result that the pragmatic rulers of the country continued along the path of reform, and the labouring classes, so unlike their French counterparts, felt a growing sense of belonging as they pinned more of their hopes for the future on peaceful change.44 The situation on the Continent was very different indeed. In the German Confederation, collective wage-bargaining was still virtually non-existent. In Belgium, strikes were repressed by the government almost as if they were acts of war, while in Switzerland they were still an anomaly that the established order found it difficult to tolerate. In France, it was declared that strikes would be legal in 1864, but the first labour unions still operated under severe restrictions.
The lack of theoretical-political advances in France – a country he regarded as crucial for the whole European workers’ movement – was one of Marx’s major preoccupations during this period. In early June 1866 he wrote to Engels: the ‘faithful followers of Proudhon (my very good friends here, Lafargue and Longuet, are also among that number) […] believe that the whole of Europe must and will sit quietly on its arse until the French monsieurs have abolished poverty and ignorance’.45 Two weeks later, he mentioned a group of ‘representatives (non-workers) of “jeune France”,’ who at a meeting of the General Council ‘trotted out their view that any nationality and even nations are antiquated prejudices’. Marx described such ideas – according to which the political institutions of the time should be ‘broken down into small groups or communes’ that would then form an ‘association, but not a state’ – as ‘Proudhonized Stirnerism’. He poked fun at the fact this ‘individualization of humanity and the “mutualism” it entails should develop by bringing history to a halt in every other country and the whole world waits until the French are ready to carry out a social revolution’. ‘Then they will demonstrate the experiment to us, and the rest of the world, being bowled over by the force of their example, will do the same’ – ‘just what Fourier expected from his model phalanstery’. Marx perceptively noted in passing that, by the ‘denial of nationalities’, many French people ‘seemed to imply their absorption by the model French nation’.46
This was the backdrop to the congress of 1867, held in Lausanne between 2 and 8 September and attended by sixty-four delegates from six countries (with one each from Belgium and Italy). The International assembled with a new strength that had come from its continuing broad-based expansion. Marx himself, busy working on the proofs of Capital, was absent both from the General Council when preparatory documents were being drafted and from the actual congress.47 The effects were certainly felt – for example, in the focus on bald reports of organizational growth and in Proudhonian themes (such as the cooperative movement and alternative uses of credit) dear to the strongly represented mutualists. Engels expressed his concern to Marx: ‘The congress really does appear to have been swept away in the French tide this time, the number of Proudhonist resolutions is really far too large.’48 But his friend reassured him: ‘None of that signifies. The main thing is that the congress was held, not what happened there. We’ll make sport of the Paris wiseacres in our General Report.’49 That is what happened – and the confrontation between the two tendencies was merely postponed.
Right from the earliest days of the International, Proudhon’s ideas were hegemonic in France, French-speaking Switzerland, Wallonia, and the city of Brussels. His disciples, particularly Tolain and Ernest Édouard Fribourg [?], succeeded in making a mark with their positions on the founding meeting in 1864, the London Conference of 1865, and the Geneva and Lausanne Congresses.
For four years the mutualists were the most moderate wing of the International. The British trade unions, which constituted the majority, did not share Marx’s anticapitalism, but nor did they have the same pull on the policies of the organization that the followers of Proudhon were able to exercise.
Basing themselves on the theories of the French anarchist, the mutualists argued that the economic emancipation of the workers would be achieved through the founding of producer cooperatives and a central People’s Bank. Resolutely hostile to state intervention in any field, they opposed socialization of the land and the means of production as well as any use of the strike weapon.
Marx undoubtedly played a key role in the long struggle to reduce Proudhon’s influence in the International. His ideas were fundamental to the theoretical development of its leaders, and he showed a remarkable capacity to assert them by winning every major conflict inside the organization. With regard to the cooperation, for example, in the 1866 Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The Different Questions, he had already declared that: ‘To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and cooperative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realized save by the transfer of the organized forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves’, recommending to the workers ‘to embark in cooperative production rather than in cooperative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system, the former attacks its groundwork.’50
The workers themselves, however, were already sidelining Proudhonian doctrines; it was above all the proliferation of strikes that convinced the mutualists of the error of their conceptions. Proletarian struggles showed both that the strike was necessary as an immediate means of improving conditions in the present and that it strengthened the class consciousness essential for the construction of future society. It was real-life men and women who halted capitalist production to demand their rights and social justice, thereby shifting the balance of forces in the International and, more significantly, in society as a whole. It was the Parisian bronze workers, the weavers of Rouen and Lyons, the coal miners of Saint-Étienne who – more forcefully than in any theoretical discussion – convinced the French leaders of the International of the need to socialize the land and industry. And it was the workers’ movement that demonstrated, in opposition to Proudhon, that it was impossible to separate the social-economic question from the political question.51
The Brussels Congress, held between 6 and 13 September 1868, with the participation of ninety-nine delegates from France, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Spain (one delegate), and Belgium (fifty-five), finally clipped the wings of the mutualists. The highpoint came when the assembly approved César De Paepe’s [1646–1714] proposal on the socialization of the means of production – a decisive step forward in defining the economic basis of socialism, no longer simply in the writings of particular intellectuals but in the programme of a great transational organization. As regards the mines and transport, the congress declared:
1.That the quarries, collieries, and other mines, as well as the railways, ought in a normal state of society to belong to the community represented by the state, a state itself subject to the laws of justice.
2.That the quarries, collieries, and other mines, and Railways, be let by the state, not to companies of capitalists as at present, but to companies of working men bound by contract to guarantee to society the rational and scientific working of the railways, etc., at a price as nearly as possible approximate to the working expense. The same contract ought to reserve to the state the right to verify the accounts of the companies, so as to present the possibility of any reconsitution of monopolies. A second contract ought to guarantee the mutual right of each member of the companies in respect to his fellow workmen.
As to landed property, it was agreed that:
the economical development of modern society will create the social necessity of converting arable land into the common property of society, and of letting the soil on behalf of the state to agricultural companies under conditions analagous to those stated in regard to mines and railways.
Similar considerations were applied to the canals, roads and telegraphs: ‘Considering that the roads and other means of communication require a common social direction, the Congress thinks they ought to remain the common property of society.’ Finally, some interesting points were made about the environment:
Considering that the abandonment of forests to private individuals causes the destruction of woods necessary for the conservation of springs, and, as a matter of course, of the good qualities of the soil, as well as the health and lives of the population, the Congress thinks that the forests ought to remain the property of society.52
In Brussels, then, the International made its first clear pronouncement on the socialization of the means of production by state authorities.53 This marked an important victory for the General Council and the first appearance of socialist principles in the political programme of a major workers’ organization.
In addition, the congress again discussed the question of war. A motion presented by Becker, which Marx later summarized in the published resolutions of the congress, stated:
The workers alone have an evident logical interest in finally abolishing all war, both economic and political, individual and national, because in the end they always have to pay with their blood and their labour for the settling of accounts between the belligerents, regardless of whether they are on the winning or losing side.54
The workers were called upon to treat every war ‘as a civil war’.55 De Paepe also suggested the use of the general strike56 – a proposal that Marx dismissed as ‘nonsense’,57 but which actually tended to develop a class consciousness capable of going beyond merely economic struggles.
This time too, the verdict on the congress that Marx expressed to Engels was generally positive: ‘[Fredrick] Lessner [1825–1910] says that we accomplished so much despite being so little represented at the congress, which was almost entirely Belgian (with the addition of Frenchmen), because on all decisive points the Belgian workers, notwithstanding their Brussels leaders, voted with London.’58
The difficulties of sending members to congresses were due to the scant resources at the disposal of the organization in London. Marx spoke of the matter with great irritation to Engels in the summer of 1869:
Yesterday there was a tragicomical meeting of the General Council. Dunning letters for cards, rent, arrears of secretary’s salary, etc. In short, international bankruptcy, so we can’t yet see how we can send a delegate [to the next congress]. […] The gist of the story is this: the local committees (including central committees) spend too much money and tax their people too highly for their national or local needs, and leave nothing over for the General Council. Money is always there to print idiotic addresses to the Spaniards etc., and for other follies. We shall be forced to declare to the next congress, either in written or spoken form, that we cannot continue to run the General Council in this way; but that they should be so kind, before they give us successors, to pay our debts, which would reach a much higher figure if most of our secretaries did not personally cover correspondence costs. If only I could somewhere see people who would not involve us in stupidities, I would greet with the greatest pleasure the exit of the Central Council from here. The business is becoming really tiresome.59
These problems, which were already emerging in 1869, were the norm rather than the exception throughout the life of the International. In Spring 1870 Marx wrote ironically to Wilhelm Bracke [1842–1880], one of the founders, with Liebknecht, of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany: ‘As a consolation, the information that the finances of the General Council are below zero, steadily growing negative dimensions.’60
In September 1868, Marx returned to the question of state socialism. In a letter to Engels, he suggested that what von Schweitzer had described the previous month in Hamburg at the congress of the General Association of German Workers as the ‘apex of Lassalle’s discoveries’ – that is, state credit for the foundation of productive associations – was ‘literally copied from the programme of French Catholic socialism’, inspired by Philip Buchez [1796–1850], which went back to ‘the days of Louis-Philippe’ [1773–1850].61
Instead, strong opposition to the government would have been good for the social struggle: ‘The most essential thing for the German working class is that it should cease to agitate by permission of the high government authorities. Such a bureaucratically schooled race must undergo a complete course of “self-help”.’62
In a letter to Schweitzer, Marx set out at greater length his differences with the Lassallean tendency. The first question was his opposition to the strategy of ‘state aid versus self-help’, which Buchez, the leader of Catholic socialism, ‘[… had used] against the genuine workers’ movement in France’, and on the basis of which Lassalle himself had later made ‘concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clericals’. For Marx, it was essential that the workers’ struggle should be free and independent. ‘The main thing is to teach [the worker] to walk by himself’, especially in Germany, where ‘he is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards’ and believes in the authority of superiors.
The other significant area of disagreement was the theoretical and political rigidity of Lassalle and his followers. Marx criticized the comrade with whom he had been in touch for many years, on the grounds that ‘like everyone who claims to have in his pocket a panacea for the sufferings of the masses, [Lassalle] gave his agitation, from the very start, a religious, sectarian character,’ and, being the founder of a sect, ‘he denied all natural connection with the earlier movement, both in Germany and abroad’. Lassalle was guilty of the same error as Proudhon: that of ‘not seeking the real basis of his agitation in the actual elements of the class movement, but of wishing, instead, to prescribe for that movement a course determined by a certain doctrinaire recipe’. For Marx, any ‘sect seeks its raison d’être and its point d’honneur not in what it has in common with the class movement, but in the particular shibboleth distinguishing it from that movement’.63 His opposition to that kind of politics could not have been clearer.
In the fight against state socialism, Marx also took issue with Liebknecht. After one of his speeches in the Reichstag in summer 1869, Marx commented to Engels: ‘The brute believes in the future “state of democracy”! Secretly that means sometimes constitutional England, sometimes the bourgeois United States, sometimes wretched Switzerland. He has no conception of revolutionary politics.’64
Apart from disputes and conflicts, however, there were also very positive developments. In late 1868, Marx reported to Kugelmann a major step forward at the recent congress of the American Labor Union, which had ‘treated women workers with full parity’. By contrast, Marx lamented, ‘the English, and to an even greater extent the gallant French, are displaying a marked narrowness of spirit in this respect. Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex.’65
Finally, Marx was not at all worried about diversity. He was well aware that, ‘as the stage of development reached by different sections of the workers in the same country and by the working class in different countries necessarily varies considerably, the actual movement also necessarily expresses itself in very diverse theoretical forms’. In his view, ‘the community of action the International Working Men’s Association is calling into being, the exchange of ideas by means of the different organs of the sections in all countries and, finally, the direct discussions at the general congresses would also gradually create a common theoretical programme for the general workers’ movement’.66
If the collectivist turn of the International began at the Brussels Congress in 1868, the Basle Congress of 5–12 September 1869 consolidated it and eradicated Proudhonism even in its French homeland; the French delegates too supported the declaration ‘that society has the right to abolish individual ownership of the land and to make it part of the community’.67 After Basle, France was no longer mutualist. A relieved Marx could write to his daughter Laura Lafargue: ‘I am glad the Basle Congress is over, and has, comparatively speaking, passed off so well. I am always fretting on such occasions of public exhibition of the party “with all its ulcers”. None of the actors was up to the high principles, but the higher class idiocy effaces the working-class blunders.’68 The Basle Congress was also of interest because Mikhail Bakunin took part in the proceedings as a delegate. Having failed to win the leadership of the League for Peace69 and Freedom, he had founded the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy in September 1868 in Geneva, and in December this had applied to join the International. In a letter to Marx, dated 22 December 1868, he wrote:
You asked if I continue to be your friend. Yes, more than ever, dear Marx, because I understand better than ever how right you are in following, and in inviting us all to march on the wide road of economic revolution, and in denigrating those among us who would lose themselves on the paths of either national or exclusively political enterprises. I now do what you yourself commenced to do more than twenty years ago. […] My homeland now is the International of which you are one of the principal founders. So you see, dear friend, that I am your disciple – and I am proud to be it.70
The General Council initially turned down the request from Bakunin, on the grounds that the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy continued to be affiliated to another, parallel transnational structure, and that one of its objectives – ‘the equalization of classes’71 – was radically different from a central pillar of the International: the abolition of classes. Shortly afterwards, however, the Alliance modified its programme and agreed to wind up its network of sections, many of which anyway existed only in Bakunin’s imagination.72 On 28 July 1869, the 104-member Geneva section was accordingly admitted to the International.73 Marx knew Bakunin well enough, but he had underestimated the consequences of this step. The influence of the famous Russian revolutionary rapidly increased in a number of Swiss, Spanish and French sections (as it did in Italian ones, after the Paris Commune), and at the Basel Congress, thanks to his charisma and forceful style of argument, he already managed to affect the outcome of its deliberations. The vote on the right of inheritance, for example, was the first occasion on which the delegates rejected a proposal of the General Council.74 Having finally defeated the mutualists and laid the spectre of Proudhon to rest, Marx now had to confront a much tougher rival, who formed a new tendency – collectivist anarchism – and sought to win control of the organization.
1David Ryazanov, ‘Zur Geschichte der Ersten Internationale’, in Marx-Engels Archiv, vol. I (1925), p. 171.
2Ibid., p. 172.
3Near the end of the life of the International, when considering for approval the revised Statute of the organization, members of the General Council raised the question of whether ‘persons’ should be substituted for ‘men’. Friedrich Engels responded that ‘it was generally understood that men was a generic term including both sexes’, making the point that the association was and had been open to women and men, in Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. (ed.), The General Council of the First International 1871–1872. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1968, p. 256.
4Quoted in G. M. Stekloff, History of the First International. New York: Russell & Russell, 1928, p. [ii].
5There were even members of secret societies favouring republicanism and/or socialism, such as the Lodge of Philadelphia, among the early members. See Julian P. W. Archer, The First International in France, 1864–1872. Lanham: University Press of America, 1997, pp. 33–5.
6See Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement. London: MacMillan, 1965, p. 34.
7Johann Georg Eccarius to Karl Marx, 12 October 1864, in MEGA2, vol. III/13, p. 10.
8Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 4 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 16.
9At the founding meeting of the International, a standing committee was struck off to organize the association. This became its Central Council, which subsequently became known as the General Council. Henceforth, these committees are identified simply as the General Council.
10Ibid., pp. 18 and 17. An ‘indisposition’ had prevented Marx from attending the first meeting of the sub-committee and the subsequent meeting of the full committee, ibid., p. 16.
11See Gian Mario Bravo, Marx e la Prima Internazionale. Bari: Laterza, 1979, pp. 18–19.
12See Karl Marx, ‘Karl Marx, Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association’, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, pp. 73–9.
13See Karl Marx to Friedrich Bolte, 23 November 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, p. 252, where he explained: ‘The history of the International was a continual struggle on the part of the General Council against the sects and amateur experiments which attempted to assert themselves within the International itself against the genuine movement of the working class. This struggle was conducted at the Congresses, but far more in the private dealings of the General Council with the individual sections.’
14Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 4 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 18. Translation: ‘strong in substance, mild in manner’.
15Karl Marx to Victor Le Lubez, 15 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 92. Marx took the same line in 1871 in a letter to the Chartist leader George Julian Harney [1817–1897]: ‘At London, I regret saying, most of the workmen’s representatives use their position in our council only as a means of furthering their own petty personal aims: […] to get into the House of Commons by hook or by crook’, Karl Marx to George Julian Harney, 21 January 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, pp. 100–1.
16See Bravo, Marx e la Prima Internazionale, p. 165.
17See Maximilien Rubel, Marx critique du marxisme, p. 41: ‘only the needs of mythology – if not mystification – could prompt them to see in this [political programme] the consequence of “Marxism”, that is, a fully realized doctrine, imposed from outside by an omniscient brain on an amorphous and inert mass of men in search of a social panacea’.
18See Oscar Testut, L’Association internationale des travailleurs. Lyons: Aimé Vingtrinier, 1870, p. 310.
19The Times, 5 June 1871; Oscar Testut, Le livre bleu de l’Internationale. Paris: Lachaud, 1871. In reality, the membership figures were much lower. It has always been difficult to arrive at even approximate estimates, and that was true for its own leaders and those who studied it most closely. On this issue, Marx declared at a meeting of the General Council on 20 December 1870: ‘respecting the list of members, it would be not well to publish what the real strength was, as the outside public always thought the active members much more numerous than they really were’, in Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. (ed.), The General Council of the First International 1870–1871, p. 96. But the present state of research allows the hypothesis that, at its peak in 1871–1872, the tally reached more than 150,000: 50,000 in Britain, more than 30,000 in France Belgium and Spain, 6,000 in Switzerland, about 25,000 in Italy, around 11,000 in Germany (but mostly members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party), plus a few thousand each in a number of other European countries, and 4,000 in the United States. In those times, when there was a dearth of effective working-class organizations apart from the English trade unions and the General Association of German Workers, such figures were certainly sizeable. See the membership table of the International in Marcello Musto, ‘Introduction’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 68.
20See Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, p. 70; Jacques D’Hondt, ‘Rapport de synthèse’, in Colloque International sur La première Internationale (ed.), La Première Internationale: l’institute, l’implantation, le rayonnement. Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968, p. 475.
21See Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, p. 289.
22Karl Marx, ‘Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866)’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 87.
23In his diary – Tagebuchblätter aus dem Jahre 1867 bis 1869. Leipzig: von Hirzel, 1901, vol. VIII, p. 406, General Friedrich von Bernhardi reported ‘from reliable sources’ that a fund of more than £5,000,000 was deposited in London for the use of the International. See Julius Braunthal, History of the International. New York: Nelson, 1966, p. 107.
24See Braunthal, p. 108, who affirms that no complete statement of the General Council’s annual income has been found among its papers. But a report by the treasurer, Cowell Stepney, has been found covering the income of the General Council from individual members’ subscriptions for the first six years. The figures were: 1865 – £23; 1866 – £9.13s.; 1867 – £5.17s.; 1868 – £14.14s.; 1869 – £30.12s.; 1870 – £14.14s. The last financial report submitted by Engels to the Hague Congress for the year 1870–2 showed a deficit of more than £25 owed by the General Council to members of the General Council and others. Copies of some balance sheets of the International have also been published in Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, pp. 80–1.
25Marx, ‘Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866)’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 85. See Karl Marx to Paul Lafargue, 19 April 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 491: ‘the General Council was not the Pope, […] we allowed every section to have its own theoretical views of the real movement, always supposed that nothing directly opposite to our Rules was put forward’.
26See Georges Haupt, L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin. Turin: Einaudi, 1978, p. 78.
27Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 24 June 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 163.
28Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 31 July 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 174.
29Karl Marx to Hermann Jung, 20 November 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 400.
30At this time, the party had about 5,000 members.
31Karl Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, 13 February 1865, quoted in Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 96.
32Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 February 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 97.
33Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, p. 65.
34Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 26 December 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 207.
35Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 March 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 238.
36Karl Marx to Antoinette Philips, 18 March 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 243.
37Marx, ‘Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866)’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 84.
38Lassalle advocated the concept of an ‘iron law of wages’, which held that efforts to increase wages were futile and a distraction for workers from the primary task of assuming political power in the state.
39Marx, ‘Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866)’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 86.
40See Karl Marx, ‘The Necessity and Limits of Trade Union Struggle’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 121. On the other hand, the need to differentiate between political and trade-union organization was always clear to Marx. In September 1869, in an interview with the German trade unionist Johann Hamann, Volksstaat, 27 November 1869, he stated: ‘The trade unions should never be affiliated with or made dependent upon a political society if they are to fulfil the object for which they were formed. If this happens it means their death blow. The trade unions are the schools for Socialism’, see Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Hamann, ‘Bericht über eine Unterredung von Metallgewerkschaften mit Karl Marx in Hannover am 30. September 1869’, in MEGA2, vol. I/21, p. 906.
41Marx, ‘Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866)’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 83.
42Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 9 October 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 326.
43See Jacques Freymond, ‘Introduction’, in Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. I (1866–1868). Geneva: Droz, 1962, p. xi.
44See Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, pp. 290–1.
45Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 7 June 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 281.
46Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 20 June 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 287.
47Marx continued not to attend congresses, with the exception of the crucial Hague Congress of 1872.
48Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 11 September 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 425.
49Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 12 September 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 428.
50Marx, ‘Resolutions of the Geneva Congress (1866)’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 85.
51See Freymond, ‘Introduction’, in Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. I (1866–1868), p. xiv.
52Karl Marx, ‘Resolutions of the Brussels Congress (1868)’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 92.
53This was possible thanks to the change in the Belgian sections, which moved to collectivism after their federal congress of July.
54Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. I (1866–1868), pp. 402–3.
55Ibid., p. 403.
56See César De Paepe, ‘Strike Against War’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, pp. 230–1.
57Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 16 September 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 101.
58Ibid., p. 102.
59Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 4 August 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 340.
60Karl Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, 24 March 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 464. His daughter Jenny wrote of the divergence between what some people imagined to be material conditions of the International and the situation in reality. When the official French press and the London Times, writing of a major strike by steelworkers and miners in Le Creusot, suggested that it had been provoked by ‘artificial excitement’ and that the leader of the strike had received 55,000 francs from the International, Jenny wrote to the family friend Kugelmann: ‘Would they [these claims] were true! It is a thousand pities the International cannot keep pace in its doings with the brilliant imaginings of these worthies’, Jenny Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 30 January 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 554.
61Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 19 September 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 105.
62Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 26 September 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 115. Although he declined an invitation to the Hamburg Congress, Marx nevertheless found some signs of progress. To Engels he remarked: ‘I was glad to see that the starting points of any “serious” workers’ movement – agitation for complete political freedom, regulation of the working day and international co-operation of the working class – were emphasised in their programme for the congress. […] in other words, I congratulated them on having abandoned Lassalle’s programme’, Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 26 August 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, pp. 89–90.
63Karl Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, 13 October 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, pp. 133–5. The actual letter has been lost, but fortunately Marx preserved his draft.
64Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 August 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 343.
65Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 December 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, pp. 184–5.
66Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 5 March 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, pp. 235–6.
67Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872), p. 74.
68Karl Marx to Laura Lafargue, 25 September 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 355.
69Of this organization, Marx wrote: ‘It is no less […] than cowardice in action. [… It] deceive[s] the public with ambiguous, ineffectual and declamatory pronouncements’, Karl Marx to Auguste Vermorel, 27 August 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 414. On the occasion of its congress in 1867, he remarked to Engels: ‘The jackasses from the Peace Congress […] completely changed their original programme and even smuggled into the new one, which is much more democratic, the words “the harmonizing of economic interests with liberty”, which could mean almost anything, including just free trade’, Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 4 September 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 420.
70Mikhail Bakunin to Karl Marx, 22 December 1868, quoted in James Guillaume, L’Internationale, Documents et Souvenirs (1864–1878), vol. I. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969, p. 153. See Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 January 1869, p. 201.
71Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Four Anarchist Programmes’, in Arthur Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, p. 174. The translation provided in this book is inaccurate and misleading. In Fictitious Splits in the International, Engels and Marx quoted directly from Bakunin’s original document (‘l’égalisation politique, économique et sociale des classes’), see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Against Sectarianism’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, pp. 287–9.
72See Edward Hallett Carr, Michael Bakunin. New York: Vintage, 1961, p. 392.
73According to Carr, Michael Bakunin, p. 374: ‘the wooden horse had entered the Trojan citadel’.
74See Karl Marx, ‘On the Right of Inheritance’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 163f.