BACKGROUND

BACKGROUND

Understanding Socialism is particularly important today, when it is attacked by its open enemies and betrayed by those who claim to defend it. Against the ‘realism’ of those who accept readily the division of labour being expressed in the globe’s division into armed States, each composed of a majority of isolated individuals being manipulated by a minority possessing economic power, it is necessary to assert once more the practicability as well as the desirability of the idea of one world order in which the interdependence of each person is expressed in their basic equality in making decisions that affect their individual and collective lives.

That this work is concerned with the first failures of attempts to organize to achieve this aim may seem to contradict the above statement. In fact, it reinforces it. Despite defections, the consistent Socialist Internationalists have advanced their cause as those who have compromised their ideals have not. Moreover, even though the world Socialist revolution may seem to have slowed down since 1979, its advance from 1945 until then was a consistent expression of the desires of large sections of the oppressed and exploited of the earth. If successive Internationals failed, the revolutionary people pushed them aside to win many struggles. Even before the founding of the official First International (The International Workingmen’s Association) in 1864, three attempts were made to form an International Alliance of workers against their common oppressors. Two of these were based in Britain, one in Germany and France. The British attempts were those of the earliest of modern working classes, created by the original Workshop of the World.

Its length in history of Socialist theory was equalled only by that of France, which it surpassed in numbers and technical development.

This British pre-eminence would soon reveal its drawbacks. As yet, it was a positive factor. In 1845 the British Chartist (democratic working class) leader, George Julian Harney (1817-1897), founded a Society of Fraternal Democrats, Chartists and foreign political refugees. It never developed outside Britain and disappeared with the Chartist movement itself after 1848.

Shortly after its foundation, the Communist League began in France - a working class movement which, though weak, had had its consciousness stimulated by its democratic revolution - and in Germany, where such a revolution had yet to occurand where the bourgeoisie would not be able or willing to lead the country’s still tiny working-class to achieve it.