On the origins of the collapse of the First International

Paul B. Smith

What caused the Collapse of the First International?

Workers worldwide have the potential to form a class that can abolish capitalism and the state. However, there are certain necessary conditions for this to happen. First of all, workers need a theory capable of understanding the present. Secondly, they need an organizational form or forms that will provide them with the ability to take power (Ticktin, 2006, p25).

Prior to the founding of the First International, socialist groups were separated theoretically and organizationally from the labor movement. The First International was the first organizational form that combined theories of the nature of capitalism and its socialist alternative — in particular Proudhon’s and Marx’s — with workers’ active political and economic resistance to capitalism. It will continue to be of interest to those students, intellectuals and activists who have similar preoccupations in the present and future.

It is notable that neither the organizational form of the International nor workers’ theoretical awareness within it was sufficient for class formation to take place. Workers did not take power. On the contrary the organization split into two groups neither of which survived for long. This was a significant defeat for the working class. The question this essay addresses is not only how did this happen but also what combination of subjective and objective forces were responsible for this defeat.

My aims here include a discussion of the recent historical context that has influenced perceptions of the collapse. I also want to ask the question whether it is possible to give a comprehensive explanation of it. This entails some discussion of method that might be used to answer to the question of explanation. I shall suggest a theoretical framework that might be used to interpret the historical events. This framework relies on an understanding of the concept of contradiction.

The context of interpretation

If the collapse of the First International was the first major defeat for the working class, later defeats have been understood in relation to it. This is especially the case with the defeat that dominated the last century — that of the Russian revolution in 1917. The emergence of Stalinism in the former USSR and its influence worldwide had a profound effect on both workers’ understanding of theory and the organizational forms they adopted. Marxism claims to be a theory of working class self emancipation. Yet, during the Cold War, it became associated with totalitarian systems. Marxism was thought of as responsible for war, famine, economic shortages and destruction (Ticktin, 2006, p12). The left supported regimes unparalleled in barbarity, inefficiency and inhumanity. Left wing opposition to Stalinism conceded much to it. For example, orthodox Trotskyists upheld the progressive nature of the nationalized property relations of the former Soviet Union. They also supported critically brutal nationalist movements and regimes in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Theoretically, the far left tended to be ignorant of or compromised by the Stalinist destruction of theory making it impossible or very difficult for workers to take an interest in or understand political economy. For some, this entailed entrapment within Althusser’s version of structuralist sociology. For others, it meant a retreat into scholastic formalism.

The challenge that the events of 1968 had to capitalism mobilized a new generation of young workers and students. Many of these rejected Marxism as an inherently oppressive set of ideas. They abandoned workers as a potential revolutionary class and proclaimed the social movements of women, blacks and Gays as the vanguards of the struggle for human liberation. Others held on to the notion of working class self emancipation but were preoccupied with short-term workers’ struggles in workplaces and communities. Some of these struggles were partial victories but most were defeats. This left many activists demoralized by the bureaucratic betrayals of a Stalinised or social democratically compromised trade union leadership.

A section of this generation was drawn to anarchism in the form that it emerged at the time of the First International. Bakunin appeared prescient in proclaiming that the revolution would find its perfection in Russia and that the Russian revolution would become the “guiding star for the salvation of all liberated humanity” (Rosdolsky, 1986, p168). Moreover, his ideas that all forms of democracy were oppressive resonated with those who felt betrayed by their social democratic or Stalinist elected representatives. Bakunin appeared not only to have predicted the Russian revolution, but also its evolution into Stalinism when he argued — against Marx — that workers’ elected representatives would cease to be workers and act in their own self interest as a bureaucratic elite. Bakunin’s argument against the possibility of a classless society mollified the disappointment of a generation led to believe that the former Soviet Union and European welfare states had created — through nationalization and full employment — classless societies.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, capitalism declared itself triumphant. The supporting propaganda promoted the legend that the supermonster, Stalin, was the child of the monster Lenin. The next logical step was to declare that the monster Lenin was the child of the monster Marx. According to Bakunin, Marx was inherently authoritarian. His authoritarianism caused the collapse of the First International. Authoritarianism was inherent to Marxism. Stalinism, Leninism and Trotskyism were spawns of this original seed.

During the Cold War, there were two antagonistic camps on the question of the collapse of the First International. On the one side, there were those who argued that Marx was to blame. The other was that Bakunin was to blame. Bakunin the monster opposed Marx the monster. For example, Hal Draper, an unorthodox Trotskyist, has described Bakunin as a dirty, evil, racist swindler (Draper, 4, p303). This has echoes of the Stalinist description of Bakunin as a “rabid enemy of Marxism” (Minutes, 5, p588). In other words he was a mad dog — moreover a mad dog with a virus capable of infecting workers’ minds.

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, blaming either Bakunin or Marx seems queer. The absence of a theoretical account of the collapse reflects the poverty of this approach. A simple monocausal explanation that focuses on the actions of one historical individual, however powerful and influential, appears at best insufficient. It is most likely paranoid and lazy. Those who still blame Marx or Bakunin (or both of these highly competitive men) do not seem to have got the point. This made well by Franz Mehring who wrote in his 19^th century biography of Marx: “nothing is more un- Marxist than the idea that an unusually malicious individual ... could have destroyed a proletarian organization like the International” (Mehring, p483) What was it, then, that destroyed it?

Method

The First International was known at the time as the International Working Men’s Association. It was the first international organization that set as its goal a classless society. The latter was the means by which workers could be freed from economic and political forms of oppression. It lasted from 1864 until 1872, a period of eight years. The International welcomed the participation of anyone who was committed to the principle workers’ self emancipation.

Despite its androcentric title, it not only welcomed women as members but upheld their need for separate women’s sections. One of the American sections was led by two sisters, Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Caflin (Collins & Abramsky, p249). At least three women attended meetings of the General Council in London regularly. Harriet Law was the most vocal. She argued for central planning as the only alternative to the market (Collins & Abramsky p151). Her protest against the attitude of some of the male members to women workers is registered in the minutes (Minutes, 2, p239). The only attempt to exclude a social group was defeated at the first congress in Geneva. Tolain, a French Proudhonist, moved a motion that capitalists, professionals and anyone with a diploma should be excluded from membership. His attempt to limit membership to manual workers was voted down (Draper, II, pp558-559).

The International brought together an alliance of trade unionists, members of socialist, democratic and republican groups, freethinkers and members of mutualist societies — similar to credit unions and co-operatives today. Some of its members, including Bakunin, were freemasons. Its collapse is marked by the split that occurred in 1872 between the General Council led by Marx and the antiauthoritarians inspired by Bakunin. Of the two competing Internationals, the anti-authoritarian lasted the longest. This was for a further three years until 1876.

Bakunin joined the International in 1868. A year later, after he had lost a motion at the Basle congress, he decided to target Marx as an enemy and split his allies away from him (Carr, pp370- 371). This began a struggle for leadership. It was a struggle that neither Marx nor Bakunin won. The collapse was a Pyrrhic victory for both leaders. For Marx, it meant that the organization had been saved from conspiratorial and terroristically inclined influences. For Bakunin, the threat of a Jewish- Germanic conspiracy against the revolution had been defeated. The possibility of a united movement for workers’ emancipation had been killed off in the process. The temporary alliance Bakunin’s followers forged with disaffected English reformist trade unionists against the General Council quickly fell apart. By 1877, it is arguable that there was a further split in the antiauthoritarian International when Belgian trade unionists called for a “United Socialist Congress” to unite all elements of the European radical and labor movements (Braunthal, p192).

What might count as a plausible explanation of the disintegration and collapse of the International? I contend that it is insufficient to explain it according to the antagonism between Marx and Bakunin. The antagonism between Marx and Bakunin was palpable and it certainly played a role in the collapse. However, an overemphasis on their subjectivity distorts both the importance of their ideas and the role that ideas play in historical events.

These two leaders had substantial political and personal differences. They were theoretically and organizationally opposed. Not only did they have opposed conceptions of the socialist goal but also of the means of achieving it. Marx called for the abolition of classes, Bakunin for their equalization. Marx supported workers engaged in open, legal, political activity including the establishment of socialist political parties capable of engaging within the electoral process. Bakunin was opposed to all forms of political activity except the immediate seizure of power and the establishment of communal production. Marx argued that the transition to socialism required a workers’ state capable of planning production and phasing out the market. Bakunin held that any such state would entail the oppression of workers by a bureaucratic elite. Marx was a Jewish German communist. Bakunin believed in a conspiracy of Jewish communists and financiers and that Germans were racially authoritarian (Draper, 4, p293 & Kelly, p219).

Throughout the evolution of the International, there had been plenty of political and organizational controversy that had not led to disintegration and collapse. There had been lively debates on political action, on nationalization, on Poland and Ireland. Moreover there had been disputes over the relationship between the General Council and the national sections over autonomy and policy making. Bakunin’s entry into the International did not mean that disintegration and collapse were inevitable. Marx had grounds to be confident that Bakunin’s intervention could be contained. There was little that was new in his ideas — they had all been discussed and debated in clearer forms previous to his joining. According to Marx, Bakunin’s political program was a mixture of empty platitudes, pretentious ideas and banal improvization (Mehring, p411). In other words, Bakunin’s ideas posed no real threat.

If a one sided emphasis on ideas and personalities does not capture the whole picture, it is also difficult to reduce the explanation of the collapse to the material practices of labor at a particular moment in its formation by and resistance to capital’s drive for accumulation. The ideas of the two antagonists cannot be reduced to the fact that workers were successful in organizing solidarity for strikes across national boundaries during an upturn in the economy, even though this is true (Riazanov, pp136-137). Thus Marx’s ideas were not the sole result of his engagement with the organized core of productive workers in Britain, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. His political economy of capitalism did not entail that reforms that strengthened the position of trade unions were the only way in which a socialist revolution could be brought into being.

Nor were Bakunin’s ideas the sole result of his reflections on workers with strong connections to the peasantry and the land whose traditions of resistance were destructive, conspiratorial and insurrectionary. His opposition to the authority of the General Council and what he called “state communism” cannot be reduced to the material power that individuals in Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia only recently transformed into agricultural and industrial wage workers had to force capitalism to change. In either case, it is not true that self propelling material forces conglomerated fatalistically into actions that neither leader nor their allies could have avoided (Meszaros, p93)

All the different theories, ideas and doctrines that influenced the International had their origins in forms of intellectual production. These forms corresponded to different stages in labor’s response and resistance to the emergence of capital’s domination over social relations. They had an ongoing formation and interaction with other ideas and practices. Thus Marx’s concept of socialism grew out of his critique of political economy. Political economy had emerged with Adam Smith at a time when the exploitation of labor power in industrial production had become the dominant source of an economic surplus. Socialists used political economy to understand and challenge capitalism. In order to understand Proudhon’s ideas on socialism, co-operatives and credit, Marx argued, one needed to understand Proudhon’s political economy. This, he showed, was hardly different from Robert Owen’s followers. The political economy of these early socialists was an application of a Smithian and Ricardian understanding of the labor theory of value. It led to hopeless experiments trying to abolish money in cooperative forms of production and consumption (Smith, 2009, p117).

Bakunin did not study political economy. His ideas on freedom came from Hegel. Russian Hegelians had argued that the spirit of freedom and civilization had passed from the Germans to the Slavs. Until his reentry to European politics after a long period of imprisonment in a Czarist jail, he had been a democratic pan-Slavist. His ideas on socialism and political activity came late and grew out of his engagement with followers of Proudhon. His ideas on organization however were similar to those of Blanqui and others who followed leftwing Jacobin traditions. These were mixed with a dash of nihilistic terrorism. (Draper, 4, p130).

An explanation, therefore, that keeps the totality of changes in material forces, ideas, proletarian class formation and bourgeois class reaction in readers’ minds is more likely to be plausible than one that opposes superstructural to productive forces or attempts the impossible task of reducing ideas mechanically to their material base. Put differently, accounts that oppose subjective to objective determinants of historical events and vice versa are likely to be partial and incomplete. A plausible explanation of the collapse would be a comprehensive one. It would be many-sided and recognize the full range of causal determinants. It would be one capable of accounting for rapid changes in consciousness both from revolution to counterrevolution and vice versa.

I shall argue here that the question of determinants of the collapse of the International can be answered by examining certain contradictions within the movement from atomized workers to a class (Ticktin, 1987, p13). Contradictions consist of opposites which act as poles of attraction or forces that have the power either to be superseded by a new form of proletarian collectivity or to fall apart, causing crises, disintegration and collapse within existing organizational forms.

I shall examine two contradictions within the form of organization adopted by the International. The first contradiction consists of competing tendencies towards centralization and decentralization in the mode of leadership. The second contradiction consists of competing tendencies towards greater secrecy and greater openness in the mode of communication. Finally I shall attempt to explain the movement of these contradictions in relation to both the uneven development of the proletariat and the uneven response of the bourgeoisie to the challenge posed by the Paris Commune.

Centralization and decentralization in the mode of leadership

The International was formed as a means to establish a unified and combined response to the political and economic oppression experienced by workers. The rules clearly recognize the power of union and combination that workers can achieve through their various organizations (Minutes, 2, p267). The composition and location of the General Council reflected this. English trade unions had fought and led decisive strikes against employers. This included solidarity action in support of victimized bricklayers (Collins & Abramsky, pp14-17). Moreover, through the Chartists and other campaigns, they had the experience of political involvement. This had forced the ruling class to concede suffrage to sections of skilled workers in the 1867 Reform Act and universal education in the 1870 Education Act.

The General Council stated that its usefulness in supporting workers attempting to exercise their collective power would be through its “utmost efforts to combine the disconnected working men’s societies, represented by central national organs” (Minutes, 2, p267). The General Council therefore saw itself as a body that would assist the process of national centralization as a means to developing collective proletarian power.

On the other hand, the statement on self emancipation preceding the rules was open to different interpretation. This stated that workers’ emancipation would be “conquered by working classes themselves.” This would be a political and economic emancipation that entailed the abolition of class society. The vague wording of this allowed some to argue that the process of emancipation could be achieved from above — either through an alliance with radical bourgeois elements or through a coup d’etat or insurrection. Others argued that self emancipation could only come from below through independent proletarian organizations trade unions, co-operatives or political parties (Riazanov, p157).

The General Council represented a tendency for greater centralization from the start of the International. However, it was put under pressure to centralize even further by groups that upheld the notion that working class emancipation could be achieved from above. It was able to successfully resist this pressure until the London conference of 1871. These two groups consisted of followers of Blanqui and followers of Lassalle.

The relationship between Lassalle and Marx was difficult. Within the sphere of German socialist politics, Marx stood for revolution from below and Lassalle for a top down collaboration with Bismarck. This was a different kind of reformism from that of the English trade union leaders. It depended on a cross class alliance between workers and the aristocracy rather than between workers and the bourgeoisie. Lassalle wanted the Prussian government to finance workers’ cooperatives and trade unions his group had formed. In response, Marx was scathing in his condemnation of how Lassalle’s policies would allow the “asses of officialdom” to control the German labor movement (Draper, 4, p63).

Lassalle’s group refused to join the International but attempted to influence it in 1868. Centralization was a dominant theme of the group. After Lassalle died, Schweitzer, who took over the leadership, stated that centralization should be the overriding goal of the labor movement. He argued that democratic centralization was the key to the victory of the working class. An editorial in its newspaper in 1868 called on the General Council to centralize its leadership so that it had more control over the national federations. There is no evidence the General Council heeded Schweitzer’s advice (Freymond, p33).

Lassalle’s group excluded itself from the International. The dominant interpretation of the principle of self emancipation in the International united English trade unionists, German communists such as Marx, and French Proudhonists. This was that change should come from below. Marx had subscribed to the idea of democratic centralism when he was a member of the Communist League in 1848 and saw no inconsistency between this and revolution from below. The Lassallean advocates of democratic centralization were clearly reformists. Bakunin also had his own version of centralized leadership from below but it excluded democratic control.

The other group that stood for greater centralization and revolution from above were the Blanquists. They stood for the imposition of a revolutionary socialist dictatorship through a seizure of state power organized secretly by a disciplined and centralized network revolutionaries. Once in power, they planned to galvanize the masses into revolution. They intervened at the 1866 Geneva Congress in order to denounce the International and disrupt it. They were ejected and had no further influence on the International until after the repression of the Paris Commune.

In 1871 thirty three of them sought asylum in London as refugees. Some of these joined the General Council and supplied delegates to the London conference of 1871. The Blanquists had hopes of dominating the leadership of the International and demanded that it become a disciplined, centralized international party with a reorganized General Council at its head. By the Hague Congress of 1872, they were arguing that the General Council should constitute itself as the vanguard of an international revolutionary workers party. They denounced the General Council for refusing to face up to this task (Collins & Abramsky, p230).

Finally, Bakunin was initially a supporter of centralization. He voted for moves to give the General Council greater powers at the Basle Congress in 1869. This was motivated by personal ambition and the hope that the General Council would take action against those sections in Switzerland whose members he opposed.

The opposing decentralizing tendencies manifested themselves throughout the organization from its inception until its demise. One of the founding rules stated that every society that joined could keep their existing organizations intact (Minutes, 1, p268). This meant that every affiliated society could manage its own special affairs without reference to the International. This could be interpreted as applying to sections or branches. Early on in 1865, Belgian workers had asserted their autonomy against an unelected representative of the General Council who wanted to bring a variety of democratic and republican groups into a national federation. This caused a dispute that was resolved through a decision by the General Council to affirm the right of every branch to elect its own officers “subject to the approval of the Central Council” (Freymond, p17)

The Swiss were perhaps the most active and enthusiastic of the national groups of workers in the International. It was among Swiss workers that the contradiction between centralizing and decentralizing tendencies was the most pronounced. At the Geneva Congress in 1866, there were fifteen Swiss sections represented as against four French and three German. When Bakunin arrived in Switzerland in 1868 over thirty sections had been formed. In Geneva, the building workers had rebelled against the clockmakers forming separate antagonistic branches (Freymond, p15). The issues of reform from above and revolution from below were confused with arguments for centralization and decentralization.

In Switzerland strikes had been unusual. This changed with the arrival of the International. The Geneva building workers and the Basle ribbon makers fought unprecedented disputes against intransigent employers. Backed by the financial and moral support of English, French and American workers, the Swiss workers fought for holidays and shorter working hours despite lock outs and the hostility of the Swiss bourgeoisie to the International. At the same time, one of the first representatives of the International, Pierre Coullery of the La Chaux-de-Fonds branch had led Jura workers — domestic workers scattered in mountain villages and unused to mass organization and action — into an electoral alliance with bourgeois and monarchist radicals (Mehring, p414). The Jura workers felt betrayed by the political leadership of the International and chose a new representative: James Guillaume, a member of Bakunin’s circle.

Bakunin and Guillaume were able to exploit political and economic divisions within the Swiss working class. Through Guillaume, Bakunin gained influence with the isolated Jura watchmakers — in decline under the impact of competition from British and American mass produced watches. In Geneva, Swiss sections included both those of the “fabrique” — enfranchised skilled jewelry and watch making workers — and those of unenfranchised “gros metiers” — building workers of immigrant Italian, French and German origin. The highly paid enfranchised “fabrique” workers of the luxury trades of Geneva had concluded electoral compromises with bourgeois political parties. Bakunin called on the “gros metiers” to reject political action for the vote and concentrate on plans for social upheaval. At the Basle Congress in 1869, he moved a motion for the abolition of the right of inheritance. This was intended to attack the “fabrique” workers’ attachment to private property (Carr p362). He also denounced the Zurich section’s call for referenda on canton legislation as “bourgeois.”

The move by French speaking sections to form a national federation of Franco-Italian Swiss workers led to an unresolved split in 1870 with two national groups claiming to represent the International in Switzerland. One had a base in the “fabrique.” This was loyal to the General Council and based in Geneva. The other had a base in the Jura watchmakers and “gros metiers.” This was loyal to Bakunin’s Alliance (Mehring, pp430-431). The attempt to centralize various sections into a national federation had collapsed into two antagonistic decentralized and uncoordinated groups.

The Jura Federation in Switzerland formed the base for the Bakuninist campaign against the General Council. This campaign gained support from two further disputes that were evidence of centralizing and decentralizing tendencies. The first was the question of representation in the USA. The second was the move to decentralize the English section of the International.

The first concerned the General Council’s order that Section 12 of the North American Federation be dissolved in 1871. Section 12 was led by Woodhull and Caflin — two feminists who argued that women’s liberation should precede any change in class relations (Minutes, 5, p324). A dispute had arisen over an attempt Section12 had made to take over the leadership of the North American Federation. This had been challenged by U.S. sections consisting of foreign born workers. Section 12 had made an appeal calling on the Federation to form an alternative U.S government consisting of radicals. This would run alongside and correspond with the US Congress (Minutes 5, p324). The General Council’s order was an exercise of its greater central powers. It showed how centralization could be used to resolve political disputes between decentralized sections. In response, Woodhull allied with the Bakuninists. This was an unprincipled alliance as Woodhull argued for electoral political activity whereas the Bakuninists were opposed to it.

The second dispute was similarly unprincipled. The General Council had acted both as a coordinating body for the International and the English trade union movement. John Hales, an English trade unionist member of the General Council, had argued that England needed its own national section for five years. He won this demand at the London conference of 1871. Hales was a supporter of the idea of a British working class political party — he was an early advocate of a Labor party. However, after gaining the vote in 1867, he was — like other trade union leaders — under pressure to support the Tories or the Liberals. He broke with Marx after the Hague in 1872. He took offense at Marx’s remark that the English trade union leaders were “more or less bought up by the bourgeoisie and the government” (Draper, 2, p130) He chose thereafter to side with the Bakuninists. He joined them in the first anti-authoritarian International in 1873. He soon abandoned this alliance and ended his life a Liberal.

This shows the two contradictory forces in operation simultaneously. Hales stood both for national autonomy and for a centralized international leadership. Whilst he was a member of the General Council, he had allied with Marx on the idea of working class emancipation from below. However, when he became the leader of a decentralized national Federation, he moved towards support for the idea of working class emancipation from above. His temporary alliance with the Bakuninists on the question of autonomy was therefore a tactic that hid his reformism.

Secrecy and openness in the mode of communication

Secrecy in the mode of communication has two sides: one as a means of control and the other as a means of resistance to control. On the one side, secrecy is a means by which an oppressive power can repress and politically atomize collective resistance to it. A mode of communication that restricts information to the few who initiate and execute plans for control is itself an effective form of control. Similarly, secrecy entails hiding information concerning the effect of those plans (especially if they involve torture or summary execution). This is also a form of control.

On the other side, secrecy can be both a means of maintaining forms of collective opposition to an oppressive power (for example during periods of state repression) and a means of planning to overthrow or destroy that power (especially if it involves assassinations or forms of terrorism). The two sides of secrecy often coincide. This happens when conspiratorial organizations are penetrated by paid informers and provocateurs. The success of secret intelligence and secret police forces in the twentieth century has made most conspiratorial organizations ineffective. The fact that terrorist organizations thrive is, in part, due to the collapse of this mode of control. The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s secret police after the invasion in 2003 and the occupying power’s prompt reemployment of former officers come to mind here.

Openness in the mode of communication is essential for democratic planning. A free flow of information is necessary for individuals to make judgments concerning the truth or falsity of statements, to evaluate critically mistakes, to assess the success of proposed plans, and to judge whether elected representatives have fulfilled their mandate. Freedom of communication, assembly and expression is required for ideas to reach a mass audience through the forms of media and transport available to them.

The General Council of the International adopted an open form of organization that presupposed a free flow of information. Its goal was to become a mass organization of workers worldwide and at its height tens of thousands of workers were affiliated to it. The fact that minutes were kept is an indication that members were able to inspect and correct the record of opinions and decisions made. The International was formally democratic. The founding rules stated that no independent local society should be precluded from directly corresponding with the General Council. Members of the Council were elected at Congresses at which every local branch could send a delegate (Minutes, 2, pp269-270). If a branch were more than five hundred members, it could send an extra delegate. Members took full advantage of the new media and forms of transport — the telegraph and the railways.

However, the influence of conspiratorial methods of organization on the International was still strong. These had a long history and were various in origins. Freemasonry, although not a conspiratorial organization, had a secret mode of communication between members. This allowed republican, democratic and materialist literature to circulate and be discussed during periods when freedom of the press was limited by the Catholic Church and absolutist regimes. It played an important role in developing the ideas needed for the transition from a mercantile to an industrial form of capitalism. During periods of repression and reaction, the secrecy freemasonry afforded allowed republicans and democrats the opportunity to communicate and organize free from the fear of arrest or imprisonment. Many of the generation of revolutionaries that had led the democratic movements of 1848 became masons. This was as true of the French emigres in London that helped to found the International as it was of Bakunin, Mazzini and Garibaldi. Bakunin had been a mason since 1845 (Carr, p128).

In France, non-Proudhonist socialists and communists had an attachment to conspiratorial forms organization. These had their origins in the French revolution with the ideas of Babeuf and Buonarroti. They were kept alive by Blanqui. Blanquists were initiated blindfolded. They were made to repeat a catechism and sworn to secrecy (Bernstein, pp73-74).

Another source of attachment to secrecy was the long tradition of peasant revolt. All leaders of peasant revolts have, of necessity, had to organize covertly — bound by oath to death within a secret fraternity. Bakunin’s ideas on revolutionary organization had elements taken from these various sources that maintained secrecy as a mode of communication. He stressed the importance of a collective invisible centralized dictatorship based on an anonymous, secret organization of revolutionaries. This was similar in conception to Blanquism. The organization would draw up a plan in secrecy which would be discussed and determined beforehand. They would then use this plan to direct the spontaneous activity of the masses. The masses would have no awareness of the dictatorship exercised over them (Kelly, pp242-244). Bakunin used this model in failed attempts at insurrection at Lyons in 1870 and Bologna in 1874.

The secret and spontaneous direction of the masses was similar to way peasant leaders had organized insurrections. In the 1848 revolution, Bakunin had placed his hopes for world-wide revolution upon a mass revolt of the peasantry in Eastern Europe, especially Russia. His revolutionary aspirations reflected the methods of peasant revolt against feudal despotism. In his “Confession to the Czar” he expressed a desire to destroy all castles, and burn all documents of an administrative, governmental and juridical nature. His desire accurately mirrored the reality of what happened in peasant revolts -the destruction of everything associated with the oppressive yoke of the feudal master (Howes, p111).

During the time he was active within the International, he became an advocate of the revolutionary aspirations of those who were recently dispossessed from the land and forced to sell their labor power for a wage. He had an intuitive understanding of the forces that were changing the face of Europe and the world. The advance of capitalism presaged a terminal crisis for remnants of feudal relations of dependency between serfs and masters. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in the 1850s. The subordinate rural population was being transformed into a poor peasantry or an agricultural or urban proletariat. Dispossession of land meant either a move into small scale commodity production or into the position of a landless laborer forced to compete for a wage in town or countryside. Bakunin’s ideas of an alternative to capitalism were to revive ideas of communal forms of production of the land that had survived throughout the feudal period. He also channeled the real hatred of the new political and economic forces into older organizational and revolutionary forms — secret organizations with a mass base intent on the destruction of state and church. His chosen vehicle for this form was the International.

It has been stated that the International was born out of the struggle against the old methods of political conspiracy and secret organizations (Nicolaevsky, p56). These old methods were typical of France during the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. From 1832 to 1840, there had been six attempts at assassinating the French King. However, under the influence of the Chartists , new forms of organization had arisen. These mixed an open communication of socialist ideas with the building mass organizations of laborers. The followers of the founding utopian socialists had built their own legal organizations but tended to ignore the mass political struggles of workers for the vote and the economic struggles of workers organized in trade unions. Proudhon’s French working class followers came to the International with these perspectives. On the other hand socialist ideas had also influenced members of conspiratorial republican and democratic groups. The defeat of the 1848–49 revolution set the open forms of organization back and the old type of conspiratorial organization came once again to the fore (Nicolaevsky, p40).

Marx was well aware of these competing tendencies. The Communist League had been a propagandist organization and Marx had fought against attempts to make it into a conspiratorial group. He argued that where revolutionaries enjoyed democratic rights such as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, then there was no need for secrecy. Conversely, where these basic democratic rights were yet to be won or withdrawn by the state, the need for secrecy was forced on workers and their communist allies. This was a step backwards. The importance of the struggle for democratic rights was the extension of the freedoms of the bourgeoisie to workers and their allies. This extension was necessary if the consciousness of the proletariat was to advance through a process of education to an awareness of its historical role.

When the International was formed in 1864, workers had different levels of freedom to organize and engage in political activity. This depended upon the extent of control the bourgeoisie had over the superstructure. In France, there was a ban on political association and the formation of trade unions. Workers had only just been granted the right to strike. In Britain, workers had the right to associate and to strike. Moreover as a result of the Chartist campaign for universal male suffrage, they had gained concessions from the bourgeoisie such as a partial inclusion in the suffrage in 1867 and universal education for working class children in 1870. These concessions were paid out of state revenue derived from the move away from industrial to finance capital and the surplus value extracted from the super exploitation of labor power in Asia and Africa. The British bourgeoisie had control over the aristocracy who were dependent on the profits of capitalist farmers for their rents. The peasantry had ceased to exist as a class and the whole of the rural population were converted into landless laborers dependent on wages as a source of income.

The French emigres that helped form the International were refugees from the 1848 period. They retained a secret mode of communication as members of a Masonic type of organization called the Philadelphians. Members were also associated with a group called Commune Revolutionnaire formed by Felix Pyat, a left republican member of the French national Assembly in 1848. They also fraternized with Italian emigres who followed Mazzini. The French shared with the Italians an attachment to secrecy, conspiratorial activity and a sympathy with individual acts of terror especially attempts to assassinate tyrants such as Napoleon the third (Nicolaevsky, p43).

These members formed a branch of the International in London. Some of them were members of the General Council. Many of the early struggles within the council were between the conspiratorial London French and the open Proudhonists based in France. One of the reasons the latter were attracted to the International was that they could get round repressive legislation. They could argue they were members of a foreign organization and therefore not violating the law against political societies. One of the causes of dispute between the Proudhonists and the London French was that the latter’s attachment to secrecy attracted the attention of the French police and this threatened the security of the Paris section’s attempts to propagandize among workers and build mass organizations.

By 1866, the London French had become an embarrassment to the General Council. In the Lefort case of 1865 the English and German members of the General Council supported the Proudhonists against the London French. Lefort stood for the violent overthrow of the Empire and the restoration of parliamentary democracy. His propaganda was devoted to the advocacy of political change as opposed to economic demands supported by workers (Collins & Abramsky, pp101-103). A year later members had attended a dinner in commemoration of the 1848 revolution at which Pyat gave a speech that suggested he would support an attempt to assassinate Napoleon. This was reported in the press and the General Council felt obliged to distance itself from Pyat and his followers in the International. The General Council stated its commitment to openness as a mode of communication and its opposition to terrorism. In 1868, the French state moved against the International in Paris arresting leading members of the Paris section who were put on trial for being members of a political society (Collins & Abramsky, p136). Documents taken from correspondence with the London French were used as evidence that the International was a secret organization attempting to overthrow the Empire. The trial affected Proudhonists whose position was for political abstention from political activity. It was a warning by the French state that they should continue to keep away from politics and have nothing to do with republicans and Blanquists.

The General Council had a continual battle to disassociate itself from and to assert the International’s non-conspiratorial and anti-terrorist nature. Thus the General Council upheld the Irish Fenians’ use of physical force as the only possible means of challenging British state oppression at the same time as arguing there were a range of peaceful means open to workers in England.

The French state attempted to harass the International’s operations by characterizing it as a potentially terrorist organization. The Central Committee of the French Federation were tried for being members of a secret society three times (Braunthal, p106). Conspiracy became the major plank of the French state’s propaganda campaign against the International in the repression that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune. Anyone who was a member or sympathizer of the International was liable to imprisonment. The International, it was alleged, was the secret organization that had planned and organized the Commune. Favre, Thiers’ foreign minister, attempted to mobilize a European wide campaign against the International. This was supported by the Pope, Bismarck and Beust, the Austro-Hungarian Chancellor. Significantly, it failed to get the support of the British government who refused to pass emergency legislation against it. Marx’s support for the Commune in his document produce for the General Council — The Civil War in France - alienated some of the English trade unionists. The British government wisely judged that to attack the International as a whole had the potential to antagonize and politicize the British labor movement. This could cause a breach in the cross class alliances that had been formed with trade unionists (Braunthal, p163).

The General Council rejected the request for affiliation by Bakunin’s organization the “Alliance of Socialist Democracy” in 1868. The Alliance’s program stated that the Alliance had a special philosophical mission to bring about the “equalization of classes.” This contradicted the International’s founding document. This stated that class rule and class society needed to be abolished. For Marx it represented the idea that working class emancipation was compatible with value, money and capital. He also took exception to the clause in the Alliance’s program which rejected all forms of political action which did not have as its immediate aim the triumph of the workers’ cause against Capital.

However it was not the issue of differences in the theory and their programmatic expression that motivated the General Council to reject affiliation. Previous differences had been resolved democratically through debates at Congress. The reason was that, if the Alliance had been allowed to affiliate there would have been two central committees and two contending and competing power structures. Moreover, although the Alliance — in response to rejection — decided to dissolve itself into the International, the General Council was not convinced that its members were converted to openness as a mode of communication. For example, new Spanish members recruited by one of Bakunin’s Italian followers Fanelli did not distinguish between the Alliance and the International. They were led to believe they were one and the same organization. Suspicions grew that Bakunin retained the Alliance as a secret conspiratorial organization.

Of note is that Bakunin’s practice embodied the contradiction between secrecy and openness of modes of communication. In other words openness was the public face of his political activity. He kept his commitment to secrecy private. It was his disingenuous embrace of these contradictory forces that led him to be accused of deceit regarding his plans to split the International. The contemporary evidence that Bakunin had not abandoned the older mode of communication and its sympathies with terrorism was provided by the Netchayeff affair in 1870. Impressed by the young Russian nihilist’s revolutionary fervor, Bakunin sent Netchayeff back to Russia with letters indicating that he had the support of an International network of revolutionaries led by Bakunin to agitate on their behalf. Netchayeff was an unscrupulous character who murdered one of his friends, robbed Bakunin of money and threatened to kill Marx’s publisher when he asked Bakunin to pay back the advance he had been given to translate Capital into Russian.

By 1871, the General Council were facing what seemed to be a losing battle to save the International as an organization committed to openness. As a result of the General Council’s endorsement of Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France, the International came under external attack by the French, German and Austrian states as a secret conspiratorial organization sympathetic to terrorism. Moreover, it was growing in Italy and Spain under a leadership that, internally, did not contradict this impression and seemed ambivalent concerning the need to protect openness. Moreover, at the same time that bourgeois newspapers were hinting that Marx was part of a Jewish conspiracy; Bakunin was vilifying him on the same grounds (Collins & Abramsky, p215). It was in this atmosphere that the London congress was called by the General Council in 1871. This increased its disciplinary powers. As a result of this, the Italian federation refused to attend the Hague Congress of 1872 thus denying the Bakuninists the opportunity of taking over the leadership of the International and abolishing the General Council.

The final playing out of the contradiction between openness and secrecy explains why the decision was taken at the Hague to move the General Council from London to New York. In order to defeat the anti-authoritarians, the General Council relied on Blanquist refugees from the Commune to support the move to greater centralization. The International’s disintegration involved the loss of tendencies that stood for openness in modes of communication. The Proudhonists were imprisoned by the French state and powerful English trade unionists had abandoned ship under the pressure of the campaign against the International’s support for the Commune. In this weakened state, the General Council would have been taken over by the Blanquists who were even less committed to openness as a mode of communication than the Bakuninists (Nicolaevsky, p56). New York was the only place that an open form of the International could survive. In fact, the move signified the demise both of a unified International and the General Council.

Conclusion

I have attempted to answer the essay question by indicating that there was an interaction of two tendencies or forces. The first was towards centralization at the core of the leadership and decentralization at the periphery. The pull of these forces was confused with different notions of workers’ self emancipation — from above and from below. The latter — in particular concepts of the nature of the socialist goal and the means of realizing this — coincided with an assertion of and a struggle against conspiratorial forms of secrecy. In other words, the antagonism between open, democratic, mass forms of collectivity and closed, elitist forms of leadership was raised to a new level of awareness. The combined effect of these forces caused an unforeseen and unwelcome disintegration and collapse. Neither Marx nor Bakunin planned for this even if there is evidence that both leaders knew that the International could split and were, after a life and death struggle for leadership, resigned to the final outcome.

Finally, I need to mention the impact of what might be called a contradiction between theory and practice. This in itself is a determined result of the division between intellectual and other forms of labor within capitalism. How far did the International contribute to workers’ theoretical awareness of their ability to take power? This awareness was limited. The leadership was educated through debate and discussion of various positions at Congresses. However, the International had no education program and the General Council made no effort to organize groups to study theory. It does not make sense, for example, to state that the General Council’s move towards greater centralization at the London conference of 1871 was Marx’s attempt to impose a theoretical program of the International. There was nothing written during the life of the International comparable to the Erfurt program of 1891 or to Trotsky’s transitional program. Marx had written a program for the Communist Manifesto and attempted to realize this through his involvement in the International but this never became the program of the International. The International was based on a principle of workers’ self emancipation and a classless society as a means to realizing this movement for emancipation. There was no program that members agreed on about the nature of the classless society or the political means of achieving it. A Marxist was not someone committed to understanding and developing Marx’s critique of political economy, his theory of history or his conception of socialism. “Marxist” was a term of abuse invented by Bakuninists to describe anyone who was a friend of Marx. English reformist trade unionist leaders and French Blanquists were Marxist in this sense. On the contrary, there were a diversity of intellectual currents within the International and not one of them was dominant. Only Marx and the Proudhonists had a theoretical understanding of socialism based on a political economy of capitalism. The Blanquists, Bakuninists, and English trade unionists were activists little concerned with theory. Bakunin has been described as being opposed to theory in principle (Thomas, p284). The same could be said of the English trade unionists. This does not mean the leadership of the International did not consist of educated individuals who thought about what they were doing, had plans and wrote about them in newspapers and journals. Indeed in this sense they were more theoretical than many people on the left today. However this thinking was confined to the immediate tasks of the class struggle, organization, resistance, propaganda and solidarity. The leadership of the International did not concern itself with controversies over the truth or falsity of Marx and Proudhon’s theories of value nor connect this debate with different conceptions of socialism and how to achieve it.

Nonetheless, the brief flowering and vicious suppression of the Paris Commune made a difference to the climate of opinion. It made the open communication of all forms of controversy difficult. Not only were previously active sections, such as the Proudhonists in France driven underground but the International was targeted as a terrorist organization that had secretly conspired against the French government. This was a different environment from one in which the ruling class tolerated the International’s existence despite it being a thorn in the flesh of previously uninhibited forms of capital accumulation.

If the Commune had not happened, would the International have collapsed? It is likely that the success of the International would have forced the ruling class into a coordinated response but it is not clear whether this would have been led by Britain and a policy of cooption rather than by the French and Prussian’s choice of repression. The response of the International ruling class to the Commune and the International’s support for the Commune was varied according to different national perceptions of the International’s threat. Differences between the legal superstructures were themselves determinate responses to previous phases in the class struggle and uneven development. Thus in France and Germany, the International was banned, but in Britain it was not. The British bourgeoisie was wise to follow a path of cooption of trade union leaders intent on reform as a means of amelioration of workers’ economic oppression. The acquiescence of British workers’ leaders to their bourgeois superiors would, of course have been less likely, had British capital not shifted from industrial investment into financial investment in the Empire. Those of us familiar with Lenin, know that the super-exploitation of the subject colonial populations through brute force supplied the surplus value that paid for the state financed housing and welfare schemes of Britain and Germany.

Both the Commune and the International were defeats for the working class. Neither was successful in overthrowing capitalism and establishing the conditions for working class emancipation. The Commune showed that a socialist alternative to capitalism was possible but that it would be resisted violently by the ruling class. It wasn’t until the October Revolution of 1917 that there was another opportunity for proletarian power world-wide. The International was a crucial response to and exacerbating element with the political and economic crisis of the 1850s and 1860s. Out of its defeat rose a new phase of capital accumulation based more clearly on the need to secure class collaboration through the investment of state revenue in unproductive labor. This included a decisive shift towards finance capital and away from industrial capital. This tendency accelerated in the subsequent century. It has dominated capitalist social relations and the role of finance capital is only now becoming transparent. Put differently, the International and the Commune were the triggers that started a process of capitalist decline.

Bibliography