Presentation

This semester the entire Journal is dedicated to retracing the events, struggles, victories, and defeats that lie at the roots and form the historical continuity of the Party across times and generations.

This work does not seek to rewrite an organic history of the First International in the manner of a work of historiography; instead, our intention is to trace the stages of the constitution of the working class into a political party, because we believe that every past progress of the proletariat towards its emancipation can provide the future revolutionary world party with historical examples and fundamental lessons, confirmations and refinements of its doctrine. For this reason, quotations from Marx and Engels are abound in the work, both from their writings published at the time and from their correspondence, because in them we identify the tradition of the later and present Communist Party, and the revolutionary critique of the same capitalist social relations that we intend to accompany to their historical burial.

Marxism is the impersonal doctrine of a class and not the product of the brain of a single genius or enlightened individual. We wrote in 1952: ‘Men make history, it’s just that they have very little idea how and why they make it. As a rule, all the “fans” of human action, and those who mock what they allege to be fatalist automatism, are generally the very people who privately nurture the idea that their own wee bodies contain that predestined MAN. And they are the very ones who do not and cannot understand anything at all: they fail to see that whether they sleep like logs, or realize their noble dream of rushing around like men possessed, history will not be affected one iota’ (Dog’s Legs, in Battaglia Comunista, No. 11).

The repetition therefore of the usual things that have been said a hundred times and more, both about the International Association and its enemies, is not because there ain’t fuck-all to do in these dark times, but simply because, according to Marxism, theory is the first of the weapons to destroy this infamous society. The real weapons come later and are only needed when there exists a theory that knows how to direct them! Marx himself believed that Capital was the best missile until that moment ever hurled by the proletariat against respectable bourgeois normality.

It is therefore well understood that for the party to repeat the ‘usual lecture’ on the First International is neither ritual nor casual. The party has the primary task of handing over to the proletariat, in a tomorrow once again illuminated by the glow of revolution, the entire corpus of its historical doctrine, the only one that can guide the working class in the difficult transition, seeking to avoid the deleterious and tragic errors of the past. The party’s decision today to devote a considerable part of its forces to theoretical clarification is determined by factors far greater than the party itself and is perfectly in line with the tradition of the revolutionary Left. The party defends today the programme, latent in the human species, of a future communist society, a need that today, after eighty years of triumphant counter-revolution, is all the stronger the more distant it appears. In its work, the party wields the mighty lens of historical materialism, through which it alone understands present-day society and the path to be able to overthrow it.

This report is the result of collective will and work, and does not intend to ‘discover’ anything sensational or original; its sole purpose is to bring back to the consciousness of the party’s operating structure the numerous and significant lessons of a fundamental cycle of proletarian struggles and doctrinal affirmations such as that traced out by the brief life of the International Workingmen’s Association.

When Marx in 1850 wrote Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850, he began his analysis from the social and production relations in France at the time, from the economic crisis to the various class formations present in the country. As we are not in the habit of leaving topics hanging in the air, we begin this class novel with a look at the economic, social, and political relations of the time, at the environment in which the Association came to move during its ten or so years of existence.

In the year the Association was founded, 1864, capitalism had reached its maturity in Europe and the United States, and had thus laid the foundation for its dialectical negation. The worldwide increase in industrial production was proceeding at an average rate of about +5.4% per year. Undisputed over all was England, boasting the highest degree of industrialisation in the world and the largest colonial empire, from which it drew all the raw materials indispensable to its production machine. The qualitative intensity of English industrialisation, i.e. the ratio of industrial production to population (see The Course...), reached the remarkable figure of 1878% in 1870, three times greater than that of the United States, Germany, or France.

England’s capitalist maturity can also be read in the fact that agricultural activity was, even at that time, relatively small compared to industry: it can be seen, for example, that between 1841 and 1861 the population working in agriculture fell from 28% to 24%. England was the country where the majority of the population belonged to the class of the proletariat. Being the strongest and most solid nation, the concentration of capital was obviously also greater in England than in other countries. In the splendid Inaugural Address of the Association by Marx it is noted that ‘3,000 persons divide among themselves a yearly income of about £25,000,000, rather more than the total revenue doled out annually to the whole mass of the agricultural labourers of England and Wales’.

But England, while it is the bourgeois vanguard of the world, is however at the same time the advocate of an international policy tending towards alliances with the old feudal powers in order to counter the new and competing forces of rising capitalism: an example can be the English support given to the Southern States in the American Civil War. In our journal, Comunismo, No. 35, we concluded that ‘England was playing a revolutionary role from an economic point of view, and a conservative role from a political point of view’ (Marxism and the English Working Class).

The economic expansion of 1864, also induced by the discovery of gold in California and Australia, and the subsequent cycle of relative expansion could not however erase the memory of the crises of the previous twenty years, with periodic recessions that stripped the bourgeoisie of the mask of invincibility. Marx was by then already well aware of the basic economic fragility of capitalism.

The seriously acute crisis would erupt in 1866, two years after the founding of the Association, and then become more acute in 1870. England will have a zero increase in production in 1866, a figure that will fall again to -3.1% in the following year. France, likewise in recession, will reach a decrease in production of 6.9% in 1870 (for figures see always The Course...).

So while these are not yet the years of a capitalism in decline, they already show its defects and inability to progress indefinitely. The relative effervescence lies in the fact that it has not yet completed its diffusion across the entire planet nor even throughout all of Europe.

Let’s look at the general conditions of other European states.

Prussia, although steadily developing its productive forces, still had a feudal character in many respects. Since 1859, however, it had embarked upon its capitalist evolution, which could only be definitively facilitated by the German unification completed in 1871. Far stronger than Prussia from a capitalist point of view was still the France of Napoleon III, which moreover had a very combative urban proletariat.

Russia was still among the feudal nations and capitalism was only embryonic there; however, it proved decisive in the international arena due to its role as a bulwark of conservation. From it emanated the false ideal of Pan-Slavism, and in its name Russia had bloodily crushed the Polish Independence Revolution in 1863. It should be noted, however, that in the 1860s capitalism was beginning to penetrate Russian society, albeit not by a bourgeois class, as in Prussia, but by direct intervention of the Tsarist state itself.

Marxist communism supports national liberation movements and bourgeois revolutions insofar as these have not fulfilled their task: thus the Association, from its foundation, will support both the Union of North American states led by Lincoln and the Polish insurrection against Russia, both the German bourgeoisie so that, emancipating itself from the aristocracy, it may conquer its national unity, and the Risorgimento struggles for Italian unification. The communists will support all this, but not by virtue of some ahistorical patriotic principle or similar rubbish, but because they hold that the bourgeois victory over feudalism was indispensable for laying the foundations for the progress of the productive forces which must prepare the ground for the seizure of power by the proletariat at the international level.

In the first half of the 1800s Germany was divided into a myriad of small statelets. In 1859, Prussia, the largest and most powerful of these, began a policy of expansion in the region with the aim of constituting a new great nation in opposition to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, and Russia.

In the Marxist view, German unification would have been a positive factor for the revolution as it would have allowed Germany to fully develop its capitalist potential that would have inexorably swept away all the old feudal junk. Germany had not enjoyed a bourgeois revolution like France and England: the bourgeois class had entered the scene in a servile and undetermined manner against the landed and military aristocracy, the Junkers. When it attempted to become revolutionary and overthrow the old feudal order, it immediately retreated from its bellicose intentions out of fear of the proletarian class and peasants whom it had incited to insurrection.

The hope of our masters was that the proletariat would be able to express such a force that the bourgeois revolution would be pushed to its limits, thus giving a radical thrust to the German economic and social structure, independently of the bourgeoisie’s capacity.

Instead, it will be the aristocrat Bismarck who will lead the process that, between 1859 and 1871, will also see Germany enter the capitalist arena. As in Russia, capitalism will penetrate into Germany without relying on the work of a true bourgeois class, but will lean directly on the state apparatus, still formally feudal and reactionary.

In 1864, therefore, Germany was not yet a fully capitalist country: the aristocratic class was still in power and, although it was veering towards bourgeois interests, it nonetheless remained a reactionary element that held back free social and economic development. The problem to be addressed, therefore, was how the German working class should behave towards the aristocracy-bourgeoisie clash. Marxists have always had a very clear position on this issue, but in Germany, the excessive influences on the workers by the Lassalleans and trade unionists made the proletarians lurch before the question aristocracy or bourgeoisie?

Engels had intervened decisively in the issue with his work The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party, written on the occasion of the discussion in Prussia on army reform. On the bourgeoisie-aristocracy question the ‘crystalline Engels’ states that the German proletariat must support the bourgeoisie so that the latter can one day be overthrown by the proletariat itself. ‘The mere existence of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is a thorn in the flesh of the reactionary party. Its power is based on suppressing or at least obstructing present-day social development. Otherwise all the possessing classes will gradually be transformed into capitalists and all the oppressed classes into proletarians, and in the process the reactionary party will disappear of its own accord (...) The steam-engines, the mechanical spinning and weaving looms, the steam-ploughs and threshing machines, the railways and electric telegraphs and the steam-presses of the present day (...) gradually and remorselessly destroying all the relics of feudal and guild conditions and are reducing all the petty social contradictions surviving from former times to the one contradiction of world-historical significance: that between capital and labour (...) As these contradictions between classes in society are simplified, so the power of the bourgeoisie grows, but at the same time the proletariat’s power, class-consciousness and potential for victory grow even more’.

From this splendid quote follows the correct Marxist tactic: since proletarian revolution is easier after a bourgeois revolution has been established over feudalism, the proletariat has an interest in supporting bourgeois emancipation where possible. Affirming this then was important as the bourgeoisie still pressed for emancipation in many nations, Germany, Russia, Spain and south-eastern Europe. But this tactic has to be placed in its historical context: for example, in Italy, Gramsci’s ordinovism was still calling for a united front against Mussolini, believing his despotism to be an attempt at feudal restoration, a thesis the Left easily dismissed: the last bastion of feudalism in Europe had collapsed in 1917 in Russia.

Engels insists in his paper on the need for the German proletariat to make itself totally autonomous from the radical bourgeoisie by constituting itself into a party: ‘the proletariat will become a power from the moment when an independent workers’ party is formed, and a power has to be reckoned with’. A proletariat is indeed strong when it fights for the defence of its living conditions, without accepting the false gifts that the rulers promise it: ‘With the spear one should accept gifts, point against point’.

Among the contingent goals to be achieved by the German proletariat through open class struggle was compulsory military service, a disruptive revolutionary bourgeois demand.

According to Marx and Engels, the German proletariat was to set itself the immediate goal in Germany of obtaining the right of coalition. Marx wrote in a letter to Schweitzer on 13 February 1865: ‘[I]n Prussia, and indeed in Germany as a whole, the right of combination also means a breach in the domination of the police and the bureaucracy, it tears to shreds the Rules Governing Servants and the power of the aristocracy in rural areas (...) It is beyond all question that Lassalle’s ill-starred illusion that a Prussian government might intervene with socialist measures will be crowned with disappointment. The logic of circumstances will tell. But the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience’.

The sympathies of the German proletariat were divided between Marx’s scientific communism and Lassalle’s reactionary, gradualist, and opportunist socialism. Despite his long exile in England, among the German workers Marx was still considered fundamental to the movement: when Lassalle died in 1864, they asked him to stand as successor to the leadership of the German Workers’ Association and in November 1864 the General Association of German Workers proposed to Marx and Engels to collaborate on its official organ, ‘Der Social-Demokrat’. They accepted as the Berlin newspaper was not yet entirely permeated with Lassalleanism and could still be recovered to a revolutionary line.

In December, before the ‘Social-Demokrat’ was confiscated by the police, Marx’s articles against Lassalle became increasingly frequent, even accusing him of having plotted with Bismarck. One of the reasons for the difficulties the International Association encountered in taking root in Germany lay in the petty-bourgeois corruption of many members of the Association. According to Marx, only in the Rhineland could the Association hope to find solid and revolutionary foundations. In February, Marx and Engels would sever all relations with the ‘Social-Demokrat’.

With the workers influenced by the theses of the Lassalleans, so heavily criticised by Marx and Engels, the International Association would face serious problems until the very end. Ferdinand Lassalle had actually died a month before the founding of the Association, but the errors associated with his name outlived him and for many years would cause some serious splits and degenerations in the German movement.

The first serious rupture between us and Lassalle had occurred in the late 1850s over the position to be taken in the war between France and Austria, a war in which the two states were gambling the fate of Italian unification. Marx and Engels argued that a victory for Austria would strengthen the reaction and block the progressive unification of Italy; but, at the same time, that a victory for Napoleon III would allow for a future war with Russia: therefore the communists should support neither of the contenders. For Lassalle, who reasoned from a Prussian and not an internationalist point of view, France represented liberalism, progress, and modern civilisation in the conflict, as opposed to feudal and reactionary Austria.

But above all, Lassalle’s error lay in asserting that, in Germany at the time, ‘before the proletariat’ all other classes formed ‘one reactionary mass’, thus equating the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the middle strata. Marxism responded by asserting that the victory of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy was an essential building block for the Proletarian Revolution, as already clearly stated in 1848 in the Manifesto. Only after the bourgeoisie has seized power and can freely pursue its own interests does it become a reactionary class, and therefore one to be overthrown.

Outside of any historical dialectic, Lassalle considered the State an entity autonomous from all social and production relations: instead of incorporating the new discoveries of proletarian theory, he went back decades, dusting off the idealist thought of Hegel and Fichte. The State, an entity superior to social laws, was supposed, according to Lassalle, to intervene directly for the liberation of the ‘people’ through the establishment of producers’ cooperatives (from which socialist society would later emerge) and a free public school for all. Marx replied that Lassalle’s state was nothing other than the bourgeois democratic state that has always passed itself off as the defender of the so-called people. The very word ‘people’ is not a term used in revolutionary communist language since communism emphasises the different classes that make it up and defends only one part of it, the proletarian class, against the other.

Marx, with scathing sarcasm, will pen, in 1875, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘Since one has not have the courage to demand the democratic republic, one should not have resorted, either, to the subterfuge, neither “honest” nor decent, of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, already influenced by the bourgeoisie, and bureaucratically carpentered, and then to assure this state into the bargain that one imagines one will be able to force such things upon it “by legal means”’.

Our merciless doctrine opposes both dictatorship and bourgeois democracy with violence that subverts the state, destroys it and replaces it with proletarian dictatorship: bourgeois dictatorship and democracy are for Marxists two different forms of government, both emanations of bourgeois interests, and therefore to be overthrown. The fact is that this programme of Lassalle’s on the use of the bourgeois state for a peaceful path to socialism will not remain among the theories on the shelves of libraries, but will rather be the banner first of the revisionism of the Second International, then of the national-communist parties in the 1900s, both Stalinist and, even worse, anti-Stalinist.

Lassalle furthermore placed the class struggle on an exclusively national level, whereas Marxism has always declared that the proletariat has an international nature and horizon.

The poverty of Lassalle’s prediction of socialist society crowns and explains all of his false interpretations. The Lassalleans considered socialism to be the ‘collective organisation of total labour with just distribution of the fruits of labour’. The socialism foreseen by Marxism is something else entirely. Again in the Critique, Marx highlights the lack of content of the concept of ‘just distribution’: is it not true that many bourgeois parties are already fighting for a less unjust distribution of wealth? Socialism is not reduced to a just distribution of the product in equal shares for all. Socialism is above all a new mode of production, it means the abolition of wage labour, it distinguishes itself qualitatively and not quantitatively, from a ‘fairer’ wage, from capitalism.

In the different European countries, the social structure had a decisive influence on ideologies and political programmes.

Since in the Marxist vision it is precisely the country that is capitalistically stronger that carries within it to a greater extent the germs of the future socialist society, in 1864 England could be considered as the main base for the proletarian vanguard. In Capital Marx wrote: ‘In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself’. A few years later he would add: ‘Though landlordism and capitalism are most traditionally established in this country (England ed.), on the other hand the material conditions for getting rid of them are also most ripe here’ (The General Council to the Federal Council of French Switzerland, 1870).

Although numerically stronger, Marx and Engels judged the English proletariat to be less combative than the French. He continued: ‘The English have all that is needed materially for social revolution. What they lack is the sense of generalisation and revolutionary passion. These are things that only the General Council (of the Association ed.) can supply, and it can thus speed up the genuinely revolutionary movement in this country, and consequently everywhere else (...) England can not be considered simply as one country among many others. It must be treated as the metropolis of Capital’.

Marx’s interest in the English proletariat was mainly due to the fact that, as part of the more developed capitalism, it was the one furthest removed from the suggestions of petty-bourgeois ideologies. The more pugnacious French proletariat, on the contrary, retained within it positions that harked back to Proudhon, a reflection of the lesser progress reached by French capitalism and its social composition that included a widespread petty bourgeoisie.

But the Association will be declaredly born as a supranational movement, not limited to England and France alone. In Germany, which at the time was divided into several small states, the largest of which was Prussia, the proletariat was numerically small compared to the other social components; and the classes of nascent capitalism were still flanked by the old, reactionary feudal structures, which were still preponderant and entrenched. This led to deviations of the proletariat according to Lassalle’s ideas, which were reactionary despite being tinged with socialism.

Italy, compared to Germany, presented a yet different situation. The very low numerical spread of the proletarian class did not facilitate the acceptance of the Marxist programme. On the contrary, the overlapping of a myriad of very diverse social components (nobles, petty bourgeois, artisans, wage earners, peasant proprietors, sharecroppers, day-labourers, students, intellectuals, artists, etc.) facilitated the spread of Bakunin’s anarchist ideas which, unlike Marxism, were addressed indiscriminately to all social classes and sectors.

This composite picture, together with the movement’s theoretical immaturity, explains why there were various ideological differences within the Association. The Marxist line found itself coexisting with other orientations, firstly because it had not yet been able to demonstrate in living historical experience its correspondence to factual reality; secondly because the different schools justified their presence in representing sectors of the working class that were not yet fully proletarianised, in the variegated economic-social situations of Europe at the time.

Class struggles had resumed in 1862, after an ebb since 1848. England was obviously the most involved: the English proletariat had vigorously opposed English military support for the Southern States in the Civil War in the first half of the 1860s. To the government’s intentions of supporting the slave-owners with arms, the proletariat had taken the position en masse of solidarising instead with the anti-slavery Northern States. Since 1863, then, with the outbreak of the Revolution in Poland, smothered in blood by the Tsarist army, the English proletariat had tried on several occasions to collaborate with the Polish revolutionaries. It was also very active on the Irish question and fiercely opposed to the terrorist methods with which English imperialism countered the island’s liberation movements. Thus a fervent period of struggle against Her Majesty England in the two years leading up to the First Association, with a proletariat that had demonstrated on several occasions that it was capable of opposing the bourgeoisie on class grounds.

Over the previous fifteen years, the English proletariat had emerged victorious in the bitter battle over the ten-hour law. Despite the law, however, the conditions of the workers, and not only in England, were at the limit of what was bearable and the ten hours themselves often remained on paper and not respected by the capitalists. In this regard Marx will report in Capital the testimony of a factory inspector of the time: ‘The (extra) profit to be gained by it appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist; they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and when they see the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still be a considerable balance of gain’. Marx’s explanation of ‘this anomaly of a disregarded law’ is very clear: ‘These laws curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist and landlord’. Marx with indignation demonstrates the falsity of bourgeois laws through numerous examples of cases where the working day far exceeds 10 hours per day, reaching 16, 18, 20, and even, in some cases, 24 continuous hours of slaughter! And all this even on the backs of women and children.

Indeed, we cannot but note that today, in the year 2000, the massacre continues to be perpetrated with the same systems and the same ferocious intensity, and moreover with an immensely higher productivity than then, by a bourgeoisie determined not to allow its crisis to precipitate into a revolutionary resurgence.

Against all this, in 1862, the proletariat had raised its head again and set itself the sacred task of class struggle: for this it needed an international organisation that would unify its isolated struggles. A petty bourgeois of the time, a certain Charles de Rémusat, faced with the collapse of his world, had already to admit in 1863, in the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes’: ‘Only the working class seems to be saved’.

The occasion for the founding of the Association was the defeat of the Polish Revolution and the consequent desire of the English proletariat to defend the insurgents from Tsarist persecution. The London workers first addressed the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston with the explicit call to support the Polish cause militarily as well, which was followed by an appeal to the workers in Paris to urge them to common action.

Officially formed on 28 September 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association set itself the task of unifying the scattered and divided workers’ struggles across Europe, beyond the boundaries of race and nation, with a view to a possible and imminent seizure of power by the working class.

The Association brings together workers’ defence organisations from Europe and America. These are inspired and led by workers of diverse political faiths: Marxists, Trade-Unionists, Proudhonists, Lassalleans, Mazzinians, anarchists.

At the birth of the Association, a provisional Committee is immediately appointed, to which Marx is also elected. At its first meeting on 5 October, the Committee is charged with drafting a political programme for the Association. Drafted in the absence of Marx, who cannot participate in it, the programme presents explicit Mazzinian and patriotic influences, of a non-proletarian nature. On 18 October, however, at a subsequent meeting of the Committee, Marx subjected the programme to sharp criticism and proposed his own draft of the Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen’s Association, which was unanimously approved.

In the Address, Marx first traces the history of the workers’ struggles that took place from 1848 to 1864, as well as the objective conditions of the workers, gradually worsened over the years. Against all bourgeois progressivism, the Address is lapidary: ‘No improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, not all these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses’.

Despite the relative social calm imposed in that last two decades of the century, the Address highlights well the two significant achievements obtained by the English proletariat. The working class had won the 10-hour law: on this great victory for the proletariat, Marx states in the Address that ‘it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class’. The other great victory for the proletariat had been the experiment of the co-operatives theorised by Owen: their usefulness was not in taking a step towards a socialist economy, let alone towards a Revolution, but they did prove that large-scale production was possible without the presence of a bourgeois master. Their failure also gave new confirmation to historical materialism in dismissing as utopian the theories that envisaged a gradual transformation of the capitalist economy into socialism.

In the Address Marx must, as he says in a letter to Engels, set forth the communist point of view in such a way that it could be accepted. ‘It was impossible’, Riazanov will comment in Marx and Engels, ‘to employ the bold revolutionary language of the Communist Manifesto (...) The Communist Manifesto was written at the request of a small group of revolutionists and communists for a very young labour movement. These communists emphasised even then that they were not stressing any principles which they wanted to foist upon the labour movement, but that they were trying to crystallise those general principles which, irrespective of nationality, represented the common interests of the proletariat of the entire world. In 1864 the labour movement grew, and penetrated the masses. But as far as a developed class consciousness was concerned it was much behind the revolutionary vanguard of 1848. A similar retrogression was also to be observed among the leaders, on whose behalf Marx was then writing’.

Marx is also tasked with rewriting the Statutes. In the Statutes, the Association proclaims itself to be a ‘central medium of communication and co-operation between workingmen’s societies existing in different countries’ and declares its sole purpose: ‘the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule’. Furthermore, the Statute states that ‘the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopoliser of the means of labour – that is, the source of life – lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence’, finally establishing that ‘the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’.

The representative body is the Central Council, elected within the Association. It is composed of mostly proletarian elements. Hermann Jung will write, regarding the Council, that it is made up of comrades ‘accustomed to handling the hammer and the file, and who only at the price of personal sacrifice manage to replace them with the pen’ (Letter to ‘L’Echo de Verviers’, 20 February 1866).

The Association is made up of the membership of various workers’ societies that belong to a single centre. It expresses in itself both the consciousness of the need for a single international discipline of the proletarian struggle against capital, and the search for a unitary doctrine that can inform a party-form that universally directs it. The entire history of the International will see the commitment, particularly of Marx and Engels, in defence of this constitutive necessity, against backwardness and autonomist and localist infiltration.

Certainly the birth of the Association is not to be ascribed to the will of individual men, least of all Marx, whose speech at the 7th anniversary banquet of the International was reported in the ‘World’ of 15 October 1871: ‘The great success which has so far crowned our efforts is due to circumstances beyond the power of its members. The very foundation of the Association was the result of these circumstances, and not at all the merit of the men who devoted themselves to this task. It was not the work of a handful of able men; all the politicians of this world taken together could not have created the conditions and circumstances that were necessary for the success of the Association’.

The proletariat’s most generous struggles, culminating with the seizure of power in the Paris Commune, go to the imperishable honour of that First International, of a class still young in experience and doctrine but already fully manifesting its abnegation and courage, physical and intellectual, when organising into a trade union was often only possible clandestinely, compensated with dismissal and those who went on strike braved prison if not the lead of troops. Today’s proletariat, corrupted and sated with bourgeois culture, has too much to learn from those admittedly ignorant but strong ancestors of healthy sentiments and class instincts. Those stalwart predecessors, given their still meagre experience of struggle, could not yet recognise in Marxism their adequate doctrine. But it was very clear where the enemy to beat was: the bourgeois bosses of all countries entrenched in their state and church institutions.

The disputes among the most disparate currents during the historical course of the Association did not deny the European proletariat the degree of class maturity that would have allowed it to launch itself to the assault on the heavens in 1871.

Marx and Engels, in 1872, in The Fictitious Splits in the International, will write: ‘Contrary to the sectarian organization, with their vagaries and rivalries, the International is a genuine and militant organization of the proletarian class of all countries, united in their common struggle against the capitalists and the landowners, against their class power organized in the state. The International’s Rules, therefore, speak of only simple “workers’ societies”, all aiming for the same goal and accepting the same programme, which presents a general outline of the proletarian movement, while having its theoretical elaboration to be guided by the needs of the practical struggle and the exchange of ideas in the sections, unrestrictedly admitting all shades of socialist convictions in their organs and Congresses’. Again, Engels wrote to Paul Lafargue on 19 January 1872: ‘The most divergent views, not only concerning the future organisation of society, but also concerning measures to be taken now, are represented in the great International Association. The Association necessarily debates questions of this nature at its General Congresses, but in not a single article of its Statutes does it lay down a system, an obligatory standard for the sections. There is nothing obligatory save the fundamental principle: the emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves (...) Communists and individualists work side by side, and it is fair to say that all forms of socialism find expression in the International (...) however, the International has always known to close its ranks firmly in the face of the external enemy’.

With the Statute, the Association presents itself as a formal party of the proletariat, although still lacking in unity of direction on the means to arrive at the ends. Communism is born and fights before Marxism. The blood shed by Parisian proletarians of all tendencies, of which none backed down, gives us a sense of class dignity and belonging to our party. The Association was a communist and revolutionary party, of the working class alone, in that historical cycle tending towards a single international programme and discipline, and not an interclass front of leftist forces.

The militia of individuals is documented through membership cards. The card also serves as a ‘passport’: those who, as members, are forced to emigrate by bourgeois persecution are recognised and helped, as far as they can, by comrades abroad. At the head of the entire Association is the President of the Central Council, a position that will be abolished in September 1867 at the proposal of Marx.

Already in the first few months the Association is successful and entire trade unions, such as the miners’, bricklayers’, and printers’ unions, join en masse. The stronghold of the First International is England where everything is going well for the proletarian movement. The English, French, and German sections are then joined by the Swiss section which will become very active within a few months.

The Association in May 1866 counts almost 12,000 members in England alone. France, despite some serious problems, is then well on its way thanks to the continuous workers’ struggles in the factories. On 1 May 1865 Marx can write to Engels with satisfaction: ‘We have baffled all attempts by the middle class to mislead the working class’. And Engels replies: ‘The International Association really has gained an enormous amount of ground in such a short time and with so little to-do’.

The clashes of course did not lack, as when at a rally the leader of the League for Polish Independence states that Poland should ask France, the only nation historically benevolent towards it, to intervene on its behalf. Marx responded harshly to these claims in the Council by demonstrating how historically France, like all other bourgeois states, had made cannon fodder of the Poles for its own gains.

Fundamental discussion in the First Association, right from its beginnings, was the question of universal suffrage, a tactical cornerstone of Marxism until the First World War. Marx himself actively contributed in 1865 to the creation in England of the Reform League, the League for the Reform of Electoral Law, the main national organisation of the proletariat in England that set itself the programme of obtaining universal suffrage.

For Marxism, universal suffrage was a matter of principle: when the bourgeoisie denies proletarians political rights, the revolutionary party claims them as recognition of class political maturity and social defiance. Consistently afterwards, and today, when the bourgeois whore winkingly offers the ballot paper to the workers, for the same purpose of preventing their political assertion, the communists respond with the delivery of deserting elections and parliaments.

However, Marxism, as well as rejecting the bourgeois democratic principle in all its premises and consequences, always saw universal suffrage and the workers’ presence in bourgeois parliaments as nothing more than a means to propagandise the destruction of parliaments and the bourgeois state and the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx said in 1871 at the London Conference, against those, the anarchists, who did not want parliament to be used for our ends on principle: ‘One should never believe that it is of small significance to have workers in Parliament. If one stifles their voices, as in the case of De Potter and Castian, or if one ejects them, as in the case of Manuel – the reprisals and oppressions exercise a deep effect on the people. If, on the other hand, they can speak from the parliamentary tribune, as do Bebel and Liebknecht, the whole world listens to them. In the one case or the other, great publicity is provided for our principles’. Quite clear: the best thing that can happen to us is to be thrown out to show the proletariat what they really are! No concession, therefore, of parliamentary activity ‘in favour of the proletariat’, as propagandised by opportunism; at most parliament can serve as a megaphone to spread the revolutionary programme.

At this time, the Marxist vision of the violent seizure of power and proletarian dictatorship still coexisted with the perspective that postulated a peaceful path to socialism because history had not yet demonstrated the impossibility of the second hypothesis. For all this, the Central Council and Marx himself made a strong contribution to the establishment of the Reform League: it set itself the primary task of extending the right to vote to the entire adult male population, without distinction of class or social class. It was opposed by various organisations including the petty-bourgeois National Union for Reform, which called for the extension of suffrage only to the petty bourgeoisie and the more affluent strata of the proletariat. However, while the communists made suffrage the primary goal of the movement in England, in Prussia they did not consider it useful for the purposes of the revolution. The Germans, instead, were fighting in parliament, where the propaganda of Liebknecht and Bebel was anything but democratic and constantly put internationalist buzzwords on the agenda.

In short, universal suffrage but only if useful for proletarian propaganda: democracy was never considered by Marxism to be a superior good common to all classes! Parliaments and democracy were the means, not the end, which was and will be anti-democratic and anti-parliamentary. Even as a forum, parliament will be deemed no longer usable by the Communist Left from the 1920s onwards. The parliaments of the 19th century, although bourgeois, were still non-negligible elements of the political clash between classes, they were not the unworthy cloisters of our century. It is worth noting in this connection that the Communist Parties’ use of parliamentary activity has led to such serious misunderstandings within the party and the proletariat that their usefulness in propaganda terms has been far outweighed.

The question of nationalities and bourgeois demands in some nations still in the process of revolutionary settlement imposed themselves as fundamental issues among the sections of the Association also because of the repercussions on their everyday attitudes.

Despite the geographical remoteness of the United States of America, the European proletariat felt the need to support with all its might the bourgeois demands of the Northern States against the reactionary Southern States.

Only the Union’s victory in the Civil War would in fact allow the full development of capitalism. The war was the final act that allowed the pre-capitalist structures in North America to be sunk by unleashing the infamous, but then burgeoning, bourgeois productive forces. The degree of revolutionary violence decided the future structural configuration of the United States.

At the same time, the war marked the definitive consecration of the United States’ autonomy from the English motherland. England based the power of its textile industry on the bales of cotton coming in from the very cheap crops on the plantations of the South. The war caused first and foremost the defeat of English economic interests, which at the time were the most powerful on the globe, converging with those of slavery and the Southern landowners. Hence the importance of the English proletariat’s gesture of support for the Northerners, despite the pounding campaign in favour of the South conducted by the English bourgeois newspapers. Like all bourgeois war propaganda, since 1861 the newspapers had bombarded the proletariat with the ‘atrocities’ perpetrated by the Northerners against the South. This propaganda campaign was thrown in the proletariat’s face with a view to English intervention against the North. The struggles of the English proletariat helped to prevent this, which was a classic example of real class defeatism.

England, unable to move directly militarily due to the opposition of the proletariat, then pushed France and Spain into a joint expedition to Mexico, so as to reserve that outpost to North America for itself. But the situation had already become unfavourable by 1863 due to the continuing military victories of the Northerners, which by then foreshadowed the total defeat of the Confederates.

Marx and Engels on several occasions wrote numerous articles on the Civil War, carefully studying it first and foremost as the birth of a great capitalist power and, consequently, of an immense proletariat that could stand as an international vanguard. Of all the English aims Marx had been able to identify in his articles the fundamental one: not the victory of the South over the Northern States, but the perpetuation of the war for as long as possible. ‘For England’, he had written on 18 September 1861 in the New York Daily Tribune, ‘the only real reason why it is looked upon favourably being this, that whereas the present great-scale conflict may issue in a restored and stronger political unity, the alternative of infinitely multiplied small-scale quarrels will issue in a weak and divided continent, that England cannot fear.’

Consistent with this line, the First International from its inception had postulated unconditional support for the Northerners and as a task the defection from every pro-slavery English instance.

The Civil War ended in 1865 with the total defeat of the Southerners. Marx would later also judge it as ‘the first war waged by modern capitalist means’. It was a mass mobilisation that not only enriched the fledgling industries, but also involved and deeply wounded the entire social structure, both in the South and the North.

As expected, it also led to the reorganisation of the American proletariat, which would very quickly become among the most combative in the world. In August 1866, the National Labour Union will be founded, which immediately set itself the goal, for the first time in the world, of achieving the 8-hour workday.

In May, also in 1865, an Owenite carpenter, a certain John Weston, presented in ‘The Bee-Hive Newspaper’, the official organ of the Trade Unions and the Association, two theses that caused much discussion. These argued that, 1st, a general increase in wages would bring no improvement in the living conditions of the workers because it would cause a corresponding inflation, and, 2nd, the Trade Unions, by fighting for these increases, would even bring harm to the proletariat. Marx was commissioned by the Central Council to write a report in response to Weston’s theses. The report, not an easy one given the issues that were being addressed, was read by Marx in two sittings, on 20th and 27th June, and was later published posthumously under the famous title of Value, Price and Profit. In its contents, Marx’s report also served as an anticipation of the contents of Capital, on which he was finishing work at this time and on which the issues described in the report would be more fully explored.

Through his powerful analysis of the laws of economics and history, Marx refuted all of Weston’s theses, reconfirming in clear terms how indispensable the economic struggle of the Trade Unions was to the workers. Marx had to start in his demonstration from the theories of value and surplus value, difficult to understand in their destructive grandeur of entrenched myths.

Marx then presented the Council with a weighty critique of bourgeois society, going far beyond Proudhon’s formula that ‘property is theft’: ‘In their attempts at reducing the working day to its former rational dimensions (i.e. 6 or 8 hour working day), or, where they cannot enforce a legal fixation of a normal working day, at checking overwork by a rise of wages, a rise not only in proportion to the surplus time exacted, but in a greater proportion, working men fulfil only a duty to themselves and their race. They only set limits to the tyrannical usurpations of capital. Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalised in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation’.

Marx went on to explain that the struggle between capital and labour is incessant as ‘the capitalist [is] constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction’. In concluding the report Marx then warned that the daily conquests are, yes, fundamental to the movement, but they should not delude the workers any further as they will always be forced to fight against capital until it is annihilated by the more general political struggle. ‘[The working class] ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society’.

In June 1866, Paul Lafargue was given the task of drawing up a report for the Council on the situation of the sections in Europe and the progress of the Association. Lafargue was happy to conclude that the result of these first two years was to be considered highly satisfactory.

In England, the Association was now rich in prestige thanks mainly to its decisive intervention in class struggles. There were as many as 14,000 members of the Association in England. Lafargue wrote: ‘The reform movement has absorbed the entire attention of the working class for a moment and the entire activity of the Central Council. But for some time past deputations from the Central Council have been sent to all the working men’s societies in order to acquaint them with its principles and to invite them to join. These deputations have everywhere been warmly received’.

On 12 December 1865, for example, a public rally of the Reform League was organised. The great success of this rally can be read in this comment by Marx to Engels on 26 December 1865: ‘The Reform League, one of the organisations we founded, has had a triumphant success at the St Martin’s Hall meeting, the largest and most purely working-class meeting that has taken place since I have been living in London. The people from our Committee were at the head of it and put forward our ideas’. But this movement did not hold out for long: on 12 March 1866, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone had introduced an electoral reform bill that provided for an insignificant lowering of the census required to vote. In the face of this, the Reform League will swerve completely by accepting the compromise with the government. Marx will write to Engels on 6 April: ‘In England, the reform movement, which we brought into being, has almost killed us.

Following disagreements between the Central Council and the editors of the Association’s official organ, ‘The Bee-Hive Newspaper’, the Council decided to choose another newspaper as the mouthpiece of its decisions: it was ‘The Workman’s Advocate’, later called ‘The Commonwealth’. The newspaper was financed by the Industrial Newspaper Company, on whose board of directors Marx also sat. This was a response to the increasingly pressing need to make the workers’ press completely independent of the bourgeois press, including financially. It was stipulated that ‘we must take the work of our salvation into our own hands, and this can only be done by, acquiring a more prominent position in the press and on the platform than we have hitherto done. In order that we may guard against deceitful friends, we require a press of our own’. (To the Workers of Great Britain and Ireland).

In addition to England, other successes of the Association came from the young Swiss section. At the beginning of 1866, there were 250 members in Geneva, 150 in Lausanne and 150 in Vevey, as well as others scattered over many cities. Of the three newspapers that came out in Switzerland, one quickly gained great prestige, the ‘Vorbote’: in little more than a year it reached 1,300 copies and was sold not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Paris, London, New York, Chicago and other cities. The work then carried out by this section in defence of the workers’ conditions was impeccable: the Association procured work in Switzerland to distribute among its members in the bad seasons, set up a bank called Caisse de Crédit Mutuel, and a fund for the construction of workers’ houses. Given the excellent functioning of the section, the Central Council transferred the management of the German section and its members to the Geneva Central Committee, at least until this country managed to establish a strong national centre.

Germany, in fact, was not sailing in good waters, although some things seemed to be finally moving. The situation was made even more difficult by widespread police repression and harsh legislation that prohibited, among other things, membership to foreign associations. Wilhelm Liebknecht, Marx’s trusted correspondent at the time, was unable to create a solid section that would finally give Germany a secure revolutionary leadership.

One point in favour of the Association as far as Germany was concerned, was the fact that the situation was becoming heavy for Lassalle’s followers and their newspaper, the ‘Social-Demokrat’. This ‘has now about 300 subscribers; and the “Lassalleans” have dwindled down to a few hundred deluding or deluded people, who are divided into two different sects carrying on an internecine war, as disgusting as it is ludicrous’, writes W. Liebknecht. Bismarck had also put John Schweitzer, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, on trial, while Bernhard Becker, Lassalle’s heir, had been forced by circumstances adverse to him to step aside. Satisfied, Engels writes to Marx on 2 December 1865: ‘So that it was not our intervention, but our non-intervention that put paid to the whole caboodle. This no doubt means that “Lassalleanism” in its official form will soon come to the end of the line’.

In Napoleon III’s France, legislation was even more restrictive than in Germany for the proletariat, as many workers’ associations were absolutely forbidden. It was positive, however, that despite the repression, the Association in France had thousands of workers (including 2,000 in Paris alone). As mentioned above, Marx saw the French proletariat as far more combative than the English proletariat, as would be demonstrated in 1871 with the Commune. However, what remained in France as a cumbersome legacy was the spread among the workers’ ranks of Proudhonist ideas, against which Marx had polemicised years earlier with his writing The Poverty of Philosophy, in response to Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty.

A good section was present in Belgium, while serious difficulties were encountered in proselytising in countries such as Spain and Italy; the latter was slow to shake off Mazzini’s ideology and when it did it would replace it with anarchism.

In September 1865, one year after its foundation, a preliminary international meeting was held, attended by 9 foreign delegates plus the members of the Central Council. At this meeting, the agendas for the Geneva Congress, to be held in September of the following year, were decided. The agendas were: the reduction of working hours, cooperative work, women’s and children’s work, the Polish question and finally the question of standing armies and their influence on the working class. After that, the conference took stock of the situation. It was noted, for example, that in England it was ‘the first time that an association having anything to do with politics was accepted by the trade unions’.

Centralism corresponded to the objective necessity of the world proletariat to strive for a single doctrine, a single battle and a single governing body, with the supreme goal, the communist revolution, firmly fixed before it.

We are obliged, in this work, to mention Marx’s name often. This is not, we know, idolatry for the ‘great leader’ to be mythologised as an otherworldly being. None of these shortcuts are suitable with our method and worldview. The party, in certain historical periods, has had men, of great worth, who have acted as leaders. A product of history and the environment, these comrades better and earlier than others knew how to represent the class to itself. But that the class programme must always be ‘revealed’ by a man of exception is by no means expected, if anything the contrary, to the extent that party doctrine is perfected and consolidated, accessible to all. Thus, comrade Karl Marx, not because of his skills as a political climber careerist, but organically, because of his abilities, was in fact, if not officially, the managerial and organisational centre of the First International.

Already at its foundation, Marx was almost everywhere recognised as the leading theorist of the proletarian cause as well as the only one of the old leaders who had not, over the years, gone over to the other side of the barricade. Marx wrote to Kugelmann on 13 October 1866: ‘I am in fact having to run the whole Association myself’. But the party, deterministically, chooses Marx not only for his exceptional personal qualities, selflessness, helpfulness, generosity and capacity for work, i.e. for his proletarian and communist ‘style’, but because it instinctively already recognises Marxism as its doctrine. Marxism, we have known since the Manifesto, is not a particular theory alongside others of the proletariat, it is the theory of the proletariat, the only one that encompasses all others, partial, naïve, utopian.

Marx was aware of the power of the theory of dialectical materialism in the face of the fragile and infantile Proudhonist and anarchist theories. But he fought constantly within the Association not to make ‘his’ theses triumph at all costs, which he knew the party would spontaneously embrace as it matured, but to prevent it from taking dead-end paths that would have prevented or delayed that maturation. Believing that the political growth of the proletariat is only possible by overcoming particularism and localism and in the exchange of experiences between different countries, we can define the First International as Marx’s constant struggle to defend the international discipline of the movement. It is an unceasing resistance against the particular or outdated ideologies that gradually claim to impose themselves, even with fraudulent methods, on the Association. There is, for example, a constant risk of a yielding to Proudhonist theses.

Between December 1865 and the beginning of 1866 the Central Council, and Marx in particular, were publicly slandered in the newspapers by the Proudhonist French section in London. Particularly violent were the attacks by Pierre Vesinier who accused the Council and Marx of behaving like ‘Bonapartists’ towards the Polish question. Furthermore, Vesinier claimed that ‘too much importance’ had been given to the national question at the expense of the social question and proletarian emancipation. The Central Council responded to Vesinier’s accusations with a letter to ‘L’Echo de Verviers’.

Engels then took on the task, at Marx’s invitation, of responding in depth to the Proudhonists regarding the Polish question with a series of articles entitled What the German Working Class Has to Do with Poland. In these it was asserted that ‘the working men of Europe unanimously proclaim the restoration of Poland as a part and parcel of their political programme, as the most comprehensive expression of their foreign policy’. In the consistent and lucid assessment of the progressive wars of the bourgeoisie at the time, it is said, among other things, that ‘[t]hey mean intervention, not non-intervention, they mean war with Russia while Russia meddles with Poland, and they have proved it every time the Poles rose against their oppressors’. And these are not liberal but revolutionary theses: Marx and Engels identified Russia as the main bastion of counter-revolution and considered its collapse a favourable passage for the proletariat.

The sound authority of Marx and the Council was undisputed within the Association, but particular tendencies often tended to gain the upper hand with methods that were anything but limpid, sometimes facilitated by the theoretical weaknesses of the Council members themselves. Moreover, Marx did not abandon his work on economics and continued at a fast pace with the final draft of the first volume of Capital: in order to devote himself fully to this fundamental work of his, Marx had on several occasions acknowledged that it was necessary for him to leave the Central Council, but he well understood that, in a situation as favourable as this for the proletarian movement, it was to be avoided passing into the hands of intriguers or incompetents.

A ‘low blow’ to the Association was then perpetrated by Mazzini. The latter, taking advantage of Marx’s absence due to illness, sent his follower Luigi Wolff to the Council to criticise Marx’s conduct, relying on the recent Vesinier case. With his intervention, Wolff convinced the fragile comrades in the Association to withdraw all public accusations made by the Council against Vesinier, and even obtained a public apology from the Council to the London Proudhonists. On this occasion Wolff even succeeded in having purely Mazzinian theses published with the Council’s signature at the foot of the page. Marx commented in a letter to Engels on 24 March 1866: ‘[Mazzini] demanded that the English should recognise him as leader of the continental democrats, as though it was for the English gentleman to appoint leaders for us!’ Immediately the foreign secretaries of the Council, who were also absent during Wolff’s session, demanded Marx’s intervention against Mazzini’s theses put forward in the public document. Marx intervened, harshly criticising Mazzini’s entire ‘patriotic and theological’ programme, concluding that it had nothing to do with the movement as the proletariat, in its daily praxis, was already far removed from certain theses.

It was the rekindling of class struggles that had determined in the European proletariat the need for a supranational body, namely the Association. A need that started in particular in England and France, the vanguards of the workers’ movement, but also in countries such as Poland, Belgium, and Switzerland, and that was, in spite of everything, also present in Germany and Italy, and even in the United States where, shortly afterwards, a very strong workers’ movement would arise spontaneously. The aim of the Association was to coordinate these ferments into a single, disciplined movement, whether they kept to the defensive or the political and revolutionary level.

In France there were numerous agitations in the factories and the proletariat continually demonstrated its combativeness even in the most difficult situations. In addition to the workers’ struggles, the French government also had to endure the desertions of soldiers forced to depart for a war of plunder in Mexico. The outbreak of student revolts in Paris had also had a great echo, a sign that there was also rebellion in the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie. The student revolts were followed by a harsh repression that led to arrests and expulsions of the movement’s leading representatives. On the student question, the clashes between Marx and the Proudhonists were noteworthy: while the latter unconditionally supported the uprisings and applauded them from all over Europe, Marx (and we with him) always felt a definite distrust of the student demands.

But it is in England, where it is strongest in numbers and capacity to intervene, that the Association demonstrated its united will to defend the proletarian cause. We can, for example, recall a glorious proletarian struggle of the time, won thanks to the direct intervention of the Central Council. In March 1866 the tailors’ strike broke out in London with wage demands: to this the bourgeoisie responded by hiring scabs on the continent in order to break the movement. On this real proletarian trade, Marx’s judgement is lapidary: ‘The purpose of this importation is the same as that of the importation of Indian labourers to Jamaica, namely, perpetuation of slavery’. To the employers’ counter-offensive, the Association responded vigorously by foiling the move and getting the tailors the wage increase they were fighting for. The Association’s successful intervention brought it great prestige among the working class, so much so that the entire tailors’ union joined the Association.

The example of the London tailors’ struggle was soon repeated in Scotland. In Edinburgh the tailors went on strike and here too the bosses responded by hiring scabs from Germany. From London the Central Council again intervened, supported by the London Tailors’ Association, trying to foil the bosses’ plan as it had done before. The Scottish workers withstood the long strike mainly thanks to a providential collection initiated by the London workers. Envoys from the Council then managed to induce the German workers who had arrived in Edinburgh to dissolve their contracts and return to Germany.

Opportunism instead gained the upper hand in another struggle that erupted in late July. Because of the government crisis and the possible rise of the Conservatives into government, ‘spectacular’ workers’ demonstrations erupted in London led by the Association through its members in the Reform League. Tension reached a peak when on 23 July the League summoned a rally in Hyde Park in London, despite a government ban. Here the police attacked the demonstrators and arrested 50 of them. In response over the next two days tens of thousands of workers rallied again, and many took to the streets armed. To avoid confrontation the government then opted to remove the police and troops and utilised some ‘right-wing’ trade union leaders to persuade the workers to back down from their intentions. Marx commented to Engels on 27 July that the workers ‘will accomplish nothing without a really bloody clash with those in power’.

We communists usually set 1871 as the historical watershed of two distinct phases of bourgeois power: whereas until then the bourgeois wars were generally judged to be progressive against the reactionary old feudal systems, from 1871 onwards we affirmed that the bourgeoisie in Europe was entering the imperialist phase, which then reached its peak of cruelty exterminating workers in all countries in the 1914 world war. But already in 1871 the bourgeoisie fully unleashed all its repressive apparatus against the Paris Communards, demonstrating that, at the moment of revolutionary danger, it was willing to overcome all national divisions and partial interests to unite in defence of common privileges.

In the decade prior to 1871, in reality many nations had freed themselves from the old feudal systems that fell one by one before the all-encompassing bourgeois maelstrom. By 1859, Prussia had begun the long war for the unification of the entire German region, the future Germany, and was thus on its way to becoming a capitalist power in its own right. In 1861, Italy, with its unification, eliminated the pre-bourgeois remnants of its institutions. In the same year, Russia too, with the abolition of serfdom, opened up to capitalism, albeit under an autocratic regime. By 1865, the United States was well on its way to becoming a major imperialist power within a few decades. Faced with these radical and revolutionary transformations, the proletariat could not fail to claim its own revolution.

England, well ripe with commodities and capital, was constantly busy controlling its great colonial empire. At the end of 1865, a revolt against the colonialists broke out in Jamaica. The English suppressed the revolt in blood: about 2,000 black people were hanged, shot or flogged, and numerous villages set on fire. Marx commented to Engels on 20 November: ‘[The black rioters] enjoyed the liberty, amongst others, of having their hides taxed to raise money for the planters to import coolies and thus depress their own labour market below the minimum’. By September of that year, the English government had arrested and tortured the main leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an Irish self-determination group linked to the Association. There were numerous workers’ strikes throughout England against this repression.

While the student struggles were spreading in Paris, France continued its war in Mexico with the aim of turning the Mexican republic into a colony of the great powers and a secure base to support the Southern States in the Civil War. France’s greatest difficulties in this expedition were the constant desertions within its own ranks. Marx wrote to Engels on 26 December: ‘Bonaparte appears to me shakier than ever. The business with the students is symptomatic of ominous signs of conflict in the army itself, but above all the Mexico affair and that original sin of the Lower Empire, debts! Nor has the fellow managed to pull off a single coup in the past year’.

But it is in Europe that the fuse of war seemed likely to explode at any moment. The interests of different nations were clashing in the very centre of Europe. Bismarck’s Prussia, engaged shortly before against Denmark over the region of Schleswig-Holstein, now directed its sights towards the other statelets in the German region, but above all against the overwhelming power in the region of Austria. Behind the absolutist, even aristocratically feudal façade of the Bismarck government, the complex and powerful machine of the bourgeois regime, i.e. banks, big industry, military apparatus, was actually moving. Russia, on the other hand, was interested in Bismarck’s threats as they would distract Prussia from its expansionist aims towards Poland. Austria, fearful of war with Prussia, sought the support of Napoleon III. Engels wrote to Marx on 13 April: ‘the bourgeoisie has not the stuff in it to rule directly itself, and that therefore unless there is an oligarchy, as here in England, capable of taking over, for good pay, the management of state and society in the interests of the bourgeoisie, a Bonapartist semi-dictatorship is the normal form. It upholds the big material interests of the bourgeoisie even against the will of the bourgeoisie, but allows the bourgeoisie no share in the government’.

In May 1866, the Austro-Prussian war grew ever closer. Among the various cards in his possession Bismarck plays that of Italy, which would like to wrest Venetia from the Austrians. Between these war movements a hope arose in Engels, which he expressed in a letter to Marx on 1 May as follows: ‘I hope that, if he pulls it off, the Berliners will hit out. If they proclaim a republic there, the whole of Europe can be overturned in 14 days’.

The Prussian army, on the other hand, appears to be in bad shape, morale is not sky high and Marx and Engels believe that Prussia can only win the war if Austria attacks first. Engels continued on 11 June: ‘If this opportunity passes without being used, and if the people allow that to happen, we can then calmly pack up our revolutionary paraphernalia and devote ourselves to pure theory’.

The war with Austria is fought between June and July 1866. Engels punctually analyses the events from the minutiae of the war operations. The aim of the work is to ‘point out their probable influence upon impending [military] operations’. Engels identifies in the Austrians a certain superiority on several fronts, including the number and better organisation of the army. But the Prussians, in an organisational deficit due to fifty years of peace, have in their favour first and foremost their armament, decidedly more modern and functional. And it is precisely this superior technique that will give Prussia victory on 3 July in the decisive battle of Konniggratz.

But this is not the only front on which Prussia finds itself victorious: within a short time Bismarck’s troops occupy the states of Hanover, Electoral Hesse, and Saxony. The first consequence of these astounding victories are clear to Engels: ‘the Prussian army has, within a single week, conquered a position as high as ever it held, and may well feel confident now to be able to cope with any opponent’. And again: ‘The simple fact is: Prussia has 500,000 needle-guns and the rest of the world not even 500’ (Letter to Marx of 9 July).

Engels, through his continuous and profound analyses of the German military question, has been able to come to the conclusion that the conflict has not concluded, but only begun. He understands very well that Russia, now fearful of Prussian power, will be forced to ally itself with Austria. But above all he fully understands that the future great conflict Prussia will wage will be against France. On all this too Marx and Engels have precise positions, solid as party theses: Prussia is on its way to the unification of a future German nation, and this is a decidedly progressive factor in that it brings about the victory of the bourgeoisie over the various aristocracies of the German statelets. Engels again: ‘Bismarck himself, who, in order to be able to govern all appearances feudally and absolutely for a few months at home, is pursuing the policy of the bourgeoisie with a vengeance abroad, preparing the ground for the bourgeoisie to rule and striking along paths where progress is only possible by liberal, even revolutionary means’. He goes on to write to Marx on 25 July: ‘Politically Bismarck will be compelled to rely on the middle class, whom he needs against the imperial princes. Not at the moment, perhaps, because his prestige and the army are still sufficient. But he will have to give something to the middle class even if only to secure from Parliament the necessary conditions for the central power, and the natural course of the affairs will always force him or his successors to appeal to the middle class again; so that if at present, as is possible, Bismarck does not concede more to the middle class than he actually has to, he will still be driven more and more into their camp’.

In August of the same year, peace was concluded in Prague. With it Prussia obtained a large part of North Germany as well as military control over the South German statelets. In addition to this, Austria lost Veneto, which passed to the Kingdom of Italy. Furthermore, the facts made it clear that Napoleon III was powerless to conduct a victorious war and that Russia would have to radically change its friendly relationship with Prussia.

The first congress of the Association was held in Geneva between the 3rd and 8th September 1866 with the aim of drawing the necessary conclusions from the first two years of activity, and to draw perspectives and rational plans on the movements to be undertaken in the immediate future. The Congress, reports Tullio Martello (an opponent) in his History of the International from December 1872, ‘was convened in the great hall of the Treiber brewery, and was presided over by Mr Jung. It was attended by the workers’ sections of Geneva, Chaux-de-Fonds, Lausanne, Montreux, Zurich, Wezikon, Cologne, Solingen, Stuttgart, Magdeburg, Paris, Lyons, Roano, and the Central Committee of London, a total of sixty delegates’. They represented Internationalist sections and workers’ societies.

The official report of the Central Council was drafted by Marx, but he did not present himself at the Congress. The report recognised the Provisional Statutes as an adequate organisational plan for the Association. London was again proposed as the seat of the Central Council and it was reaffirmed that the General Secretary, elected for one year, was the only salaried official of the Association. All these proposals were voted through by a majority. The report openly stated the goal to which the Association was striving, the communist society. It stated: ‘It is one of the great purposes of the Association to make the workmen of different countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army of emancipation’.

The Congress proposed that Marx take over as president of the Central Council, a position that Marx refused.

On the field of daily conquests, the Association resolutely took on its new tasks, such as obtaining the eight-hour working day. Marx’s report stated, among other things: ‘It is needed to restore the health and physical energies of the working class, that is, the great body of every nation, as well as to secure them the possibility of intellectual development, sociable intercourse, social and political action. We propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day. This limitation being generally claimed by the workmen of the United States of America, the vote of the Congress will raise it to the common platform of the working classes all over the world’.

It should be noted that the eight-hour cry arose not from a ‘desire’ of a leader or party but from the reality of the movement in its most advanced outpost. Marx wrote to Kugelmann on 9 October: ‘the demands I had put up for Geneva were put up there, too, by the correct instinct of the workers’. With the Civil War a year over, the American proletariat immediately set class objectives that were defined in August 1866 in Baltimore with the founding of the National Labour Union, which immediately established its programme on the conquest of the eight-hour working day. The Baltimore Congress and the Geneva Congress thus simultaneously set themselves the same goals.

The Council’s report then went on to address the issues of child and female labour, proposing that the Association set itself the goal of obtaining decidedly restrictive laws on children’s working hours and at the same time urging its members not to allow their own offspring to be employed in work that is harmful and counterproductive to their healthy and educated growth. Also accepted by the Congress in the report were the points on co-operative labour and the standing armies of nations. On the latter point Marx said: ‘We propose the general armament of the people and their general instruction in the use of arms’. It was then recognised in the report that the Association had achieved a great victory over the Trade Unions who, with the Sheffield Congress two months earlier, had decided to espouse the cause of the Association for the general emancipation of the workers.

Two points of the report were not accepted: the one on the Polish question, for a reconstitution of Poland on a democratic basis, ready to act as a proletarian buffer to the reactionary advance of Tsarist Russia; the one for the abolition of indirect taxes, proposed by Marx because, he stated, ‘indirect taxes conceal from an individual what he is paying to the state, whereas a direct tax is undisguised, unsophisticated, and not to be misunderstood by the meanest capacity’.

But the Geneva Congress is also to be remembered for the polemics that the French Proudhonists raised against Marx’s report and against some of the foundations of the Statutes of the Association. The inconsistency of the petty-bourgeois theses of Proudhon and his followers Marx had already demonstrated in the past with his The Poverty of Philosophy and other works, but the polemic with them was not over and would indeed be a constant in the Association’s history. Thus, dusting off old but still lively objections, the Proudhonists at the Congress criticised Marx’s direction on the future communist society, rejecting his prediction of the social distribution of products and the abolition of every forms of commodity. As active as they once were, they asserted at the Congress that the servant-master, or rather proletarian-bourgeois, dialectical clash was due to nothing more than an injustice in principle: it was now a matter of ‘re-establishing violated justice’. The injustice would be in the fact that for the performance that the worker gives of their labour-power, the bourgeois does not pay the full compensation.

The Proudhonists said to the bourgeoisie: ‘You have been rendered a service for which your fellow-citizens are now asking you to repay; and, in the name of solidarity, of reciprocity between all, they enjoin you to fulfil your duties as you have enjoyed your rights; either you practice exchange as equals, or they exclude you from the group’ (Memoir of the French Delegates to the Geneva Congress). In the society idealised by the Proudhonists, everyone would exchange goods at will, everyone would have the same wage, everyone would become a petty bourgeois owner of money. They stated: ‘What we want is the freedom to organise exchange between producers, service for service, work for work, credit for credit. In every commercial speculation, one party loses what the other has gained: that is the state of war. It is up to us to organise peace in industry by the gradual suppression of the risks of trade, by cooperation which, based on reciprocity and justice, can only admit, between the contracting parties, a mutual exchange of equivalent services’. Nothing, therefore, to do with the communist theses that advocate a society based on the abolition of exchange between equivalents, replaced by miserable utopias, which if they were feasible would be reactionary, typical of the petty-bourgeois mentality.

The Proudhonists then attacked at the Congress the communist formula ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. In contrast, the French theses, while on the one hand vulgarly endorsed the quasi-divine role of the State, on the other sharply criticised the centralism of the Association, advocating instead a co-operation without hierarchies and leaders, but which was in reality ‘the power, the faculty that each one has to enjoy the economic forces’.

Even worse were the decidedly enigmatic theses about the uselessness of strikes for the workers, which presaged further setbacks.

Finally the Proudhonists, through Tolain, wanted to push through the openly instrumental resolution that ‘only workers could represent workers’. This overtly instrumental proposal was fortunately rejected, thanks also to the intervention of some delegates who emphasised that the Association owed its foundation also and above all to bourgeois citizens who had espoused the proletarian cause.

On the Proudhonist opposition we quote a comment that Marx wrote to Kugelmann on 9 October: ‘They prattle incessantly about science and know nothing. They spurn all revolutionary action, i.e. arising from the class struggle itself, every concentrated social movement, and therefore also that which can be achieved by political means (e.g., such as limitation of the working day by law). Beneath the cloak of freedom and anti-governmentalism or anti-authoritarian individualism these gentlemen, who for 16 years now have so quietly endured the most wretched despotism, and are still enduring it, are in actuality preaching vulgar bourgeois economics, only in the guise of Proudhonist idealism! Proudhon has done enormous harm. His pseudo-critique and his pseudo-confrontation with the Utopians (he himself is no more than a philistine Utopian, whereas the Utopias of such as Fourier, Owen, etc., contain the presentiment and visionary expression of a new world) seized hold of and corrupted first the “jeunesse brillante” the students, then the workers, especially those in Paris, who as workers in luxury trades are, without realising it, themselves deeply implicated in the garbage of the past. Ignorantly vain, arrogant, compulsively talkative, rhetorically inflated, they were on the verge of spoiling everything, as they flocked to the congress in numbers quite out of proportion to the number of their members’.

The Association came to the attention of Europe. The Geneva Congress itself had also been widely reported in the bourgeois press. A new power was recognised: the world proletarian organisation! The growth of the Association in 1867 was closely related to the strengthening of the proletariat’s international struggles.

Despite the fact that they were not voted on at the Congress, Marx’s theses on the Polish question achieved great success on 22 January 1867, at a rally celebrating the 4th anniversary of the Polish insurrection. In his report, Marx made his position on Russia understandable to anyone, namely that it represented the main reactionary element in Europe. On one hand, Marx warned that the abolition of serfdom in 1861 was not, as one might have thought, a factor that in itself had brought Russia among the capitalistically evolving nations, it was rather the harbinger of greater centralisation of Tsarist power against the nobility.

Marx then pointed out to the audience how Russia had carried out an offensive policy in Asia (wars in the Caucasus and the Black Sea) and how it was now setting the regions of Eastern Europe as its new targets. Russia was therefore a country, in Marx’s analysis, that aimed to conquer large territories and had also always played the role of European gendarme in both the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. In February 1848, for example, Russia, by suppressing the Revolution in Hungary and threatening its repression of the revolutions in Austria and Prussia, had received applause and support from the Western bourgeoisies. Marx noted: ‘On all the European (stock ed.) exchanges shares rose with every Russian victory and fell with every Russian defeat’.

Marx saw Poland as the only state capable of opposing the Tsarist autocracy and therefore called on the Western proletariat to support a Polish revolution for independence with all its might. This is how he concluded his speech, delivered at the Polish Association in London: ‘Poland is the most important instrument in carrying out Russian intentions for world domination; but it is also an insurmountable obstacle, if the Pole, tired of its unceasing betrayal by Europe, does not become a fearful whip in the hands of the Muscovites’. Finally: ‘Thus Europe faces only one alternative: Either Asian barbarism, under the leadership of the Muscovites, will come down on Europe like an avalanche, or Europe must restore Poland and thereby protect itself against Asia with a wall of 20 million heroes, to win time for the consummation of its social transformation’.

The more substantial role that the German proletariat was beginning to assume can be seen from the following statement Marx made to his daughter Laura in a letter of 13 May 1867: ‘The working class, in the greater centres of Germany, are commencing to assume a more decided and threatening attitude. One fine morning there will be a nice dance!’ However, Marx and Engels’ fear was that the revolutionary movement or Prussia’s future war against France would break out too soon, without giving the Association time to mature politically: ‘As far as the war is concerned, I am entirely of your opinion. At the present moment, it can only do harm. If it could be delayed, even just for a year, that would be worth its weight in gold to us’ (Marx to Engels, 7 May 1867).

In England the Association was now a powerhouse, not least because of the prestige it had gained from its interventions in workers’ struggles. In response to a bosses’ attempt to reduce wages by 5%, workers in some factories had replied with the demand for, and conquest of, reduced hours. The Association had intervened in support of the London basket weavers’ strike in October 1866 and had succeeded in blocking the bourgeoisie’s tried and tested move to attract scabs from abroad. The Association also resolutely opposed the attack perpetrated by the Royal Commission against the Trade Unions, which, under the pretext of certain acts of violence, wanted to declare them illegal. The Council’s response was grandiose, with meetings in every major city and a national conference. Otherwise the attention of the English proletariat was directed towards the Reform League. However, the Council was to find at the Lausanne Congress in September 1867 that ‘it is impossible for the General Council to draw the attention of the workers to social questions, the solution of which they do not see in the very distant future’.

In France, too, the prestige of the Association was growing daily. When the bronze workers’ strike broke out in Paris in February 1867, the General Council intervened directly through collections and also convinced the Trade Unions to support the Parisian proletariat financially. As a result of this action and its subsequent success, in many towns in France the Association saw its membership grow from a few dozen to several hundred. In Neuville-sur-Saône a workers’ cooperative was founded, in Caen the workers obtained a reduction in working hours for the same wages, in Fuveau many miners joined the Association because of the confidence it had gained by supporting their struggles.

A section then arose in the United States, freshly emerged from and greatly tested by the Civil War, despite the obvious communication difficulties. The National Labor Union, which came into being in August 1866 and set itself the immediate goal of the 8-hour day, joined the Association. One of the most important American trade unions, the National Union of Iron Molders, a union with militants from Canada to British Columbia, also joined, as did the New York Communist Club.

As many as twenty-one sections had now been formed in Switzerland. In Belgium, too, the situation was brightening up thanks to the Council’s decisive intervention in the events of the Manchiennes uprising, where a miners’ strike had been responded to with gunfire by the military. The Association’s intervention was providential in helping the widows of the killed and wounded. In a leaflet, the Council stated: ‘Today, in every civilised country, the working class is on the move, and it is in such countries as America and England, where industry is most developed, that the working class is most solidly organised and the struggle between the bourgeois class and the working class is at its sharpest’.

It remained more difficult to establish the Association in countries like Spain and Italy, although in the latter, sections were beginning to form in major cities like Naples, Genoa, Milan, and Bologna. In these two nations, the lack of a mature proletariat forced the revolutionary militants into vague formulas between democraticism and extremism that would result in anarchist ideology.

The second Congress of the Association took place in Lausanne between the 2nd and 8th September 1867. At the same time, the Congress of the democratic League of Peace and Freedom, in which men like Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, and John Stuart Mill were active, was being held in Geneva. At the reluctance of some militants of the Association to form a common ‘front’ with the League, Marx succeeded in pushing through the resolution that there could be no participation at the official level.

The report of the Central Council at Lausanne made two sore points clear: 1) the Association was living economically in large debts, 2) the French government’s repression of the proletariat made the Council’s contacts with the French section very difficult. In better news, the Council could rejoice in its report about the numerical and political progress made over the past year and the interventions in the victorious class struggles of the European proletariat. In addition, the Congress had some practical organisational problems to solve.

What emerged from this second Congress of the Association was the increased influence of Proudhonist theses, especially among the French delegates. While the previous one saw Marx’s proposals spontaneously accepted, in Lausanne the Congress let through many theses that referred back to Proudhon’s concepts. It was only at the 1868 Congress in Brussels that these doctrines were recognised as erroneous and rejected.

At Lausanne, the Proudhonist Cesar de Paepe, for example, overemphasised the objective, fundamental for him, of transforming national banks into free credit banks, as if they implied communist society. Proudhonists brought out, in their reports, continuous petty-bourgeois poverties posed in such a way that they could sound like revolutionary riches. Words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ were constantly repeated without realising that these ‘values’ belong to the bourgeois class and not the proletarian one.

Compared to the Geneva Congress, at Lausanne the Proudhonists found a terrain more willing to embrace their petty-bourgeois ideal of a future society and were able to re-propose to the audience the famous formulas according to which the problem of capitalist society would essentially be its being based on an ‘unjust distribution of wealth’, an injustice to be resolved within it. Thus the Proudhonists reaffirmed their utopia of a socialism in which the exchange of goods still existed, i.e. a capitalism that made every representative of society a petty bourgeois equal to another.

The Frenchman Chemale exclaimed at the Congress: ‘the product should be exchanged for a product of analogous value, otherwise there is cheating, fraud, theft!’ For the Proudhonist, the real problem lay in unequal exchange with respect to the values of commodities. For Marx, on the other hand (which will be fully demonstrated in Capital), social inequality in the capitalist world was based precisely on the ‘honest’ exchange of equivalents; behind the ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ of exchange lay real class oppression. For the Proudhonist, the social problem would lie in the fact that the worker is not paid his just value, when Marx had already stated in The Poverty of Philosophy that the just value of the product corresponds to the labour time necessary to produce it, and that consequently the ‘just value of the worker’, a commodity like any other in this filthy society, corresponds to the labour time necessary to produce what he needs for his own and his family’s survival.

The delegate Vasseur then put forward theses regarding the State that decidedly departed from revolutionary communism. Vasseur asserted in his report that the State was an autonomous entity, independent of existing social relations and the result of a social pact of citizens expressing their free will in it. Heresy for us Marxists as this would have meant going back to the theses of a century earlier and denying the revolutionary truth that states that the State represents nothing other than the business committee of the bourgeoisie and is consequently determined by the latter. The Proudhonist Vasseur concluded by asserting that the question of the ‘unjust’ State was solvable through a total reformulation of the ‘sense of justice’ and a great ‘authentic and reciprocal’ collective commitment.

Other Proudhonist theses passed by the Congress concerned the necessity of cooperatives, the demand for an economic monopoly of the State, the search for ‘an equal distribution of labour and profit’. All these formulations were taken up and widely propagated in all the subsequent degenerative waves of the movement: the language of opportunism, which claims to be always ‘new’ is instead always the same!

The Congress was nonetheless able to declare: ‘In the present situation of industry, which is one of war, mutual aid must be given for the defence of wages; but it considers it its duty to proclaim that there is a higher end to be pursued: the abolition of the wage-earner’. Furthermore, the Congress identified the spread of the petty bourgeoisie as an unprecedented phenomenon that deserved to be studied in depth. The introduction of machines in industry was recognised as an indispensable and necessary advancement of society, despite the fact that this at the same time meant the end of all human freedom in the world of labour and pushed the worker into complete alienation.

Immediately after the Lausanne Congress, Marx was finally able to put into print the work for which he had sacrificed so much of his private and family life. A personal act of love for the working class, the result of Karl Marx’s passion and sleepless nights, it is incandescent material, energy erupting from the social subsoil, the never-to-be-forgotten Bible of a new Revolution, words that had to be written, a cyclopean monolith that in the middle of the 19th century announced to friends and foes alike the necessity of a liberation of new forms. It is therefore a class text, and a party text, with a clear subtitle: Critique of Political Economy. On 17 April 1867, Marx wrote to Johann Philipp Becker, a comrade in the Geneva section, about Capital: ‘It is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included)’. Engels wrote in one of his reviews of Capital: ‘We can be sure that all factions of this party will welcome the present book as their theoretical bible, as the armoury from which they will take their most telling arguments’.

Capital immediately gained enormous prestige because, on the one hand, it definitively brought communist ideology within the bounds of scientific knowledge, and on the other, it came out at the very moment when bourgeois political economy was entering into its irreversible crisis. The capitalism of the time was succumbing to its positivist illusions: social problems and conflicts were increasingly coming to belie the fine bourgeois words of a future society in which every problem would be solved by peaceful means. Marx identified David Ricardo as the last great economist of the bourgeoisie, the last to put his political economy on a scientific basis. To go beyond the results obtained by Ricardo meant recognising not only the inability of the bourgeoisie to theorise, but above all recognising in the present society the preconditions for its destruction and the premises for a new society. Due to the stark reality of the evolutionary process, bourgeois society was heading for its final phase, the senile phase of imperialism.

Ricardo had died in 1823, almost fifty years before the publication of Capital. From that year onwards, bourgeois political economy drifted in nothingness, pretending or deluding itself into discovering new antidotes for the ills of its society, intoxicating itself with discoveries that were either bogus or that had already been brought to light previously, sometimes centuries before. In a note to Capital, Marx explains: ‘by classical Political Economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds’.

This political economy, which, fearful of its possible and dialectical conclusions, had retreated from posing as a scientific theory and preferred to bask in romantic, even pre-Hegelian idealism, could at this point only wait for something or someone to completely liquidate it on a theoretical level. That something was Capital. It owed its importance to the fact that, in addition to demonstrating the decaying and transient structure of this society and its future collapse, it grounded the critique of the greats among the thinkers of bourgeois economics: thus Marx rereads Smith and Ricardo, while scorning and hurling social truth in the face of the vulgar economists then in vogue such as John Stuart Mill, Malthus, Bastiat.

Marx was aware of the fundamental necessity of Capital for the cause of the emancipation of the proletariat. The importance, the necessity, of a sound theory is the condition for the party to grow and strengthen and to lead the proletarian class without hesitation. Marx had explained to Kugelmann in this way on 23 August 1866 that he would not be attending the Geneva Congress: ‘Although I am devoting much time to the preparations for the congress in Geneva, I cannot go myself, nor do I wish to, because my work cannot be subjected to prolonged interruption. I consider that what I am doing through this work is far more important for the working class than anything I might be able to do personally at any congress whatsoever’.

A close relationship linked the publication of Capital and the events of the Association. As it was published in German, its first circulation was in Prussia and the various statelets into which Germany was then divided. The success was as expected by Marx: the most advanced part of the German bourgeoisie who had it in their hands grasped the grandeur of the work and its purpose. But what amazes today’s ‘advert civilisation’ is the diffusion that the book had among the proletarian class: that class, today decerebrated by massive doses of bourgeois culture and mistreated by all as uncultured and easy prey to trends, had then been able to dedicate itself to studying and understanding the arduous content – deadly for its enemies – of Capital. Six years later, in 1873, when the second edition was published, Marx was able to note in the Postscript: ‘The appreciation which Capital rapidly gained in wide circles of the German working class is the best reward of my labours. Herr Mayer, a Vienna manufacturer, who in economic matters represents the bourgeois point of view, in a pamphlet published during the Franco-German War aptly expounded the idea that the great capacity for theory, which used to be considered a hereditary German possession, had almost completely disappeared among the so-called educated classes in Germany, but that among its working class, on the contrary, that capacity was celebrating its revival’.

The working class of a century ago, despite its immaturity and even its grave errors of perspective and method, must be credited with a youthful impetus towards the most resolute struggle and a sincere willingness to study and learn about the world and its own destinies. A freshness of strength, clarity of language, and straightforwardness of purpose that today makes all that political ‘working-class’ rottenness and bourgeois trade unionism has rendered twisted, indecipherable, and vile stand out.

For a French edition one would have to wait until 1875 (and it would be a masterfully translated edition from a scientific point of view), while for the English edition, which Marx was particularly keen on, as late as 1886. So the English working class saw the study of Capital postponed for a good twenty years, ten years after the end of the Association. Instead the first translation was into Russian, completed by Nikolai Francevic Danielson in 1872. The first German edition spread in the United Kingdom, as well as in the United States and Russia, exclusively among the more advanced socialists who had made German their Esperanto.

England in 1868 had not yet emerged from a severe economic crisis: in that year its production increase was 3.2%, a figure that cannot be considered a recovery given the previous year’s decrease of 3.1%. France, even more shaken by the crisis, showed a +3.8% increase in 1868, which followed a zero increase in production in the previous year. Germany, by contrast, slumped by -6.7%, a decline that would continue until 1871. Only the United States made profits, given its young capitalism, at a level of +20% growth per year (cf. The Course...).

In an outline of a history of the Association written by Wilhelm Eichoff in the summer of 1868, with the theoretical support of Marx, this period is masterfully analysed: ‘In England as well as on the Continent the years 1866 to 1868 were especially plentiful in strikes on the part of the workers arid in factory lock-outs on the part of the capitalists. The common reason for this was the crisis of 1866 and its aftermaths. The crisis paralysed speculation. Large enterprises came to a standstill, and those entrepreneurs who, owing to the changed situation on the money market, were unable to meet the financial commitments they had made at the time when speculation was at its highest, were forced into bankruptcy. The stagnation of all trading enterprises had reached a point where it was surpassed only by the extraordinary glut of gold in the banks of England and France. Arid the gold had piled tip in the banks because it could no longer find any use for business purposes. This led to a general stoppage of commerce and a general decline of prices. Victuals alone, notably bread, the workers’ most vital necessity, had gone up in price owing to the crop failures of 1866 and 1867. And precisely during this general shortage came the calamity of universal crisis, which made itself felt to the workmen through the reduction of the working time and the lowering of wages by the employers. Hence the many strikes and lock-outs. It so happened, furthermore, that the laws against working men’s coalitions had only just been lifted in France and other countries of the Continent. Unquestionably, too, the resolutions of the working men’s congresses in Geneva and Lausanne had had a moral effect, made even stronger by the workmen’s awareness everywhere that they could rely on the powerful backing of the International Association’ (The International Workingmen’s Association, Its Establishment, Organisation, Political and Social Activity, and Growth).

The period following the Lausanne Congress saw the Irish question on the agenda in England. On 18 September 1867 a group of Independence fighters attacked a prison carriage, freeing two Fenian leaders. In the clash, a policeman was also killed. The reaction of the English bourgeoisie was textbook: they mounted a bespoke trial against five Fenian leaders, built on forged or completely fabricated evidence. The Association intervened in support of the Fenians and against police repression through official statements and demonstrations. Of the support given by the English proletarians to the Irish demands, Marx and Engels could truly be satisfied, not so much because of sympathy with the Fenian cause, not proletarian but democratic and republican, but because of what this anti-national orientation really meant for the English labour movement. Engels wrote to Kugelmann on 8 November 1867: ‘The London proletarians are more openly declaring their support for the Fenians, in other words, and this is without precedent here and really splendid, for a movement that firstly advocates the use of force and secondly is anti-English’.

During this period, attacks on the government and capitalists in Germany by Wilhelm Liebknecht, who was elected to Parliament, caused a stir in the General Council. His harsh speeches provoked attempts by bourgeois politicians to silence an annoying voice, but had a strong resonance among the public, especially the proletariat. On 8 October, for example, Liebknecht, with distant support from Marx, tabled a motion for the establishment of a commission of inquiry into the workers’ living conditions. On 17 October he asked Parliament for the introduction of a national army in placed of the standing army and then accused the Prussian Confederation of being nothing more than ‘the fig leaf of absolutism’. On 19 October he proposed, with Bebel’s support, the maintenance and defence of the existing laws on the restriction and control of child labour. Liebknecht then managed to make his way into the public eye by publishing a new newspaper, the ‘Demokratisches Wochenblatt’, which purported to champion the Association’s programme.

But it is precisely from what will be published in this journal that Marx and Engels will realise that their main German support, Liebknecht, was assuming attitudes of frenetic activism made up of mediations with the German petty bourgeoisie and a desire to get as many people as possible, from all walks of life, to join his political movement. The line that Liebknecht took deviated from Marx’s strict line. The healthy communist attitudes in Germany, however, will gain influence in cities like Berlin or in areas like Hanover, where, among others, Ludwig Kugelmann, a doctor with whom Marx was in close correspondence with for many years, was militating.

In Germany the approach of a new war was in the air, the pretexts, this time, were coming from Italy, where Garibaldi’s exploits tended to annex the Papal States to Italy. A new timid attempt at intervention by Napoleon III, obviously in defence of the Pope, was part of a possible anti-Prussian alliance. The fact was that, although the war was postponed for a few more years, Europe could no longer cope with the crisis in production and the saturation of the markets; hence a situation that looked decidedly nervous for the bourgeois class and its interests. In this respect Liebknecht was to fall into error in the early months of 1868, judging it preferable, in the event of war, for Austria to win, which he considered a new revolutionary bulwark.

Engels wrote to Marx on 5 November 1867: ‘Things may begin to happen any day now (...) If the storm does break, however, the revolution will everywhere be faced with a quite different situation from 1848. After last year, the disorganisation of that time will be out of the question in Germany, and even if an immediate violent uprising in Berlin has little chance, the impact of events would provoke clashes there, too, which would inevitably end in the downfall of the present regime. Monsieur Bismarck would very soon lose command of the situation. And then this time England would be dragged in straightaway and above all the social question would at once become the burning issue throughout Europe’.

In France, Napoleon III dedicated himself industriously to the repression of the French section of the Association. In December 1867, the police searched and seized many homes of Parisian comrades. The police thus came into possession of important documents of a revolutionary nature and in particular of support for the Fenian cause; they also seized material that was to be used by the French to prepare the agenda for the next congress of the Association. The French magistracy, in support of all this, decreed the Association illegal and sanctioned its official dissolution.

The excellent Swiss section obtained large memberships in 1868 thanks mainly to the direct support the Association had given to the struggles of the Geneva proletariat in March-April. During this period, the Geneva workers went on strike demanding a reduction of the working day from 12 to 10 hours, as well as an increase in wages and a wage calculated by the hour instead of the day. The Association intervened mainly through its German and Romance sections in Geneva, as well as through massive class solidarity actions throughout Europe, especially in Germany. The Association’s intervention enabled the Geneva workers to win their struggle by obtaining not only the 11-hour working day, but above all, a substantial wage increase of 10%.

The Association was also successful in Belgium thanks to similar interventions. In the spring of 1868, workers in the Charleroi mining district went on strike against the restriction of production and the reduction of wages. The events degenerated on 26 March with bloody clashes with the gendarmerie, the result of which was many injured and 22 people arrested and tried. The Belgian section of the Association, with the direct support of the General Council, intervened massively in favour of the strikers and above all in favour of the immediate release of the tried workers. The Charleroi case was declared a common cause by the General Council of the whole Association.

The third Congress of the Association took place in Brussels between the 6th and 13th September 1868. Around 100 delegates from England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain participated. The Congress was important above all for the prevailing of Marxist convictions over those of other currents, especially Proudhonist ones. The General Council had in the last year gained enormous prestige among the European workers for its consistent and determined behaviour in various situations and in particular Marx was considered at the Congress to be the theoretical leader of the workers of the world, thanks also to the great resonance he had received from the publication of Capital.

The month preceding the Brussels Congress, the Lassallean General Assembly of German Workers had proposed a programme that moved further and further away from that of Schweitzer, a follower of Lassalle, and closer to Marxism. The Assembly had recognised that political freedom was a prerequisite for social victories (a thesis set out three years earlier by Engels in The Prussian Military Question...), recognised that Marx’s Capital had rendered an invaluable service to the proletarian class, and began to set itself the task of joint international action (although the Lassallean in pectore Schweitzer succeeded in avoiding adhesion to the Association) and set itself the task of building trade unions (although this too was prevented by Schweitzer). The League of German Workers’ Associations, founded by Liebknecht and Bebel among others, joined the Association with its Nuremberg Congress and also definitively separated itself from the influences within it of the liberal bourgeoisie.

On the previous 28 July, Marx had presented a report to the Central Council entitled The Consequences of Using of Machinery under Capitalism with the aim that the Brussels Congress would address the topic, dealt with in Capital, strictly theoretically, by focusing on the spread of political economy in the party of the proletariat. The theses of the report became the theses of the Congress, which took up the following points: 1st, the introduction of machines had not, as many bourgeois flaunted, resulted in the sharp limitation of the working day, but a substantial increase from the 10 hours at the end of the 1700s to the 16 or 18 hours of then; 2nd, it had forced women and children into inhuman work inside the factories; 3rd, it had caused the increasingly widespread proletarianisation among the population, transforming, for example, rural workers, owners of their tools, into factory workers, owners of nothing; 4th, it had caused a stronger centralisation of the capitalist’s power over the proletarians and a greater capacity for police control over them; 5th, it had caused the death on the job of many workers; 6th, finally, the introduction of machines had meant absolutely no progressive decrease in misery, but an increase in it and ever more widespread unemployment.

On 4 August, Marx added to these theses the following conclusion, which was to become a verbatim resolution of the Brussels Congress: ‘that on the one side machinery has proved a most powerful instrument of despotism and extortion in the hands of the capitalist class; that on the other side the development of machinery creates the material conditions necessary for the superseding of the wages-system by a truly social system of production’.

Also on proposal of Marx, the Brussels Congress dealt very well with the question of the reduction of the working day, asserting that this point in the programme, already voted in Geneva two years earlier, was to have a practical effect. Marx’s report also skilfully resolved the petty-bourgeois slights of the Proudhonists in this regard, asserting that this demand would not create any problems for the worker and his wages, nor would it necessarily lead to an increase in the prices of essential goods, rather it would induce a greater quest on the part of the capitalists for the perfection of machines; moreover, it would create the indispensable conditions for the moral growth of the working class.

Marx had realised that the best method to combat the vain theses of Proudhon’s followers was to unmask their utopian ideals about the future society by confronting the Congress with resolutions regarding the practical programme of the communist society. Thus important resolutions passed according to which what was now in the hands of capitalists and landlords would, in the future society, become the common property of the workers.

Giving great support to Marxist theses, comrade Moses Hess then condemned the utopian Proudhonist theory of free credit and the exchange bank in a report, inviting the comrades of the individual sections to study Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, a text that refuted precisely those theses. The German delegates proposed and obtained that Marx’s Capital be given due recognition by the entire Association. Their resolution was as follows: ‘We, the German delegates at the International Working Men’s Congress at Brussels, recommend to the working men of all countries the work of Karl Marx: Capital, published last year, and urge upon them the desirability of endeavouring to cause that important work to be translated into those languages into which it has not yet been translated. Marx has the inestimable merit of being the first political economist who has scientifically analysed capital and dissolved it into its component parts’. The German delegates added: ‘It is the finest scientific contribution in favour of the proletariat that the German school has produced to date’.

The report of the General Council at Brussels, then tracing the development of the various sections, also dealt with the overseas activity of the American proletariat, finding as its deficiency the lack of links with the European proletariat. The concluding report, written by Marx, stated: ‘Nothing but an international bond of the working classes can ever ensure their definitive triumph. This want has given birth to the International Working Men’s Association. That Association has not been hatched by a sect or a theory. It is the spontaneous growth of the proletarian movement, which itself is the offspring of the natural and irrepressible tendencies of modern society. Profoundly convinced of the greatness of its mission, the International Working Men’s Association will allow itself neither to be intimidated nor misled. Its destiny, henceforward, coalesces with the historical progress of the class that bear in their hands the regeneration of mankind’.

From all this one can well understand the central role that not only Marx but, by now it can be said, Marxism had earned, despite opposition within the Association. The Brussels Congress of 1868 can thus be read as the clear demonstration that in Marxism the theoretical and militant political planes intersect.

The fundamental resolution of the Congress concerned the legitimacy and importance of strikes. The resolution definitively silenced the Proudhonist wing and imposed the question of resistance societies for proletarian struggles as a matter of principle. On the Congress’s agenda was the question of the strike, its importance and the position the Association should take on it. On this subject there was a clash at the Congress between different sections: on the one hand those who, like the Marxists, declared the strike essential for the aim of the final emancipation of the proletariat; on the other, the Proudhonists asserted the uselessness of the strike, which they even considered harmful because of its consequences for the proletariat.

Let us say, in defence of the adversaries of the time, that the Proudhonists asserted their anti-strike theses not as the fruit of the base senile opportunism flaunted today, in the year 2000, by regime trade unions and well-paid fake ‘communists’. At the time, Proudhonist theses originated from a different vision, naive rather than opportunist, of the future society and the means to reach it. Those theses were the product of a utopia: the belief that socialism could be achieved not through the rise of class struggles onto the terrain of politics and power, but through the gradual spread of cooperatives and various forms of associationism; the widespread diffusion of these economic creations would then, likely in a peaceful manner, gradually overcome the limits of bourgeois society.

We Marxists, on the other hand, have always considered it a dangerous illusion, often nurtured by the bourgeoisie itself, to believe that workers’ associations can ever undermine capitalist relations, just as we considered the future society professed by Proudhon to be utopian. Economically, capitalism itself takes care of ‘overcoming’ capitalism, and even better than workers’ cooperatives; the material premises of communism are contained within the purest and most absolute capitalism. Communism is not built, it is liberated. It is not a matter of feeding it to grow by dint of small good deeds, but of breaking the chains that hold it back.

The clash on the issue of strikes in the Congress was of immense importance for the future of the Association. The Liège section presented a Report on this issue that supported and firmly upheld the Proudhonist thesis of the uselessness of the strike. The report repeatedly insisted on this by asserting that the strike was, above all, counterproductive for the worker, a view not far removed from what Mr. John Weston had said some time before, and that, moreover, it was even ruinous for the creation of a fairer and more equitable future society. The formula used in the report was: ‘The only means of suppressing the strike is to arrive at a welfare state based on justice, in which mutuality will take the place of antagonism’. The Report went on to explain, in a pseudo-scientific guise, that what the worker should really aim for was the goal of ‘justice’ and the ‘cessation of all antagonism’ through the development of a ‘sense of mutuality’ in the worker. Having achieved this, according to Proudhonists, the strike would be of no use and would be a harmful weapon for proletarians themselves as well as the opposing class.

The report continued: ‘The workers must unite, associate, and replace factories in which a hundred individuals are exploited by one man with others in which a hundred associates mutually support each other and share the profits thus made. The factories thus constituted must, according to the principles of solidarity, guarantee reciprocity of exchange and gratuitousness of credit’. In place of the revolutionary political act, the Liège Proudhonists were therefore putting forward the piecemeal construction of various workers’ cooperatives that could only lead to a new, but not unprecedented for us in the early 2000s, form of capitalism.

Besides the report of the Liège section, the Proudhonists’ line against the use of the strike was also represented by the Report presented to the Congress by the Rouen section. At the head of this report was the assertion that the emancipation of the proletariat could only occur when there was a ‘relative determination of the value of products’, a vague formula but one that hides nothing more than a society that is still unabashedly capitalist, as well as the Proudhonists’ ignorance of the law of value that Marx had just unveiled in Capital. The Rouen group also says: ‘The illegitimacy of interest we know to be the one and only cause of our miseries’.

The worst of the report lay in its claimed scientificity, especially when it addressed, vulgarising and destroying in substance, a kind of theory of surplus value. The report reads: ‘We are convinced, citizens, that no code, no doctrine of jurisprudence, no morality can in a civilised world justify such a way of practising the exchange of products, and a scientific demonstration of this can be given; it is impossible for a reasonable being to sanction that a product, which contains a sum of hours equivalent to 4, should be exchanged for 5 or 6, etc., otherwise it would be necessary to recognise that he who yields 3, when he is lent 4, is perfectly honest!’ The report then raged against the demand for the reduction of working hours. In defence of these theses, the Rouen group argued that obtaining reduced working hours would lead to an increase in the prices of basic necessities and, secondly, would provoke the collapse of production and the consequent spread of unemployment. The report concluded: ‘Social economy has long since shown that wage increases are a red herring for the workers, because it has the equivalent of raising the value of the product, without at all increasing its quantity or quality’.

Had these theses passed at the Congress, they would have been perceived by the entire Association as a betrayal and would have caused a serious disbandment in the ranks of the proletariat, which at that time was very active in class struggles. But they did not pass thanks to the resolute interventions of several sections.

The Geneva section, which had no doubts about the usefulness of the strike, even put on the agenda the need to set up central welfare funds everywhere to help the proletariat where it was in difficulty in its daily struggles. The Geneva report explained that such a fund had already existed in Geneva for 15 years and that this had enabled the workers’ struggles to succeed.

In clear opposition to the Proudhonist theses stood above all the detailed report from the Brussels section. The report opened as follows: ‘We believe that we must react against the exclusivist co-operators who, outside the consumer, credit and production society, do not see any serious movement among the workers and in particular consider the strike useless, or even disastrous for the workers’ interests’. The extensive intervention then followed with an attack on Adam Smith’s thesis on strikes, a thesis that had always been bandied about by the bourgeoisie. This thesis asserted that the proletariat has no use in going on strike as it is unable to last long without working; whereas, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie has all the means at its disposal to be able to resist the strike of its workers for a long time. The Belgian section argued that while such a thesis might have been current and realistic at the time of its formulation, i.e. in the previous century, it could no longer be valid since workers were now able to resist for a long time thanks to the coffers of their associations and thanks to the support of the proletariat in other sectors. On the contrary, it had to be considered that the bourgeoisie today would resist for a much shorter time, as it had the constant need for new income to meet its creditors and huge fixed expenses.

The Brussels section then went on to accuse those who deplored the interruption of work as it would also interrupt production. It is said with indignation in the report: ‘They deplore the time the workers lose with it; production stops, they say, as if the products were lacking! They also add that, when the worker remains 8 or 15 days without doing anything, this does not mean he consumes less. This kind of language is simply ridiculous, when you think that there are men in society who in their lives have never produced a damn thing, have never worked a quarter of an hour’.

With good scientific rigour the discourse of the comrades in Brussels went on to address the particular issue of struggles for wage increases. They addressed and criticised the theses on the subject put forward by economists such as McCulloch and Ricardo: these asserted that wages corresponded to the prices of basic necessities and that no effort could destroy the naturalness of this economic law. The Brussels section refuted the theses with crystal-clear examples in which this law was denied. It noted: ‘A simple glance at the facts suffices to show that the dependence of the level of wages in relation to the price of basic necessities is not very strict’. The report pointed out that ‘in the twenty years just passed, prices of basic necessities had steadily risen, while wages in many types of trades had fallen’.

The Brussels section, as Marx had already done in the General Council, demonstrated the a-scientificity of the bourgeois opinion that states that an increase in wages always corresponds to an increase in basic necessities, by illustrating to those present that the price of a commodity also depends, unlike its value, on the competition between individual capitalists, as well as on the spread of the monopoly forced to defend the wide spread of sales. Thus, the price is independent of the increase or decrease in wages.

The Belgians’ report condemned Proudhonist theses by concluding that the strike was always legitimate and useful to the proletarian cause. Rather, it hoped that any future strike would be supported by a well-tested functional organisation, that it would favour the resistance of the workers allowing them to be stronger in the confrontation and negotiation with the bosses, and finally favour the possibility of solidary support from other worker categories. ‘We are convinced that the strike must no longer be a war waged at random, a fight in random order, but must be well organised, duly pondered in advance and studied at length’.

The best organisation was seen, as by the Genevans, in the formation of resistance societies: ‘We believe that strikes must be led by resistance societies. Without these, although sometimes necessary, strikes will always run the risk of going against the interests of the workers and will almost always end in disorders, designated more vulgarly, and with malicious intent, by the name of riots’. And again: ‘Persecution and repression could easily be avoided by wise organisation on the part of the resistance societies. And the coal workers of the Charleroi coalfield have understood this very well: after having allowed themselves to go on unorganised strikes many times, and therefore to riots, they have now resolutely taken a new path by forming resistance societies, and the Charleroi coalfield is already being interwoven with this kind of society (...) To strike outside resistance societies is to want to wage an unequal struggle, because the bosses, few in number, favoured by fortune and protected by power, will always easily agree. It is like waging war without tactics and munitions. However, let one not be deceived as to the scope of our words: despite everything we have just said against a strike not organised by a resistance society, we maintain that it is legitimate, just and necessary, when conventions are violated by the bosses, and even in this situation it is worth trying despite the odds of failure. Is it not always beautiful and great to see the slave protesting against barbaric and inhuman measures? And what measure can be more barbarous and inhuman than that which consists in continually reducing the share of the goods of those who already live only by deprivation?’.

As we have seen, the Brussels Congress confirmed the Marxist theses on multiple fronts. The Proudhonists’ positions were rejected as much with regard to the contingent programme as to the historical programme. We reproduce the ten programmatic points approved at the Congress, as many definitive theses for the future communist movement.

As in much of Europe and the US, the English proletariat also became more threatening as the crisis deepened and the government’s increasingly overt despotism over the workers became more explicit. In these years, however, as in the rest of its history, the English proletariat did not go much beyond immediate demands; even if, as with Poland and the Civil War, the impetus of those revolutionary times would lead it to clash on the political plane and on internationalist positions.

Between 1868 and 1869, the relationship between Trade Unions and the International became closer. The International was constantly trying, albeit with great difficulty, to give the trade union struggles a perspective that went beyond the narrow economic limit.

The struggle for legal recognition was the one that most interested the Unions movement, in view of a forthcoming national unification. At the Birmingham Congress in August 1868, the trade union movement, after declaring that the proletarian class would never be at peace as long as the bourgeois order existed, stated that ‘the realisation of the principles of the International will bring lasting peace among the nations of the earth’.

Unions and the Association jointly intervened in a March strike in Lancashire, which allowed the workers to hold out until August. In the summer of 1869 there had been a massacre of workers under soldier fire in Wales. Engels wrote to Marx on 6 July: ‘previous ideas about the English laws in this connection were quite wrong, and that people take an entirely Prussian point of view’. Even in democratic England, the queen nation of bourgeois constitutions, the democratic State was showing its true face: arrested workers were sentenced to ten years of forced labour at the chain gang.

An attempt to elevate the movement politically was the founding, on the inspiration of the General Council, of the Land and Labour League in October 1869. Its programme included the nationalisation of land and the reduction of the working day. But soon this organisation, which at first wanted to break with the bourgeois party, switched to less and less proletarian and more and more reformist programmes.

The Irish independence movement had greater political depth, and was seen as fundamental by Marx and Engels; especially the combative Fenian movement of the summer and autumn of 1869, which focused above all on the release of its political prisoners. The General Council, and Marx in particular, took a stance denouncing the Gladstone government for its aversion to political amnesty and its alliances with the Southern States, while encouraging the Fenian people to continue the struggle.

A striking gesture was made by the Fenians during the elections to the House of Commons, for which they put forward as a candidate a political prisoner, Jeremiah O’ Donovan Rossa, who, moreover, was elected. Engels commented to Marx on 29 November: ‘The election in Tipperary is an event. It launches the Fenians from empty conspiracies and the fabrication of coups on a path of action that, even if legal in appearance, is still far more revolutionary than what they have done since their abortive insurrection. In fact, they are adopting the methods of the French workers, and this is an enormous advance. If only this business is carried on as intended’.

On the Irish question, then of paramount importance, here is what Marx wrote in a letter to Kugelmann on 29 November ‘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 (...) 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 (...) 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’. Marx himself wrote to Laura and Paul Lafargue on 5 March 1870: ‘[If] Ireland [is] lost, the British “Empire” is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms’.

The pressure of the proletariat in 1868 and 1869 was continuous throughout Europe, in France as in Switzerland, in Belgium as in Spain, in Germany as in America. A sign of the times, and of an International ever more firmly established, are the contacts that the General Council was establishing with regions hitherto little involved in the social struggle, such as Italy, Spain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and even dark Russia. Frequent in this period in Switzerland were open clashes between the proletariat and the police, in a nation which until yesterday had had a proletariat totally subjugated to the iron heel of a reactionary, medieval-minded bourgeoisie and which only since 1866 was becoming autonomous, freeing itself from its radical bourgeois representatives.

One clash, exemplary among many others, was the real revolt of the Basel workers in response to the ‘disloyalty’ of the bourgeoisie who violated the agreements. The repression was carried out with lead, with forced evictions from houses owned by the bosses, and with a ban on merchants selling to the strikers, confirming that towards the proletariat, bourgeois liberality has never existed. Five months of struggle were crushed by the state of siege invoked by the Grand Council of Basel. The International was accused of being the cause of the riots and had to suffer, as it did in France, a heavy campaign of slander.

Another workers’ massacre in Belgium had an enormous resonance. According to Marx, who recalled the earlier slaughter at Charleroi, ‘with that constitutional model government, such working men’s massacres are not an accident, but an institution’ (Report of the General Council to the General Congress in Basel). In an Address drafted by Marx it was stated: ‘There exists but one country in the civilised world where every strike is eagerly and joyously turned into a pretext for the official massacre of the Working Class. That country of single blessedness is Belgium (...) the snug, well-hedged, little paradise of the landlord, the capitalist, and the priest’. The International, with a widespread subscription campaign, aided the widows and children of the victims of the massacre and supported their legal defence.

But it was France that saw its proletariat appear increasingly radical in political struggle and well prepared to respond to Napoleon III’s persecutions.

Among the episodes of heroic struggles was the clash in December 1868 in several towns in Normandy in which the cotton pickers turned to the International and to the English proletariat. ‘This was a great opportunity (Marx reported) to show the capitalists that their international industrial warfare, carried on by screwing wages down now in this country, now in that, would be checked at last by the international union of the working classes’. Even in the workers’ revolts of June 1869 in Lyon, the workers wanted to ask the International for help and, as Marx put it, ‘it was not the International that threw the workmen into strikes, but, on the contrary, it was the strikes that threw the workmen into the International’. In the same summer, violent clashes occurred between the miners of the Saint-Étienne region and the gendarmerie, with another massacre, along with struggles led by women silk workers. The providential intervention of the International led the latter’s struggle to victory: the International ‘in a few weeks recruited more than 10,000 new adherents in this heroic population’.

The widespread repression carried out by Bonapartism had taught the proletariat something important: ‘the workmen on the Continent, as elsewhere, begin at last to understand that the surest way to get one’s natural rights is to exercise them at one’s personal risk’.

On 15 July 1869 Marx wrote to Kugelmann: ‘In Paris where, by the by, the growing movement is palpable’. The parody of the Second Empire revealed itself more and more for what it was. ‘In France things are going well. On the one hand the old-fashioned demagogic and democratic shriekers of all tendencies are being compromised. On the other hand Bonaparte is being pushed along a road of concessions, on which he will have to break his neck’. Marx’s daughter Jenny also wrote to Kugelmann on 30 January 1870: ‘The hubbub and excitement prevailing in the capital are incredible. All parties, nay all individuals are at loggerheads (...) As for the Bancels, Gambettas, Pelletans, Favres, etc., that tribe of big-mouthed spouters of sonorous phrases have altogether vanished – they are no-where. Experience has taught the people what they have to expect from the bragging “gauche”’.

In the United States, a combative proletariat continued its struggle for the eight hours, and contacts with the International were being strengthened.

In May 1869, when the spectre of war between England and the United States loomed, the General Council sent an Address to the National Labor Union of the United States calling on the American proletariat to openly oppose the conflict: ‘The working classes are bestriding the scene of history no longer as servile retiners but as independent actors, conscious of their own responsibility, and able to command peace where their would-be masters shout war’. The days of the Civil War are now a thing of the past, and here the watchword of defeatism as that of a conscious and independent power is masterfully formulated word for word. Impose peace by declaring war, against a war that would come to ‘drive back the movement for an indefinite period of time’. Having made the interests of the conflict clear Marx explains: ‘In the States themselves, an independent working-class movement, looked upon with an evil eye by your old parties and their professional politicians, has since that date sprung into life. To fructify it wants years of peace. To crush it, a war between the United States and England is wanted’. Such is the political and social significance of wars.

Then the peripheral proletariats of Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Spain appear on the scene. In Austria and Hungary, following the military defeat of 1866, the movement gains strength, though it is harshly repressed with the support of the middle classes.

In Italy, the young proletariat attempts to give itself a trade union organisation, mainly to defend itself against the constant repression, intensified following the Garibaldian expeditions against the Papal States. The worker Stefano Caporusso will say at the Basel Congress: ‘If the republic were proclaimed tomorrow, it would change nothing in its miserable condition: it would merely change the oppressor’.

In Spain, the bourgeois revolution had exploded at the end of 1868. It succeeded in obtaining a constitution, but it would nevertheless fail within a few years.

‘This struggle against Monsieur le Capital – even in the minor form of a strike’, Marx wrote to Engels on 18 August 1869, ‘will deal with national prejudice differently from the peace declamations made by bourgeois gentlemen’.

In the first half of 1868, the Lassallean-oriented Alliance, led by Schweitzer, moved, driven by events, increasingly to the left. Meanwhile Liebknecht and Bebel’s League of German Workers’ Associations officially joined the International. We have seen Marx’s repeated criticisms, mostly expressed privately, of Liebknecht’s attitudes and of his newspaper, the ‘Demokratisches Wochenblatt’. Liebknecht showed various hesitations, on the one hand through concessions to the middle classes and their democratic demands, and on the other hand by supporting the autonomist claims of the South German states that placed themselves under the military aegis of Prussia. The worst legacy of Lassalleanism was the League’s acceptance of limiting its action within the bounds of legality. Marx writes to Engels on 26 September 1868: ‘The most essential thing for the German working class is that it should cease to agitate by permission of the high government authorities. Such a bureaucratically schooled race must undergo a complete course of “self help”. On the other hand, they undoubtedly have the advantage that they are starting the movement at a period when conditions are much further developed than they were for the English and that, as Germans, they have heads on their shoulders capable of generalising’.

Engels wrote to Marx on 8 October 1868: ‘I had drawn [Liebknecht’s] attention to the fact that at a moment when revolutionary action came nearer, it was absolutely against the interests of our Party that our people should be too closely committed to one party in the basically rotten antagonism between Greater Prussia and Austrian-Federalist Greater Germany’. The knots came to the boil when Liebknecht had the workers’ list presented in the Hanover elections alongside the federalist bourgeois: the bourgeois candidates turned their backs on the workers’ candidates. Lapidary again Engels on 2 April 1869: ‘The rabble are all united against the workers but this does not disturb Liebknecht’. In the meantime, the Liebknecht-Schweitzer controversy had continued mainly through newspaper articles. The situation came to a head when in March 1869, at the General Assembly of the Association, Liebknecht and Bebel denounced Schweitzer for plotting with Bismarck and working for the division of the German labour movement. As a result, strong opposition to Schweitzer arise within his own Association.

Instead, the name of the League resonated among the proletarians, especially following Bebel’s amendments in the Reichstag for the 10-hour day, the ban on work for children under the age of 14, freedom of association for trade unions and the declaration in favour of the International.

For his part, Schweitzer declared in June 1869 the merger with the Lassallean General Association without having consulted the opposition; the latter then decided to contact Bebel and Liebknecht to organise a congress in which the workers who then called themselves Social Democrats would merge into a single pan-German party. Marx was pleased, albeit cautiously, at the birth of a strong party in Germany, but decided not to join the Congress personally for the following reasons, as he wrote to Engels on 3 July: ‘If we went now we would have to speak against the People’s Party, and that would not please Wilhelm and Bebel! And if they – mirabile dictu – would themselves admit this, we would have to throw our weight directly onto the scales against Schweitzer and Co., instead of having the change-over appear as a free action by the workers’. Marx’s caution was then due to the bad premises of the Congress, between pro-federalist statements and claims that political concessions could be obtained from Bismarck. As Marx writes to his friend on 10 August: ‘What Wilhelm does not grasp is that the present governments flirt with the workers, but know full well that their only support lies with the bourgeoisie, and that they therefore scare the latter with phrases friendly to the workers, but are never really able to take steps against the bourgeoisie’.

The Eisenach Congress took place in August and led to the founding of the German Social Democratic Party. Excluded from the Congress were militants from Schweitzer’s Association. The approved programme of the party was based on the Statutes of the International, with some concessions to Lassallean theories. In the first point, for example, it asserted the importance of the struggle to achieve a ‘free people’s State’, further on, the future society was described as obtaining the ‘right to the full proceeds of labour’. It claimed ‘the attainment of universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage for all men’. The ‘Demokratisches’ became the official party organ under the name ‘Volkstaat’.

Up to now we have seen the theoretical struggles between the General Council, with Marx at the head, and the most widespread utopianisms: Lassalleanism and democratism in Germany, Proudhonism in France and trade-unionism in England. From the end of 1868 would begin the bitter clash between the line of the International and Marx on the one side and that of the anarchists on the other; a struggle often poisoned by Bakunin’s constant conspiratorial intrigues within the party, a conflict that would culminate in the clear and irrevocable split of 1872, which saw us stand on the side of the defence of centralism in the party and the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

An anarchist pamphlet, War and Peace by A. Schwitzguébel, published in the autumn of 1870, well summarised the anarchist thesis. It began by identifying the existence of a military organisation as the primary cause of war. The State was defined as an organ that arose from the ‘common interests’ of a people, in the style of the ‘social contract’, completely abstracted from productive conditions. The State is certainly the guarantor of the privileges of the ruling class, the pamphlet recognised, but the proletariat when it became the ruling class would not have to build its own State. ‘How will collective property be organised? Through the transformed State, the authoritarian communists will tell us; through the producer groups, we anarchist collectivists say in turn. The authoritarian principle is condemned by philosophical reason: liberty is reconciled with order, it excludes authority. The State, in its various historical manifestations, is likewise condemned; any State can only be the organisation of any authority’. The future society described in the pamphlet is nothing more than a collection of small commodity producers, à la Proudhon.

Credit must be given to the early spread of anarchism among the working class. The ideologies of a class are determined by the objective conditions in which it operates: this is how we explain Lassalleanism in Germany and Proudhonism in France. Anarchism in the International first manifested itself in the Swiss sections, but would spread mainly to the less developed Spain and Italy. In these nations, anarchism among workers and landless peasants would be the first manifestation of a proud anti-capitalist consciousness that broke with submission to ultra-reactionary ideologies such as Mazzini’s. The objective situation of these two countries, which still lacked a strong proletariat, allowed the passage, to name but a few, from Mazzini to Bakunin, and not from Mazzini to Marx. The anarchist ideology in fact did not address itself exclusively to the proletarian class but to all individuals in society, regardless of their class affiliation, supporting their struggles and demands.

Bakunin did not express an ideology that, though idealist, could be considered coherent in itself. Texts and articles, depending on the period in which they were written, even in the short space of a few years have decidedly contradictory positions.

Marx had met him as early as 1843, when he had to harshly challenge his fervent Pan-Slavism, a view that never completely died out in Bakunin. As Marx wrote, Bakunin ‘denounced the Occidental bourgeoisie in the same tone that the Muscovite optimists use to attack Western civilisation in order to minimise their own barbarism’. While Marx waited impatiently for the collapse of Russian Tsarism to sweep away Europe’s most dangerous reactionary force, Bakunin instead hoped that the Russian Empire would crush all Slavic territories under its heel. How this was to be reconciled with his libertarian theory of the abolition of the State remains an unsolvable mystery!

In September 1867, while the proletarian internationalists of Europe were meeting at the Congress in Lausanne, Bakunin still belonged to the Executive Committee of the democratic League of Peace and Freedom, which was simultaneously holding its own congress in Berne. Having failed in his attempt to draw the League to its positions, Bakunin presented himself at the next congress as an agitator in order to clamour his way out of it and move ‘with trumpets and fanfare’ to the International. Already at the Brussels Congress he presented the General Council with the proposal of a parallel organisation to the International, which would be founded in October, under the name Alliance of Socialist Democracy, in Geneva, where it had its own General Council within which sat Bakunin himself, the ‘anti-authoritarian’ undisputed leader.

The decidedly ‘infantile’ programme was sent in November to the General Council in London. In it, the Alliance declared to fight for ‘the economic and social equalisation of classes and individuals’, a bombastic phrase but devoid of any meaning. The equality of individuals had been a slogan of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1789, which, in its hypocritical language, also meant the political, economic and social destruction of the feudal class. The communist proletariat, by contrast, demands the abolition of classes, an undisputed central principle that united all the, albeit diverse, revolutionary conceptions lodged in the International. As stated in the response of The General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association to the Central Office of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, ‘The “egalisation des classes”, literally interpreted, comes to the “harmony of capital and labour” (“l’harmonie du capital et du travail”) so persistently preached by the bourgeois socialists’.

In addition to its heterodox positions, the Alliance entered into disciplinary conflict with the Association in that it likewise proclaimed itself to be an international organisation, proposing itself as a political actor in its own right and mobilising ‘its own’ sections against the Association, with which, however, it declared itself ready to merge!

‘Authoritarian’ was the inevitable response from the General Council: ‘The International Alliance of Socialist Democracy is not accepted as a branch of the International Workingmen’s Association’. Marx notes: ‘They want to compromise us under our own patronage’.

A month before the Eisenach Congress, at which the German Social Democratic Party was born, Johann Philip Becker published a statement in the ‘Vorbote’, at Bakunin’s instigation, denying the need for a socialist political party in Germany and identifying the trade unions as the ideal form of organisation. Engels blurted out this trade-unionist heresy to Marx on 30 July 1969: ‘If this damned Russian really thinks of intriguing his way to the top of the workers’ movement, then the time has come to give him once and for all what he deserves and ask the question whether a pan-Slavist can be a member of an international workers’ association. The fellow can very easily be tackled. He should not imagine that he can play a cosmopolitan communist for the workers, and a burning national pan-Slavist for the Russians’.

Following the Alliance’s refusal of admission into the International, Bakunin, having failed in his ‘conspiracy’, shifted to open polemics. At the end of 1869, in the pages of the weekly ‘Egalité’, he accused the General Council of not having fulfilled certain obligations set out in the Statutes, of having placed too much emphasis on the Irish question and of being concerned exclusively with the fate of the English proletariat. The move was repudiated by the General Council in an internal circular accompanied by the famous Confidential Communication for some comrades. Bakunin was reproached for using a newspaper that did not belong to the International, when he should have asked the Council directly for an explanation; the importance of the Irish question for the international proletariat was then reaffirmed.

In April 1870, at the Ordinary Congress of the Federal Committee of Romance Switzerland, the Bakuninists demanded recognition as the federation’s Central Committee, as opposed to the Geneva Committee. Two separate committees emerged from the clash: in addition to the Geneva Committee, which was official, the La Chaux-de-Fonds Committee now operated. The clash at the Congress was due, among other things, to the Bakuninists’ declaration that the proletariat should not engage in political struggle. On 28 June, the General Council did not recognise the new Committee.

Marx wrote to De Paepe, a French comrade, on 24 January 1870, reproducing extracts of a confidential letter from Henri Perret of the Geneva Committee, to Jung, a member of the General Council: ‘These democrats are authoritarians, they do not want any opposition (...) They attempted to bring pressure to bear on the Federal Committee, and that did not succeed; we do not want to engage in adventures with them or to bring discord in our sections. Please believe me that l’Alliance is dangerous for us, especially now. As for their plan in Geneva (...) to let the men of l’Alliance move to the top of all the societies in order to dominate the Federation. If you knew their mode of action – denigrating at the sections the people who do not let themselves be dominated by them; they did everything to push my candidature out of the way in Basle, the same thing in Grosselin... You see the manoeuvre – sending to Basle no one but members of the l’Alliance, Heng, Brosset, Bakunin’.

It should be noted that the methods of the Bakuninists, here condemned by Perret, and subsequently by Marx, are precisely those sanctified and codified within bourgeois and degenerated proletarian parties, where manoeuvring between personalities, currents and local groups constitutes the essence of the so-called democratic dialectic and the method, which we loathe, of ‘pressuring’ the central organs or ‘putting one’s own people in charge’ is a natural and appreciated political skill. Homo capitalisticus, with his brain regressed to piggy-bank form, can never understand our need and demand to place before men the impersonal Revolutionary Class Programme and the healthy and organic, sometimes we said honest, conviction of the party in its complex Theses. The word honest here means heavy, the result of hard collective labour, not of passing moods of congresses.

In the historical course of the International from the Brussels Congress to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in addition to the theoretical controversies that pitted ‘authoritarians’ against ‘anti-authoritarians’, several others arose and were debated at the Basel Congress, which took place in September 1869. As at previous congresses, the Marxist line prevailed on several issues. Martello records: ‘At the Congress there were eleven delegates from England, five from Germany, eighteen from France, five from Switzerland, one from Italy, and fifty-four from Belgium. We will omit to mention the countries from which they took their names because there are too many (...) today, just four years after the Brussels Congress, if one wanted to record the workers’ sections of the International, one would compile a small geographical dictionary’. The presence of Spanish and American delegates also appears. Marx did not present himself here either, but the main speeches and voting proposals were from his pen.

In view of the progress of the International in the past year and the main events, the Congress first decided on the abolition of the office of president as a ‘monarchical and authoritarian principle’. It was also voted that the General Council could expel sections that acted contrary to the Statutes of the International; however, the final word on expulsion was to be left to the votes of the following Congress. The Council was then entrusted with full power over whether or not to accept a particular section into the International (a resolution also voted for by the anarchists).

One of the theoretical points discussed at the Congress, on which the Marxist view prevailed, was the land question. In the report on this subject, prepared by Marx, the requests of the Proudhonists for representatives of the peasant class to attend the Congress were rejected. The report noted that the interests of the peasantry, bourgeois and reactionary, were in fact represented, not by themselves, but by Proudhonist ideology. The report stated: ‘The small [peasant] is only a nominal proprietor, but he is the more dangerous because he still fancies that he is a proprietor’. It concluded with a glimpse into the future: ‘In England the land could be transformed into common property by act of Parliament in the course of a fortnight’.

The Resolutions on Landed Property, endorsed by Marxism, which were passed on the issue, state: 1) ‘society has the right to abolish individual ownership of land and have the land managed by the community’; 2) ‘today it is necessary for land to be cultivated as collective property’.

Bakunin, in his speech on landed property, asserted at the Congress that the future society would indeed be collective, but that in order to destroy individual property one would first have to abolish the State. He illustrated the necessary existence of a sense of collectivity in man and his naturally anti-individualistic essence, although he framed this in a context that was anything but materialist. ‘The collectivity forms the basis of the individual. It is society that forms individuals, and isolated men would not have learned to speak, to think. Men of genius, the Galileans, the Newtons, etc., would have invented nothing, discovered nothing, without the acquisitions of previous generations’.

The resolution on landed property was to cause much discussion within the party in Germany and heated polemics would continue for some time, with Liebknecht wavering between one position and another. But of the good fruits of this discussion at the Congress Engels wrote to Marx on 1 November 1869: ‘The resolution on landed property has worked real wonders. It forces the fellows in Germany to think, for the first time since Lassalle started his agitation, something hitherto regarded as completely superfluous’.

Another important disagreement at the Congress was over the right of inheritance, raised at Bakunin’s proposal. According to the Alliance, the abolition of this right was a programmatic point of primary importance, confirmed by the fact that it was placed at the very beginning of its programme: ‘The Alliance wants in the first place the political, economic and social equality of individuals of both sexes, beginning with the abolition of the right of inheritance’.

Marx demonstrated in his report how the abolition of the right of inheritance was a demand proper to petty-bourgeois simplicism and its short-sightedness compared with the proletariat’s view. The proletarians must struggle for the abolition of the general institution of bourgeois property, of which the abolition of the personal right of inheritance will merely be a consequence. ‘[I]f the working class had sufficient power to abolish the right of inheritance, it would be powerful enough to proceed to expropriation, which would be a much simpler and more efficient process (...) Our efforts must be directed to the end that no instruments of production should be private property. The private property in these things was a fiction, since the proprietors could not use them themselves; they only gave them dominion over them, by which they compelled other people to work for them (...) All the means of labour must be socialised (...) As long as this is not the case, family inheritance law cannot be abolished’ (On the Right of Inheritance). ‘Suppose the means of production transformed from private into social prosperity, then the right of inheritance (so far as it is of any social importance) would die of itself, because a man only leaves after his death what he possessed during his lifetime’ (General Council Report on the Right of Inheritance).

Just how limited the anarchist perspective is can be seen in Bakunin’s reply: ‘Between the collectivists who deem it useless to vote for the abolition of the right of inheritance and those who consider it necessary to vote for it, there is the following difference: the former take the future as their starting point, that is to say, they take the collective ownership of land and instruments of labour as already realised, while the latter take the present, that is to say, individual hereditary property in its full power, as their starting point’. Marx commented, writing to Paul Lafargue on 19 April: ‘The whole thing stems from an antiquated idealism which takes the present jurisprudence as the basis of our economic situation, instead of realising that our economic situation is the basis and source of our jurisprudence’.

The other important theoretical debate at the Congress was on the question of children’s education. Once again, it was Marx who pulled the strings on the issue and rebuked any yielding to reformism by again stating that ‘a change of social circumstances was required to establish a proper system of education’. The issue was resolved at the Congress limited to the provision for the abolition of child labour. Against the false public school – private school alternative, however, Marx argued for a nationally organised school, but ‘without being governmental’: as in the factories, oversight was to be left to special inspectors. It was necessary to oppose the introduction of subjects that ‘admitted of party and class interpretation. Only, subjects such as the physical sciences, grammar, etc., were fit matter for schools. The rules of grammar, for instance, could not differ, whether explained by a religious Tory or a free thinker’. More glimpses into wide horizons.

This was Marx’s final verdict on the Congress as expressed to his daughter Laura on 25 September: ‘I am glad that the Basel Congress is over and that it went relatively well. It always worries me when the party presents itself in this way publicly “with all its sores”. None of the actors lived up to the principles, but the idiocy of the upper classes makes up for the errors of the working class’.

In mid-July 1870, Napoleon III’s France declared war on Bismarck’s Prussia, a war between the two ceasars that Marx and Engels had been waiting for at least four years, ever since Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866.

This war is of enormous importance to Marxists: politically, it will be the last progressive bourgeois war in Western Europe; militarily, it will unify Germany, a nation that thus becomes the nodal centre of the world revolutionary movement; economically, it will open the imperialist phase of capitalism. The Franco-Prussian War would also give birth to the proletariat’s first revolutionary attempt, the Paris Commune.

The causes of the war obviously lay not in the will of Boustrapà or Bismarck on duty, but in the need to supply oxygen to bourgeois interests through arms. Whereas Italy before unification was fragmented into several region-sized states, Germany was full of small statelets often as small as a city. The Kingdom of Prussia in 1859 was one of these, albeit the largest and already a not insignificant military power since the 18th century. In order for it to keep pace with the European capitalist powers, it had to give free rein to bourgeois economic and political concessions, which were reflected socially in the weakening of the increasingly parasitic aristocratic class.

German unification, which can be said to be the fruit of the military policy exercised by Bismarck between 1859 and 1871, is to be considered a positively revolutionary phenomenon for the economic development of Germany. A peculiar characteristic of this revolution is that it was not produced by a popular shock led by the bourgeoisie, as in England, the United States, and France, but was carried out from above, by monarchical power. Bismarck’s monarchy, unlike that of the Romanovs in Russia, will bring the work to completion, leaving the German bourgeois class to wallow in its historical incapacity and cowardice.

For several decades, Prussia had already had economic control over the various German statelets and strongly urged them to destroy the feudal remnants. From 1859, it was extending direct political control over them. Between 1859 and 1870, Prussia conquered the Schleswig-Holstein region bordering Denmark; it defeated the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its direct adversary to the south; it first occupied the myriad of statelets in northern Germany and then those in the south. Russia had reacted with control over Poland in 1863, and now it was Prussia’s turn to respond to France to protect the territories of Alsace and Lorraine.

Marx and Engels foresaw that within this war were already contained the motives for a future war between Prussia and Russia. Marx and Engels wrote to the Social-Democratic Workers’ Committee: ‘Anyone who has not been entirely overawed by the din and noise of the moment and has no interest in overawing the German people must realise that the War of 1870 will necessarily lead to a war between Germany and Russia just as the War of 1866 led to the War of 1870’. On the one hand France would appeal to Russia for help in reconquering Alsace and Lorraine, on the other hand, Germany and Russia would have violently disputed the entire Balkan region. The design of the World War of 1914 was thus, in its fundamental contours, already drawn.

Marx and Engels’ prediction was not limited to this: ‘a war No. 2 of this kind will act as the midwife to the inevitable social revolution in Russia’ (letter to Sorge of 1 September 1870).

Marx and Engels noted the growing affirmation of the German proletariat, whose great role in our future revolution they foresaw: ‘German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers’ movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon’s, etc.’ (Marx to Engels, 20 July 1870).

The inability of the German working class to live up to its historical responsibility will be shown both in the defeat of the Commune, when it will not be able to unite with the Paris proletariat abandoned to the Versailles reaction, and in 1919, fifty years later, when the defeat of the Revolution in Germany will signal the defeat of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia. Until the German proletariat can live up to its historical role, we have repeatedly said, victory will be difficult for European revolutionaries.

The unfolding of the War and the characteristics it took on are important for our treatment because it is these that will drive the Parisian proletariat, already very combative for years, to overthrow the French Government and establish proletarian power.

On 15 July the Corp Législatif voted on the war credits and on the 19th, war was officially declared. While the proletariats of the two nations were sending each other animated messages of brotherhood, immediately the General Council of the International instructed Marx to draft an Address to the French and German Proletariat, which was approved on the 26th, and immediately translated from English into French, German, and Russian. The great prediction of the Address was: ‘Whatever may be the incidents of Louis Bonaparte’s war with Prussia, the death-knell of the Second Empire has already sounded at Paris’. The initial condemnation was for Louis Bonaparte, who with the plebiscite of the previous May had attempted to give legitimacy to his power, which the abstentionism of the proletarians denied him. From the plebiscite Louis Napoleon began the systematic repression of the militants of the International, whom however he failed to convict.

Regarding the war, it is stated: ‘On the German side, the war is a war of defence; but who put Germany to the necessity of defending herself? Who enabled Louis Bonaparte to wage war upon her? Prussia! It was Bismarck who conspired with that very same Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of crushing popular opposition at home, and annexing Germany to the Hohenzollern dynasty’.

Had France had won the conflict, Bonapartism would have been consolidated for years. In that case, the much hoped-for autonomous workers’ movement in Germany would have struggled to emerge and grow stronger, moving instead towards nationalist positions. If, on the other hand, Germany had won, Bonapartism would have been defeated, allowing greater freedom of movement for French workers, and the German working class would have organised itself on a broader national scale; moreover, a victory would have swept away the old regionalist rivalries prevalent among the Germans.

The International then called on the German proletariat to defend this sort of bourgeois revolution while at the same time giving the French proletariat a hand in getting rid of Napoleon III. However, the German proletariat was to oppose the war as soon as it took on an offensive rather than defensive character, and it had therefore set itself the anti-proletarian and imperialist objective of occupying Alsace and Lorraine. In short: Germany had to defend itself against France in order to save its own bourgeois revolution and not turn history back decades; it was to be supported by the internationalists as long as it did not express expansionist aims.

Defeat would also help deflate the French’s over-rooted chauvinism. Engels wrote to Marx on 15 August 1870: ‘Until this chauvinism is knocked on the head, and that properly, peace between Germany and France is impossible. One might have expected that a proletarian revolution would have undertaken this work, but since the war is already there, nothing remains for the Germans but to do it themselves and quickly (...) Bismarck, as in 1866, is at present doing a bit of our work for us, in his own way and without meaning to, but all the same he is doing it’.

Napoleon III intended to cross the Rhine quickly and enter German territory before the enemy could mount a defence. But the French army failed to prepare itself as quickly as hoped and the officers stalled in the face of the attack. As early as 22 July Engels could see: ‘As things now stand, I consider a campaign in Bonaparte’s favour impossible’. It was Prussia that was quickest to organise the army and it was therefore Prussia that crossed the Rhine, attacked the French army in its own fortifications and immediately put the French in difficulty. Already on 29 July, in one of the analyses of the war that Engels kept almost daily in the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’, he could predict that ‘the advantage of the Germans is bound to grow, will increase if the decisive clash is postponed, and will reach its climax at the end of September’. Europe’s most prestigious army, the French, suddenly flopped!

On 31 August Engels was still able to write: ‘The army organisation fails everywhere; and a noble and gallant nation finds all its efforts for self-defence unavailing, because it has for twenty years suffered its destinies to be guided by a set of adventurers who turned administration, government, army, navy – in fact, all France – into a source of pecuniary profit to themselves’. With the defeat at Sedan on 2 September 1870, the end for the Second Empire was sealed. Having routed the French army on the eastern front, the Prussians nipped in the bud the attempted advance from the North-East: the main French fortresses were broken through and Bismarck’s and Wilhelm I’s army was able to march on Paris.

By the beginning of August, proletarian insurrection in Paris was already on the agenda. On 10 August Engels wrote to Marx: ‘It seems that the revolution will be made very easy for the people; everything will fall apart of its own accord, as was not to be expected otherwise’. In the situation of instability that had been created, on the one hand the Orléanists were aiming at a monarchical restoration (even provisionally under a republican guise); on the other was the revolutionary threat. However, Marx wrote worriedly to Engels on 8 August: ‘If a revolution breaks out in Paris, the question is whether they have the means and the leadership to offer a serious resistance to the Prussians’.

On 2 September Napoleon III was made prisoner of war, on the 4th the Republic was proclaimed. This immediately revealed itself for what it really was, that is to say an Orléanist farce headed by General Trochu. Engels commented in the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’: ‘It is the fate of the Second Empire and everything connected with it to fall without being pitied. The commiseration which is the least that falls to the lot of great misfortunes does not, somehow or other, appear to be extended to it. Even the honneur au courage malheureux (honour to unfortunate courage ed.) which you cannot nowadays use in French without a certain irony, seems to be denied to it’. In war, things necessarily go wrong ‘when military operations are unceasingly subordinated to political considerations’.

The defeat at Sedan definitively set the proletariat in motion. We wrote in The Military Question: Phase of the Constitution of the Proletariat into the Ruling Class, in Il Programma Comunista, No. 2/4 in 1966: ‘It rises up, arms in hand and with Proudhonist internationalists and Blanquist socialists at its head, it overwhelms the barricades of city guards in front of the building of the Legislative Body and enters the chamber, where the Blanquist Granger orders the deputies to decree the fall of the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic. This is a repetition of the scene of February 1848 in which the Second Republic was imposed by the worker Raspail with the armed people behind him. But, as then, this time too the proletariat, generous and good-natured, lets slip from its grasp the power that nevertheless belonged to it by right, this being founded solely on force’. The proletariat is cleverly tricked into forming a Government of National Defence with republicans and Orléanists.

On 5 September, a vigilance committee was formed for each district, which appointed four delegates to form part of a central committee. In Paris, however, as the promises made by the republicans (political amnesty, abolition of the police, compulsory conscription) failed, on 30 September the proletarians and the National Guard resumed agitation, and on 5 and 8 October armed demonstrations began again. The earth trembled more and more.

The insurrection had erupted not only in Paris but in several places in France, including Lyon. Marx recounts in a letter to Beesly on 19 November: ‘At first everything went well. Under the pressure of the “International” section, the Republic was proclaimed before Paris had taken that step. A revolutionary government was at once established – La Commune – composed partly of workmen belonging to the “International” partly of radical middle class Republicans. The octrois (consumption taxes ed.) were at once abolished, and rightly so. The Bonapartist and Clerical intriguers were intimidated. Energetic means were taken to arm the whole people (...) The action of Lyons was at once felt at Marseilles and Toulouse, where the “International” sections are strong’.

Regarding Lyon Marx would later write: ‘But the asses, Bakunin and Cluseret, arrived at Lyons and spoiled everything. Belonging both to the “International” they had, unfortunately, influence enough to mislead our friends. The Hotel de Ville was seized for a short time – a most foolish decree on the abolition de l’Etat (abolition of the State ed.) and similar nonsense were issued’. It happened that ‘the State, in the guise of two companies of bourgeois national guards, entered from a side that they had forgotten to guard, cleaned the hall, and hurriedly drove Bakunin back to the Geneva road’.

With the fall of Napoleon III and the defeat at Sedan, the second phase of the war opened up: the Prussians laid siege to Paris and repelled the French sorties, although the civilians fought a real defensive guerrilla war.

The two predictions enunciated by Marx in the Address had come true, namely the fall of Napoleon III and the falsity of the alleged defensive character of the war. The General Council commissioned Marx to draft a Second Address to the proletariat on this new phase of the war. In it he harshly criticised the German middle class called upon by Wilhelm I for the patriotic enterprise: ‘That middle class, which, in its struggles for civil liberty, had, from 1846 to 1870, been exhibiting an unexampled spectacle of irresolution, incapacity and cowardice, felt, of course, highly delighted to bestride the European scene as the roaring lion of German patriotism’.

In the Second Address, Marx refutes the claim that there are ‘just borders’ for a nation, explaining that any newly obtained border would already have in itself the germ of a future war to render it still ‘more secure’. He comes to relativise the concepts of attack and defence: ‘Such is the lesson of all history. Thus with nations as with individuals. To deprive them of the power of offence, you must deprive them of the means of defence. You must not only garrote, but murder (...) History will measure its retribution, not by the intensity of the square miles conquered by France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the 19th century, the policy of conquest’.

The German Social Democratic Party was supposed to oppose the continuation of the war, the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, and fight for an immediate ‘honourable peace for France and the recognition of the French Republic’. Not that Marx was hiding how much of a reactionary character there was in that newly proclaimed Republic, its defence, he explained, was only a passing moment before its overthrow by the proletariat. The French proletarians ‘must calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of republican liberty, for the work of their own class organisation’.

The Address closed with an acknowledgement of the courage of the English proletariat who, through strikes and demonstrations, had forced the Government to recognise the French Republic by opposing the dismemberment of France.

Bourgeois France was instead increasingly bowing before the Prussian army. The disappearance of the regular army since September had handed the defence over to inexperienced new recruits and partisan groups formed by civilians. It would be the guerrilla warfare between Prussians and French partisans that would create serious problems for the Prussians, worn down by a full four months.

Bourgeois Paris, on the other hand, experienced four months of complete immobility: Trochu did not dare attack the Prussians in the slightest, just as they did not attempt to enter Paris. The spectre of the Proletarian Revolution was far more dreadful than the Prussians in the eyes of Trochu and the clique that had assumed the reins of power with him.

In November and December, the Prussians indulged in requisitions and shootings of civilians, which led to popular uprisings in various places. Major battles, however, were no longer to be seen. Engels wrote in Notes on the War: ‘It is no longer the great battles which make up the bulk of these lists, it is the small encounters where one, two, five men are shot down. This constant erosion by the waves of popular warfare in the long run melts down or washes away the largest army in detail, and, what is the chief point, without any visible equivalent’.

On 31 October, echoing the fall of the Metz fortress, Paris again revolted. The workers in arms took the entire government prisoner, but the so-called ‘government of Judas’ once again seduced the proletariat and even managed to win a majority in a plebiscite-farce. We wrote in Il Programma Comunista: ‘Once again, the explanation for the meagre result of that great day lies in the lack of cohesion among the workers’ representatives: Blanqui, Blanc, Flourens, Delescluze, etc., and in the inability of the C.C. of the 20 Districts to exercise leadership functions, as well as in the good-naturedness of those who, still hoping that the lesson will lead the members of the government back to the observance of their duties, spare their lives (...) On 28 November, General Ducret, who was to lead the “great sortie” out of Paris and who had sworn to return only as the victor, after subjecting the national guards to needless and bloody sacrifices, ordered the retreat and was the first to reenter Paris. Not content with this, the government of these heroes has the cheek to “purge” the national guards of the “undisciplined” battalions, and give them as their new leader Gen. Thomas, the very man who had ordered fire on the workers in June 1848. On 21 December there is another “heroic” action in the same vein as the last: the “Trochu plan” proves itself increasingly more to be a plan for class defence. From this, further workers’ demonstrations and the posting of the “red manifesto” on 6 January by the Central Committee of the 20 Districts. On 20 January, Trochu gives his final performance: another “torrential sortie”, another retreat that turned into a rout; in reaction, another uprising on 22 January against the government, and thus more blood shed from the workers who absolutely refused capitulation’.

Engels again reports in Notes on the War: ‘Trochu, however continues in his inactivity, masterly or otherwise. The few sorties made during the last few days appear to have been but too “platonic”, as Trochu’s accuser in the Siècle calls the whole of them. We are told the soldiers refused to follow their officers. If so, this proves nothing but that they have lost all confidence in the supreme direction’.

By the end of January, Paris was increasingly isolated and the spectre of starvation crept in. Engels continues: ‘All reports from Paris agree in ascribing the want of success to the absence of confidence of the soldiers in the supreme command. And rightly so. Trochu, we must not forget, is an Orléanist, and, as such, lives in bodily fear of La Villette, Belleville, and the other “revolutionary” quarters of Paris. He feared them more than the Prussians. This is not a mere supposition or deduction on our part. We know, from a source which admits of no doubt, of a letter sent out of Paris by a member of the Government in which it is stated that Trochu was on every side urged on to take the offensive energetically, but that he constantly refused, because such a course might hand over Paris to the “demagogues”’.

On 23 January, Paris capitulated.

As we have seen, the Revolution in Paris had been underway since early September and it was it, and it alone, that determined the connotations of the final months of the war. The French bourgeoisie proved incapable of launching a counter-offensive: the reasons lay in its constitutional fear of the proletariat in arms. The Parisian bourgeoisie knew well that it would not be able to return to its own affairs until the proletariat was disarmed and its leaders rendered harmless.

The Prussians for their part for 131 days of siege did not dare enter red Paris. On 23 January with the capitulation of Paris, the Prussians ‘dared to occupy a tiny corner of Paris, which, into the bargain, consisted partly of public parks, and even this they only occupied for a few days! And during this time they, who had maintained their encirclement of Paris for 131 days, were themselves encircled by the armed workers of Paris, who kept a sharp watch that no “Prussian” should overstep the narrow bounds of the corner ceded to the foreign conquerors. Such was the respect which the Paris workers inspired in the army before which all the armies of the empire had laid down their arms’ (Engels, 1891 Introduction to The Civil War in France).

On 8 February 1871, elections were held for the National Assembly: a new government and the form of peace were to be decided. The Prussians had gladly conceded the Assembly rather than face the well-armed Parisian civilians with invasion. Thiers’ party was the direct instrument of the counter-revolution and the landowners, Orléanists, and Legitimists took refuge in its bosom. The speed with which the vote came about was due to the consummate bourgeois cunning on how to electorally defeat the proletariat.

Once elected, Thiers immediately tried to get the National Guard disarmed and order restored. But how could he impose this when he had only 3,000 policemen and 15,000 soldiers against the National Guard’s 300,000? Until mid-March, the C.C. of the National Guard, increasingly prestigious among Parisians, remained on the defensive. In its report of 10 March, it stated: ‘What we are is what the events have made us (...) We are the inexorable barrier erected against any attempt to overthrow the Republic’. Certainly a certain consciousness formed over the past seven years was not lacking in it. We continued in Programma: ‘For the National Guard and their C.C. the Republic had to have a social content: it had to be a Republic of Labour and not a Republic of Capital. What the C.C. of the National Guard lacks is a clear strategic vision of a sound revolutionary policy, so that what it does positively on the military level will be partly due to the events and mistakes of the class enemy’.

The real civil war opened when Thiers sent troops to seize the weapons of the National Guard. Not only did the night expedition fail completely, but the infantry employed by Thiers fraternised with the National Guard. After the defeat Thiers, increasingly fearful of the turn of events, announced that he ‘wanted’ to keep the National Guard armed but called it to submission to the orders of the republican government. When only 300 soldiers out of 300,000 answered the call, Thiers had no choice but to flee to Versailles. It was 18 March and the National Guard, unwillingly and driven by events, had to go on the offensive. Barricades were erected, Generals Lecomte and Thomas killed, and the main buildings in the city occupied. In the evening the C.C. assumed full power. As Marx wrote in The Civil War in France, ‘Europe seemed, for a moment, to doubt whether its recent sensational performances of state and war had any reality in them, or whether they were the dreams of a long bygone past’.

The Commune Government already immediately sinned by indulgence. Not only were counter-revolutionaries allowed to flee Paris freely, but the bourgeoisie was also tolerated in assemblies and demonstrations. So that on 22 March, four days after the insurrection, the bourgeoisie was already attempting to regain power, arms in hand. ‘In war’, we wrote in Programma, ‘even for the proletariat the morality of war must apply and no bonhomie whatsoever is permissible’.

For the eight days that followed 18 March, instead of going on the offensive, the C.C. was more concerned with giving itself a useless formal legitimacy by preparing new elections. ‘They attached importance to the form and forgot the substance on the basis of which they had already acted: this was certainly a baleful inheritance of bourgeois conceptions and their functions in this matter: they had forgotten that “the revolution (of 4 September) had become the legal regime of France”. And even if that had not been the case, the revolution of 18 March alone – we add – would have been more than sufficient to give legal title to that government which was the C.C., and therefore it should have been in no hurry to rid itself of power’.

The Commune was proclaimed on 28 March, ten days after the insurrection. At the same time, several cities in Southern and Eastern France rose up, although the hesitations of the government in Paris led to the immediate defeat of these insurrections scattered across the country.

On 3 April, Thiers’ Versaillese began their counter-offensive against the Communards: the first clash was a painful defeat and a serious warning for the National Guard. Following this, the bourgeois radicals, already undecided, walked out of the C.C.: the comrades who remained at its head, instead of assuming power as they should have, called elections again, forming a Council divided between Jacobins, Blanquists, and Proudhonists. They lacked the programmatic and tactical compactness proper to the Marxist party: both the Proudhonists and the Blanquists, these certainly great barricadiers and, as Engels puts it, ‘socialists only by revolutionary instinct’, lacked a general knowledge of revolutionary dynamics, far removed from scientific socialism. The ‘wishful thinking’ of the newly-born state was fully revealed when an attempt was made to draft a political and economic programme on 19 April.

Despite this ‘bonhomie’, events forced the Communards to make choices that instinctively pushed the revolutionary government towards a genuine proletarian dictatorship. Not only that, but the very laws that were decreed were far removed from Proudhonist theories and were decidedly closer to what was proper to Marx’s doctrine: an example are the provisions on the association of production that was to be an opening to the future society without exchange or money. ‘In spite of everything, and against all appearances of democracy, the reality of the revolutionary dictatorship of the Commune was asserting itself under the pressure of facts (...) It was an organism that was moving further and further away from parliamentarism and its false division of powers, because it was becoming every day more and more an organism at the same time legislative and executive (...) By making its members revocable at any time, and by giving them a worker’s wage, the Commune had broken up the two pillars of the old bourgeois State: the military and the civil bureaucracy. The Commune was an entirely new State for history: it was the first proletarian dictatorship, which, being an instrument of the majority of the exploited people to crush the resistance of the exploiting minority, was no longer a State in the proper sense of the word, but a Gemenweisen, a German word meaning not a distinct commune, but a community, an organic system of communes’ (The Military Question...).

Among the measures enacted by the Commune in its short existence were the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the people in arms. Then came the election of municipal councillors by universal suffrage and their revocability at any time. In addition, all work, including administrative work, was rewarded with a worker’s wage. The magistrates were then no longer ‘autonomous and super partes’ according to bourgeois fiction, but they too could be elected and revoked at any time. The separation of the Church from the State was then decreed, as was the expropriation of all churches and clerical property. ‘The priests’, Marx, who does not lose himself in petty-bourgeois anticlericalism, can ironically remark, ‘were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the apostles. The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of Church and State. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it’ (The Civil War in France).

Many have accused the Commune of having a purely urban character. Marx in the Address explains the falsity of this assertion: ‘The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralised government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers (...) The Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif of his constituents (...) 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’.

On 16 April, a census of Parisian factories was ordered so that they could be put back into operation by creating cooperative companies free of the bosses’ rule. On the 20th, night work for bakers was abolished. On the 30th, pawnshops were abolished.

The petty bourgeoisie had immediately supported the Commune and the historical initiative of the proletariat, having now realised that the bourgeois class and the regime of the Second Empire were dragging it into their ruin: the working class remained its only alternative. In favour of the middle class the Commune had decreed the extinction of debts and bonds. It also decreed the remission of rent for the last three quarters.

Thus Marx explains: ‘The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economic foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule’. The aim was thus to open the door to the future classless communist society: ‘The working class have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’. ‘This was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of State power. It was a revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people of its own social life’ (Marx, First Draft of the Civil War in France).

Revolutionary circumstances had created in the proletariat the capacity to give itself its own dictatorship. However, the lack in it of its united Marxist vanguard led to a series of tragic mistakes. There was too much honour given to a cowardly and ruthless enemy and too much faith in the possibility of loyal relations with it; there was too little resolve to establish the indispensable Red Terror against it. The uncertainty of the proletarian dictatorship in Paris is reflected in the constant changes of personnel in the revolutionary leadership, as well as in the unjustified respect of the Communards before the Bank of France, which was not occupied.

After the Communards had suffered a crushing defeat on 3 April when attempting a sortie against the Versaillese besieging Paris, it was completely surrounded to the North-East by the Prussians and to the South-West by the Versaillese, formally at war with each other. The fatal mistake of the Commune Government was remaining on the defensive. Thiers’ counter-revolutionary army had grown from 22,000 soldiers to around 130,000 in May; of the five army corps, two were made up of prisoners of war freed for the occasion by the Prussian ‘enemies’! By contrast, the Communards’ army would have been far larger if only the C.C. had taken an offensive. Instead, the number of actual fighters did not exceed 15 or 16 thousand soldiers and of the 1,200 guns only 200 were used. In addition, the inability to radically centralise the army created decisive instances of indiscipline at the height of the fighting and a decidedly poor military tactic.

In the first half of May, the fighting became continuous. Thanks to Prussian support, Thiers’ troops defeated the revolutionary army on several occasions. On 21 May, when Paris was already exhausted by the hard fighting, a betrayal opened the door to the Versaillese army. The Hôtel de Ville, instead of organising a solid and unified defence, ‘let the councillors each go to their own district to prepare the defence, detached from any connection with the action of the others, as a common defence plan would have it’ (The Military Question...).

The next day, the Versaillese occupied several gates and without much resistance reached Montmartre. It was at this point that the Revolution revived and the population rushed to take up arms. Throughout the city, women and men, the elderly and children erected barricades. Delescluze’s proclamations for a heroic defence of the Commune echoed widely. But the military error of little centralisation was repeated: ‘Delescluze’s own proclamations theorised the “autonomy” of district defences as the only just military solution, and criticised the “learned manoeuvres” of the professional military. As we can see, there was no clear understanding of militarism, since all forms of organisational discipline was being confused with it: a discipline which is inevitable unless one prefers to rely on spontaneity, which (especially when it is exclusive) is a sure source of defeat’.

By 23 May, Thiers’ troops had occupied several parts of the city, although the resistance of the Communards, even by small groups, was truly heroic and unforgettable for the proletariat and its party. Between the 24th and 28th were the last attempts by the Communards to defend themselves, but the Versaillese butchers settled everything by spilling blood at will. Those who were not killed on the barricades faced the firing squad. The glorious Commune was crushed in blood by its historical enemy.

Marx commented: ‘The civilisation and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilisation and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge. Each new crisis in the class struggle between the appropriator and the producer brings out this fact more glaringly. Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June 1848 vanish before the infamy of 1871. The self-sacrificing heroism with which the population of Paris – men, women, and children – fought for eight days after the entrance of the Versaillese, reflects as much the grandeur of their cause, as the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilisation, indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over’ (The Civil War...).

In a letter to Kugelmann dated 12 April, Marx wrote: ‘However that may be, the present rising in Paris – even if it is 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’.

The bourgeoisie was immediately terrified of the Commune. The first reaction to the uprising was the hunt for members of the International by the main governments of Europe: for the bourgeoisie, the mesh of democracy became tighter and tighter. The International and the ‘Red Terror Doctor’ Karl Marx came to be seen as the ones who behind the scenes had ‘conspired’ to make the Parisians rise up, the ones who had given specific and precise orders to take up arms and overthrow the French government. In reality we have seen that it is not orders that determine revolutions but specific objective circumstances.

The ruthless campaign against the Internationalists was joined not only by the police all over Europe but also by the various bourgeois newspapers and Marx’s Address, republished as The Civil War in France, made the fearful bourgeoisie, which, under the threat of the Red Revolution, had unified into a single party and a single ideology, the Counter-Revolution, lash out in anger. The governments of France, Prussia, Austria and Italy coalesced into a Holy Alliance against the internationalists. Engels writes on this subject: ‘A general drive against the International has been launched, all the powers of the old world, the courts-martial and civil courts, the police and the press, squires from the backwoods and bourgeois, vie with each other in persecuting it, and there is hardly a spot on the entire continent where every means is not used to outlaw this fear-inspiring great brotherhood of workers’ (The Sonvillier Congress and the International).

As much as the Marxist component in the International could not act directly, we claim for our class and its party all the honour of the heroic Parisian attempt. Again in Programma in 1966 we concluded: ‘The International had essentially had the merit of preparing the proletariat ideologically. Declaring that “the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself” or that “the great task of the working class has become the conquest of political power” (Inaugural Address), the International enlightened the consciences on the general task of the military question, which is the armed insurrection and armed defence of the proletarian State that has arisen from the demolition of the bourgeois State. Declaring then that “the working class possesses one element of success, numbers; but numbers only weigh in the balance when they are united by organisation and guided by knowledge”, Marx in that Address, threw full light on the irreplaceable function of the Party in the proletarian revolution.

On 13 June 1871 the 1,000 copies of the Address that the General Council had commissioned from Marx appeared in London; within a few months the pamphlet would have several editions in English distributed among the workers and in just one year it would be translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. In it, Marx condensed not only the history of past events, but also the lessons that the working class had to learn from it for the sake of its own emancipation. The programme of the International was thus decisively affirmed.

Marx first concluded that the proletariat in Western Europe no longer had to lend its support to the bourgeoisie in any national war: none could any longer have a progressive and anti-feudal character. The Commune had shown that ‘the national governments are one as against the proletariat’.

The main part of the Address dealt with the question of the proletarian State. Marx hailed the measures that the Commune State had taken in just three months, but at the same time noted its limitations. In a letter to Kugelmann dated 12 April 1871 he explained: ‘If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting’.

In a letter of 6 April to Liebknecht, Marx criticised the overly ‘good-natured’ character of the Communard government as follows: ‘It seems that the Parisians are succumbing. It appears that the defeat of the Parisians was their own fault, but a fault which really arose from their too great honnêteté (decency ed.). The Central Committee and later the Commune gave the mischievous avorton (malignant abortion ed.) Thiers time to centralise hostile forces, in the first place by their folly in trying not to start civil war – as if Thiers had not started it by his attempt at the forcible disarming of Paris (...); 2nd, in order that the appearance of having usurped power should not attach to them they lost precious moments (...) by the election of the Commune, the organisation of which, etc., cost yet more time’.

Marx in the Address lays bare clearly the nature of the modern bourgeois State, which, with its army, police, judiciary, bureaucracy, clergy, etc., originated in the absolute monarchies of the 17th century and only came of age with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire that broke up the last feudal remnants. Since then, the State has become the modern means of repression of the bourgeois class over the proletarian class. The facts of the Commune confirm that ‘after every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief’. And then: ‘In view of the threatening upheaval of the proletariat, the ruling class united used that State power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war engine of Capital against Labour’. These were the truths that the International taught the proletariat in 1871.

‘The direct antithesis to the Empire was the Commune. The cry of “Social Republic”, with which the February Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that was not only to supercede the monarchical form of class-rule, but class-rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that Republic’.

The International did not limit itself to the dissemination of the Address. Several conferences were held in England where comrades who had participated in the Commune, such as Robert Reid and Auguste Serrailier, recounted to the proletariat the heroic moments of the barricades and the harsh bourgeois repression that followed. Strikes and demonstrations were also organised in support of the Communards. For many months, the General Council had to concern itself with the maintenance of the Parisian refugees, as it had become extremely difficult for them to find work.

The General Council during the period of the Commune had also maintained a dense correspondence with the sections of the various countries where the proletariat was attempting to rebel. In Spain, especially in Barcelona, political strikes were widespread. In Belgium, the General Council had to intervene in support of a massive cigar-maker’s strike and it was thanks to this aid that the strike was able to last until September and win. In Germany, the struggles organised by the German Social Democratic Party against the war, as well as the arrests and harsh repressions, were notable.

Strengthened by the defeat of the Commune, reaction raged across the continent. The Communards and Internationalists, those not shot or chained to hard labour in the hell of Cayenne, had been forced to flee France and were militating in complete illegality. In Germany the same: the Internationalist leaders, Liebknecht and Bebel among others, had been arrested and sections of the International Association dissolved by force. The repression in Spain and Italy was extremely harsh, while in England, despite the maintenance of legality, the repression and propaganda against the International and the Commune was systematic. The Catholic Pope was no different: in front of a Swiss delegation he declared: ‘Your government (...) assures the right of asylum to a quantity of the worst kind, tolerates this sect of the International which intends to treat the whole of Europe in the way it has treated Paris. These gentlemen of the International, who are no gentlemen at all, are fearsome, because they work on behalf of the eternal enemy of God and of man’.

These repressions, which did not prevent the International from gaining militants and sympathisers due to the still-living enthusiasm of the Parisian insurrection, created constant difficulties in the links between the sections and between them and the General Council, and it was not easy to find new local leaders to replace those arrested. Despite this, the International for more than a year, and at least until the Hague Congress, remained a menacing giant to the established order throughout Europe. The echo of its power reached not only Russia but as far as Australia and Argentina. It is indicative that the production of bourgeois articles and pamphlets against the proletarian organisation flourished more than ever before.

But, as is usually the case with revolutionary movements, bloody defeats require them to draw lessons of principle from them. Historical maturation demands these painful births in the consciousness of the parties and the consequent separation from those who draw different and sometimes opposing lessons. Within the International, the struggle flared up around the inescapable definition of principles. The Marxist current was opposed by: anarchism, which acted as a secret society, preached the immediate abolition of the state and condemned the militant and programmatic centralisation in the party; the Blanquist movement, which theorised conspiracy, confident that the will of a few could set the course of the Revolution in motion again. In England, on the other hand, moderate tendencies had to be reckoned with: on one side the proletarians were increasingly corrupted with the crumbs of the benefits that the English bourgeoisie had gained from the Franco-Prussian War, on the other side the trade union leaders were by now nothing more than sellouts to capital.

The defeat of the Commune provoked the spread of voluntarism, consisting in the inability to understand the reasons for the defeat and therefore incapable of a ‘good retreat’, as Lenin would have put it. It is on this ground that anarchism spreads, in spite of Marxist materialism, which instead recognises the necessity of party preparation in anticipation of the next revolutionary wave.

In Italy, as in Spain, numerous sections had formed that claimed to adhere to the International but, thanks mainly to Bakunin’s intrigue, had no contact whatsoever with the General Council in London. In Italy, theoretical immaturity was at its maximum: the Macerata section had, for example, appointed Garibaldi, Marx, and Mazzini as honorary presidents.

But what marked the International from the end of 1871 and in 1872 is the clash between Marxism and anarchism, a clash that will lead to the split in September 1872 at the Hague Congress, where the party arrived at the splendid resolutions of principle on the absolute centralist character of the revolutionary party and on the aim of class political dictatorship. The Hague is one of those fruits that are born from defeats which revolutionaries treasure most in their current programme.

At The Hague also, at the end of a cycle of international class warfare, it was decided to transfer the General Council to New York after eight years of permanence in London. Four years later, the International would no longer exist.

Because of the war in September 1870, the annual congress could not be held. Following the Commune and the harsh repression that followed, the congress could not be held the following year either. Marx and Engels wrote in The Fictitious Splits of the International: ‘In view of the internal situation, France was, of course, unable to elect any delegates. In Italy, the only organised section at the time was that of Naples; but just as it was about to nominate a delegate it was broken up by the army. In Austria and Hungary, the most active members were imprisoned. In Germany, some of the more well-known members were prosecuted for the crime of high treason, others landed in jail, and the party’s funds were spent on aid to their families’. A conference was then held in London in September 1871 with 32 delegates, which, given the situation, was to resolve pressing organisational questions and try to get to the bottom of the internal struggle unleashed by the Bakuninists.

The Blanquist Vaillant opened the Conference discussion on these theoretical clashes by highlighting how dangerous the anarchist theses were for the revolutionary movement given their opposition to class political action. Marx in one of his speeches reiterated that for the International the prerogative of political action was already enshrined in the Statutes of 1864 and the Inaugural Address, and that it was precisely the underestimation of political tasks that was one of the reasons for the failure of the Commune.

Against the Jura anarchists, as anti-political opponents of the use of Parliament for revolutionary ends, Marx objected that the matter had to be evaluated according to the usefulness that the party could derive from it. Addressing those who waved the banner of the rejection of political struggle Engels added: ‘We want the abolition of classes. What is the means of achieving it? The only means is political domination of the proletariat. For all this, now that it is acknowledged by one and all, we are told not to meddle with politics. The abstentionists say they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence. Yet revolution is a supreme political act and those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it, that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution’ (On the Political Action of the Working Class).

In a speech on the trade union question Marx exposed the typical limitations of the English trade unions: ‘If the trade unions want to utilise their forces, they could with our help obtain everything. They have in their statutes a section which prohibits them from mixing in politics; they ventured upon political action only under the influence of the International’.

At Marx’s suggestion, the formation of secret societies was banned in the International: these, Marx explained, ‘instead of instructing the workers, these societies subject them to authoritarian, mystical laws which cramp their independence and distort their powers of reason’. Another lesson: the party, at certain stages, will have to assume defensive attitudes involving varying degrees of secrecy, outwardly, and to a certain extent even inwardly. But the party is not a secret society. The resolutions on political action and secret societies were approved, and, against the chaotic anarchist regroupings, it was decided that ‘[a]ll local branches, sections, groups, and their committees are henceforth to designate and constitute themselves simply and exclusively as branches, sections, groups, and committees of the International’.

Also reiterated is the ultimate aim of the abolition of classes as well as the necessity for the proletariat to make itself completely independent from bourgeois politics.

The dissident sections in Switzerland were invited to form themselves into a Federal Council of the International. Marx concluded: ‘the Conference appeals to the feelings of fraternity and union which more than ever ought to animate the working class’.

On 25 September, Marx gave a speech to mark the seventh anniversary of the founding of the International: ‘In destroying the existing conditions of oppression by transferring all the means of labour to the productive labourer, and thereby compelling every able-bodied individual to work for a living, the only basis for class rule and oppression would be removed. But before such a change could be effected a proletarian dictature would become necessary, and the first condition of that was a proletarian army. The working classes would have to conquer the right to emancipate themselves on the battlefield. The task of the International was to organise and combine the forces of labour for the coming struggle’.

At the London Conference, in the end, only principles already contained in the Statutes were made explicit. But the Alliance took advantage of this to go on the open offensive against the General Council. On 31 October, the Alliancist Schwitzguébel sent a circular on behalf of the Romance Federation to the sections of the Jura and French Switzerland calling for a congress to be held in Sonvillier on 12 November.

At Sonvillier ‘of sixteen delegates, fourteen represented dead or moribund sections (...) Of twenty-two sections, only nine were represented at the Congress; seven had never replied to any of the Committee’s communications, and four were declared well and truly defunct. And this is the federation which believed itself called to shake the International to its very foundations!’ (Marx-Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Workingmen’s Association).

At the Congress, the Jura Federation was formed and a circular was approved to be sent to all sections of the International. In it the General Council was accused of contravening the powers entrusted to it by the Statutes and of wanting to impose its authority on the sections by denying their ‘natural autonomy’. The General Council, it said, would arbitrarily decide the fate of the International from time to time, decreeing rules without having convened any congresses for two years. The circular then demanded the immediate convocation of a congress of the International so that the Council would ‘return to its normal functions, which are those of a simple office of correspondence and statistics’.

The circular also contained this effective ‘summa’ of anarchism: ‘If there is one incontrovertible fact, borne out a thousand times by experience, it is that authority has a corrupting effect on those in whose hands it is placed. It is absolutely impossible for a man with power over his fellow men to remain a moral being’. It goes on to say: ‘The society of the future should be nothing other than the universalisation of the organisation with which the International will have endowed itself. We must, therefore, be careful to ensure that this organisation comes as close as possible to our ideal. How can we expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organisation? Impossible. The International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of liberty and federation and shun any principle leaning towards authority and dictatorship’.

In addition to the fact that we Marxists cannot recognise any meaning in the word Authority outside of a given historical context, nor abstract principles such as Liberty and Federalism, which we consider comprehensible only within the bourgeois worldview, our concept of the party as a prefiguration of communist society, as also stated in the recent Theses of the Communist Left, differs distinctly from the biological and merely quantitative concept of an embryo, to which the anarchists refer. The anarchist – especially post-Hague – is a petty bourgeois: he sketches out a reactionary communism that generalises the lack of generality of the minimal spheres into which his world, made up of small production, small trade, etc., is fragmented. A sum of isolated individuals, frightened in the face of the overbearing power of the State. Condemned to reformism, he does not give up starting to do communism in the basement, heedless of the sense of ridicule it arouses. For the Marxist, on the contrary, the party is the conscious, militant organ within which feelings of indignation and contempt for the present world and aspirations for post-capitalist relations between men must be able to be expressed. But on no account can the party, a besieged fortress, set itself up as a model of productive relations that require quite different spaces, times, and broken chains.

‘Anarchist doctrines’, we wrote in 1957, in The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism, ‘are the expression of the following thesis: centralised power is evil; and they assume that the entire question of the liberation of the oppressed class can be resolved by getting rid of it. But for the anarchist, class is only an accessory concept. He wishes to liberate the individual, the person, and thereby conforms with the programme of the liberal and bourgeois revolution. He only reproaches the latter for having installed a new form of power, failing to see that this is merely the necessary consequence of the fact that it didn’t have as its content and motive-force the liberation of the person or the citizen, but the achieving of dominion of a new social class over the means of production’.

The Sonvillier Congress was only the beginning of the war declared on the General Council, which would spread from Switzerland to Spain, Italy, Russia, as well as to London, and which would employ means anything but ‘anti-authoritarian’.

Engels responded to Sonvillier Congress with an article in the ‘Volkstaat’ in which he reiterated why it was impossible to hold a congress in Europe and refuted the accusation that ‘authoritarian’ resolutions had been given at the London Conference. But it is against the advocated ‘anti-authoritarianism’ that he rails: ‘A workers’ association which has inscribed upon its banner the motto of struggle for the emancipation of the working class is to be headed, not by an executive committee, but merely by a statistical and correspondence bureau (...) Just now, when we have to defend ourselves with all the means at our disposal, the proletariat is told to organise not in accordance with requirements of the struggle it is daily and hourly compelled to wage, but according to the vague notions of a future society entertained by some dreamers!’.

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels had written, twenty-five years earlier, a marvellous chapter against utopian socialism, directing their harshest critique at so-called petty-bourgeois socialism in particular. Despite the brief experience of the proletarian struggles, already in 1847, the communists had identified the so-called middle strata as a spurious jumble of social elements, devoid of historical determination and rich only in cowardice.

If we exclude 1848, 1871 and the period 1917-1923, years in which social crisis and subjective factors brought the proletariat onto revolutionary terrain, in 150 years, in repeated waves, petty-bourgeois socialism has spread enormously, serially influencing ex-socialist and ex-Marxist parties. The petty-bourgeois ideology, behind which the long hand of big-bourgeois conservatism and of states is often hidden today, has always nurtured the dream of a return to a more backward capitalism, where competition among small producers and the free market still has its place. Even when this ideology has disguised itself as revolutionary, it has not failed to hide gradualism, reformism and, generic anti-authoritarianism under the guise of social subversion and even ‘terrorism’. The proletariat does not fight against the authority of capital, it wants to destroy it.

Anarchism within the Association aimed at a non-centralised, federalist organisation in which each section was completely autonomous: revolutionary sentiment alone, on the big day, would unify the forces in struggle. From the experience of the Commune the anarchists drew the lesson of communalism, we Marxists the confirmation of internationalism. The Revolution, or rather Bakuninist pandestruction, would have envisaged the immediate construction of a free federation of free producers, a society not dissimilar to that envisioned by Proudhon and disavowed by the Proudhonists themselves during the Commune. Whereas for us the Revolution, being a war, needs the most absolute discipline in international action, for the anarchists it would have been won by relying on instincts and spontaneous revolutionary practice.

Marxism is the negation theory of capitalism and therefore the theory of the proletariat, of the only class that is the negation of the ruling class. Anarchism, on the other hand, is a ‘classless’ theory, it addresses individuals indiscriminately, a hollow abstraction of which it claims to be the faithful expression. Marxism sees the Revolution as a collective act of the proletariat, historically inevitable, anti-individualist insofar as it is the necessary product of irrepressible economic and social forces. For anarchism, instead, the Revolution is the product of conscience and will, and not of the party but of individuals. Moreover, it is a predominantly an intellectual act: for them, the great problem lies in the superstructure, i.e. the obscurantism of the Churches, violated Justice, Authoritarianism, etc., without being able to understand that these are by-products of the economic mode of production and its natural effects upon society.

Anarchism at the end of the 19th century had spread mainly among the workers in Spain, southern France, and some Swiss regions, where capitalism was less mature, but anarchism-Proudhonism, as a mouthpiece for the dissatisfaction of the spurious and reactionary classes, will only die with capitalism.

Like the Proudhonists, the Alliance anarchists rejected the economic and trade union struggle (although not everywhere) as well as the organised political struggle of the proletariat against the status quo. Against the exercise of political power by the proletariat Bakunin is then explicit: ‘He who says State, says violence, oppression, exploitation, injustice, erected into a system and made into so many fundamental conditions for the existence of society (...) Whoever wants with us the establishment of liberty, of justice, and of peace, whoever wants the triumph of humanity, whoever wants the radical and complete emancipation of the popular masses, must want, like us, the dissolution of all states in the universal federation of the productive and free associations of all countries’ (To the Comrades of the Federation of International Jura Sections).

Engels replied, writing to Cuno on 24 January 1872: ‘Bakunin has a peculiar theory of his own, a medley of Proudhonism and communism, the chief point of which is in the first place that he does not regard capital, and therefore the class contradiction between capitalists and wage earners which has arisen through social development, as the main evil to be abolished – instead he regards the state as the main evil. While the great mass of the Social-Democratic workers hold our view that state power is nothing more than the organisation with which the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists have provided themselves in order to protect their social prerogatives, Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by favour of the state. Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is in itself the social revolution and involves a change in the whole method of production’.

Engels again burst out, writing to Paul Lafargue on 30 December 1871: ‘Whenever the Bakuninists take a dislike to something, they say: “It’s authoritarian” and believe that by so doing they damn it for ever and aye. If, instead of being bourgeois, journalists and so forth, they were working men, or if they had only devoted some study to economic questions and modern industrial conditions, they would know that no communal action is possible without submission on the part of some to an external will, that is to say an authority. Whether it be the will of a majority of voters, of a managing committee, or of one man alone, it is invariably a will imposed on dissidents; but without that single, controlling will, no co-operation is possible. Just try and get one of Barcelona’s big factories to function without control, that is to say, without an authority! Or to run a railway without knowing for certain that every engineer, stoker, etc., is at his post exactly when he ought to be!’.

Here we have tried to draw the main lines of anarchist thought, at least as far as the polemic with Marxism is concerned. But in reality anarchism has never expressed a single coherent political theory. Even Bakunin, according to opportunity reveals himself as an ultra-revolutionary par excellence, elsewhere he flirts with Marxism, at other times he appears aligned with the Jacobin ideology of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Sometimes he is a fomenter of conspiratorial seditions and individualist terrorism, and sometimes instead he is a legalitarian. Who was the real Bakunin, then? Bakunin is all of this together; he represents the post-Marxist involution of anarchism, by now merely the expression of spurious and declassified strata, lacking social placement and historical perspective, and therefore incapable of rising to the science of Politics and condemned to the dealings of petty politicking.

He does not hesitate, in order to attack Marx, to write pages of banal anti-Semitic prejudices. From anti-Semitism he moves on to anti-Germanism, from anti-Germanism to Slavophilia. For organisation he resorts to the methods of the secret sect, with criteria of closed hierarchy, and these are truly ‘authoritarian’. He is, in short, the forerunner of late bourgeois rebellionism, as bombastic as it is impotent, which still today spreads its stench but has no longer anything to do with the working class.

The proletariat in Italy, decidedly in the minority, on the threshold of the 1870s still had no experience of class struggle. The attempts at workers’ coalitions in the previous decades were decidedly primitive compared to the maturity of the class struggles in England, France, and Germany. The workers’ movement was moreover entangled with Mazzini’s reactionary ideology.

Mazzini sided against the Communards at the outbreak of the Commune. In one of his writings, L’Internationale, we read: ‘Our first duty is to separate ourselves openly and expressly from both sides and to ensure that the moral sense, unfortunately lost in France, is not lost in Italy. Woe to us if we do not feel in our souls that all our future progress lies in that pact! Woe if the holy battle between Good and Evil, between Justice and Arbitrariness, between Truth and Lies fought in the full light of heaven and under the eye of God in Europe is turned into a war waged in darkness, without a determined rule, without a beacon to guide the combatants, without any inspiration other than the impulses of the hour and the wretched passions of each individual! (...) We must solemnly separate ourselves from both sides. Neither with one nor with the other are Justice and eternal Right’. To the principles of the International on the abolition of classes, Mazzini explicitly contrasts ‘God, the Immortality of Life, the Fatherland, Duty, the Moral Law which alone is sovereign, the Family, Property, Liberty, Association’. Not a bad revolutionary programme!

In this historical phase, the development of the proletariat, both material and spiritual, was accompanied in Italy by a heated theoretical debate that was to reach its peak in November 1871. Mazzini had in fact called a congress of workers’ societies in Rome for 1 November, attempting with this move to win an early victory over the International. Bakunin, who had in the meantime presented himself to the Italian proletariat as one of the main elements of the International, then led the opposition, supplementing it with his propaganda on the abolition of the State and even passing off this personal programme of his as that of the International itself. Against Mazzini Engels had written articles in Lodi’s ‘La Plebe’ and in ‘Roma del popolo’.

Anarchist influence grew: several sections of the International were opened, convinced of the anarchist programme and never made contact with the London Council. Engels explained to Becker on 5 August 1872: ‘In the whole of Italy we have only one section, Turin, of whose quality we are certain; and perhaps Ferrara. Milan has been, since Cuno’s departure, completely in the hands of the Bakuninists, Naples always was and the Fascio Operaio in Emilia, the Romagna and Tuscany is wholly under Bakunin’s influence. These people constitute an International of their own, they have never applied for membership, have never paid dues, but they act as if they belonged to the International’.

Much more so than Italy, Russia was the country where the proletariat was an ultra-minority and where a radical bourgeois action with an anti-feudal function was struggling to emerge. At the beginning of the 1860s, however, student struggles began, which, with a certain radicalism, would continue for years and had as their theoretical soul the socialist Chernyshevsky, later deported to Siberia. Following harsh Tsarist repressions, the students retreated into secret societies. The less fortunate ended up in one that had Nechayev as its organiser and Bakunin as its leader from abroad. Here one could witness yet another of his disguises, that of a ‘terrorist’. It should be noted that there are anticipations here of practices of degenerate bourgeois and communist political struggle that were to have great application in the following century: slanders, plots, and acts of terrorism by the sect were planned not only against enemy classes and institutions, but also for internal use against individuals and groups who refused to submit to the ‘line’.

In Spain too, the Alliance conducted parallel activity to the International and attacked the ‘authoritarian Internationalists’ on several occasions. The Alliance had been founded here by bourgeois politicians such as Fanelli (member of the Italian Parliament) and Garrido (deputy to the Spanish Cortes). It soon spread to Spain, as well as Portugal, thanks in part to the fact that Spanish Internationalists had been made to believe that the Alliance was a body recognised by the International and an integral part of it.

The first bitter clash between the Alliancists and the Internationalists took place at the Valencia Conference in September 1871 where the Internationalists, tired of months of sordid intrigue, proposed that the entire Spanish Federal Council join the Alliance, a proposal to which the Alliancists were vehemently opposed on the grounds that it would mean ‘subordinating the Alliance to the International’. Internal war had broken out.

The Alliancists did not dare take a direct stand in favour of the Sonvillier resolutions, so the Internationalists, comforted by the results of the London Conference and now aware of the true role of the Alliance, attempted to disband it. They then declared their intentions to found an autonomous workers’ party in Spain and launched harsh attacks on the bourgeois republicans, allies of the Alliancists. The Internationalists within the Federal Council were defeated and suspended by it. In April, following the Zaragoza Congress, the Internationalists, just recently readmitted, were again expelled from the Federal Council. They responded by founding the Nueva Federaciòn Madrileña, which the London Council recognised as the only official Federal Council.

In Spain, the anarchists, being the majority, continued to represent the International, whereas the Nueva Federación Madrileña, in line with the General Council, was struggling to gain effective influence over the working class. From 1868 onwards, Spain was in the throes of the bourgeois revolution, aimed at overthrowing the feudal remnants upheld by the monarchists and Carlists, and the party that would emerge strongest by early 1873, upon King Amadeo’s abdication, would be that of the intransigent bourgeois who would not only obtain the Republic, but would attempt to push it to their positions and seize power, to decree the federal state called for in their programme.

In the elections for the Cortes the Internationalists, aligned with the General Council in New York, would claim it was the decisive moment to take the initiative, initially by entering the government en masse thanks to a favourable shift in working-class opposition and thereby completing the destruction of the monarchist parties. The anarchists on the other hand, not knowing what to do, since entering government would have gone against their anti-authoritarian principles, will give ‘freedom of choice’ to their militants for the elections, so that the disorganisation of the workers in the elections will result in a resounding defeat, while several Alliancists will have no problem in principle in being elected.

But their political incapacity will be revealed when in June the intransigent bourgeoisie will push several cities to insurrection. In the Spanish working-class city par excellence, Barcelona, where the Alliancists are particularly strong, they will not call on the proletariat to take up arms but will proclaim... a general strike. In Engels’ analysis in ‘Volkstaat’, entitled The Bakuninists at Work, it is rightly noted that if Barcelona had taken part in the insurrection, it would have been very difficult for the Spanish Government to save itself. Where the Alliancists did lead the insurrection, in Alcoy and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, they not only assumed power in the newly formed local revolutionary juntas but did nothing to organise the proletarians for the defence of the cities from the army, so that the latter would have no problem suppressing the revolt. Not even in Andalusia, where several cities will revolt, will the anarchists have any problem sitting in the governments of the various cities, as well as in following the political bandwagon of the intransigents. In addition to this, the propaganda for federalism and local autonomy in the insurrections sealed the defeat of the revolts, which collapsed within days.

Engels commented: ‘As soon as they were faced with a serious revolutionary situation, the Bakuninists had to throw the whole of their old programme overboard. First they sacrificed their doctrine of absolute abstention from political, and especially electoral, activities. Then anarchy, the abolition of the State, shared the same fate. Instead of abolishing the State they tried, on the contrary, to set up a number of new, small states. They then dropped the principle that the workers must not take part in any revolution that did not have as its aim the immediate and complete emancipation of the proletariat, and they themselves took part in a movement that was notoriously bourgeois. Finally they went against the dogma they had only just proclaimed – that the establishment of a revolutionary government is but another fraud another betrayal of the working class – for they sat quite comfortably in the juntas of the various towns, and moreover almost everywhere as an impotent minority outvoted and politically exploited by the bourgeoisie (...) In short, in Spain the Bakuninists have offered us an unsurpassable example of how not to make a revolution’.

In an attempt to dismantle the personal – today we would say ‘media’ – myth of Bakunin that was then influencing the International, our people, forced to defend the organisation, resolved to publicly denounce his infamies. In order to close the clash once and for all and to clarify to the various sections the nature of the controversy between the General Council and the anarchists, Marx and Engels sent out a circular letter in March 1872 entitled The Fictitious Splits of the International. On 5 March, the General Council had unanimously decided to circulate the document, which represented the International, since up to that point the London Council had preferred to avoid any controversy. ‘the support which European reaction finds in the scandals provoked by that society at a time when the International is undergoing the most serious trial since its foundation obliges it to present a historical review of all these intrigues’.

The location of the 5th Congress of the International had been decided in the Netherlands, at The Hague. This provided the pretext for further uproar among the anarchists, as it was difficult for the Spanish, Italians, and Swiss to reach. But how could the Congress be held in another place if the International was illegal in the other countries and the police were hounding its militants in all their movements?

Polemically, the anarchists organised a congress of a supposed Italian Federation to be held between 4 and 6 August in Rimini. The Congress officially declared the split from the International and the foundation of the Anti-Authoritarian International.

Among the anarchists present at the Rimini Congress were Andrea Costa (who a few years later would switch to socialism), Carlo Cafiero (already in correspondence with Engels and author of a fine Compendium of Capital) and 21-year-old Errico Malatesta. The majority of the sections represented were from Emilia-Romagna and central Italy. The Milanese of the ‘Plebe’ did not join and kept their attitude oscillating between the official International and the anarchist one. The Spanish limited themselves to sending a message urging them to take the battle to the Hague Congress. As can be seen, in reality the Rimini Congress had no international scope, like the Sonvillier Congress.

In Rimini, the constitution of an Italian Federation was decreed with its own statutes and dues, but with the declared will to open up to Europe. At the Congress, the Preamble of the International’s Statutes were accepted, though in a watered-down and unofficial translation, which, among other errors, saw the substitution of ‘working class’ with the more generic ‘workers’, which better suited, it was said, the ‘Italian situation’.

It was decided not to take part in the Hague Congress and instead to organise a counter-congress in Neuchâtel, to be held at the same time as the Congress of the International. Under pressure, however, from the Spanish, Belgians, and Russians, the Bakuninists eventually accepted attendance at The Hague, but were ready to walk out of the Congress the moment they went against the Rimini resolutions. In fact, the Jura Federation declared: ‘If the Congress does not accept the principles of the International set out above (abolition of the General Council, etc.) the delegates, in agreement with the representatives of the Anti-Authoritarian Federations, will have to withdraw’ (Imperative Mandate of the Delegates of the Jura Federation for the Hague Congress).

Definitive independence from the London Council and from the International was declared in mid-September at the Congress of Saint-Imier where, among other things, a pact was proclaimed between the free autonomous federations, which would henceforth be able to determine autonomously on the political line to be taken. At Saint-Imier it was declared that ‘the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat’ and that ‘any organisation of political power, however provisional and revolutionary it may proclaim itself, in order to achieve the aforementioned destruction, can only be a further deception and would be as dangerous for the proletariat as all existing governments today’.

Engels took it upon himself to respond to the ‘Riminists’: ‘It should be pointed out that of the 21 sections whose delegates have signed this resolution, there is only one (Naples) which belongs to the International. None of the other 20 sections has ever fulfilled any of the conditions prescribed by our General Rules and Regulations for the admission of new sections. An Italian federation of the Working Men’s Association therefore does not exist. Those who want to find it, form their own international outside the great Working Men’s Association. It will be the task of the Hague Congress to deliberate on these usurpations’. (Address of the General Council to the Italian Sections on the Rimini Conference).

After the Hague Congress, the Anti-Authoritarian International sought to expand in Italy, aiming to take advantage of the disappearance of the International from the rest of European countries. The anarchists, who declared themselves the historical successors of the glorious International Workingmen’s Association, will gain a foothold primarily through figures such as Bakunin, Andrea Costa, Carlo Cafiero, and Errico Malatesta. In Italy, they counted 130 sections and 25,000 followers, mostly located in Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, and Central Italy. In just two years, however, the increasingly unfavourable situation will have a significant impact on the organisation, which will see a drastic decline in the number of its militants.

The practice of organisation will be left to the free initiative and improvised opinions of the individual sections, resulting in an organisation in which some will struggle within the ranks through economic battles, others will attempt adventurist coups intended as demonstrations, others will opt for the outright terrorist and individualist act.

L. Faenza writes in Marxists and Riminists: ‘That eagerness to act, that fever of action, which in 1874, two years after the Rimini Conference, had triggered the Bologna movement, already failed at birth at the Prati di Caprara (...) had first gathered, Costa, Cafiero, and Malatesta at the Baronata, and it was precisely at the Baronata that they had come up with that fantastical plan that was supposed to bring about a “collapse” in Italy and give rise to a new order based on anarchic and free “communism”. Starting from the hills of Emilia, the uprising was to immediately spread to Tuscany and Apulia, where Malatesta, ready to act, found himself almost entirely alone (...) After the failed Bologna attempt, in 1877 those young men had tried again in the Matese: no longer assaults on palaces and churches, according to the cry Costa had made three years earlier to the bands heading for Bologna, but offensives launched from the countryside to stir up the peasant masses. In the rugged and desolate area of the Matese (...) a meagre band of internationalists, including fourteen from Emilia-Romagna (...) led by Cafiero, Malatesta, and Pietro Cesare Ceccarelli from Savignano, thus met with a second disastrous failure in their attempt to spark a great blaze after having ransacked the archives of some little mountain communes’.

By the end of the 1870s, the anarchist International was in acute crisis. In 1879, through a split, Andrea Costa, until then a symbolic figure of Italian anarchism, officially switched to socialism. In 1881, Andrea Costa founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna, which for Costa was to represent an initial nucleus of a future national party; in Lombardy the Federation of Upper Italy would emerge, substantially anti-anarchist in orientation and to which Engels would look with hope. In the South, where Malatesta would be more successful in resisting the socialist advance, they would have to contend with Benoit Malon’s social reformist movement.

After Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels, and Basel, the 5th Congress of the International was held in The Hague amid a decidedly difficult climate, due both to the counter-revolution now dominant across Europe and to the internal clashes with the anarchists. Marx commented to Sorge on 21 June 1872 that ‘At this congress the life or death of the International will be at stake’.

The Congress was held between 2 and 7 September and the official report of the General Council was written as usual by Marx, this time present at the Congress, and was unanimously approved. The report retraced the events of the class struggles of the last two years and emphasised the heroism of a proletariat that, despite great hardships, continued its struggle for emancipation. Marx’s report concluded as follows: ‘The difference between a working class without an International, and a working class with an International, becomes most evident if we look back to the period of 1848. Years were required for the working class itself to recognise the Insurrection of June, 1848, as the work of its own vanguard. The Paris Commune was at once acclaimed by the universal proletariat’.

At the historic Congress four key points were established: 1) Definitive repudiation of the anarchist theses; 2) Confirmation of the functions of the General Council, that is, of centralisation; 3) Necessity of the proletarian dictatorship as a transitional revolutionary form; 4) Relocation of the General Council from London to New York.

Regarding the anarchist question, a proper commission of inquiry was set up to examine the evidence coming in from various sections on the subversive behaviour of the Alliance. Engels himself was on the commission. The aim was to publish, once it had been collected, the material demonstrating the Alliance’s true nature. The text was published in early 1873 with an account of the whole affair. On the issue Engels told the Congress: ‘In other words, the aim of the Alliance is to impose its sectarian programme on the entire International by means of its secret organisation. This can be, most effectively achieved by taking over the local and Federal Councils and the General Council, using the power of a secret organisation to elect members of the Alliance to these bodies. This was precisely what the Alliance did in cases where it felt that it had a good chance of success (...) Clearly no one would wish to hold it against the Alliancists for propagating their own programme. The International is composed of socialists of the most various shades of opinion. Its programme is sufficiently broad to accommodate all of them: the Bakunin sect was admitted on the same conditions as all the others. The charge levelled against it is precisely its violation of these conditions’.

The issue was not exclusively disciplinary. The International, our party, as Marx defines it, gloriously spearheading, though not Marxist, the Commune’s assault on the heavens, confirmed itself as a healthy political organism of the class and as a vindication of our prediction that historical experience would lead the proletariat to recognise, among many, its genuine communist orientation. This indeed occurred, with the triumph of Marxism within it. But this search for the correct path implied the selflessness of all, fraternally united in the common battle. The anarchists came to betray this original agreement and thus broke with the discipline and common method. There is a necessary relationship between the maturing of class consciousness and the anarchists’ refusal to renounce the old sect-like ideologies and their recourse to non-communist methods. Another party was being born.

And on the conception of the party, the results of The Hague were fundamental, a point of arrival from which all subsequent experiences of the movement would set out again, from the Second to the Third International to the Communist Left. The following Article was included in the Statutes, a gigantic monolith marking the culmination of that glorious cycle of proletarian struggles and upon which generations of fighters to come would take their stand:

Eight years of the Association’s life, culminating in the trial by fire of the Paris Commune, experimentally demonstrated the correctness of the Marxist orientation: those who did not see then would never see again. For the supreme goal, the abolition of classes, the Revolution unfolds, in its three moments, as Party, Trade Union, and Dictatorship, across the interconnected planes of Programme, Economy, and Politics. The roles of the party and the trade union, which until then in the Association had not yet appeared fully distinct, here take on precise contours and formal definition, and their necessary reciprocal relationship is clearly established. For the trade union (‘already effected’), the comparison of the lever (‘at the same time, to serve as a lever’) is adopted, taken from mechanics like that of Lenin’s transmission belt, in the struggle against the political power of the exploiters. The class, led by a centralised party, uses its defensive struggles as a lever for the declared purpose of the revolutionary seizure and exercise of power, with a view to the destruction of the capitalist economic structure and the definitive abolition of classes.

The Congress voted to entrust greater powers to the General Council, which was obliged ‘to execute the Congress Resolutions, and to take care that in every country the principles and the General Rules and Regulations of the International are strictly observed’. In the event of indiscipline, the General Council could expel a section pending the decision of the next congress. In an assembly held in Amsterdam on 8 September, Marx would declare: ‘the Congress of The Hague considered it proper and necessary to enlarge the authority of the General Council and to centralise all action for the approaching struggle, which would otherwise be impotent in isolation. And, moreover, where else could the authorisation of the General Council arouse disquiet if not among our enemies? Does the General Council have a bureaucracy and an armed police to compel obedience? Is not its authority entirely a moral one, and does it not submit its decisions to the judgment of the various federations entrusted with their execution?’.

The Commune had provided a lesson in intransigence, both in regard to the contingent organisation and the future state of the proletariat, lessons already drawn in that magnificent Address. Only now could the proletariat confront the bourgeoisie, in revolutionary moments, on equal footing, not only with its own doctrine and ‘worldview’, but also with its own independent military science of revolutionary warfare, later merely restored and confirmed in 1917 in Russia.

The decision to transfer the General Council from London to New York, at the urging of Engels and Marx in particular, appeared unexpected in Congress. Of all the resolutions this was the most difficult to pass: after a long debate only 30 voted in favour, 14 voted for London, 13 abstained. The Blanquists especially complained that the move would decree the death of the International.

Why then did Marx and Engels push for this solution? The question is instructive.

First of all, the dissolution of the International would have occurred shortly in any case. Not only was the counter-revolution raging throughout Europe making the International’s situation very difficult, but the proletariat itself, after the massacres of the Commune, feared a return to revolutionary struggle.

In eight years, the International had achieved tremendous gains, programmatically marked by the path from the Inaugural Address to the resolutions of Geneva, Brussels, and Basel, from the Address on the Civil War in France to the final Hague resolutions. All of this represented an enormous patrimony for the future proletariat that had to be defended, amid the unfavourable cycle now opening, against anarchist manoeuvres, potential careerists, and the conspiratorial voluntarism of the Blanquists. The victorious revolutionary programme, just formulated at the extreme apex of a lost battle, would be taken up again, once the time was ripe, no longer by an association of various revolutionary ideologies but by a party constituted from birth on a coherent body of doctrine and on a unique and undisputed historical balance sheet.

This could not be understood by the Blanquists who opted for their split from the International. Revolutionary voluntarists, they measured revolutionary capacity in a given period by the will to act and conspiratorial energy of a handful of revolutionaries. ‘Let us not forget’, they stated at the Congress, ‘that the value of a group depends less on the number than on the energy of those who make it up (...) Around the revolutionary Commune let the proletariat unite and regroup, around the Commune let the call to battle be raised and soon to the victory of the social revolution’.

The Blanquists were, within the socialist camp, as Engels would admit in 1874, not far from our Marxist communism, but their insufficient grasp of the historical dialectic led them onto a terrain of flawed tactics and erroneous political conclusions.

In his letter to Bebel of 20 June, Engels is very clear about what his conception of the party was and what the perspective of the International should be: ‘One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for “unity”. Those who have this word most often on their lips are those who sow the most dissension, just as at present the Jura Bakuninists in Switzerland, who have provoked all the splits, scream for nothing so much as for unity. Those unity fanatics are either the people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything up together into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again in much more acute opposition because they are now all together in one pot (...) or else they are people who consciously or unconsciously (...) want to adulterate the movement. For this reason the greatest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues are at certain moments the loudest shouters for unity. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble and been more treacherous than the unity shouters.

‘Naturally every party leadership wants to see successes and this is quite good too. But there are circumstances in which one must have the courage to sacrifice momentary success for more important things. Especially a party like ours, whose ultimate success is so absolutely certain, and which has developed so enormously in our own lifetime and under our own eyes, momentary success is by no means always and absolutely necessary. Take the International, for instance. After the Commune it had its colossal success. The bourgeoisie, struck all of a heap, ascribed omnipotence to it. The great mass of the membership believed things would stay like that for all eternity. We knew very well that the bubble must burst. All the riff-raff attached themselves to it. The sectarians within it began to flourish, and misused the International in the hope that the most stupid and mean actions would be permitted them. We did not allow that. Well knowing that the bubble must burst some time all the same, our concern was not to delay the catastrophe but to take care that the International emerged from it pure and unadulterated.

‘The bubble burst at the Hague, and you know that the majority of Congress members went home sick with disappointment. And yet nearly all these disappointed people, who imagined they would find the ideal of universal brotherhood and reconciliation in the International, had far more bitter quarrels at home than those which broke out at the Hague! Now the sectarian quarrel-mongers are preaching conciliation and decrying us as the intolerant and the dictators. And if we had come out in a conciliatory way at the Hague, if we had hushed up the breaking out of the split – what would have been the result? The sectarians, especially the Bakuninists, would have got another year in which to perpetrate, in the name of the International, much greater stupidities and infamies even; the workers of the most developed countries would have turned away in disgust; the bubble would not have burst but, pierced by pinpricks, would have slowly collapsed (…)

‘For the rest, old Hegel has already said: A party proves itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can stand the split. The movement of the proletariat necessarily passes through different stages of development; at every stage one section of people lags behind and does not join in the further advance; and this alone explains why it is that actually the “solidarity of the proletariat” is everywhere realised in different party groupings which carry on life and death feuds with one another, as the Christian sects in the Roman Empire did amidst the worst persecutions’.

How can we fail to recall at this point Lassalle’s famous phrase from 1852, which Lenin will quote at the beginning of What Is To Be Done: ‘The greatest proof of a party’s weakness is its diffuseness and the blurring of clear demarcations; a party becomes stronger by purging itself’.

In September 1872, the General Council was therefore transferred to New York. Among its members was Friedrich Adolph Sorge, a friend of Marx and Engels and their trusted correspondent. New York remained the leadership centre of the International until 1876, the year of its official dissolution. In reality, however, even restricting ourselves to mere chronicle, nothing of significance was added during this period to the class struggle of the proletariat.

Marx wrote to Kugelmann on 18 May 1874: ‘Notwithstanding all diplomatic moves, a new war is inevitable au peu plus tôt, au peu plus tard (a little sooner, a little later ed.), and before the ending of this there will hardly be violent popular movements anywhere, or, at the most, they will remain local and unimportant’.

Despite the efforts, order reigned supreme across Europe. The French proletariat had been crushed by Thiers’ reaction, but in Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire too, the proletariat was defeated by police repression and by a situation that had so suddenly tipped in favour of the bourgeoisie. In Portugal, despite the sudden proliferation of internationalist sections, especially in Lisbon, the police apparatus of the state had the upper hand. Only in England did the proletariat boldly continue to fight, but by then it was irreversibly channeled into the bourgeois leadership of the Trade Unions.

Spain, on the other hand, was experiencing genuine uprisings, but the anarchist leadership fully revealed its defeatist character.

It was therefore inevitable that the General Council in New York could not act in any meaningful way. It is telling that when the 6th Congress of the International was organised for September 1873 in Geneva, the participants were exclusively Swiss. New York could only send its Report, but no delegates of its own nor from any other country arrived in Geneva.

These are Marx’s clear words written to Sorge, on 27 September 1873, concerned about the failure of the Congress: ‘As I view European conditions it is quite useful to let the formal organisation of the International recede into the background for the time being, but, if possible, not to relinquish control of the central point in New York so that no idiots like Perret or adventurers like Cluseret may seize the leadership and discredit the whole business. Events and the inevitable development and complication of things will of themselves see to it that the International shall rise again improved in form. For the present it suffices not to let the connection with the most capable people in the various countries slip altogether out of our hands and as for the rest not to give a hang for the Geneva local decisions, in fact simply to ignore them’.

A year later, in September 1874, Engels could say to Sorge that ‘the old International is entirely wound up and at an end’. The formal dissolution of the International took place in Philadelphia on 15 July 1876. The official document states: ‘The International is dead, the bourgeoisie of all countries will once again cry, blaring their scorn and their joy at the decisions of the Conference, which they will consider as proof of the defeat of the international workers’ movement. Let us not be disconcerted by the cries of our enemies! Taking into account the political situation in Europe, we have abandoned the organisation of the International, but, in its place, we see its principles recognised and defended by the progressive workers of the whole civilised world. We leave it to our comrades in Europe to take some time to recover their strength and take care of matters in their own countries and, before long, they will undoubtedly be able to tear down all the barriers that separate them from one another and from the workers in other parts of the world’.

It is noted, however, that both the leadership of the newly founded Workingmen’s Party of the United States and the Federal Council retained the task of reconvening an international congress in Europe ‘as soon as events permit’ and further promised to preserve ‘all the documents of the Council until a new international body is established’.

The new International would be resurrected, after 15 years, Engels still alive, based solely on Marx’s doctrine. But this, as the saying goes, is another story, one that a forthcoming party study will patiently unravel.