THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were leading theoreticians of the Communist League, writing its Manifesto in the revolutionary year of 1848. After that year’s defeats the League declined, under the pressure of European reaction. In 1852 it was liquidated by Marx and Engels to save comrades imprisoned in the German State of Prussia. During the 1850s, the British skilled workers built up their industrial strength in a series of ‘new model’ trade unions, which were to survive as such bodies had not done before.

This encouraged the ex-Chartist Emest Jones (1819-1869), to start a third International Association, named thus, in 1855. Marx was invited to join but refused because it included (already) among its leaders the Russian Liberal refugee Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), who was making his peace with the new Czar. The Association lasted four years before it collapsed.

THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN’S

ASSOCIATION

The traditions set by these three bodies were strengthened by events after 1860. Not only had British trade unionism grown but the French workers were also active and were even helped, for a time, by the Government of what was then the Second Empire, against the Republican capitalists. This misalliance did not last long, but resulted in a delegation of French workers visiting the British World Exhibition of 1862. There the more radical of them met their British comrades and agreed to work jointly on matters of common interest. On their return home they sponsored election candidates and agitated for the repeal of the anti-trade union laws, which were reformed partially in May 1864. In what was then merely the German Confederation, in 1863 a mass agitation to form a working class political party was started by Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). —_Lassalle claimed to be a follower of Marx yet he kept his belief in an ‘Iron Law’ by which real wagescould notrise under capitalism, which Marx had renounced. He was also opposed to the emancipation of women.

Consciousness was raised too by several international democratic struggles : by the War of Italian Unity (Risorgimento) from 1859; the American Civil War from 1861; and what was, in fact, the most effective of these as a catalyst for Anglo-French working-class unity, the Polish Uprising of 1863.

Just after Lassalle’s murder, on 28 September 1864, a meeting of representatives of English, French and German workers was held in London. Itresolved to set up a Committee to form a new Intemational Workingmen’s _ Association (I.W.M.A.). Twenty-five out of forty-nine seats on this Committee were occupied by British representatives, mainly from the skilled unions. Karl Marx was just one of six who represented the German workers. However, he wrote the new International’s Jnaugural Address and its Rules. The I.W.M.A. was, in practice, a European body [albeit with branches in the U.S.A and, eventually, Australia]. In 1871 anattemptto start an Indian section was agreed on the understanding that it be open to native Indians, but it never prospered. In fact, both Marx and Engels insisted on limiting the new International’s scope to “countries in which modem capitalism exists”, as the Rules put it, and emphasized the role of the “most advanced countries” in the struggle. Their reason was that large areas of the world were still pre-eminently tribal, Asiatic, or even, as with Cuba and Brazil, dominated by slave economies. Few of these had a proletariat in the modem sense. Karl Marx (1818-1883) © The new International had more immediate problems. The largest national working class political organization was that of the German followers of Lassalle, organized around the paper Sozialdemokrat.

Their new leader, Johann von Schweitzer (1833-1875), declared that they were in full solidarity with the I.W.M.A., but asked to remain only as an associate member due to the laws of Prussia, the largest German State. Though this was later to be agreed in this and other cases, the International rejected this proposal, with Marx and Engels in full agreement. They had always considered Lassalle’s perspective too much limited to Germany and they may have suspected what has been established since : that Lassalleanism was helped on its way by a Prussian State bribe. The International’s German Section remained limited to Marx and his small group of German followers, led by Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1901).

Within the International too, the Marxists were in a minority. To their right was the largest group : the British craft union leaders, whose initiative had started it. Their perspective was limited to the need for democratic rights, particularly for their unions which were still handicapped by Combination Acts, and for the vote for all heads of household in general elections. Beyond these demands they would be content to conform to the British Liberal Party but, as they had yet to be won, they stayed loyal to the International and practically militant.

To Marx’s left were the groupings dominating French socialism : the Proudhonists and the Blanquists.

The former were followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), who is best known as the pamphleteer who exposed the moral and legal illegitimacy of private property titles.

He advocated a system of communally-based craft economics rather than the new factories. The Proudhonists agreed with the Lassalleans about the uselessness of trade union action and in their opposition to women’s rights. They also opposed claims for national selfdetermination (particularly the Poles). The followers of Louis-August Blanqui (1805-1881) were formally more extreme since they advocated that the working-class leadership be organized as a secret society to seize State power by a coup. When no coup was obviously possible, however, they were ready enough to accept Marx’s lead. Their support and that of the British trade union leaders - who recognized his ability to relate to the situation’s practical needs - enabled Marx to give the I.W.M.A. guidelines to make it relevant to the Socialist and democratic struggles of the time. Though it was only being formed at the end of the American Civil War, it sent a goodwill message to Abraham Lincoln on his reinauguration and received a very friendly reply from the first President of what has become the party of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Partly to radicalize the British, an overture was made to the head centre of the Fenian Brotherhood, James Stephens (1826-1901) but though he is said to have agreed to join, nothing seems to have developed beyond this apart from the International’s defence of his Movement against its repression by the British State. The I.W.M.A. was more immediately effective in other democratic and trade union campaigns. In the first, it was most successful in Britain, its campaign bringing about urban household suffrage in 1867.

For the latter, it did not initiate so much as support the trade union struggle that developed over Europe and America. By 1869, even the Proudhonists had been involved in these struggles. Regularly defeated 6 in the International on issues in which their principles proved irrelevant, they were disintegrating. The Lassalleans too were forced to recognize that trade unionism had its uses.

However, their intervention in them was handicapped by excessive political control, particularly the dogma of the Iron Law of Wages. Weaker vis-a-vis the International, they voted to affiliate in 1868. The next year, the I.W.M.A. reached its highest point at its Congress at Basle. Its previous assembly had demanded workers’ control of production and resources and the nationalization of transport and communications. Now it called for the nationalization of the land.

However, it also saw the first appearance of a Russian delegate, Mikhail Ivanovich Bakhunin (1814- 1876). Against Marx, he passed a proposal to abolish the rights of inheritance, which he claimed would win the peasantry to Socialism. His contributions challenged Marx from all points. He intensified Proudhon’s hostility to the State and to religion and his mistrust of trade unionism.

He developed Blanqui’s concept of the coup into counterposing to the working-class party a small international society ready to organize acts of ‘propaganda by deed’. Even the British were wooed through Bakhunin’s opposition to the International’s support for the Fenians and his demand for a Federal Committee, independent of the International’s General Council, to run the British struggle. For all this, other than on inheritance, Bakhunin won little support immediately. In the eighteen months after Basle, his supporters’ chief achievement was to split the International’s affiliated Franco-Italian-Swiss Federation.

Mikhail Bakunin(1814-—76) Engels (1820-1895)