The First International: Founding and Split

St Martin's Hall, London, 28 September 1864

The idea of international working-class solidarity was not new. The Communist League, formed among exiles in Paris in the 1840s, had commissioned The Communist Manifesto from Marx and Engels, and in London in 1844 exiles and the Chartist leader George Julian Harney had founded the Fraternal Democrats under the motto "All men are brethren." After the defeat of 1848, however, the 1850s were "almost a dead period for Socialist thought." The political and economic crises of the late 1850s and early 1860s revived the workers' movement across Europe. In Britain a new generation of trade union leaders, the "Junta," organised solidarity for Garibaldi's struggle for Italian independence, against Russian repression in Poland and for the Union side in the American Civil War. 1

In France trade unions were illegal but tolerated as friendly societies. Workers influenced by Proudhon began to seek independent political representation, and the Manifesto of the Sixty, written in 1864 by the bronze sculptor Henri Tolain, proclaimed the existence of a distinct proletarian class. A delegation of French workers sent with government support to the London International Exhibition of 1862 made contact with British trade union leaders, and the meeting led to a London rally in support of the Polish uprising in July 1863. The Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by George Odger, the shoemaker who was secretary of the London Trades Council, complained that whenever workers tried to shorten their hours or raise their pay, employers threatened to bring over "Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others" at lower wages, and called for "regular and systematic communication between the industrial classes of all countries." 1 2 3 4

On 28 September 1864 an international meeting of some 2,000 workers was held at St Martin's Hall in London. Prepared jointly by British and French labour leaders including Odger and Tolain and chaired by the Positivist professor Edward Spencer Beesly, it resolved unanimously to found an international organisation of workers with its central committee in London. The committee of twenty-one elected to draft rules and a programme included British trade union leaders such as Odger, William Randal Cremer and George Howell, French representatives such as Tolain and Charles Limousin, the Italian Mazzinist Luigi Wolff, and Karl Marx. Marx had sat on the platform "in a non-speaking capacity," but was invited onto the committee by Johann Georg Eccarius, a German tailor active in the British trade union movement, and played a decisive role from the outset. 1 5

The Inaugural Address and the Rules

Marx drafted the association's two founding documents, the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association and the Provisional Rules; his versions were enthusiastically accepted after drafts by Mazzinists and Owenites had been rejected. The Address began from the fact that between 1848 and 1864 industry and commerce had developed as never before while the misery of the working masses had not diminished. Careful to avoid language that would alienate the founders, Marx named two victories for "the political economy of the working class": the Ten Hours' Bill in Britain and the co-operative movement. Because the lords of land and capital would always use their political privileges to defend their economic monopolies, he concluded, "to conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes," and he ended with the call of The Communist Manifesto: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" 1 6

The preamble to the Rules laid down that the emancipation of the working classes must be won by the working classes themselves, and that their economic emancipation was "the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means." The preamble carried over into the 1871 edition of the General Rules of the International Working Men's Association. The organisation had a standing central committee in London, the General Council, while local sections and national federations sent delegates to annual congresses. Odger became the first President of the General Council; Randal Cremer, a carpenter and union organiser, was elected Secretary in 1865 and resigned in 1867 when the association decided to admit women as members. When Robert Shaw resigned that year, Eccarius was elected General Secretary and held the post until 1871. 1 7 4 8 5

From its first months the International spoke on politics beyond Europe. Marx's Address to Abraham Lincoln, written at the end of November 1864, congratulated Lincoln on his re-election: if resistance to the Slave Power had been the reserved watchword of his first election, "the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery." The workingmen of Europe, it said, had felt instinctively from the start of the war that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. It was presented to the American minister Charles Francis Adams on 28 January 1865. 9

Strike Support and International Solidarity

The International's most direct use to workers was strike support. The instructions Marx wrote for the General Council's delegates to the Geneva Congress of 1866 said that counteracting the capitalists' readiness, in strikes and lockouts, "to misuse the foreign workman as a tool against the native workman" was one of the particular functions the association "has hitherto performed with success." By backing strikes across the continent with money and organisation and stopping the importation of strikebreakers, it greatly enhanced its prestige among workers. 10 1

The General Council's report to the Basel Congress of 1869 called the strikes that had shaken the continent in the past year "guerrilla fights between capital and labour," which governments and the press blamed not on workers' misery or employers' despotism but on the secret intrigues of the International. In Basel, after an employer locked out ribbon-weavers who claimed their customary Michaelmas holiday on 9 November 1868, lockouts and strikes went on until the spring of 1869; the weavers were evicted from company cottages and the masters circulated letters asking shopkeepers to refuse them credit. In March 1869 building workers and compositors in Geneva, both affiliated to the International, went on strike. 11

In Britain the International's union leaders formed the leadership of the Reform League, founded in February 1865 to campaign for manhood suffrage. George Howell, Odger, Cremer and Benjamin Lucraft were at its centre, and the movement led to the Reform Act of 1867, which gave part of the urban working class the vote. On 22 January 1867 the General Council held a public meeting in London to commemorate the Polish uprising of 1863. When a campaign for an amnesty of the imprisoned Irish Fenians arose in the autumn of 1869, General Council members organised a second campaign in their defence in England; nearly 200,000 workers demonstrated in London on 24 October, and in November the General Council adopted a resolution, drafted by Marx, condemning the British government's policy towards the Irish prisoners. 12 4 13 14

From Geneva to Basel: Mutualists and Collectivists

The International's French members were at first mostly mutualists who followed Proudhon. Mutualism was a market socialism based on "free credit" and "equitable exchange" among small producers; it opposed political action, strikes, trade unions and collective ownership, and regarded the state as an oppressive institution to be ignored rather than captured. In the Paris section, which opened an office in the rue des Gravilliers in January 1865, Tolain was one of the three secretaries responsible for relations with the General Council until 1867. This line clashed directly with Marx and the General Council, who advocated a communist programme, political action through an independent workers' party and the strike as a weapon of class struggle. 1 2

The first congress, at Geneva from 3 to 8 September 1866, brought together 46 regular delegates representing 22 sections and 14 fraternal delegates. It declared the legal limitation of the working day a preliminary condition "without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive" and proposed eight hours as the legal limit. The General Council's instructions, written by Marx, argued that trade unions were needed for the "guerilla fights between capital and labour" over wages and hours, but were still more important "as organised agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule." The Proudhonists were largely defeated. 3 10 1

The Lausanne Congress of 1867 took up the question of property, passing the first resolutions in favour of state ownership of the means of transport and exchange, and resolved that "the social emancipation of the workmen is inseparable from their political emancipation." At the Brussels Congress of 1868 the collectivists led by the Belgian doctor César De Paepe carried a resolution that mines, quarries, railways and arable land should become the common property of society, while Tolain went on defending mutualism and private property. Marx's economic theories were still little known among the delegates, and the communism endorsed at Brussels was not state socialism but one based on producers' co-operatives and federated communes. 1 15 16 2

The Basel Congress of September 1869 reaffirmed the land resolution but clashed over the right of inheritance. Bakunin demanded its immediate and complete abolition as a precondition of social change. The General Council's report, written by Marx, held that inheritance laws were not the cause but the effect of an economic order based on private property in the means of production; once those means became social property, the right of inheritance would die of itself, and in the meantime it proposed transitional measures such as higher inheritance taxes. Bakunin's motion won 32 votes for, 23 against and 13 abstentions, short of the required majority; the Council's was defeated by 19 to 37 with 6 abstentions. At the same congress Bakunin voted to give the General Council the right to suspend sections acting against the association's interests. 1 17

Bakunin and the Alliance of Socialist Democracy

The Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, who had moved to Switzerland in 1867, joined the Geneva section of the International in 1868. He and his followers agreed with the Marxists on collective ownership but diverged radically on the state and political action. Bakunin called for the complete abolition of the state and all political authority and rejected the "dictatorship of the proletariat," arguing that any state, even a "workers' state," would become a new tyranny. The primary means of social change, in his view, was not organised political action but the spontaneous revolutionary instincts of the masses, above all the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. 1 18

On 28 October 1868 Bakunin and 79 others founded the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy in Geneva and applied for its admission as a body within the International. On 22 December the General Council unanimously refused in a resolution Marx wrote in French. The Alliance, it noted, was established "entirely within" the International while at the same time providing itself with a self-appointed central council and congresses of its own; a second international body operating within and outside the association would be "the most infallible means of its disorganization" and would make it "a plaything for intriguers of every race and nationality." The Alliance formally dissolved in the spring of 1869 and its sections joined the International as ordinary branches, but the Marxists believed that a secret network continued to work to win the International to Bakunin's programme. 19 20 1

Bakunin's influence was strongest in Spain and the Swiss Jura. In October 1868 the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Fanelli, sponsored by Bakunin, toured Barcelona and Madrid introducing workers to the International, and in June 1870 the Barcelona Workers' Congress voted to join it. The Spanish Regional Federation thus formed grew to more than 29,000 members by 1873, one of the largest national chapters of the International. Around April 1870 Rafael Farga Pellicer and others in Barcelona founded a secret group with the same programme and rules as the Geneva Alliance. In the Swiss Jura, home of many watchmakers, the Bakuninists began to split away at the congress of the Fédération Romande in January 1869. 21 22 19 23

War and the Commune

The years after the Basel Congress were the peak of the International's influence, but repression in France grew harsher. On the eve of the plebiscite of 1870 Napoleon III's government raided the members of the International's administrative committees in Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Marseille, Brest and elsewhere, alleging a secret society plotting the emperor's assassination, a pretext soon exposed as absurd by his own judges. The real crime of the French branches was that they had told the French people publicly that voting for the plebiscite meant voting for despotism at home and war abroad. 24 1

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, the General Council's first address, written by Marx and dated 23 July, denounced it as a dynastic war and warned that if the German working class allowed it "to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous." It printed the anti-war manifesto of the Paris members alongside the replies of a workers' meeting at Brunswick and of a delegate meeting at Chemnitz representing 50,000 Saxon workers that recalled the watchword "Proletarians of all countries unite." The second address of 9 September charged that after Sedan and the proclamation of the Republic Prussia had turned to a war of conquest, and protested against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany, founded at Eisenach in 1869, abstained on the first war credits and were arrested and prosecuted for their anti-war stand. 24 25 26 1

The International did not instigate the Paris Commune of 1871, but its Parisian members played an influential role. Around a third of the members of the Commune's council belonged to the International, among them Eugène Varlin, Benoît Malon and Leó Frankel, and they formed part of the minority that pressed for social and economic reforms against the Jacobin-Blanquist majority's focus on political and military measures. Tolain, by contrast, elected deputy for the Seine on an International ticket in February, disavowed the Commune. When the Federal Council of the Paris sections expelled him, the General Council confirmed the decision on 25 April, declaring that the place of every French member was on the side of the Commune of Paris "and not in the usurpatory and counter-revolutionary Assembly of Versailles." 1 2 27

Immediately after the fall of the Commune Marx issued The Civil War in France in the name of the General Council. Written by the end of May, it appeared in London as a 35-page pamphlet around 13 June, sold out quickly and was translated into many languages in 1871 and 1872. On 6 June the French foreign minister Jules Favre sent a circular to all the European powers calling on them to hunt down the International, which was banned by law in France. The British trade union leaders, who had never been revolutionaries, recoiled from Marx's defence of the Commune and distanced themselves from the organisation. Engels wrote in 1874 that the Commune was "without any doubt the child of the International intellectually, although the International did not lift a finger to produce it," and that the International had been held responsible for it with full justification. 28 29 1 30

From the London Conference to the Hague Congress

The delegate conference held in London from 17 to 23 September 1871 adopted a resolution on working-class political action. Citing the Inaugural Address, the preamble to the Rules and the Lausanne resolution, it declared 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," and that this was indispensable to the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end, the abolition of classes. The combination of forces won in economic struggles was to serve at the same time as a lever against the political power of landlords and capitalists. On 24 October the General Council issued the 1871 edition of the General Rules. 1 15 7

The resolution was a direct challenge to the anarchists, who rejected political action. The Jura Federation, formally inaugurated at the Sonvilier congress of 12 November 1871, denounced the London decisions in a circular to all federations as the imposition of "authoritarian" German communist doctrine and called for a "free federation of autonomous groups" in place of the centralised General Council. The Spanish, Italian and Belgian federations, where Bakunin's influence was strong, rallied to the Jurassians. The General Council answered in March 1872 with Fictitious Splits in the International, a private circular by Marx and Engels that attacked the Alliance as a society hostile to the International that deliberately kept up confusion between the two. 1 23 19 31

The split ran through the national federations too. In Spain, where Marx sent his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, the Bakuninists prevailed; in June 1872 the Marxists associated with Lafargue were expelled and formed the New Madrid Federation, which gathered a couple of hundred members against the 15,000 of the rest. The Italian Federation voted at its Rimini congress in the summer of 1872 to break with the General Council. When the Council chose The Hague for the next congress, the Bakuninists saw it as a choice meant to keep their federations away, and Bakunin, sought by the French and German police, could not attend. 22 32

The Hague Congress of 2–7 September 1872 brought together 65 delegates from Europe, America and Australia. The Marxists secured a majority, thanks partly to a large London delegation holding numerous mandates, and its legitimacy remains contested. The congress wrote the London resolution on political action into the Rules as Article 7a by 29 votes to 5 with 8 abstentions, and gave the General Council the right to suspend branches and federations until the next congress. The commission on the Alliance reported that "the secret Alliance was established with rules entirely opposed to those of the International" and proposed to expel Bakunin "as founder of the Alliance, and for a personal affair" — an attempt at intimidation connected with his unfinished Russian translation of Capital. The congress expelled Bakunin by 27 votes to 6 with 7 abstentions and James Guillaume by 25 to 9 with 8 abstentions, but rejected the expulsion of Adhémar Schwitzguébel by 16 to 15. These votes were taken after a great number of French and German delegates had been obliged to leave. 1 33 32

On Engels's proposal the congress moved the General Council to New York. The change of residence passed narrowly, by 26 votes to 23 with 9 abstentions, and New York won 30 votes against 14 for London. The move was meant to keep the Council out of the hands of either the Blanquists or the anarchists, but it effectively ended the International as a functioning European organisation. At a meeting in Amsterdam on 8 September, just after the congress, Marx said that there were countries, such as America and England, and perhaps Holland, where workers could attain their goal by peaceful means, but that in most countries of the continent the lever of the revolution would have to be force. 1 33 34

Two Internationals and the Dissolution

On 15–16 September 1872, a little over a week after The Hague, fifteen delegates representing the Spanish, Italian and Jura federations, clandestine French sections and American sections met at Saint-Imier in Switzerland. They rejected the Hague resolutions and the new General Council and concluded a "pact of friendship, solidarity and mutual defence" among the federations. Their resolution on the political action of the proletariat declared "that the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat" and that any organisation of a supposedly provisional and revolutionary political power to bring it about "can only be another deception" as dangerous to the proletariat as all existing governments. Historians call the body the Anti-authoritarian International and count it among the foundations of the anarchist movement. 35 36

The General Council in New York, led by Friedrich Adolph Sorge as General Secretary from 1872 to 1874, was cut off from the main currents of the European movement and quickly lost influence. In Britain the movement split and collapsed, and the German Social Democrats concentrated on building at home. In September 1873 both Internationals held congresses at Geneva; the Council's was composed almost entirely of Swiss delegates, and Marx called it an "inevitable 'fiasco'." On 15 July 1876 a conference at Philadelphia abolished the General Council. Its proclamation acknowledged that the bourgeoisie would cry "The International is dead!" but answered that its principles were recognised and defended by progressive workers everywhere, promised that the American comrades would guard its acquisitions until workers of all countries could again struggle together, and closed: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" 1 37 38

The Anti-authoritarian International held congresses at Geneva in 1873, Brussels in 1874 and Berne in 1876. Bakunin planned the Bologna insurrection of 1874, which failed, and died in Bern on 1 July 1876. The Verviers congress of 1877 inclined towards "propaganda of the deed" and opened the first debate between Bakunin's collectivism and the anarchist communism of Kropotkin, Malatesta and Élisée Reclus. The Spanish anarchist Anselmo Lorenzo later wrote that the association "ceased to exist materially in the Congress of Verviers." The Jura Federation had brought the young Peter Kropotkin to anarchism: "After a week's stay with the watchmakers," he wrote of his visit in 1872, "my views on socialism were settled. I was an anarchist." 36 18 23

Assessment: Where Socialism and Anarchism Parted

Engels wrote to Sorge in 1874 that the old International "belonged to the period of the Second Empire," when the oppression reigning throughout Europe from 1849 to 1864 had imposed unity and abstention from internal polemics on a reawakening workers' movement, so that every fraction could join; its first great success, the Commune, "was bound to explode this naive conjunction of all fractions." For ten years, he judged, the International had dominated "one side of European history — the side on which the future lies," but in its old form it had outlived itself; the next International, after Marx's writings had had some years of influence, would be "directly Communist." 30

The issues of the split became the dividing line between socialism and anarchism. In "On Authority" (1872) Engels criticised the anti-authoritarians for demanding that the political state be abolished at one stroke, before the social conditions that gave birth to it had been destroyed: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is," and the Paris Commune would not have lasted a single day without the authority of the armed people. In his unfinished letter to La Liberté of 5 October 1872, a month after The Hague, Bakunin protested against "the sentence of excommunication" and criticised Marx's theories of revolutionary dictatorship, the transitional period and provisional governments, setting against them a federalist, decentralised organisation from below. 39 40

Short-lived as it was, the First International was the first mass international movement of the working class and spread socialist and communist ideas across Europe and America, laying the theoretical foundations of revolutionary communism, moderate socialism and anarchism. Modern research puts its membership at its 1871–72 peak at around 150,000, though the Paris public prosecutor claimed 800,000 members in France alone in 1870 and The Times reported 2.5 million across Europe in 1871; its strength lay less in individual members than in affiliated trade unions. At the founding congress of the Second International in 1889 Wilhelm Liebknecht called the new body "indeed the offspring of the International Workingmen's Association," and Lenin wrote in 1919 that "the First International laid the foundation of the proletarian, international struggle for socialism." 1 41