The late 1860s and early 1870s were a period rich in social conflicts. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation was spreading ever wider, and to ask it to support their struggles. The year 1869 witnessed a significant expansion of the International all over Europe. Britain was an exception in this respect, however. While the union leaders fully backed Marx against the mutualists, they had little time for theoretical issues1 and did not exactly glow with revolutionary ardour. This was the reason why Marx for a long time opposed the founding of a British federation of the International independent of the General Council.
This period also saw the birth of some sections of Irish workers in England and the appointment of the workers’ leader John MacDonnell [1845–1906] as corresponding secretary for Ireland on the General Council. At its session on 16 November, Marx proposed a resolution expressing the International’s ‘admiration of the spirited, firm and high-souled manner in which the Irish people carry on their Amnesty movement’.2 A few days earlier, he had told Engels in a letter how much he enjoyed the ‘latest meetings in Ireland’, at which ‘the clerics were seized by their collars and removed from the speaker’s stand’.3
While exhaustively analysing the Irish question, Marx not only continued the political battle – against the scepticism of British workers’ leaders – for the International to adopt a radical, not merely ‘humanitarian’, position; he also developed an important turn with regard to his previous conceptions. He wrote to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann:
I have become more and more convinced – and the thing now is to drum this conviction into the English working class – that they will never be able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and not only make common cause with the Irish, but even take the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801, and substituting a free federal relationship for it. And this must be done not out of sympathy for Ireland, but as a demand based on the interests of the English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain bound to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because they will be forced to make a common front with them against Ireland. Every movement of the working class in England itself is crippled by the dissension with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England itself. The primary condition for emancipation here – the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy – remains unattainable, since its positions cannot be stormed here as long as it holds its strongly-entrenched outposts in Ireland. But over there, once affairs have been laid in the hands of the Irish people themselves, as soon as they have made themselves their own legislators and rulers, as soon as they have become autonomous, it will be infinitely easier there than here to abolish the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the same persons as the English landlords) since […] it is not just merely an economic question, but also a national one, as the landlords there are […] the mortally-hated oppressors of the nationality.4
Marx returned to the theme in an important ‘Confidential Communication’ of the International that he sent out on 28 March 1870.5 ‘In Ireland,’ he stated, ‘landlordism is maintained solely by the English army. The moment the forced union between the two countries ends, a social revolution will break out in Ireland, even if in outmoded form.’ As to the British working class, ‘by maintaining the power of their landlords in Ireland,’ it made them ‘invulnerable in England itself’. This was also true from a military point of view. For Ireland was ‘the only pretext the English Government has for maintaining a large standing army, which in case of necessity, as has happened before, can be loosed against the English workers after getting its military training in Ireland’.6
Marx had become increasingly convinced that the independence of Ireland was an absolutely central question. In a letter he sent to Kugelmann in November 1869, he concluded: ‘Not only does England’s internal social development remain crippled by the present relationship to Ireland’; it also had a negative impact on British foreign policy particularly ‘with regard to Russia and the United States of America’. Bearing in mind the ‘fact’ that ‘the English Republic under Cromwell met shipwreck in Ireland’, he now warned: ‘Non bis in idem!’7
In December 1869, Marx outlined to Engels the convictions he had developed on how the English working class should relate to the liberation of Ireland:
For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New-York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.8
Moreover, as the ‘world metropolis of landed property and capitalism’, England was decisive for the whole of Europe and the proletarian revolution in general. Marx expressed this nexus clearly, in March 1870, in a letter to Laura and Paul Lafargue [1842–1911]: ‘To accelerate the social development in Europe, you must push on the catastrophe of official England. To do so, you must attack her in Ireland. That’s her weakest point. Ireland lost, the British “Empire” is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms.’9
The ‘Confidential Communication’ of 28 March maintained that the ‘first task’ of the International should be to ‘hasten the social revolution in England’. But that would occur only if the political set-up ensuring the ‘enslavement of Ireland’ was transformed – ‘into an equal and free confederation, if possible, or complete separation, if need be’.10
A very similar point is made in a long and rich letter that Marx sent, in Spring 1870, to Sigfrid Meyer [1840–1872] and August Vogt [1830–1883], two members of the International, of German origin, in the United States: ‘After studying the Irish question for years, I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the ruling classes in England – and this is decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world – cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland.’11
For Marx, however, there was something even ‘more important’ politically than the English occupation of Ireland, and that was the division that violent nationalism had produced within the ranks of the proletariat. In the ‘Confidential Communication’ he emphasized that ‘the English bourgeoisie has not only exploited the Irish misery to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen’; it had also proved able to divide the workers ‘into two hostile camps’.
In all the big industrial centres in England, there is a profound antagonism between the Irish and English proletarians. The average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He regards him practically in the same way the poor whites in the southern states of North America regard the black slaves. This antagonism between the proletarians in England is artificially nourished and kept alive by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of maintaining its power.12
In the letter to Meyer and Vogt, Marx pushed his point of view even further. He reminded them that the English worker ‘feels himself to be a member of the ruling nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself’. ‘The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money’, rightly seeing the English worker as ‘the accomplice and the stupid tool of English rule in Ireland’. The ruling classes encourage this antagonism as much as possible; it is ‘kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the[ir] disposal’.13
Moreover, ‘the evil does not end here. It rolls across the ocean.’14 In the ‘Confidential Communication’ of March 1870, Marx pointed out: ‘The Irish, driven from their native soil, […] reassemble in North America, where […] their only thought, their only passion, is hatred for England.’ The English and American governments, or ‘the classes they represent’, ‘nourish these passions in order to perpetuate the covert struggle between the United States and England, and thereby prevent a sincere and serious alliance between the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic, and, consequently, their emancipation’.
Marx elaborated on these themes to Meyer and Vogt: ‘The antagonism between English and Irish […] enables the governments of the two countries, whenever they think fit, to blunt the edge of social conflict by mutual bullying and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.’ In this letter to comrades on the other side of the Atlantic, Marx expounded better than anywhere else the political choices necessary in the existing situation:
England, as the metropolis of capital, as the power that has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important country for the workers’ revolution and, in addition, the only country where the material conditions for this revolution have developed to a certain state of maturity. Thus, to hasten the social revolution in England is the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association. The sole means of doing so is to make Ireland independent. It is, therefore, the task of the ‘International’ to bring the conflict between England and Ireland to the forefront everywhere, and to side with Ireland publicly everywhere.15
The International, and particularly the General Council in London, had to make the British workers realize that ‘the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment’, as certain enlightened liberals or religious figures were arguing. It was a basic question of class solidarity, ‘the first condition of their own social emancipation’.16 As Marx put it in the ‘Confidential Communication’, ‘England today is seeing a repetition of what happened on a gigantic scale in ancient Rome. A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.’ The International had come into being to prevent such a repetition.
In 1870, in every European country where the International was reasonably strong, its members gave birth to new organizations completely autonomous from those already in existence. In Britain, however, the unions that made up the main force of the International naturally did not disband their own structures. The London-based General Council therefore fulfilled two functions at once: as world headquarters and as the leadership for Britain, where trade union affiliations kept some 50,000 workers in its orbit of influence.
In France, the repressive policies of the Second Empire made 1868 a year of serious crisis for the International. The following year, however, saw a revival of the organization, and new leaders who had abandoned mutualist positions came to the fore. The peak of expansion for the International came in 1870, but despite its considerable growth the organization never took root in 38 of the 90 départements. The national total has been put somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000.17 Thus, although the International did not become a true mass organization in France, it certainly grew to a respectable size and aroused widespread interest.
In Belgium, membership peaked in the early 1870s at several tens of thousands, probably exceeding the number in the whole of France. It was here that the International achieved both its highest numerical density in the general population and its greatest influence in society. The positive evolution during this period was also apparent in Switzerland. In 1870, however, Bakunin’s activity divided the organization into two groups of equal size, which confronted each other at the congress of the Romande Federation precisely on the question of whether his International Alliance for Socialist Democracy should be admitted to the Federation.18 When it proved impossible to reconcile their positions, the proceedings continued in two parallel congresses, and a truce was agreed only after an intervention by the General Council. The group aligned with London was slightly smaller, yet retained the name Romande Federation, whereas the one linked to Bakunin had to adopt the name Jura Federation, even though its affiliation to the International was again recognized.
During this period, Bakunin’s ideas began to spread, but the country where they took hold most rapidly was Spain. In fact, the International first developed in the Iberian Peninsula through the activity of the Neapolitan anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli [1827–1877], who, at Bakunin’s request, travelled to Barcelona and Madrid to help found both sections of the International and groups of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy. His trip achieved its purpose. But his distribution of documents of both international organizations, often to the same people, was a prime example of the Bakuninite confusion and theoretical eclecticism of the time; the Spanish workers founded the International with the principles of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy.
In the North German Confederation, despite the existence of two political organizations of the workers’ movement – the Lassallean General Association of German Workers and the Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany – there was little enthusiasm for the International and few requests to affiliate to it. During its first three years, German militants virtually ignored its existence, fearing persecution at the hands of the authorities. The weak internationalism of the Germans ultimately weighed more heavily than any legal aspects, however, and declined still further when the movement became more preoccupied with internal matters.19
Against this background, marked by evident contradictions and uneven development between countries, the International made provisions for its fifth congress in September 1870. This was originally scheduled to be held in Paris, but repressive operations by the French government made the General Council opt instead for Mainz; Marx probably also thought that the greater number of German delegates close to his positions would help to stem the advance of the Bakuninists, which had been taking place mainly in southern Europe. In May, after a General Council meeting at which his proposal was accepted, Marx remarked to Engels: ‘The transfer of the congress to Mainz – unanimously voted yesterday – will give Bakunin a fit.’20
A month earlier, Marx had sent a long letter to Paul Lafargue that contained information about ‘Bakunin’s intrigues’ for Paris branches of the International. Bakunin, Marx wrote, had given his Alliance for Socialist Democracy the character of ‘a sect’, which was to ‘have general congresses of its own, […] to form an independent international body, and at the same time to be a member of our Internationale’. In short, Bakunin was seeking to turn the International into an organization under his control, by means of an ‘interloping secret society’.21 A conflict thus began to develop between the two, with no holds barred.
Marx kept a close watch on the workers’ movement, to ensure that it did not acquire similar features. On the occasion of the founding of a new section of the International, he urged Paul Lafargue to do everything to prevent its being given ‘a sectarian name, either Communistic or other’. According to Marx:
Sectarian ‘labels’ should be avoided in the International Association The general aspirations and tendencies of the working class emanate from the real conditions in which it finds itself placed. They are therefore common to the whole class although the movement reflects itself in their heads in the most diversified forms, more or less phantastical, more or less adequate. Those who interpret best the hidden sense of the class struggle going on before our eyes – the Communists – are the last to commit the blunder of affecting or fostering sectarianism.22
In summer 1870, in the course of preparations for the congress of the International, Marx also wrote to Hermann Jung and sent him a detailed note on the issues to be taken up there. These were:
1) The necessity of abolishing the public debt. Discussion on the right of indemnity to be accorded. 2) The relations between political action and the social movement of the working class. 3) Practical measures for converting landed property into public property. […] 4) The conversion of currency banks into national banks. 5) Conditions of cooperative production on a national scale. 6) On the necessity for the working class to keep general statistics of labour in accordance with the resolutions of the Geneva Congress of 1866. 7) Reconsideration […] of the question of measures to abolish war.
To these points he added the proposal of the Belgian general council to consider ‘practical measures to set up agricultural sections within the International and to achieve solidarity between the proletarians in agriculture and the proletarians in other industries’.23
However, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, on 19 July 1870, left no choice but to call off the congress. The conflict at the heart of Europe meant that the top priority now was to help the workers’ movement express an independent position, far from the nationalist rhetoric of the time.
In his ‘First Address on the Franco-Prussian War’ (1870), Marx called upon the French workers to drive out Charles Louis Bonaparte [1808–1873] and to obliterate the empire he had established eighteen years earlier. The German workers, for their part, were supposed to prevent the defeat of Bonaparte from turning into an attack on the French people: ‘if the German working class allows the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous’. Marx added:
The English working class stretch the hand of fellowship to the French and German working people. They feel deeply convinced that whatever turn the impending horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill; this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future. It proves that in contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose international rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be everywhere the same – Labour! The pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men’s Association.24
This text, in 30,000 copies (15,000 for Germany and 15,000 for France, printed in Geneva), was the first major foreign policy declaration of the International. One of the many who spoke enthusiastically in support of it was John Stuart Mill: ‘there was not one word in it that ought not to be there,’ he wrote, and ‘it could not have been done with fewer words’.25
The leaders of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel [1840–1913], were the only two members of parliament in the North German Confederation who refused to vote for the special war budget,26 and sections of the International in France also sent messages of friendship and solidarity to the German workers. Yet the French defeat sealed the birth of a new and more potent age of nation-states in Europe, with all its accompanying chauvinism.
This was the scenario that Marx had in mind in the ‘Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War’, when he wrote that ‘the present tremendous war might be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation to a renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital’.27
After the German victory at Sedan and the capture of Bonaparte, a Third Republic was proclaimed in France on 4 September 1870. In January of the following year, a four-month siege of Paris ended in the French acceptance of Bismarck’s conditions; an ensuing armistice allowed the holding of elections and the appointment of Adolphe Thiers [1797–1877] as President of the Republic, with the support of a huge Legitimist and Orleanist majority. In the capital, however, Progressive-Republican forces swept the board and there was widespread popular discontent. Faced with the prospect of a government that wanted to disarm the city and withhold any social reform, the Parisians turned against Thiers and on 18 March initiated the first great political event in the life of the workers’ movement: the Paris Commune.
Although Bakunin had urged the workers to turn patriotic war into revolutionary war,28 the General Council in London initially opted for silence. It charged Marx with the task of writing a text in the name of the International, but he delayed its publication for complicated, deeply held reasons. Well aware of the real relationship of forces on the ground as well as the weaknesses of the Commune, he knew that it was doomed to defeat. He had even tried to warn the French working class back in September 1870, in his ‘Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War’:
Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workmen […] must not allow themselves to be swayed by the national souvenirs of 1792 […]. They have not to recapitulate the past, but to build up the future. Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of republican liberty, for the work of their own class organization. It will gift them with fresh herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and our common task – the emancipation of labour. Upon their energies and wisdom hinges the fate of the republic.29
In a letter to Liebknecht, Marx complained of the ‘too great honesty’ of the Parisian revolutionaries. In trying to avoid ‘the appearance of having usurped power’, they had ‘lost precious moments’ by organizing the election of the Commune. Their ‘folly’ had been ‘not wanting to start a civil war – as if Thiers had not already started it by his attempt at forcibly disarming Paris’.30 He made similar points to his friend Kugelmann a week later: ‘The right moment was missed because of conscientious scruples. […] Second mistake: The Central Committee surrendered power too soon, to make way for the Commune. Again from a too honourable scrupulousness.’
At any event, alongside critical observations on the course of events in France, Marx never failed to highlight the exceptional combative spirit and political ability of the Communards. He continued:
What resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians! After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not still at the gates of Paris! History has no like example of a like greatness.
Marx understood that, whatever the outcome of the revolution, the Commune had opened a new chapter in the history of the workers’ movement.
The present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June Insurrection in Paris.31 Compare these Parisians, storming the heavens, with the slaves to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades reeking of the barracks, the Church, the cabbage Junkers and above all, of the philistines.32
Marx continued these reflections a few days later in another letter to Kugelmann. Whereas his close friend had wrongly compared the fighting in Paris to ‘petty-bourgeois demonstrations’ like those of 13 June 1849 in Paris, Marx again exalted the courage of the Communards: ‘World history,’ he wrote, ‘would indeed be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances.’ His thinking here shows just how remote he was from the kind of fatalist determinism that his critics attributed to him:
[History] would, on the other hand, be of a very mystical nature if ‘accidents’ played no part. These accidents themselves fall naturally into the general course of development and are compensated again by other accidents. But acceleration and delay are very dependent upon such ‘accidents’, which include the ‘accident’ of the character of those who first stand at the head of the movement.33
The circumstance that worked against the Commune was the presence of the Prussians on French soil, allied with the ‘bourgeois riff-raff of Versailles’. Bolstered by their understanding with the Germans,34 the Versaillais ‘presented the Parisians with the alternative of taking up the fight or succumbing without a struggle’. In the latter case, ‘the demoralization of the working class would have been a far greater misfortune than the fall of any number of “leaders”’. Marx concluded: ‘The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.’35
A fervid declaration hailing the victory of the Paris Commune would have risked creating false expectations among workers throughout Europe, eventually becoming a source of demoralization and distrust. Marx therefore decided to postpone delivery and stayed away from meetings of the General Council for several weeks. His grim forebodings soon proved all too well founded, and on 28 May, little more than two months after its proclamation, the Paris Commune was drowned in blood. Two days later, he reappeared at the General Council with a manuscript entitled The Civil War in France (1871); it was read and unanimously approved, then published over the names of all the Council members.
The document had a huge impact over the next few weeks, greater than any other document of the workers’ movement in the nineteenth century. Speaking of the Paris Commune, Marx wrote:
The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and thereafter responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society.36
The Paris Commune had been an altogether novel political experiment:
It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour. Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.37
For Marx, the new phase of class struggle that opened with the Paris Commune could be successful – and therefore produce radical changes – only through the realization of a clearly anticapitalist programme:
the Commune intended to abolish […] class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. […] If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism? The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce by decree of the people. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.38
Three English editions of The Civil War in France in quick succession won acclaim among the workers and caused uproar in bourgeois circles. It was also translated fully or partly into a dozen other languages, appearing in newspapers, magazines and booklets in various European countries and the United States.
Despite Marx’s passionate defence, and despite the claims both of reactionary opponents and of dogmatic Marxists eager to glorify the International,39 it is out of the question that the General Council actually pushed for the Parisian insurrection. Prominent figures in the organization did play a role – Leo Frankel [1844–1896], for example, though Hungarian by origin, was placed in charge of work, industry and trade – but the leadership of the Paris Commune was in the hands of its radical Jacobin wing. Of the eighty-five representatives elected at the municipal elections of 26 March,40 there were fifteen moderates (the so-called ‘parti des maires’, a group of former mayors of the arrondissements) and four radicals, who immediately resigned and never formed part of the Council of the Commune. Of the sixty-six remaining, eleven, although revolutionary, were without a clear political tendency, fourteen came from the Committee of the National Guard, and fifteen were radical-republicans and socialists; in addition there were nine Blanquists, and seventeen members of the International.41 Among the latter were Édouard Vaillant [1840–1915], Benoît Malon [1841–1893], Auguste Serrailler [1840–1872], Jean-Louis Pindy [1840–1917], Albert Theisz [1839–1880], Charles Longuet [1839–1903] and the previously mentioned Varlin and Frankel. However, coming as they did from various political backgrounds and cultures, they did not constitute a monolithic group and often voted in different ways. This too favoured the hegemony of the Jacobin perspective of radical republicanism, which was reflected in the Montagnard-inspired decision in May (approved by two-thirds of the Council, including the Blanquists) to create a Committee of Public Safety. Marx himself pointed out that ‘the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it have been’.42
During the ‘bloody week’ (21–28 May) that followed the irruption of the Versaillais into Paris, some ten thousand Communards were killed in fighting or summarily executed; it was the bloodiest massacre in French history. Another 43,000 or more were taken prisoner, 13,500 of whom were subsequently sentenced to death, imprisonment, forced labour or deportation (many to the remote colony of New Caledonia). Another 7,000 managed to escape and take refuge in England, Belgium or Switzerland. The European conservative and liberal press completed the work of Thiers’s soldiers, accusing the Communards of hideous crimes and trumpeting the victory of ‘civilization’ over the insolent workers’ rebellion. From now on, the International was at the eye of the storm, held to blame for every act against the established order. ‘When the great conflagration took place at Chicago,’ Marx mused with bitter irony, ‘the telegraph round the world announced it as the infernal deed of the International; and it is really wonderful that to its demoniacal agency has not been attributed the hurricane ravaging the West Indies’.43
Marx had to spend whole days answering press slanders about the International and himself: ‘at this moment’, he wrote, [he was] ‘the best calumniated and the most menaced man of London’.44 Meanwhile, governments all over Europe sharpened their instruments of repression, fearing that other uprisings might follow the one in Paris.
Despite the bloody denouement in Paris and the wave of calumny and government repression elsewhere in Europe, the International grew stronger and more widely known in the wake of the Commune. For the capitalists and the middle classes it represented a threat to the established order, but for the workers it fuelled hopes in a world without exploitation and injustice.45 Insurrectionary Paris fortified the workers’ movement, impelling it to adopt more radical positions and to intensify its militancy. The experience showed that revolution was possible, that the goal could and should be to build a society utterly different from the capitalist order, but also that, in order to achieve this, the workers would have to create durable and well-organized forms of political association.46 Enormous vitality was apparent everywhere. Attendance at General Council meetings doubled, while the press linked to the International increased in both number and overall sales, after the emergence of many new papers.
Two years had passed since the last congress of the International, but a new one could not be held under the prevailing circumstances. The General Council therefore decided to organize a conference in London; it took place between 17 and 23 September 1871, in the presence of twenty-two delegates47 from Britain (Ireland too being represented for the first time), Belgium, Switzerland and Spain, plus the French exiles. Despite the efforts to make the event as representative as possible, it was in fact more in the way of an enlarged General Council meeting.
Marx had announced beforehand that the conference would be devoted ‘exclusively to questions of organization and policy’,48 with theoretical discussions left to one side. He spelled this out at its first session:
The General Council has convened a conference to agree with delegates from various countries the measures that need to be taken against the dangers facing the Association in a large number of countries, and to move towards a new organization corresponding to the needs of the situation. In the second place, to work out a response to the governments that are ceaselessly working to destroy the Association with every means at their disposal. And lastly to settle the Swiss dispute once and for all.49
Marx summoned all his energies for these priorities: to reorganize the International, to defend it from the offensive of hostile forces, and to check Bakunin’s growing influence. By far the most active delegate at the conference, Marx took the floor as many as 102 times, blocked proposals that did not fit in with his plans, and won over those not yet convinced.50 The gathering in London confirmed his stature within the organization, not only as the brains shaping its political line, but also as one of its most combative and capable militants.
The most important decision taken at the conference, for which it would be remembered later, was the approval of Vaillant’s Resolution IX. The leader of the Blanquists – whose residual forces had joined the International after the end of the Commune – proposed that the organization should be transformed into a centralized, disciplined party, under the leadership of the General Council. Despite some differences, particularly over the Blanquist position that a tightly organized nucleus of militants was sufficient for the revolution, Marx did not hesitate to form an alliance with Vaillant’s group: not only to strengthen the opposition to Bakuninite anarchism within the International, but above all to create a broader consensus for the changes deemed necessary in the new phase of the class struggle. In an intervention at one of the sessions on 20 September, Marx argued:
[T]he tribune is the best instrument of publicity [and] one should never believe that it is of small significance to have workers in Parliament. […] To give but one example: when during the [Franco-Prussian] war, which was fought in France, Bebel and Liebknecht undertook to point out the responsibility of the working class in the face of those events, all of Germany was shaken; and even in Munich, the city where revolutions take place only over the price of beer, great demonstrations took place demanding an end to the war – which, in Munich, won many workers to the International Association. The governments are hostile to us, one must respond to them with all the means at our disposal and launch a general crusade against them. To get workers into Parliament is synonymous with a victory over governments, but one must choose the right men. […]. The Association has always demanded, and not merely from today, that the workers must occupy themselves with politics.51
Marx returned to the subject on the following day. In the part of his intervention that was transcribed and preserved, he ‘explained the history of abstention from politics and said that one should not get worked up over this question’.52 And he added: ‘The men who propagated this doctrine were well-meaning utopians, but those who want to take such a road today are not. They reject politics until after a violent struggle, and thereby drive the people into a formal, bourgeois opposition, which we must battle against at the same time that we fight against the governments.’53 According to Marx, the International should give the following message to governments: ‘We know you are the armed power which is directed against the proletarians; we will move against you in peaceful ways where it is possible, and with arms if it should become necessary.’54 The resolution passed at the London Conference therefore stated:
that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes; that this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes; and that the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economic struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists.55
The conclusion was clear: ‘the economic movement [of the working class] and its political action are indissolubly united’.56
Whereas the Geneva Congress of 1866 established the importance of trade unions, the London Conference of 1871 shifted the focus to the other key instrument of the modern workers’ movement: the political party. It should be stressed, however, that the understanding of this was much broader than that which developed in the twentieth century. Marx’s conception should therefore be differentiated both from the Blanquists’ – the two would openly clash later on.57
For Marx, the self-emancipation of the working class required a long and arduous process – the polar opposite of the theories and practices in Sergei Nechaev’s [1847–1882] Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869), whose advocacy of secret societies was condemned by the delegates in London58 but enthusiastically supported by Bakunin.
Only four delegates opposed Resolution IX at the London Conference, but Marx’s victory soon proved to be ephemeral. For the call to establish what amounted to political parties in every country and to confer broader powers on the General Council had grave repercussions in the internal life of the International; it was not ready to move so rapidly from a flexible to a politically uniform model of organization.59
Marx was convinced that virtually all the main federations and local sections would back the resolutions of the Conference, but he soon had to think again. On 12 November, the Jura Federation – the anarchist-led Swiss group of the International – called a congress of its own in the small commune of Sonvilier, and, although Bakunin was unable to attend, it officially launched the opposition within the International. In the ‘Circular to All Federations of the International Working Men’s Association’ issued at the end of the proceedings, James Guillaume [1844–1916] and the other participants accused the General Council of having introduced the ‘authority principle’ into the International and transformed its original structure into ‘a hierarchical organization directed and governed by a committee’. The Swiss declared themselves ‘against all directing authority, even should that authority be elected and endorsed by the workers’, and insisted on ‘retention of the principle of autonomy of the Sections’, so that the General Council would become ‘a simple correspondence and statistical bureau’.60 Lastly, they called for a congress to be held as soon as possible.
Although the position of the Jura Federation was not unexpected, Marx was probably surprised when signs of restlessness and even rebellion against the political line of the General Council began to appear elsewhere. In a number of countries, the decisions taken in London were judged an unacceptable encroachment on local political autonomy. The Belgian Federation, which at the conference had aimed at mediation between the different sides, began to adopt a much more critical stance towards London, and the Dutch too later took their distance. In southern Europe, where the reaction was even stronger, the opposition soon won considerable support. Indeed, the great majority of Iberian Internationalists came out against the General Council and endorsed Bakunin’s ideas, partly, no doubt, because these were more in keeping with a region where the industrial proletariat had a presence only in the main cities, and where the workers’ movement was still very weak and mainly concerned with economic demands. In Italy too, the results of the London Conference were seen in a negative light. Those who followed Mazzini gathered in Rome from 1 to 6 November 1871, in the General Congress of Italian Workers’ Societies (the more moderate labour bloc), while most of the rest fell in with Bakunin’s positions. Those who met at Rimini between 4 and 6 August 1872 for the founding congress of the Italian Federation of the International took the most radical position against the General Council: they would not participate in the forthcoming congress of the International but proposed to hold an ‘anti-authoritarian general congress’61 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. In fact, this would be the first act of the impending split.
Across the Atlantic, too, various feuds limited the expansion of the International.62 Apart from the English, support for the General Council still came from a majority of the Swiss, from the French (now mostly Blanquists), the weak German forces, the recently constituted sections in Denmark, Ireland and Portugal, and the East European groups in Hungary and Bohemia. But all these added up to much less than Marx had expected at the end of the London Conference.
The opposition to the General Council was varied in character and sometimes had mainly personal motives; a strange alchemy held it together and made leadership of the International even more difficult. Still, beyond the fascination with Bakunin’s theories in certain countries and Guillaume’s capacity to unify the various oppositionists, the main factor militating against the resolution on ‘Working-Class Political Action’ was an environment unwilling to accept the qualitative step forward proposed by Marx. For all the accompanying claims of utility, the London turn was seen by many as crass interference; not only the group linked to Bakunin but most of the federations and local sections regarded the principle of autonomy and respect for diverse realities as one of the cornerstones of the International. This miscalculation on Marx’s part accelerated the crisis of the organization.63
1Jacques Freymond, ‘Introduction’, in Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. I (1866–1868), p. xix.
2Karl Marx, ‘Draft Resolution of the General Council on the Policy of the British Government towards the Irish Prisoners’, 18 November 1869, in MECW, vol. 21, p. 83.
3Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 12 November 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 371.
4Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 29 November 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, pp. 390–1.
5This text was an extract from a private circular sent by Marx to his friend and International member Kugelmann for him to forward it to its intended recipient: the Brunswick Committee of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Marx appended to it a text he had written on or soon after 1 January 1870, entitled ‘The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland’, and published, in 1872, in the brochure Fictitious Splits in the International.
6Karl Marx, ‘Confidential Communication’, in MECW, vol. 21, p. 120.
7Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 29 November 1869, p. 391. Translation: ‘Let this not happen a second time!’
8Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 December 1869, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 398.
9Karl Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue, 5 March 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 449.
10Marx, ‘Confidential Communication’, in MECW, vol. 21, pp. 120–1.
11Karl Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 473.
12Marx, ‘Confidential Communication’, in MECW, vol. 21, p. 120.
13Karl Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, pp. 474–5.
14Ibid., p. 475.
15Ibid.
16Ibid.
17Jacques Rougerie spoke of ‘some tens of thousands’, ‘Les sections françaises de l’Association Internationale des Travailleurs’, in Colloque International sur La première Internationale (ed.), La Première Internationale: l’institute, l’implantation, le rayonnement, p. 111.
18Jacques Freymond (ed.), Études et documents sur la Première Internationale en Suisse. Geneva: Droz, 1964, p. 295.
19Ibid., p. x.
20Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 May 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 523.
21Karl Marx to Paul Lafargue, 19 April 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, pp. 489–90.
22Karl Marx to Paul Lafargue, 18 April 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 485.
23Karl Marx to Hermann Jung, 14 July 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 538.
24Karl Marx, ‘First Address on the Franco-Prussian War’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 239.
25John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 32. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, p. 244.
26The representatives of the Lassallean General Association of German Workers voted in favour.
27Karl Marx, ‘Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 241.
28See Arthur Lehning, ‘Introduction’, in Lehning (ed.), Bakunin – Archiv, vol. VI: Michel Bakounine sur la Guerre Franco-Allemande et la Révolution Sociale en France (1870–1871). Leiden: Brill, 1977, p. xvi.
29Marx, ‘Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War’, p. 241.
30Karl Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 6 April 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, p. 128.
31Marx is referring to the workers’ uprising of June 1848, which was drowned in blood by a conservative republican government.
32Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 April 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, pp. 131–2.
33Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 April 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, pp. 136–7.
34See Karl Marx to Léo Frankel and Louis Eugène Varlin [1839–1871] (draft), 13 May 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, p. 149: ‘The Prussians won’t hand over the forts to the Versailles people, but after the definitive conclusion of peace (26 May), they will allow the government to invest Paris with its gendarmes. […] Thiers & Co. had […] asked Bismarck to delay payment of the first instalment until the occupation of Paris. Bismarck accepted this condition. Prussia, being herself in urgent need of that money, will therefore provide the Versailles people with every possible facility to hasten the occupation of Paris. So be on your guard!’
35Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 April 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, p. 137.
36Karl Marx, ‘On the Paris Commune’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, pp. 215–16.
37Ibid., pp. 217–18.
38Ibid., pp. 218–19.
39See Georges Haupt, Aspect of International Socialism 1871–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, who warned against ‘the reshaping of the reality of the Commune in order to make it conform to an image transfigured by ideology’, p. 25.
40There were 92 seats, but the multiple election of some individuals meant that there were only 85 actual council members.
41See Jacques Rougerie, Paris libre 1871. Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 146; Pierre Milza, L’année terrible. Paris: Perrin, 2009, p. 78.
42Karl Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, in MECW, vol. 46, p. 66.
43Karl Marx, ‘Report of the General Council to the Fifth Annual Congress of the International’, in Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. (ed.), The General Council of the First International 1871–1872, 1968, p. 461.
44Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 18 June 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, p. 157.
45See Georges Haupt, L’internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, p. 28.
46Ibid., pp. 93–5.
47In fact, only nineteen delegates participated in the conference, since one could not attend and two were present only at the first two sessions.
48Karl Marx, 15 August 1871, in Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. (ed.), The General Council of the First International 1870–1871, p. 259.
49Karl Marx, 17 September 1871, in Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872), p. 152. The ‘Swiss dispute’ was linked to disagreement with the anarchists. See Marcello Musto, ‘Introduction’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 36f.
50See Miklós Molnár, Le déclin de la première internationale, p. 127.
51Karl Marx, ‘On the Political Action of the Working Class’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, pp. 278–9.
52Karl Marx, ‘On the question of Abstentionism’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 280.
53Ibid.
54Ibid.
55Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘On the Political Action of the Working Class and Other Matters’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 285.
56Ibid.
57In the early 1870s the working-class movement was organized as a political party only in Germany. Usage of the term ‘party,’ whether by the followers of Marx or of Bakunin, was therefore very confused. Even Marx used the term in a vague manner. For him, according to Maximilien Rubel, Marx critique du marxisme, p. 183, ‘the concept of party […] corresponds to the concept of class’. It is useful to emphasize that the conflict which took place in the International between 1871 and 1872 did not focus on the construction of a political party – an expression uttered only twice at the London Conference and five times at the Hague Congress – but rather on the ‘use […] of the adjective “political”’, Haupt, L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, p. 84.
58See Henri Burgelin, Knut Langfeldt and Miklós Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872). Geneva: Droz, 1962, p. 237; and Karl Marx, ‘Declaration of the General Council on Nechayev’s Misuse of the Name of the International Working Men’s Association’, in MECW, vol. 23, p. 23.
59See Jacques Freymond and Miklós Molnár, ‘The Rise and Fall of the First International’, in Milorad M. Drachkovitch (ed.), The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864–1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966, p. 27.
60Various authors, ‘Circulaire du Congrès de Sonvilier’, in Burgelin, Langfeldt and Molnár (eds), La première Internationale, vol. II (1869–1872), pp. 264–5.
61Various authors, Risoluzione, programma e regolamento della federazione italiana dell’Associazione Internazionale dei Lavoratori, in Gian Mario Bravo, La Prima Internazionale, p. 787.
62See Musto (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!, p. 20.
63See Freymond and Molnár, ‘The Rise and Fall of the First International’, pp. 27–8.