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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.1: The International Working Men’s Association

Welcome to our series on the great Russian Revolution, which in the history of revolutions is probably second only to the French Revolution in terms of importance, impact, and then ongoing historiographic controversy and debate. But unlike the French Revolution, and indeed because of the French Revolution, the men and women who made the Russian Revolution were actively longing to embark on a world historical event.

Guys like Danton, Desmoulins, and Robespierre had improvised their way through a great upheaval, but now would-be revolutionary adepts like Lenin and Trotsky studied the course of the French Revolution, and then spent their whole lives planning for and anticipating a new, great revolution.

Not that the Russian Revolution is not also defined by spur of the moment improvisations, just that the revolutionaries were aiming from the beginning at something as big as the French Revolution. And I think they succeeded. Now before the Russian Revolution came along and added a new, great revolution for everyone to focus attention on, be afraid of, want to emulate, et cetera, the French Revolution continued to hang over European affairs as the revolution that everybody focused their attention on was scared of or wanted to emulate. And if you remember back to the episode I did in our series on 1848 called The Specter of the French Revolution, we talked about how the French Revolution played such a huge role in defining one’s position inside of 19th century politics, that on the one hand you had anti revolutionaries. This group included both full throated reactionary, conservatives, like Metternich, but also liberal constitutional monarchists, like François Guizot, who believed that any further democratic or social reform would be the first step towards the return of Madame la Guillotine.

But this group also included liberal reformers, like Alexis de Tocqueville in France, the Count of Cavour in Piedmont, Sardinia, and István Széchenyi in Hungary, who were anti revolution, but who believed that slow and steady reform was just the thing that would prevent that revolution, not trigger it.

On the other hand, there were those who thought actually, hell yeah, little revolution is just what the doctor ordered. And they broke into three camps, those representing what we might call the spirit of 1789: yes, revolution against lingering feudal absolutism, but always guarding against the slip into mob driven chaos and the reign of terror. Then beyond them, there were those representing the spirit of 1792: radical democratic Republicans who believe 1789 was the unsatisfying precursor to the much more important and much more glorious revolution of 1792, which ushered in real political Liberty and social equality. Finally, there was this weird and obscure minority representing what we might call the spirit of 1796. Those who saw 1789 as a step to 1792, but who also saw 1792 as a step towards the aborted promise of 1796, represented by Gracchus Babeuf and the conspiracy of equals.

They believe that the liberty and equality espoused even by the radical republicans would be impossible without economic equality, that it was not enough to declare the rights of man if the wealth of the nation was still unequally distributed. That simply transferring land and capital from a dying aristocracy to a rising bourgeoisie was no revolution at all. Especially not as the idealism of the revolution gave way to the cynicism and despotism of the Directory, and then the Consulate, and then the Empire.

It was this last group that first asked the social question. And as the 19th century progressed, their demands for an answer only grew louder. And it is from that tiny seed from the spirit of 1796 that we find the origins of the Russian Revolution, a social revolution to match the size and scope of the merely political French Revolution.

It was in fact during the cynical and despotic days of the consulate and the empire that the first batch of new commentators and critics and reformers wanted to address the failed promise of the French Revolution. They were not yet called socialists because that word and concept didn’t really exist yet. But in retrospect, we recognize them as such. These early utopian socialists were highly critical of the failures of the disciples of the enlightened philosophic to produce anything resembling a just society. But this first generation of proto-socialists did not yet abandon capital or reason as the proper tool to eradicate social and political injustice.

The oldest and most influential of this generation was the Comte de Saint-Simon. As a young man, Saint-Simon had served in the French Expeditionary Force that went to fight in the American war of independence and returned an enthusiastic partisan of the coming French Revolution. Keenly interested in the scientific improvement of human society, he managed to survive the Reign of Terror, despite a brief imprisonment, and then spent the rest of his life developing a framework for a scientifically perfected society. Once people understood that humans were governed by empirically determined laws, a social science to match what Newton had done for physics. People would be able to create a harmonious society, devoid of poverty, suffering, crime, and every other social ill.

Now Saint-Simon did not preach radical communal equalitarianism so much as a technocratic meritocracy that would just render the political state obsolete. And if we’re connecting dots here to other parts of the Revolutions podcast, one of Saint-Simone’s secretaries was Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, and more specifically positivism, which we saw get picked up by the Mexican scientificos during the Porfiriato.

Saint-Simon, no less than Porfirio Diaz, wanted not much politics and a lot of administration. A younger contemporary of Saint-Simon was Charles Fourier, a trenchant and witty social critic of post-revolutionary France who developed full blown and very detailed theories about the ideal environment for the flourishing of both individuals and the community within which they live, that the individual should not be molded to fit society, but that society should be molded to fit the individual. Like Saint-Simon, Fourier believed that his great project was to discover laws of human relations to match Newton’s physics. And he thought he cracked it with a very complicated metaphysics based on types of human attraction and passion that once recognized and set free would allow human communities to fall into a voluntary, natural, and harmonious balance. To help this process along, Fourier developed schemes for networks of four story complexes, where 1,620 members would work and live, doing work that was tailored to their own proclivities and talents and passions, so that labor would cease to be labor and instead become pleasure.

Again, armed with capital R Reason, human conflict, poverty, and misery would be overcome. Fourier gained enough adherents that in the 1840s, at least 30 utopian communities were established in the United States based off of his ideas. None of them turned out to be utopia, leaving behind instead a legacy of plaques and historical markers that say on this date, in this place, humans once attempted to build a utopia.

The last of this early group that I’ll mention is Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist who took over a factory in New Lanark Scotland in January of 1800 and proceeded to use it as a testing ground for his reformist theories about how individuals, families, and communities ought to live and work. Basically, Owen thought that though biology played a role in human development, so too, did the environment within which they lived. In the beginning, this took the form of a kind of benevolent capitalism. At his factory, Owen instituted ten hour maximum work days, he insisted that company store sell goods, essentially at cost, he covered the education of children, he built good housing for the families, and for a long time, he was lauded in polite society for his noble and more importantly productive efforts.

But after the end of the Napoleonic War, Owen grew more radical, and he advanced from benevolent capitalist to outright socialist. This turned him from darling of polite society to pariah, but Owen didn’t care. He started dumping his fortune into an attempt to build an ideal society, eventually buying an entire town in Indiana called New Harmony, where he tried to build his utopia, but this utopia failed within two years because history has shown time and again, that human nature and idealistic utopian schemes go together like oil and water. Owen was financially ruined by all this, but he remained an active promoter of worker rights right up until his death in 1858, and he played a role in advancing nearly every piece of British labor legislation in the first half of the 19th century, and he was the one who coined the enduring phrase, “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, and eight hours rest” as the perfect balance for the human day, which is a motto that still has some currency today.

This early utopian socialism was mostly of interest to a few dreamers and eccentric do-gooders hoping to change the world by force of example. Socialism as an active revolutionary political force was still barely in its infancy when the revolutions of 1848 broke out, though one of the greatest statements of revolutionary socialism was produced right on the eve of the revolution, and that’s the Communist Manifesto.

But the Communist League who was issuing this Communist Manifesto was an obscure group who had almost no impact on immediate revolutionary events, and the Communist Manifesto is only important in historical retrospect. The hurricane of 1848, though, scrambled things up and sent people and ideas flying everywhere. And after that storm passed, people took stock of what had happened. They drew lessons from their failures, and they began the process of building a stronger and more advanced socialist challenge to the political and economic status quo.

The lessons learned were varied and often contradictory. Those for example, who followed Pierre (sic) Auguste Blanqui, the professional revolutionary par excellence, continued to insist that the solution was to create a hardcore professional vanguard of revolutionaries who could be trusted to be ruthless, and see the job of toppling the tyrants of Europe done properly. This is not surprising because that was Blanqui’s solution to every problem. If Blanqui’s car blew a tire, he would first want to forge a hardcore dedicated revolutionary vanguard before he thought about where to get a new tire. This Vanguard would be secretive, few in number, and deadly in impact. They would not be distracted or dissuaded by weak-kneed liberals or ignorant workers who knew nothing of revolutionary politics.

A diametrically opposed takeaway from the failures of 1848 came from Blanqui’s contemporary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-described anarchist, who counseled ignoring the state and politics completely: don’t focus on overthrowing the state, just ignore it. Build worker collectives and voluntary associations as an alternative to coercive and exploitive capitalism. These voluntary associations will grow and spread, and the next thing you know, we don’t even need a revolution because it’s already done.

There were also those who existed in between those extremes, and who still believed that the answer to the social question could only come after political liberation. In France, this group would count among its number the Neo-Jacobin Republicans — the spirit of 1792 guys — and elsewhere in Europe, those who still followed the national liberation doctrines and methods of Giuseppe Mazzini, that we must first focus on overthrowing the reactionary political powers that keep free nations in bondage, and then we can deal with the rest of it.

It’s fair to say though, that in the years after 1848, those reactionary political powers were ascendant and the power of these revolutionaries was limited, to say the least. They had been scattered and decimated by voluntary exile, forced deportation, execution, and imprisonment. So though one must always keep a watchful eye, the threat of revolution from below was pretty minimal. The violent aberration of 1848, thus survived, the great powers of Europe could get back to quote unquote normal history: making war on each other, mostly to satisfy the dynastic ambitions of Europe’s rulers.

Prince-President Bonaparte’s coup of 1851 and subsequent creation of the second French empire ended what had been a pretty good run of great power peace since the fall of the first Napoleon back in 1815. And within a few years, Napoleon the Third was teaming up with the British to go fight the Russians in the Crimean War, and then a few years later, France teamed up with Piedmont Sardinia to fight the Austrians and restart the process of Italian liberation and unification to match and counter the ambitions of Napoleon the Third. Prussian chancellor Otto Von Bismarck decided in the early 1860s that the time was just about right to make a play to consolidate the still dis- United States of Germany under Prussian domination.

At the same time, another nation of longstanding suffering, renewed its dream of liberation and unification. I speak of course of Poland, around whom all revolutionary history must ultimately revolve.

Wiped from the map of Europe by Prussia, Austria, and Russia in the 1790s and not reconstituted in the treaty of Vienna of 1815, the keepers of the old flame of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth had tried to restore themselves in the early 1830s, and then again, during the revolutions of 1848, but had failed both times.

With both Russia and Austria, having recently been knocked around, Poland saw the rise of clandestine meetings, public demonstrations, and violent clashes all through 1860, 1861, and 1862. Patriotic Poles divided between one group of more conservative liberals, intellectuals and professionals who wanted essentially home rule akin to something like what the Hungarians were about to get from the Habsburgs, and more radical, lower class workers and peasants who wanted to overthrow their foreign oppressors and found a free Polish Republic. Disunited, but mostly marching in the same direction, the situation exploded in January of 1863 with a full blown armed uprising followed in February by an uprising in Lithuania.

Now the plight of Poland had long been a cause to rally around for everyone basically to the left of Metternich since 1815, especially in France. In the very last years of his life, Lafayette was very much focused on Poland and trying to help exile Poles in Paris, and he even accepted a commission in the Polish National Guard.

No, YOU’RE writing a biography of Lafayette and awkwardly shoehorning him into the story.

This latest Polish uprising led to various radical and socialist groups wanting to show solidarity with the Poles. And so in July of 1863, a small group of French working class leaders made the trip from Paris to London to participate in a large meeting at St. James’s Hall in solidarity with the Polish insurgents hosted by English working class leaders. The French delegation was mostly made up of mutualist anarchist followers of Proudhon, and at the meeting, the French leaders and the English leaders started discussing the fact that they really had a lot of problems in common, and that international solidarity of the working classes might be the only way to find the elusive answer to the social question.

They all of course had their own national concerns, but it couldn’t hurt to think about building up an alliance from below. Talks about building up such an alliance continued all through 1863 and 1864, until some details were finalized. Invitations were written and received for a meeting to be held in London in September of 1864. This one, not just on behalf of the Poles, whose uprising, unfortunately, had already been crushed, but to discuss what an international working men’s association might look like if such a thing was feasible or even desirable.

This meeting opened at St. Martins Hall on September the 28th, 1864, and brought together quite an array of reformers and revolutionaries who had very little in common besides a general alienation from the social economic and political status quo. So there were British labor, unionists and idealistic holdover Owenites, there were French Proudhonists and Blanquists who spoke a common language, but who had little else in common. There were Irish, Italian and Polish nationalists who sought national liberation above all, among them many disciples of Mazzini’s hardcore Republican young Europe movement. Also present were a few ponderous and philosophically inclined German socialists. The men, and at this point they were all men, who gathered did not agree on a solution to the social question. Nor did they really even agree on what the problem was. But there was a sense that as long as the enemies of the status quo remained separated from each other, that the reactionary defenders of the status quo, who controlled the wealth and armies of their respective countries would always win. Sharing an enemy, they hoped that they could become allies. If not quite friends.

Those assembled in St. Martins Hall voted unanimously to found an international working men’s association, which they then creatively dubbed the International Working Men’s Association. This is a bit of a mouthful, so in time it became known as simply The International. And is known to us today as the First International, because in the decades to come, there would be a Second International and a Third International and a Fourth International, but let’s not worry about them because nobody at the meeting at St. Martins Hall in 1864 knew that they were forming merely the First International.

So among the small contingent of ponderous and philosophically inclined German socialists at this meeting was an exile from the revolution of 1848, who had been living in London with his family since 1849. This guy was not particularly important. He didn’t even know about the meeting until a week before it was held and was invited practically just because of the organizers wanted the meeting to be as International as possible and they needed some more Germans. He was at that point, known principally as a radical journalist and polemicist with a penchant for indulging in cat fights with other members of the emigre and exile communities where he had lived, in Germany Belgium, France, and the UK. If you haven’t guessed by now, I am of course, talking about 46-year-old old Karl Marx.

So we’re going to talk much more, more about the life and ideas of Marx next week, because though he is obscure at this moment, he obviously looms large over the revolution and every subsequent revolution in the 20th century. In fact, part of the reason we’re here talking about the founding of the International Working Men’s Association is because this is the organization that helps take Marx from obscure and isolated grump to an intellectual leader with actual followers.

Again, partly because he was simply a German who lived in London. Marx was appointed to an executive general council of 21 men who would guide the formation of this new working men’s association. Now Marx wasn’t really planning on playing a huge role on this council, and over the next few days, he only sporadically attended meetings, but then it was brought to his attention that the followers of Mazzini were coming to dominate the council, and that seemed to get Marx off his ass because Marx and Mazzini hated each other personally and professionally.

So when the larger general council created a smaller committee to actually work on drafts for the rules and opening statement of the new international working men’s association, Marx not only got himself on the committee, but he offered to host their meeting at his house. And given the fact that this was a working class operation, and he was likely the most gifted writer amongst them, he got this smaller drafting committee to delegate to him individually the task of drafting these crucial founding documents of the International. The documents he produced at the end of October, 1864 were unanimously approved on November the First and let Marx put his early stamp on the International.

Now, at this point, there was no such thing as Marxists. Marx himself had very few friends let alone followers in the early 1860s. But he coded a bunch of very Marxist language into the DNA of the International Working Men’s Association. The inaugural address begins by breaking down the phenomenal growth of the capitalist economy since 1848, and then laying out all the ways that the workers have been screwed over. that despite massive percentage growth in profits and productivity, that the conditions of the life of the workers was appalling. It was worse than at any point in history that they were not even receiving sufficient calories to stay alive, and that this was all according to the British government’s own reports.

The address lamented the destruction of the nascent working class movements in 1848 and went on to praise efforts to ameliorate the worst conditions by various reformers in the 1850s. But then Marx slipped in some editorializing aimed at mutualist anarchists who supported non-confrontational cooperatives that would supplant the ruling capitalist class rather than accepting the necessary logic of class conflict to overthrow their power.

Marx wrote, quote, the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864, has proved beyond doubt that however excellent in principle, and however useful in practice, cooperative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workman, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burdens of their miseries.

Marx went so far as to say outright that such cooperatives were welcomed by their oppressors because they would distract the workers from the real threat that the workers posed, that what they had was numbers, and that if they combined internationally, that they could be a force of great revolutionary strength.

So for Marx, social revolution lay through the season of political power and he wrote quote to conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes. End quote.

Marx also drafted the general rules of the International, which were prefaced by more strong language that followed from his own analysis of the situation. He wrote, quote that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves: that is, they can’t rely on any other class or group, neither friendly aristocrats nor charitable bourgeois liberals. They must do it for themselves.

He also wrote quote that the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor– that is, the source of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms of all its social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence. That the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means.

So clearly the social question must always take precedence, that mere political rights and constitutions aren’t going to be enough to magically solve the problem, but that said, political power was a key component of the answer to the social question.

But though what everyone would later understand to be very Marxist language being coded into the DNA of the first International, the actual rules of the organization were very clear that this was meant to attract as many affiliates as possible and not have some doctrinal litmus test for membership.

The inaugural address was just that and nothing more. The general council in London would be there to act as a coordinating and correspondence bureau, not some central executive handing down orders from on high. In fact, all somebody had to do to join was quote, acknowledge truth, justice, and morality as the basis of their conduct toward each other and toward all men, without regard to color, creed or nationality.

There would be lots of latitude about how national, local and individual groups who elected to affiliate with the international could operate. Self-directed autonomy and freedom of ideological choice was literally in the rules. And it said while united in perpetual bond of fraternal cooperation, the working men societies joining the international association will preserve their existing organizations intact.

This meant, for example, that whatever shot Marx had just taken at Proudhon’s mutualists, that the vast majority of French sections that affiliated with the International were mutualist anarchist, and really up through the Paris commune, it was the followers of Proudhon, not Marx, who were the single most advanced and influential faction inside the International.

The founding of the International Working Men’s Association was a momentous event in the history of labor, socialism, communism, anarchism, and revolution. It was also the beginning of a hot holy mess of disagreement and rivalry between those who now affiliated with the International. Intentionally casting, the net as wide as possible was the point. But that meant that every fish in the sea wound up coming on board and that would produce some major conflicts. And just to give you a flavor of some of these disputes, British union leaders wanted this all to be a reformist movement, continental radicals demanded full blown revolution, professional revolutionaries, who followed Blanqui wanted this to be a secretive and focused vanguard, while others like Marx himself, wanted it to be an out in the open mass movement.

Some supported union activity as a necessary focus for worker direct action, while many anarchists hated the unions because they granted the capitalist premise that some were powerful owners, while others were mere workers. The anarchists instead wanted to emphasize worker-owned collectives, not organizing factories for better wages.

Some felt that the international, movement couldn’t work without powerful direction from a central authority giving orders from the top down. Others thought that it would be pointless if it wasn’t an inverted pyramid built from the bottom up with the guys at the center, working for those at the periphery, not the other way around. Some wanted to form political parties and challenged parliamentary elections, others thought that politics was the whole problem and they needed to decisively turn their backs on the entire game of politics and build up their own alternative structures. Some believed in capturing the power of the state, others in ignoring its very existence until like a forgotten God, it simply disappeared.

But for the moment, all these disagreements were papered over, and it was with a great deal of hope and optimism that the International Working Men’s Association was founded in 1864. The International would soon be tested by all those internal disputes, and then really tested by the explosion of the Franco-Prussian war, the siege of Paris and the creation of the Paris Commune. As the years went by Marx’s influence would continue to grow as he kept a close, if behind the scenes, eye on how the international presented and directed itself, eventually bringing him into conflict with the collectivist anarchists who started joining in the later 1860s under the auspices of the Russian revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin.

The personal and ideological conflict between Marx and Bakunin would define the remaining history of the First International, as well as the future of revolutionary politics as the schism between communists and anarchists would have profound implications for the course of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and beyond.

So, over the next few episodes, we will talk about the life of Marx and his theories of economics, politics, history, and revolution, and then talk about Bakunin, and his theories of economics, politics, history, and revolution. And thus armed, we can go forth and aim ourselves at the institution that both believed more than any other, stood for tyrannical reactionary oppression, the Russian tsar.