The Origins of the International
After the Revolutions of 1848-9, radical, republican and socialist activists lost their footing. Networks withered while many clubs and newspapers disappeared. At the same time, political repression forced many activists into exile, promoting transnational circulation. In London, where a great many French, German and Italian exiles sought refuge, various international organizations took shape, although none of them really caught on. In the early 1860s, several factors contributed to the fact, unlike those earlier organizations, the founding of the First International was a resounding success. The economy was growing and steamships, railways and the telegraph were making the world smaller. European industrialization and urbanization accelerated labor-based migrations, while an international labor market was being put into place. In Great Britain, the recruitment of foreign strikebreakers became common. Labor unions and strikes were becoming more frequent in France, Belgium and Switzerland, too. Contacts sprang up between them, with, for instance, typographers in London sending money to their counterparts in Paris during the strikes of 1852 and 1862. In 1862, Napoleon III sponsored a French workers’ trip to London for the International Exhibition, and long-lasting connections between French and British trade unionists were established. Common causes, like independence for Poland, which had rebelled against Russian rule in 1863, and Italian unification, or Risorgimento (1859-1860), also contributed to strengthening those bonds.
On 28 September 1864, some 2,000 people crowded into Saint Martin’s Hall, in London, to listen to French, German, Italian and British delegates speak. That very night, they founded the International Working Men’s Association (IWA). Karl Marx, a German Communist refugee who had been in London since 1849, would soon write the association’s “inaugural address” and General Rules. The Address focuses on the unity of the working class and its shared interests, above and beyond borders. While taking the diversity of schools of thought that comprised it – from the Owenites to the “cooperators” – into account, it appealed to the working classes to “conquer political power”: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
The IWMA: An Unprecedented Organization
The IWMA decided to organize annuals congresses and established a General Council tasked with coordinating mutual aid and information-sharing. Marx played a key role in that council, whose evolving cast of 50 or so members met weekly in London, even though he did not hold an official position on it. He corresponded with a great many activists, wrote the organization’s most important statements, and became involved with the International’s day-to-day operations. He helped members to go beyond their local, national or trade-based identities in favor of a unified class identity. Yet the IWMA was not “Marxist” per se. Between the British trade unionists, the French Proudhonians, the German Socialists and the Swiss and Italian “autonomists,” a broad diversity of schools of thought was represented within it.
To begin with, the Association, which the internationalist Bibal described as “a baby born in the sweatshops of Paris and farmed out to a wet nurse in London,” grew mostly in those two countries. In 1866, it began to benefit from the development of strikes in Belgium and Switzerland. Its support for some iconic struggles, such as the Paris’s bronze workers’ and tailors’ strikes, granted it a certain prestige. Its 1868 and 1869 congresses, which adopted resolutions in favor of the collectivization of means of production, pointed it in a socialist direction. Branches spread to Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the United States and elsewhere, albeit to a lesser extent, including Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Portugal, Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico. It isn’t easy to precisely estimate its membership – which its enemies described as comprising multitudes, although it was actually probably never greater than 150,000 all told. Most members joined through their trade union or during a strike. Solidarity with strikers, through donation collections and loans, was in fact one of its strengths. The financial support the Association gave to 6,000 striking Parisian bronze-workers in 1867 contributed greatly to the strikers’ victory after six weeks of struggle, increasing the International’s aura.
At a time when politics was considered a male prerogative, the Association was run essentially by men from the main urban craft trades. They debated the topic of women’s paid labor: the Proudhonians were opposed to it, but other Frenchmen, like Eugène Varlin, were in favor of it, as were Marx and the British trade unionists, since women accounted for a significant share of textile-industry workers. Another issue: should women be allowed to join the Association? Although the IWMA stayed mostly male, several hundred, perhaps even several thousand, women were active in it, like the Frenchwomen Nathalie Lemel, André Léo, Virginie Barbet and Victorine Brocher; the Americans Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin; the exiled Russians Anna Jaclard and Elisabeth Dmitrieff; the Belgian Marie Mineur; the Italian Wilhelmine Müller (Mina Pucinelli), and the British Harriet Law and the French woman Marie Huleck, who both sat on the General Council for a little while. Women on strike, like the “ovalist” silk workers in Lyon in 1869, and organizations with female memberships, like Mariana Pineda in Cádiz, also joined.
In the Thick of the Struggles of Its Times
The Association took a stance on political issues that went beyond labor relations. It supported independence for both Poland and Ireland, and, during the American Civil War, sided resolutely with the Union and for the abolition of slavery. In France, it supported the Republic against the Empire. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, the Association strongly condemned “Louis Bonaparte.” After his defeat in Sedan, it called for immediate peace without annexation, so the German internationalist parliamentarians August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht were jailed for two years for treason.
In 1871, during the Paris Commune, Internationalists were a minority in the Council elected by the Commune on March 26 – perhaps 17 out of 85, but they gave the Council its socialist dimension. That was particularly true in the Labor and Exchange Committee, where the Hungarian worker Leó Frankel served. With the Bloody Week, many activists, including Varlin, were executed, and the Association was banned in France. The General Council added to its platform the idea that, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” It paid tribute to the Paris Commune, the “glorious harbinger of a new society,” whose “martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.” Aware of the press and the British authorities’ hostility toward the Commune, trade unionist representatives disapproved of that support and resigned.
The bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, and the repression that followed, deeply weakened the IWA. The clash between the “autonomists,” led by Bakunin, and the “centralists,” i.e., Marx and the General Council, grew stronger. At the Hague congress in September 1872, Bakunin was expelled and the autonomists withdrew, creating an ‘anti-authoritarian” International. The IWA was unable to recoup after that crisis. The General Council was transferred to New York and, on July 15, 1876, the IWMA was dissolved.
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Despite the limits of its development, despite its internal divisions, the First International represents a milestone in the history of the labor movement and, in the end of the day, of Socialism. It grappled with all of the major issues of its day, and its stances inspired generations of activists. Its most longlasting legacy may well be the idea that, in an ever-more globalized capitalism, in which employers mobilize resources in several different countries, the power of the working class isn’t just local, but also transnational. That was the basis on which the Labor International, the “Second International,” of 1889, called for unity in mass parties.
