Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 17: The International Working Men's Association

In the long years of exile Marx had so consistently declined to associate himself with any sort of political organisation that he felt that the change of attitude indicated by the appearance of his name on the list of founders of a new international workers' organisation in the autumn of 1864 required an explanation to his friends and sympathisers. On November 29, 1864, he wrote to his old friend Weydemeyer that he had consented 'because it is an affair in which it is possible to do important work.' The initiative for the formation of the new organisation had come from men who were leaders of really active mass-organisations. That was the factor that distinguished it from its predecessors, and it was the decisive factor in causing Marx to abandon his customary aloofness. He saw its negative sides plainly enough. He was only too well aware of its heterogeneous nature and the wavering and unclear political views of many of those who were at the back of it. Nevertheless he joined it. 'I knew that this time real "forces" were at work both on the London and the Paris sides,' he explained to Engels on November 4, 'and that was the reason why I decided to depart from my otherwise inflexible rule to decline any such invitations.' Engels approved of both Marx's decision and Marx's reasons. It was necessary, he said, to be guided by the 'real circumstances.' To accept contact with the active leaders of a real movement was their duty. 'It is good that we should once more be coming into contact with people who at least represent their class. After all, that is the main thing in the end,' he wrote.

It was indeed the main thing. The immediate future demonstrated what a huge sphere of activity the new organisation opened up for Marx. The new organisation was the 'International Working Men's Association,' which was so soon destined to become famous and is known to-day as the First International. A new epoch in the history of the workers' movement and in Marx's life began with its foundation. The 'sleepless night of exile' was over, and with it the loneliness and isolation from active, practical life. Marx became once more, for the second time in his life, the organiser of the political struggle of the working class.

At the beginning of the sixties there was an upsurge of the workers' movement not only in Germany, as has already been mentioned, but 'also in England and in France, the two countries which took the chief part in the formation of the International Working Men's Association. After a decade of apathy and paralysis, in which the active struggle of the proletariat was practically at a standstill, the workers once more took up the weapon of the strike and showed a new tendency to organise. The workers in France had different traditions and fought under different conditions from those of the workers in England, and "their principles and practice necessarily differed, but on both sides of the Channel they sooner or later realised that without independent organisations of their own they must necessarily remain impotent. Even if theoretical clarity were sometimes wanting, experience in the end compelled it.

French and English very soon saw that it would be necessary to get together. There were two outstanding reasons for this. The strike movement, which assumed particularly large dimensions in England, demanded a close entente cordiale with the workers of the other country, from which the employers attempted to import strike-breakers. In addition there arose at this time a whole series of international questions in which French and English workers must make common cause.

The first contacts between English and French workers were made in 1862. The great World Exhibition took place in London in that year. It was visited by a delegation of French workers. The idea of this visit arose in Bonapartist circles which nourished a 'Caesarian Socialism' of their own and aimed at propitiating the workers with the Empire. They had the support of the Emperor's cousin, Prince Napoleon, the so-called 'Plon-Plon,' who saw to it that the workers were allowed to form their own organisations in the factories to elect their delegates and raise funds to finance the journey. Such a 'legal opportunity' had of course to be exploited. Among those who took part in the electoral campaign and were elected to the delegation were men who had inaugurated an independent workers' movement in France. Many other delegates were inevitably Bonapartists to a greater or less degree, but the representatives of the most active English workers' associations were not represented on the London committee formed to welcome the French delegation either. The London committee owed its formation to moderate Liberal Members of Parliament and equally moderate men of the co-operative movement--people who represented the extreme Right wing of the workers' movement and took their stand on the principle of class peace, with which the speeches made at the meeting of welcome on August 5, 1862, were in entire conformity. The English speakers declared that 'good understanding between our employers and ourselves is the only way to smooth the difficulties by which we are at present surrounded.'

The meeting was really tame, with unctuous speeches and love, friendship and fraternal kisses. Festival of harmony though it was, with it the history of the 'Red International' begins. Apart from the beautiful ceremonies, the independent French delegates met the young English trade union leaders, entirely unfêted, and sowed the first seeds of the Anglo-French workers' alliance, the fruits of which manifested themselves in the following year.

The old sympathy for Poland and the old hatred of Russian absolutism were still alive in England and France. Both drew fresh strength from the Polish rising of 1863. The workers in both countries demanded intervention on Poland's behalf. Petitions to Napoleon bore hundreds of signatures, and a huge workers' meeting in England sent a deputation to the Prime Minister. The French Emperor declined to receive the workers, but Prince Napoleon gave them to understand that France would like to intervene, in fact it would prefer to do so to-day rather than to-morrow, but unfortunately action was hampered by English sabotage. On the English side Palmerston deplored the impossibility of stepping in on Poland's behalf, however much he would have liked to have done so, because France, unfortunately, insisted on standing aside. Then there arose a plan for a joint Anglo-French pro-Polish demonstration. It took place in London on July 22, 1863. A special delegation came from Paris, and this time it consisted exclusively of adherents of the independent workers' movement. The demonstration failed in its purpose, if for no other reason than that by this time the Polish rising was on the verge of collapse. But before the French delegates left England a decision had been made which was destined to be of great historical importance. They and the representatives of the English workers 'agreed in principle to the foundation of an international association of workers and elected a committee to do the work preparatory to an inaugural meeting. The preliminaries dragged on for more than a year, 'addresses' were exchanged about the duties of the future association, manifestoes were drafted, and finally the inaugural meeting took place in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, on September 28, 1864.

Marx took no part in the preliminary work. He read about the meeting of July 22, 1863, in the newspapers, followed the course of the Polish rising with passionate interest, became indignant at the attitude of British diplomacy, and was considering writing a pamphlet on the Polish question. The Anglo-French workers' demonstration could not possibly have escaped his notice. But he had no direct contact with the organisers of the meeting and knew nothing of the preparatory work that was quietly going on. He only heard of the organisers' plans a week before the inaugural meeting. A young French exile, Le Lubez, a Republican, was the contact man between the French workers and the English trade unionists, and he told Marx who were at the back of the movement and what their intentions were and invited him to take part in the meeting as the representative of the German workers. Marx recognised that this was a serious undertaking and accepted the invitation. Marx suggested his friend Eccarius, an old member of the Communist League, as spokesman for the Germans and he himself 'assisted as a silent figure on the platform.'

The meeting was a complete success. The big hall was filled to the point of suffocation. Speeches were made by Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians and Irish. An unanimous resolution was passed to found an International Working Men's Association, with headquarters in London, and a committee was elected to draft the programme and statutes. Marx was elected a member of this committee.

The committee was far too big. It had fifty-five members, of whom twenty-seven were English. These were mainly trade union leaders. Of the rest the French and Germans had nine representatives each, and the Italians, the Swiss and the Poles two each. The majority of the non-English members were émigrés. Politically the committee was heterogeneous, including as it did old Chartists and Owenites, Blanquists and followers of Proudhon, Polish Democrats and adherents of Mazzini. Its social composition, however, was far more uniform. Workers formed the preponderating majority.

In these circumstances it was not very easy to agree on the fundamental aims of the association, its programme and its statutes. Marx was unable to take part in the committee meetings during the first few weeks, partly because he was ill, partly for the simple reason that the invitations never reached him. In the meantime the committee asked Weston, an old Owenite, to draw up a draft programme, a task to which he devoted himself with the most righteous zeal, pondering over each sentence for weeks at a time. The task of translating the statutes of the Italian workers' association, which it was intended to make the basis of the associations' own statutes, devolved upon Major Wolff, Mazzini's secretary. When the two finally laid the fruit of their labours before the committee, its inadequacy was patent even to the least exacting. Weston's exposition, in Marx's opinion and everybody else's too, was 'full of the most extreme confusion and unspeakably verbose.' His suggested statutes were more impossible still. Mazzini repudiated the class-struggle and believed in solving the problems of modern industrial society with sentimental phrases of the kind that had been the fashion in the thirties. The old Carbonaro, who had been the leader of the movement for national liberation in Italy for generations, placed the national question above all else and could conceive of no method of organisation other than that of the Carbonari. The Italian workers' organisations which adhered to him were nothing but benefit societies founded to help in the national struggle. Apart from its other shortcomings, the Italian draft was rendered impossible by the fact that, in Marx's words, 'it aimed at something quite impossible, a kind of central government of the European working class (of course with Mazzini in the background).' The committee gave both drafts to Le Lubez to revise. The result was, if possible, worse than ever. Le Lubez presented his text at a committee meeting on October 18, the first that Marx attended. Marx, as he wrote to Engels, 'was really shocked as he listened to good Le Lubez's frightfully phrased, badly written and entirely ill-considered preamble, pretending to be a declaration of principles, with Mazzini peeping out through every word, and encrusted as it was with vague scraps of French Socialism.' Marx made 'gentle' opposition and succeeded in having Le Lubez's draft passed to a sub-committee to be revised again.

Marx now got to work himself. He summed up the sub-committee's duties in his own characteristic way. It was decided 'if possible not to leave a single line of the thing standing.' The sub-committee left him a free hand. In place of the declaration of principles Marx wrote an 'Address to the Working Classes.' The only thing it had in common with the draft was the title of 'statutes.' 'It is very difficult,' he wrote to Engels, 'to manage the thing in such a way as to make our views appear in a form which make them acceptable to the workers' movement at its present standpoint. Time is required to give the re-awakened movement its old boldness of speech. Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo is what is required.'

The sub-committee accepted Marx's proposals, and only added a few moralising phrases. These were so placed 'that they could not do any harm.' The 'inaugural address' was unanimously and enthusiastically accepted at a meeting of the general committee. The 'International' had its constitution, and now it started its work.

The fundamental idea of the inaugural address and of the statutes was expressed in the phrase: 'The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.' The International served this aim by founding proletarian mass-organisations and uniting them in joint activity. Point I of the statutes said: 'This association was founded in order to create a central means of unity and co-operation between the associations of workers which already exist in the various countries and aim at the same goal, namely, the protection, the rise and the complete emancipation of the working class.' The International left complete freedom to its various national sections as to the form their organisation might take, and refrained from prescribing any definite methods of conducting the struggle. Only one thing did it rigorously insist on. That was the absolute independence of the member-organisations. The inaugural address also demonstrated from the experience of the English workers that the 'capture of political power has become the great duty of the working class.'

The inaugural address and the statutes are typical of the work Marx did for the International in the five following years. Marx saw it to be his duty to educate the masses, and gradually and carefully, but firmly and surely lead them towards a definite goal. The groundwork of all his labour was a profound belief in the sound instinct of the proletarian mass-movement. Bitter experience in the years of revolution and still more in the years of exile had convinced him that it was necessary to keep aloof from all intermediary groups, especially organisations of exiles. He had also become convinced that great workers' organisations, able to develop freely within their own country, associated with the class movement as a whole, would find the right way in the end, however much they might vacillate and go astray. The inaugural address and the statutes and Marx's work in the International were founded on the sound instinct of the proletarian movement. The task that Marx set before his eyes was to help it, bring it to awareness and theoretical comprehension of that which it must do and of the experiences through which it must pass.

As Marx said, his old ultra-Left opponents in the forties had made the same error as Proudhon, the error into which Lassalle also fell. They did not seek, in Marx's words, 'the right basis for agitation in real conditions, but wanted to prescribe the course of the latter by certain doctrinal recipes.' Marx sought its basis in the forms of the movement which life itself created. He avoided giving prescriptions. That does not of course mean that he let things take their own course. What he did rather was to help every movement to get clear about itself, to come to an understanding of the connections between its particular interests and the whole, of how its special aims could only be realised by the realisation of the demands of the whole class, by the complete emancipation of the proletariat. An excellent example of Marx's tactics in the International was the way the inaugural address dealt with the co-operative societies. The co-operative movement was important at the time, and its influence was not always to the advantage of the workers' movement as a whole. The idea of independent co-operation was not seldom substituted for the idea of the class-struggle. Protection of the workers, the trade-union struggle, and even the downfall of capitalist society seemed superfluous, if 'not actually noxious to many, who believed the co-operative movement capable of emancipating the working class. Marx did not attack the co-operative societies outright. By so doing he would have alienated from the International the groups of workers who adhered to the co-operative ideal. He said that the value of the great social experiment represented by the co-operative movement could not be over-estimated. The co-operatives, particularly the co-operative factories, had demonstrated that large-scale production, production in harmony with modern scientific developments, was possible without the existence of a class of entrepreneurs employing a class of 'hands.' The co-operative societies represented a victory of the political economy of the working class over the political economy of ownership. But experience had also demonstrated that, in spite of the excellence of their principles and their usefulness in practice, the co-operative societies were confronted with limits which they could not overstep. The co-operative movement, to save the working masses, must be developed on a national scale and consequently be promoted by national measures. Thus the adherent of the co-operative ideal was forced to the conclusion that he who wanted co-operative enterprise must necessarily desire the capture of political power by the working class.

The fundamental idea of the inaugural address and of the whole of Marx's activity in the International was that the workers, acting on the basis of 'real conditions,' which of course differed in every single country, must create independent parties, take part in the political and social life of their country and so make the proletariat ripe for the capture of political power.

In the General Council, as the committee elected at the inaugural meeting soon came to be called, Marx was the acknowledged leader. The work to be done was more than ample. The magnitude of the need that the International fulfilled and the timeliness of its foundation were proved by its extraordinarily rapid growth. On February 23, 1865, Marx wrote to Kugelmann that the success of the International in London, Paris, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy had exceeded all expectations. On April 15--six months after the meeting in St. Martin's Hall--he wrote to one of the leaders of the Belgian section that there were more than 'twelve thousand members in England. Inquiries, suggestions, requests showered in upon the General Council from all sides. News of new sections being formed poured in. All sorts of questions concerning matters of organisation, inevitable in the case of any big new body, continually cropped up. 'The French, particularly the Paris workers, regard the London Council as a regular workers' government for foreign affairs,' Marx wrote to Engels at the beginning of March, 1865. The General Council, and in most cases that meant Marx, had to give instructions and advice and answer inquiries and incessantly take up positions towards political and economic events. Marx complained to Engels in the middle of March, 1865, that the International took up an enormous amount of his time, because he was in effect the head of the whole affair. He gave an example of how he had recently been occupied. On February 28 he had had a meeting with the Frenchmen, Tolain and Fribourg, who had come from Paris. The meeting, which lasted till twelve o'clock at night, was in conjunction with an evening meeting, at which he had to sign two hundred membership cards. On March 1 there was a Polish meeting. On March 4 a meeting of the sub-committee dealing with the French question lasted till one o'clock in the morning; on March 6 another meeting also lasted till one o'clock in the morning; on March 7 a meeting of the General Council lasted till midnight. 'Well, mon cher, que faire?' Marx wrote. 'If you have said "A" it follows that you go on and say "B."' Marx often grumbled, but never missed a meeting of the General Council. If at first it had seemed that the pressure of work was only going to be so great at the beginning, the belief soon turned out to be illusory. It very soon became clear that the demands the International made on Marx were going to increase with every month. One question gave rise to two others. It was inevitable and right that it should be so. The International developed, not according to a system, but according to the inner logic of the movement, according to the 'real conditions.'

In the case of internal questions within the organisation Marx declined to exercise pressure, and he insisted that the General Council adopt a strictly above-party attitude in all disputes between the various groups. 'Whom they have for a leader is their business and not mine,' he said on the occasion of an internal German dispute in 1868. At the beginning of 1865, when violent disputes arose between a group of workers, led by Tolain and Fribourg, who took their stand by Proudhon, and another, led by Lefort and Le Lubez, who were Republicans and Socialists, Marx made every effort to compose the dispute and keep both parties in the International.

The International had no programme if by 'programme' is meant a single, concrete, detailed system. Marx had intentionally made the statutes so wide as to make it possible for all Socialist groups to join. An announcement in the spring of 1870 declared that it was not the duty of the General Council to express a theoretical opinion on the programme of individual sections. Its only duty was to see that they contained nothing inconsistent with the letter and the spirit of the statutes. Marx, in his pamphlet on the apparent rifts in the International written in 1872, again emphasised that the International admitted to its organs and its congresses all of Socialist views without any exceptions whatever.

It must not be concluded that Marx's toleration of all the political lines of thought represented in the International meant that he abandoned his own critical attitude. His letters, especially those to Engels, contain the severest judgments on the confused mentalities with whom he had to deal. The illness from which he suffered during the first few years that followed the foundation of the International did nothing to make his mood milder; and in fact a good many of the things the sections did were more than a little trying. What is remarkable is not that Marx grumbled to his friends about the Proudhonists and the rest but the consistency and pertinacity with which he maintained his attitude and the restraint with which he tolerated all the conflicts that were bound to arise in the young movement. It was not infrequent for him actually to defend a group on some internal matter whose programme, if what they stood for can be dignified with such an expression, he contemptuously dismissed in private letters.

Tolerant as Marx was towards the various under-currents within the workers' movement, he resolutely fought all attempts to anchor the International to the programme of any single group or take away its character as a class movement. It was on the latter question that the first conflict arose. Mazzini's followers demanded the deletion from the inaugural address and the statutes of certain passages which emphasised the class-character of the International. The General Council emphatically refused. The Italian Workers' Union in London, which had been founded and set going by followers of Mazzini,' broke with its 'fathers.' This was the first victory of the 'Internationalists' in their long struggle with Mazzini. An echo of it is the judgment of Marx made by Mazzini years later. 'Marx,' he said, 'a German, a man of penetrating but corrupting intelligence, imperious, jealous of the influence of others, lacking strong philosophic or religious convictions, has I fear, more hatred, if righteous hatred, in his heart than love.'

The struggle with the followers of Mazzini was but a small prelude to the far more important struggle between Proudhonists and Collectivists which filled the whole first period of the International up to 1869.

During the first years of the International its main support came from English and French workers' organisations. There was a fundamental difference in the nature and political outlook of the two.

England was economically the most advanced country in the world. Big industry had developed more rapidly in England than anywhere else, and for this reason class-contradictions were pronounced and the workers' movement on a relatively high level. The workers were able users of the weapon of the strike. Just at the time when the International arose one wave of strikes after another swept across the country. At the beginning of the sixties flourishing trade unions developed from the benefit societies they had hitherto mainly been into fighting organisations raising their own strike funds. They constituted the most important group within the International. The number of organisations formally associated with the International was not large. Even the London Trades Council, one of the most resolute bodies in the trade union movement, did not accept the International's invitation to join. But some trade unions did join the International and were on its membership list. From the beginning British trade union leaders had an important voice on the General Council. Interested in immediate, practical results, they were utterly indifferent to theoretical questions and the ultimate aims of the International as Marx conceived them. They understood very well the importance of working-class legislation, upon which, under Marx's influence, the International laid great stress. But they preferred conducting the struggle for it, like the struggle for electoral reform, through the channel of Liberal and Radical Members of Parliament rather than as an independent party. Among them there were always a few who insisted that the movement must not assume an explicit class-character. But so far as the day-to-day struggle of the proletariat was concerned the young English trade union leaders had incomparably more experience than all the workers' leaders of the Continent combined. The main thing that interested them in the International was the possibility of using it for gaining victories in strikes. They were attracted by the possibility of making the International use its connections with countries abroad to prevent the introduction of foreign strike-breakers, which was a favourite expedient of the employers at the time. Fribourg, one of the founders of the International, said that the English regarded the International purely as an organisation from which the strike movement could receive great assistance.

France was far behind England in the industrial respect. In France the handicraftsman was still supreme, particularly in Paris, with its art and luxury trades. It was natural enough that many of the leaders of the movement in France should be followers of Proudhon, whose teaching expressed the interests of the small independent artisan or trader, the small business man and the peasant. The 'mutualists,' as the followers of Proudhon described themselves at the time, demanded cheap credit, assured markets, co-operative societies and the same measures that hard-pressed master-craftsmen have always demanded everywhere. To most of them the slogan of the collectivisation of the means of production sounded absurd, unjust and evil. Hence also they were in favour of peaceful, gradual development, and they flatly repudiated revolutionary methods. From his point of view Fribourg regarded the International as an instrument 'for aiding the proletariat in legally, pacifically and morally gaining the place in the sun of civilisation to which it is entitled.' They had very little trust in legislation or state measures for the working classes, and they regarded strikes as extremely dangerous, though sometimes inevitable; in any case as always undesirable. Varlin, one of the leaders of the International in Paris, who fell in the bloody week of May, 1871, declared as late as 1868 that the International repudiated strikes as an anti-economic weapon. The mutualists wanted an International which should occupy itself with investigating the position of the workers, cause alterations in the labour market and thrash out these problems theoretically.

Marx saw the weaknesses of the mutualists and of the English trade unions alike. He did not have a particularly high opinion of the trade union leaders. He said later that he regarded some of them with suspicion from the first, as careerists in whose devotion to the working-class cause he found it difficult to believe. But in relation to the immediate tasks of the International, the tactics of the day-to-day struggle, he stood far nearer the Englishmen than the Proudhonists. 'The gentlemen in Paris,' he wrote to Kugelmann in 1866, 'had their heads full of Proudhon's emptiest phrases. They chatter of science, knowing nothing of it. They scorn all revolutionary action, i.e. which springs from the class-struggle itself, all concentrated social movement, that is to say movement realisable by political means (for example, the legal shortening of the working day).'

In spite of all his dislike of Proudhonist phraseology, Marx stuck to his tactics. In drafting the agenda for the first Congress of the International in 1866 he took pains to avoid anything that might have given rise to general theoretical discussions, and he confined the programme 'to points which permitted of immediate accord and immediate concerted action of the workers, corresponded directly to the needs of the class-struggle and the class organisation of the workers, and at the same time spurred the workers on.' The strike question was certainly a question of the moment, but Marx did not put it upon the agenda as such but in the form of 'international assistance for the struggle of Labour with Capital.' He wished to avoid alienating the Proudhonists. He instructed the London delegates not to discuss the usefulness or the reverse of strikes but to put in the foreground the struggle with the strike-breakers, which the Proudhonists could not repudiate.

It was not Marx and his followers but the Proudhonists who opened the fray. The Proudhonists wanted to anchor the International to their own system. The most important thing to them was not those things on which all were agreed but their own particular hobby--horse, their 'mutualism.' The first Congresses took place in Latin Switzerland, for which reason the majority of the delegates came from western Switzerland and adjacent France, i.e. from the areas where the Proudhonists predominated. At the Lausanne Congress of 1867 they were fairly successful. The representatives of the General Council were not sufficiently prepared--Marx was busy at the time with the publication of Das Kapital and was not present. But their success was their own downfall. At a time when the strike movement was constantly extending and affecting even France and western Switzerland, the rejection of the strike-weapon was going too far even for many of the Proudhonists. There was a rift, which soon spread to other questions too.

The Proudhonists were the first to bring up for discussion of the fundamental question of the socialisation of the means of production. At the Congress of 1867 they raised the question of the socialisation of the means of transport. At the time the railways were using their monopoly to favour big industry at the expense of the small producer. So the principal opponents of collectivisation decided that an exception must be made in the case of the railways, which must be collectivised. Very well, their opponents replied, why stop at collectivisation of the means of transport? To their horror and alarm the Proudhonists saw opponents rising within their own ranks. Young heretics, led by César de Paepe, a Belgian, arose among the orthodox and tried hard to reconcile their mutualist doctrines with the ideal of collectivisation. This breakdown on the part of the Proudhonists assured the success of the collectivist idea in the International. The Young Proudhonists became more enthusiastic about collectivisation than anyone, and it was thanks to them that the International came out for collectivism in its official resolutions. In 1868 Marx was still opposed to declarations of principle on such critical questions. 'It is better not to make any general resolutions,' he wrote to his closest colleagues, Eccarius and Lessner, who represented the General Council at the Congress of 1868. It was only in the last stages of the debates on collectivisation that Marx intervened. He drafted the resolutions on the nationalisation of the soil which were accepted by the Bâle Congress of 1869.

Marx, who in other respects demonstrated the most extreme tolerance, only abandoned his restraint when the problem of political struggle arose acutely within the International and he began to feel that, unknown to it, something had formed behind the scenes, something that aimed quite systematically at forcing the International in a direction which was completely unacceptable to him and, after the experiences he had had, he was convinced would be injurious to the workers' movement.

Everybody in the International had been agreed from the start that the workers must take an active part in the political struggle. The English trade unionists naturally supported the movement for the extension of the franchise in every way they could. Those Proudhonists who had co-operated in the foundation of the International were all in favour of taking part in the political struggle, and would have regarded any discussion of the advisability of doing so as a sheer waste of time. Their leading Paris group had originated out of an attempt to set up an independent workers' candidate in 1864, and Proudhon himself had given his enthusiastic consent to this step in his work, written shortly before his death, De la Capacité Politique des Classes Ouvrières. The German workers' movement--though it had played no great rôle in the inner life of the International it had a notable influence upon the development of its ideas--fought, as Lassalle had taught it, for universal suffrage. Even the Swiss 'Internationalists' took part in the elections as a matter of course. The Lausanne Congress of 1867 passed a resolution--the minority was only two--to the effect that the conquest of political power was an absolute necessity for the working class. This was the Congress at which the Proudhonists were in a majority, and among those who voted for the resolution were many who were later among the most resolute opponents of any political activity whatever.

The situation altered pretty quickly. In 1867 and 1868 the International made extraordinary progress. The economic crisis which was setting in intensified social antagonisms, and one strike after another broke out in the countries of Western Europe. The International very soon proved a useful instrument in the direct economic struggle of the proletariat. It succeeded in many cases in preventing the introduction of strike-breakers from abroad, and, in cases where foreign workers did strike-breaking work without knowing it, succeeded in causing them to practise solidarity. In other cases it organised the raising of funds for the relief of strikers. This not only gave the latter moral support but caused real panic among the employers, who no longer had to deal with 'their own' workers alone but with a new and sinister power, an international organisation which apparently had resources at its disposal with which the individual employer could not compete. Often the mere rumour that the International was going to intervene in a strike was sufficient to cause the employers to grant all the workers' demands. In its panic the reactionary Press exaggerated the power of the International beyond all bounds, but this only resulted in enhancing the respect in which it was held by the working class. Every strike, whether it succeeded or not, resulted in all the strikers joining the International, the Conservative, E. Villetard, wrote in 1872 in his history of the International. In those years it often happened that the whole of the workers at a factory would join the International together. No government repressive measures, arrests or trials succeeded in stemming the movement's advance; they merely served to drive the workers into the revolutionary camp and strengthen the International thereby. Its sections seemed to spring up like mushrooms. At the 1866 Congress only four countries were represented--England, France, Germany and Switzerland --but at the Congress of 1869 there were nine, America, Austria, Belgium, Spain and Italy being the newcomers. Individual sections had arisen in Hungary, Holland, Algiers, South America and elsewhere. Because of big fluctuations and the weak development on the organisational side it is difficult to establish how many members the International really had. Eight hundred thousand workers were formally associated with the International in' any case. At the International trial in Paris the public prosecutor, who had access to the papers of the French section, stated that there were four hundred and forty-three thousand members in France alone. At the Bâle Congress of 1869 the English claimed two hundred and thirty sections with ninety-five thousand members. In Belgium in the summer of that year there were more than two hundred sections with sixty-four thousand members. The membership of the workers' organisations which declared their solidarity with the International was greater by far. The International was acknowledged in 1869 by the English Trades Union Congress, in 1869 by the Nurnberg Congress of German Workers' Educational Unions, in 1868 by the Association of German Workers' Unions in Austria, in the same year by the Neuchâtel Congress of German Workers' Educational Unions in Switzerland, in 1869 by the American Labour Union, etc. Testut, who wrote his history of the International on the basis of police reports, estimated its number of members as five millions, and the newspapers of the International actually put the figure as high as seven millions. These figures are, of course, utterly fantastic. But the élite of the European proletariat adhered to the International. In the last third of the sixties it had become a power to be reckoned with.

At the same time political questions developed from theoretical propositions to be discussed at Congresses into practical questions requiring a practical answer. The two groups within the German workers' movement, the followers of Lassalle and the 'Eisenacher,' were the first to take part, in 1867, in the North German Parliamentary elections. In 1867 and 1868, after the extension of the suffrage to workers having a house of their own, the English labour movement prepared to enter the electoral fray. In 1869 the French workers set up their own candidates in many places. The International now had to decide what attitude to take up to other parties, and to elections. The weak organisation of the sections and the political inexperience of their leaders made mistakes and differences of opinion inevitable as soon as the question of voting became an actual one, and this lead to a reaction. A section arose who opposed participating in elections and 'politics' as a whole.

In Latin Switzerland the Internationalists made particularly grave mistakes. The pioneer of the International there was Dr. P. Coullery, an old Democrat who had long been interested in social problems. He was an official of the Radical party, had a high reputation, and represented it as deputy to the cantonal legislative council. Dr. Coullery founded the first section of the International in Latin Switzerland in 1865, and worked for the extension of the International in the western cantons, and in 1867 his paper, La Voix de l'Avenir, became the chief organ of the section of that area. His activity on behalf of the International led to a rupture with the radicals. When he became a candidate for the office of juge de paix in La Chaux des Fonds the radicals opposed him. That induced the Conservatives to vote for Coullery, and it was due to their aid that he was elected. By the election of 1868 Coullery's rapprochement to the Conservatives had proceeded so far that he actually made a regular pact with them. The local Press called it 'la coalition aristo-socialiste.' The list of candidates went under the name of the International, but on it the names of members of the International were next to those of extreme Conservatives. Other sections of the International in western Switzerland protested violently against this policy, particularly the section at Locle. Its founder and leader was a young schoolmaster, James Guillaume, who was later a very prominent member of the anti-Marxist group in the International. He was a former member of the Radical party, and he and his group, which had started as the 'Jeunesse Radicale,' continued to support the Radicals in local questions. The slogan in the fight against Coullery was: 'The International keeps out of political strife'; which in this case was equivalent to support of the Radicals. Gradually the Locle group generalised their views and ended by absolutely repudiating the policy of participating in elections. Coullery, it maintained, was bound to err, to compromise the International, as was anybody who participated in elections. Coullery's tactics had, of course, nothing whatever in common with the tactical line of Marx. Marx always vigorously opposed any coalition of the revolutionary proletariat with the reactionaries against the bourgeois Democrats. When Lassalle's followers started openly practising this policy, which Lassalle himself initiated, Marx publicly and ruthlessly broke with them. What Marx demanded of the workers' parties was that they should criticise the Government and the reactionaries no less severely than they did the bourgeois Democrats.

The Locle group of 'Internationalists' formed the kernel of the later anti-authoritative faction, whose struggle against the General Council led to the split and the downfall of the International. Its leader was Michael Alexandrovich Bakunin.