First International
The International Workingmen's Association, commonly known as the First International, was a political international which aimed to unite a variety of left-wing political groups and trade union organizations based on the working class and class struggle. It was founded on 28 September 1864 at a workers' meeting in St Martin's Hall, London, and its first congress was held in 1866 in Geneva.
The IWA's history was characterized by internal conflicts between different socialist and anarchist factions. The initial ideological struggle was between the communists or Marxists, centred around Karl Marx on the General Council, and the mutualists or followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The communists successfully displaced the mutualists as the dominant ideological trend at the Brussels Congress in 1868. The rise of Mikhail Bakunin's collectivist anarchist faction in the late 1860s led to a more intense conflict over the role of the state and political action in achieving socialism. The organization reached its peak following the Paris Commune of 1871, which was celebrated and defended by the International in Marx's influential address, The Civil War in France. The bloody suppression of the Commune, however, led to a period of harsh government repression against the IWA.
The internal divisions culminated in a definitive split at the Hague Congress in 1872, where Bakunin and his ally James Guillaume were expelled. In a strategic move to prevent the organization from falling under the control of other factions, the congress voted to transfer the seat of the General Council to New York City. This decision effectively marked the end of the IWA as a mass European movement. The New York-based General Council officially disbanded the original International in 1876. The anarchist wing formed a rival International at St. Imier, but it also dissolved by the late 1870s.
Although it was short-lived, the First International was a highly significant event in the history of the labour movement. It helped establish the theoretical foundations of the main currents of socialism, communism, and anarchism, and its experience was crucial for the development of mass-based national social democratic parties that formed the Second International in 1889.
Background
The idea of international working-class solidarity was a product of the development of capitalism in the 19th century, which created a global market and a global proletariat with common interests. Early socialist and communist thinkers, from Robert Owen to Karl Marx, viewed socialism as an international project. The first concrete attempts to form international workers' organizations emerged in the 1830s and 1840s among political exiles in Paris, such as the German Communist League, for whom Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto.In Britain, the Chartist movement, while primarily national, also showed strong internationalist leanings, expressing solidarity with oppressed peoples across the world and maintaining contact with continental radicals. In November 1844, the "Fraternal Democrats" was established in London by political refugees and Chartist leaders, including George Julian Harney. It was the first international democratic organization with a working-class character, holding the motto "All men are brethren." The organization was a key forerunner of the IWA, and its structure, with national secretaries forming an executive, served as a model for the later International. The Fraternal Democrats advocated for communistic ideas, proclaiming that "the earth with all its natural productions is the common property of all" and denouncing national prejudices.
The revolutionary wave of 1848 swept across Europe, and although the Fraternal Democrats reached their peak during this period, the subsequent decade of reaction led to their decline and the general apathy of the British working class. The 1850s became an "almost a dead period for Socialist thought", with working-class movements in eclipse. The idea of international solidarity was revived in the mid-1850s with the formation of the International Committee in London, led by Ernest Jones. This committee, formed to welcome French exiles and protest a planned visit by Napoleon III, anticipated the organizational forms of the IWA and championed the idea of an "international alliance". In 1856, the committee developed into the International Association, a precursor which assumed the "shape of a public international working-class movement" before its demise a few years later.
History
Foundation
Reflecting its spontaneous origins, the French workers' leader Benoît Malon stated: "In the same way that it has no masters, the International has no founders; it came into existence... out of the social necessities of our epoch and out of the growing sufferings of the working class."The political and economic crises of the late 1850s and early 1860s led to a resurgence of the workers' movement across Europe. In Britain, a new generation of trade union leaders, known as the "Junta," emerged, advocating for greater political engagement and solidarity. They organized solidarity actions for various international causes, including support for Giuseppe Garibaldi's struggle for Italian independence, opposition to Russian repression in Poland, and support for the Union side in the American Civil War. In France, where trade unions were illegal but tolerated as friendly societies, workers influenced by Proudhonism began to seek independent political representation, culminating in the "Manifesto of the Sixty" in 1864, which was written by Henri Tolain and proclaimed the existence of a distinct proletariat class. Initial contacts between British and French workers' leaders, established during the 1862 London International Exhibition, led to a meeting in London in July 1863 that set the stage for a new international organization. The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes:
On 28 September 1864, a great international meeting was held in St Martin's Hall in London, attended by some 2,000 workers. The event was primarily a joint affair of British and French labor leaders, including Odger and Tolain. The assembly unanimously resolved to found an international organization of workers, with its central committee, which became known as the General Council, to be based in London. A committee of twenty-one was elected to draft the rules and program. The committee included prominent British trade union leaders like Odger, William Randal Cremer, and George Howell; French representatives Tolain, Charles Limousin, Eugène Varlin, and Eugène Dupont; and exiled radicals including the Italian Mazzinist Luigi Wolff and the German socialist Karl Marx. The meeting was presided over by the English Positivist professor Edward Spencer Beesly. Though he was not an organizer of the meeting and sat "in a non-speaking capacity on the platform", Marx was invited to join the committee by the German tailor Johann Eccarius, who was an active figure in the British trade union movement, and played a decisive role from the outset.
Marx drafted the two foundational documents of the association: the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association and the Provisional Rules of the Association. After early drafts by Mazzinists and Owenites were rejected, Marx's versions were enthusiastically accepted. The Address analyzed the condition of the working class since 1848, highlighting the stark contrast between the growth of capitalist wealth and the persistence of working-class misery. Marx was careful to avoid language that would alienate the organization's diverse founders. He pointed to two victories for the "political economy of the working class": the legislative success of the ten-hours day in Britain and the growth of the co-operative movement. It concluded that to achieve emancipation, the workers must conquer political power and that their success depended on international solidarity, proclaiming the famous slogan from The Communist Manifesto: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!". The Preamble to the Provisional Rules set forth the core principles: that the emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the workers themselves, and that this economic emancipation was the "great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means."
Internal conflicts and ideological development
The IWA was an ideologically heterogeneous body, encompassing a wide range of socialist, communist, and anarchist viewpoints. Its history was marked by a continuous struggle between its various factions, primarily between the communists and the anti-statist wings, first the mutualists and later the collectivists.Proudhonists versus communists
The French members of the International were initially dominated by followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhonism, or mutualism, was a form of market socialism based on the idea of "free credit" and "equitable exchange" among small independent producers. The Proudhonists were staunchly opposed to political action, strikes, trade unions, and the collective ownership of property. They viewed the state as an oppressive institution to be ignored rather than captured, and they opposed any form of centralized organization. This put them in direct conflict with the General Council, particularly with Marx, who advocated for a program of communism, political action through an independent workers' party, and the necessity of the strike as a weapon in the class struggle.The first congresses of the International became battlegrounds for these opposing views. At the London Conference of 1865, the Parisian mutualists put forward a program based on Proudhon's ideas, but it was largely overshadowed by the General Council's Marx-penned agenda. At the Geneva Congress, the Proudhonists were largely defeated. The congress passed resolutions, based on Marx's instructions to the General Council delegates, affirming the importance of trade unions, advocating for the eight-hour day and the abolition of child labour, and recognizing the need for legislative intervention in the economy. At the Lausanne Congress, the question of property was debated, with the first resolutions favouring state ownership of transport and exchange being passed. The final victory for the communists came at the Brussels Congress, which passed a resolution declaring that mines, quarries, railways, and arable land should become the common property of society. The resolution stated:
At the time, this turn towards communism was not widely associated with Marx, whose economic theories were still relatively unknown among the delegates. The form of communism endorsed at Brussels was not state socialism, but was based on producers' co-operatives and federated communes.