Abstract
This chapter explores Marx’s personal commitment to the politics of class struggle through his participation in the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). The IWA was not conceived by Marx, but emerged from a meeting organized by French and English workers, who invited him to attend. Having devoted himself for more than a decade exclusively to the critique of political economy and research into capitalist economics, Marx made the IWA his immediate priority from 1864 to 1872. He was never more than just one member of its General Council, though usually called upon to write important letters and articulate political positions. While he had some success in opposing the political ideas of both Lassalle and Proudhon in the International’s early years, over the long run the organization became polarized between a majority committed to the anarchism of Bakunin and a strong insurrectionist minority inspired by the ideas of Blanqui and the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx and his supporters were few in number, though he was recognized as among the organization’s leaders. He was also politically adroit, and succeeded in establishing among the Rules that the working class needed to constitute itself as a political party, contrary to the position of the Bakuninists.
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Notes
- 1.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, vol. 29, 257–419.
- 2.
Ibid., 540–2, n57.
- 3.
Marx’s letters of 1860 are preoccupied with Vogt’s calumnies, widely reported in Germany, including the astonishing claim that Marx had run a racket during the 1848 Revolution, extorting money from vulnerable communists in Germany (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1860–64, Letters, MECW, vol. 41, 43). The whole matter is documented in Marx’s Herr Vogt, MECW, vol. 17, 21–329.
- 4.
Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, MECW, vol. 30, 455, n1.
- 5.
Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, December 8, 1861, MECW, vol. 40, 217.
- 6.
Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, November 4, 1857, MECW, vol. 42, 15–8, n18, n19. For a brief history of the International, and a selection of its most important documents (including those that are cited here), see Marcello Musto, Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- 7.
Frederick Engels to Karl Marx, April 8, 1863, MECW, vol. 41, 465.
- 8.
Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, April 9, 1863, MECW, vol. 41, 468.
- 9.
Karl Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 29, 1860, MECW, vol. 41, 81–2.
- 10.
Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, November 4, 1864, MECW, vol. 42, spells out his view of the meeting and his intentions in what followed.
- 11.
Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW, vol. 6, 505.
- 12.
Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association”, MECW, vol. 20, 5.
- 13.
Ibid., 12.
- 14.
Karl Marx, “Provisional Rules of the Association”, MECW, vol. 20, 14.
- 15.
The original Rules of the Association referred specifically to Europe, which only was changed in the revised rules written by Marx and Engels in 1871.
- 16.
David Fernbach, “Introduction”, in The First International and After (London: Penguin/NLR, 1974), 10–3.
- 17.
I have discussed this in virtually all my previous work, and throughout this book, and will cite here only George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1987) and “Critical Thinking and Class Analysis: Historical Materialism and Social Theory”, Socialism and Democracy 27, no. 1 (March 2013): 19–56. The foundation for this historical conception lies in the work of Robert Brenner, most notably two articles collected (with rejoinders) in T. H. Aston, and C. H. E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Ellen M. Wood has contributed importantly to these ideas in Democracy Against Capitalism: Rethinking Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002). Michael Zmolek’s book, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2013) provides a lengthy historical analysis of the long development and late realization of industrial capitalism in England.
- 18.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Sphere, 1977), 56; François Crouzet, “The Historiography of French Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century”, Economic History Review 56, 2 (2003): 223.
- 19.
Karl Marx, “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland,” MECW, vol. 21, 86.
- 20.
Ibid., 87.
- 21.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, MECW, vol. 35, 511. There is an enormous literature on this issue, drawing particularly on a chapter in Marx’s original manuscript analysing the formal and real “subsumption” of labour to capital, which was not included in Capital. I take account of the published text alone here simply because it is entirely sufficient to the point.
- 22.
I am indebted for much of what follows on France to the analysis of Xavier Lafrance in his as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, Citizens and Wage-Labourers: Capitalism and the Formation of a Working Class in France (York University, 2013).
- 23.
Alain Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail: une évolution contrastée entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle”, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 33, no. 2 (2006): 101–20 (published in English as “Industrial tribunals and the establishment of a kind of common law of labour in nineteenth-century France”, in Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 24.
Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail”, 103, 113–4.
- 25.
Ibid., 105–9.
- 26.
Ibid., 109 [my translation].
- 27.
Ibid., 112.
- 28.
Ibid., 116.
- 29.
See my analysis in Rethinking the French Revolution, 200–3.
- 30.
For a classic typology of the forms of working-class organization in France, see Louis Levine, Syndicalism in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 26–33. On the compagnonnages, and particularly their political role after the Revolution, see William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
- 31.
There were 14,000 prosecutions between 1825 and 1864, and 9,000 strikers were imprisoned; Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in 19th Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010), 58.
- 32.
Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”, Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 49. Magraw offers an excellent overview of the role of syndicalism in French politics.
- 33.
Karl Marx, “Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party”, MECW, vol. 24, 340; Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, “The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm. See also Frederick Engels to Eduard Bernstein, October 25, 1881, MECW, vol. 46, 144–51.
- 34.
A remark to Paul Lafargue that Engels reported to Bernstein, MECW, vol. 46, 356.
- 35.
Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914”.
- 36.
Dick Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914”, in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 102–3.
- 37.
Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 199ff.
- 38.
Ibid., 206–7.
- 39.
Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, MECW, vol. 24, 75–99.
- 40.
Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914”, 101.
- 41.
Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution, provides an excellent history of this struggle over control of production. There are many histories of English unions and working-class organizations, but one would be hard pressed to recommend any work ahead of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
- 42.
See Gordon Phillips, “The British Labour Movement Before 1914”, in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (Oxford: Berg, 1989).
- 43.
Though Belgium was far more developed in industry on a per capita basis than either France or Germany, and its workers played a crucial role in the International, its small size undercut the impact it might otherwise have had.
- 44.
Phillips, “The British Labour Movement Before 1914”, 39.
- 45.
Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914”, 125.
- 46.
Proudhon anticipated the transformation of society largely through the formation of producer cooperatives, and it was largely to the end of realizing this that he strongly advocated the idea of “the People’s Bank”.
- 47.
Albert S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 106.
- 48.
Fernbach does see the history of the IWA in these terms, “Introduction”, 16–9.
- 49.
Marx to Engels, November 4, 1864, 18–9.
- 50.
In 1874–5, Marx commented importantly on the text of Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy, throughout which Bakunin criticized Marx explicitly (Karl Marx, “Notes on Bakunin’s book Statehood and Anarchy”, MECW, vol. 24, 485–526). Bakunin died in 1876. The literature on Marx and Bakunin is enormous.
- 51.
Frederick Engels, “Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees”, MECW, vol. 24, 13.
- 52.
For more on Blanquism as a political force, see Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
- 53.
Engels, “Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees”, 13.
- 54.
This was, however, evident as early as in his first letter to Engels on the founding of the IWA, in which he related finessing a dreadful statement of principles through his unanticipated preparation of the Inaugural Address, which was then met with unanimous approval in its stead.
- 55.
Karl Marx, “To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America”, MECW, vol. 20, 20.
- 56.
Karl Marx, “Address to the National Labour Union of the United States”, MECW, vol. 21, 53–5. The threat of war loomed in 1869 as the US pressed claims against Britain for damages resulting from the Alabama, a ship built in Britain and delivered to the Confederacy, and other violations of neutrality. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sought the enormous sum of $2 billion, with the possible alternative of annexation of British Columbia, the Red River Colony, and Nova Scotia. The claims ultimately were resolved through arbitration.
- 57.
Marx did not himself attend any of the Congresses until the last, at The Hague, in 1872, but he submitted resolutions through the General Council. There were, of course, other resolutions as well.
- 58.
Office of General Council, International Working Men’s Association, Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, 1866, and the Congress of Brussels, 1868 (London: IWMA, 1868).
- 59.
Karl Marx, Synopses of Speeches on Education (August 10 and 17, 1869), in General Council, International Workingmen’s Association, The General Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 140–1, 146–7.
- 60.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Resolutions of the Conference of Delegates of the International Working Men’s Association”, MECW, vol. 22, 424.
- 61.
Karl Marx, “The London Conference of The International Working Men’s Association September 17–23, 1871”, MECW, vol. 22, 246.
- 62.
Karl Marx, “Value, Price and Profit” [sometimes published as Wages, Price and Profit], MECW, vol. 20, 102–59.
- 63.
Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, August 8, 1870, MECW, vol. 44, 39.
- 64.
Karl Marx to Louis Kugelmann, April 12, 1871, MECW, vol. 44, 131.
- 65.
Aside from The Civil War in France, MECW, vol. 22, 307–59, see Marx’s letters of April 12, 17, and 26, May 13, and June 12, 1871, MECW, vol. 44.
- 66.
Karl Marx, “Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance”, in General Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 322–4.
- 67.
Jacques Freymond et al., La Première Internationale (Geneva: E. Droz, 1962), 2: 191–3.
- 68.
International Workingmen’s Association, 5th Congress, The Hague Congress of the First International: September 2–7, 1872, Vol. 1, Minutes and Documents (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 282.
- 69.
Which in any case would also have to take account of Lenin as a Marxist—an entirely different matter—as well as the unique historical context created by the Bolshevik Revolution.
- 70.
Bernstein did not deny that Marx was a revolutionary, especially originally, but saw a second, reformist current in his ideas, which he sought particularly to develop; Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1912).
- 71.
On the state as a form of human alienation, see above, Chap. 3, 77f f.
- 72.
That is, socialist or communist—not “libertarian”—anarchism.
- 73.
On Lenin’s conception of the party, see V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1961), 5: 347–530. On the organization of the Third International, see H. Helmut Gruber, International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967) and Fernando Claudin, The Communist movement: from Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
- 74.
General Council, Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, n57 [original emphasis].
- 75.
Karl Marx, “General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association”, MECW, vol. 23, 7.
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Comninel, G.C. (2019). Marx and the Politics of the First International. In: Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57534-0_12
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