The first International

22/08/2024

Authors • History • Marxism • Socialism

By OSVALDO COGGIOLA*

In the German labor movement, in the second half of the 19th century, divergences between the supporters of Marx and those of Lassalle were manifested.

The founding of the International Workers' Association (AIT), in 1864, crowned a centuries-old effort by the labor movement, and the intellectuals linked to it, towards an international organization of workers. This was understood as the indispensable instrument for the reorganization of society on a communist basis, on social ownership of the means of production.

In the Modern Era, communist theories dated back to the 16th century, symbolized in the Utopia by Thomas Morus (1516), who became chancellor of Henry VII's England, in which he argued that “unless private property is completely abolished, it is not possible to have a fair distribution of goods nor can humanity be adequately governed. If private property remains, the great and best part of humanity will continue to be oppressed by a heavy and inevitable burden of anguish and suffering.”[I]

In the 17th century, Francis Bacon, in the novel The New Atlantis described a society governed by science and solidarity, and James Harrington criticized, in Oceana, the unequal distribution of property and assets; in the same century, Tommaso Campanella, in The City of the Sun defended radical communitarianism. All these imaginary utopias were located in distant parts of a world that was still largely unknown.

They also anticipated modern social criticism, with “its positive proposals regarding future society, the suppression of the distinction between city and country, the abolition of the family, private profit and waged work, the proclamation of social harmony and the transformation of the State into a simple administration of production and the disappearance of the antagonism between classes, which these authors knew inaccurately... These proposals had a purely utopian feeling”.[ii]

The French Revolution (1789) concluded with the defeat of its left wing (the Jacobins), but they had their radical heirs, the “Conspiracy of Equals” of 1796. This fraction proposed a communal property program to deepen the revolution, with based on agrarian socialism. During this period “workers considered themselves part of the popular strata of the nation, and were trapped by this ideology. Their deprivation of rights could only be eliminated by demanding that all citizens have the same right to determine the activity of political power, so that the State would not be abused to the advantage of a few.

They claimed for themselves the freedom rights corresponding to “natural law”. But they were not able to put forward demands different from the thinking of radical bourgeois democrats.”[iii] In practice, however, they went beyond this level. The independent class consciousness of workers did not yet clearly exist in 1789: outside Britain and France it was almost entirely non-existent. The expression “working class” only appeared in English labor writings after 1815. Not all citizens were workers, but all conscious workers belonged to the democratic movement, the “Jacobin” and proletarian consciousness complemented each other.

Thomas de Quincey reported: “Three children of thirteen years of age, with wages from six to eight shillings per week, they replaced a mature man in the factory with a weekly salary of 45 shillings".[iv] Charles Dickens (in Oliver Twist and Hard times) reported similar or even worse cases. In the first factories, there were frequent production stops, causing unemployment. Entry and exit times from factories were generally marked by the ringing of bells, which in the city of Manchester began to ring at half past four in the morning.

Inside the factory, the worker had a specific and always repetitive role, trained to the rhythm of the machine and under the supervision of the foreman who threatened him with fines and dismissal from his job for the slightest mistake made. The analysis of the situation of the working class carried out by the Chartist activist James Leach (Stubborn facts from the Factories by a Manchester Operative, from 1844) inspired The situation of the working class in England, by Friedrich Engels, who also lived in Manchester at the time.

The new workers, these observers noted, were basically former peasants – small landowners or serfs – expropriated or expelled from their lands, and artisans expropriated from their instruments of production (tools). The intervention of the legislative power in Great Britain, in the field of social protection of workers (including safety, hygiene and health at work), dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, and was due less to the organized struggle of the labor movement (which still manifested itself in an isolated, sporadic or incipient form) than to the influence of social reformers, philanthropic employers, humanist doctors, writers and politicians with social sensitivity, if not nationalist or conservative politicians concerned with the reduction to disability of entire generations, making it impossible them from serving in the army.

The intervention of the social legislator in the era of the liberal State was no stranger to pressure from the more “enlightened” segments of public opinion, shocked by the revelation of a new class of slaves and, above all, by the condition of women and children in mills (factory establishments in the cotton textile industry with the first machines powered by hydraulic energy) in the Northeast of England, and in the coal mines of Wales.

In 1802, the first measure relating to the protection of workers had no practical effects, due to a lack of political instruments for its effective application. It did not establish restrictions regarding the minimum age for admission to factory work, although it limited daily working hours to a maximum of twelve, prohibited night work and ordered the cleaning of the walls of manufacturing establishments twice a year, as well as the ventilation of dormitories. .

The law provided for the role of a labor inspector. It was planned to create a local system of voluntary inspection of factories and workshops, composed of clergy and magistrates (visitors). This system never worked. But it was, in any case, the first attempt at State intervention in the field of worker protection, calling into question the myth of the “free” employment contract. An attempt was made, for the first time, to define by law what a “normal working day” was, as the working day began to extend beyond the limits of the natural 12-hour day. It was a setback in relation to the working time of old artisans and the regulation of craft guilds.

The 1802 law, moreover, did not bother English parliamentarians, many of whom were powerful employers and landowners (landlords), mines or mills, which soon bypassed the legal obligation: since in the articles referring to minors it referred only to apprentices, the so-called free children. Inside the factory, the worker had a specific and always repetitive role, trained to the rhythm of the machine and under the supervision of the foreman, who threatened him with fines and dismissal from his job for the slightest mistake made.

Hunger, poverty and constant supervision imposed discipline at work, but another coercion was widely used: moral and religious. Methodism, a religion organized by John Wesley (1703-1791), an Anglican theologian, played a prominent role in stating that the consequences of factory indiscipline could be, not just dismissal, but something much worse, the “flames of hell”. Man's salvation would be linked to the services he provided to God, as a good Christian and, mainly, through diligent work.

The working class grew at a faster rate than the growth of the general population. The rest of Europe was progressively affected by the English economic transformation. In Barmen, in German Wuppertal, the working population increased from 16 thousand in 1810 to more than 40 thousand in 1840. In Barmen and Eberfeld together, the working class numbered, in 1840, 1100 dyers, 2.000 spinners, 12.500 miscellaneous weavers and 16 thousand weavers of ribbons, shoelaces and braids. By 1830 there were already 200 factories throughout the Wupper valley: “The river is disgusting, an open sewer that disguises the various dyes thrown into it by dyeing establishments with an indefinite shade of filth that makes the visitor shudder when looking at it ”, wrote a witness at the time.

But the center of manufacturing-industrial development continued to be England, centered on the textile industry. The surplus working population proved to be necessary for capitalist accumulation, as an unemployed workforce available to be exploited according to the changing needs of capital expansion. These human masses gradually moved to other branches of production, especially those that had not yet incorporated the technological advances of modern industry.

The social unit of the working class created by factory system it was objective, determined by their own conditions of work and existence: “The unity of salaried workers as a productive body as a whole is outside the salaried workers, it is in the capital that keeps them together; For salaried workers, the connection between their work is contrasted with the authority of the capitalist, as the power of a strange, despotic will.”[v]

With the routine and misery imposed by the factory system, the salaried worker's only alternatives were submission or starvation and death. A collective desire for change, for improving working and living conditions and for the abolition of capitalism, was generated. The rapprochement between modern wage slavery and colonial slavery was not inappropriate. The comparison of the two forms of slavery (metropolitan and colonial) was perhaps even to the disadvantage of “free” workers in the metropolis: in a petition from English workers, they referred to the better living conditions of American slaves who, at least, worked outdoors.

The bourgeoisie discovered (and began to fear) the class struggle typical of the capitalist regime. A form of struggle used in the early days of the labor movement was “boycott”, a word derived from the name of an English officer in charge of managing the affairs of Count Erne, of Ireland. Sir Boycott was known for his brutal methods of treating employees. He refused to negotiate and the workers began to do the same, proposing that the village's residents not consume the Count's products, which caused a huge loss and removed the English officer from his position.

“Sabotage” was also used during this period as a mechanism to pressure workers. The term has French origins and derives from shoe, which means “clog”. French workers used these shoes to damage machines, jamming production. The leap in the action of this young proletariat occurred with the use of strikes to put pressure on employers. The term originates from Praça da Greve (Place de Grève), currently Hôtel de Ville in Paris. When unemployed or to deal with work-related matters, workers used to meet there.

For the new capitalist class, the strike was unacceptable: “The bourgeoisie, which had recently taken power, executes a kind of crass between morals and nature, offering one the guarantee of the other; fearing the naturalization of morality, we moralize nature, pretend to confuse the political order and the natural order, and conclude by decreeing immoral everything that challenges the structural laws of the society we want to defend. For the mayors of Charles moral and logical, philosophical foundation of bourgeois society... The strike is scandalous because it bothers precisely those to whom it does not concern. It is reason that suffers and revolts… What is opposed is not man to man, but the striker to the user. Here we find a constitutive trait of the reactionary mentality, which consists of dispersing the collective into individuals and the individual into essences (which) participates in a general technique of mystification that consists of formalizing social disorder as much as possible... In the face of the lie of the essence and On the other hand, the strike establishes the becoming and truth of the whole. It means that man is total, that all his functions are in solidarity with each other, that the roles of user, taxpayer or soldier are walls too fragile to be able to oppose the contamination of facts, and that, in a society, everything concerns everyone. By protesting against the strike that bothers them, the bourgeoisie reveals the cohesion of social functions.”[vi]

The workers' class association was opposed by the bourgeoisie, sanctioned with heavy fines and described as an attack on freedom and human rights. Workers' associations were considered an attempt to reestablish medieval guilds and an attack on the free buying and selling of labor power, although this support from political power to capital reduced wages to such a low level that legislators themselves considered it almost a remake of slavery.

Throughout the gestation of civil society, legislative interventions aimed to extend the working day, the nascent capitalist needed constant intervention from political power with this objective. The exploitation of wage labor and the subjective expression of revolt against it were a historical unity. In 1849, in the novel Shirley, the English writer Charlotte Brontë summarized the feeling of textile workers in England when faced with poverty and unemployment: “Poverty breeds hatred”. Workers' subjectivity was born from this hatred, which also generated the feeling of fraternity and class unity.

In the German labor movement, in the second half of the 19th century, differences between Marx's supporters and Lassalle's supporters became apparent. The differences between the Marxist and Lassallean groups led to the founding of the International Workers' Association, or First International. The International would be an extension of the League of Communists, whose main objective was to establish “a central point of communication and cooperation between working-class societies in different countries”.

The League was dissolved in 1852, two years after the internal split and expulsion of the ultra-leftist faction of Willich and Schapper, who defended the transformation of the League into a “society of conspirators”, against the opposition of Marx and Engels. Unlike Lassalle's association, the International Association (AIT) preached that the emancipation of the working class, and the abolition of all class regimes, would be obtained through the struggle of the workers themselves.

O Inaugural Manifesto of the International Workers' Association, written by Karl Marx, stated that “the emancipation of workers will be the work of the workers themselves; The efforts of workers to achieve their emancipation must not tend to constitute new privileges, but to establish for all the same rights and the same duties; the worker's submission and dependence on capital is the source of all servitude: political, moral and material; for this reason, the economic emancipation of workers is the great purpose to which every political movement must be subordinated; all efforts made to date have failed due to the lack of solidarity between workers from different professions in each country, and a fraternal union between workers from different regions; the emancipation of workers is not a simply local or national problem, but one that interests all civilized nations, with the solution of the problem necessarily being subordinated to its theoretical and practical contribution; the movement that is developing among the workers of the most industrious countries, giving rise to new hopes, gives a solemn warning not to fall into old mistakes, and advises combining all efforts that are still isolated…”.

The International was founded at a congress in which, basically, local (English) and French workers' associations participated: their presence was facilitated by the holding of an international industrial exhibition in London, and also by the new communication facilities provided by the international telegraph system, which allowed workers on both sides of the English Channel to come into direct contact. The International Workers' Association was not only the product of a convergence of workers' organizations, but also of a theoretical and political struggle: theoretical and practical divergences between the Marxist and Lassallean groups in German socialism led to the founding of the International Workers' Association.

After the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, given the situation in France and also in England, only Germany could serve as a base and center for the international labor movement. The policy of the General Council of the International Workers' Association was modeled, from 1871, on the basis of German socialism: it was a radical transformation, in accordance with the mode of organization and the program of German social democracy, reputed to be the driving force of Renewed international. In 1872 the last congress of the First International on European soil was held in The Hague.

At Engels' proposal, the General Council of the International Workers' Association was transferred to the United States, to protect itself from the attacks of the reaction and also from the actions of the Bakuninists, who threatened to take over the organization's leadership by assault. In the vote on the relocation of the General Council to New York, the proposal received 30 votes in favor, 14 for London, one for Brussels and one for Barcelona, with thirteen abstentions, which allows the number of delegates in the Congress to be fixed at almost exactly sixty: ' It is undoubted that Marx and Engels wanted to move the General Council to New York not because it would do any good, but to remove it from the hands into which it would fall if it remained in London.”[vii]

The anarchists reacted immediately, holding a meeting in Zurich, and immediately traveling to Saint Imier, in Switzerland, where, on the initiative of the Italians, a congress was held that created what would be known as the “Anti-authoritarian International”. There were four Spanish, six Italian and two French delegates, two from the Jurassic Federation and one from the United States. A total of fifteen delegates unanimously decided not to recognize the Hague congress, and deliberated resolutions on the “pact of friendship, solidarity and mutual defense between free federations”, “the nature of the political action of the proletariat”, the “organization of resistance of work.”

Anarchists established their “anti-political and anti-authoritarian” status by stating: “(i) that the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat; (ii) that any organization of a supposedly provisional and revolutionary political power, to bring about this destruction, can be nothing more than a mistake, and would be as dangerous for the proletariat as all the governments that exist today; (iii) that, rejecting any compromise to achieve the Social Revolution, the proletarians of all countries must establish, outside of all bourgeois politics, the solidarity of revolutionary action”. Marxists called Bakuninists “divisionists.”

These finally held their Congress in Geneva, in 1873, organized by the Socialist and Revolutionary Propaganda Section of Geneva, with the presence of 26 delegates. The statutes of the International Workers' Association were modified in accordance with the principles defended by the Bakuninists.

The “Hague” (“Marxist”) International still lived weakly for a few more years: “The utopian way of thinking typical of the infancy of the proletarian movement was still deeply rooted in the mentality of the workers, which, according to Marx, had been overcome by the International, just as science had surpassed the ancient conceptions of astrologers and alchemists. The era of utopian socialism was not yet so over when the authors of the London resolutions attempted to transform the Association into a militant political organization adapted to the needs of the modern proletariat.

Many were still those who had known the inhabitants of the New Harmony of Owen, and among the members of the International there were still old Icarians from the Texian colony of Considerant... The International was still deeply marked by utopianism. It was only viable as a broad organization made up of heterogeneous elements… If it had continued to be what it was in 1864 (date of its foundation) it would have been able to survive for some time, albeit in a more or less anachronistic way. Upon leaving its old sphere, it condemned itself to the distortion produced by the centrifugal force of its various tendencies released from that context, just as the commitment to its fundamental pact would be denounced”.[viii]

In Philadelphia (USA), in July 1876, it was agreed to "suspend the International Workers' Association indefinitely". Engels wrote to Sorge on the occasion of the latter's resignation from the position of secretary of the organization: “With your resignation, the old International is definitively wounded to death and comes to its end. That is good. It belonged to the period of the Second Empire”. The exiles of the Commune in New Caledonia constituted a “community” that, notably, sided with the French authorities when there was an anti-colonial uprising of the local population.[ix]

In France, in January 1875 the new Constitution was proclaimed, on a republican basis and based on universal suffrage. This was established after the defeat of the Commune, when it had ceased to be the terror of the ruling classes. The Commune's convicts were finally amnestied; At the beginning of the 1871th century, a cultural group of French anarchists made a modest (silent) film about the Commune, in which some survivors of XNUMX participated. The last commonard alive, Adrien Lejeune, died in 1942 in the Soviet Union; he was buried in the Kremlin during the Second World War and currently rests in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, opposite the “Wall of the Federals” (place of execution of Commune fighters).

The International arrived in the Americas mainly from European militants. Between 1864 and 1872, several reports announced important progress by the International Workers' Association in the USA. North American delegates participated in the International congresses between 1868 and 1871, such as Andrew Carr Cameron, (1834-1890), director of the Workman's Advocate and the 8 Hour League. Further south, Argentine typographers were the first in Latin America to establish links with the AIT in the late 1860s. Despite these ties, it was necessary to wait for the arrival of European exiles, mainly French survivors of the repression against the Paris Commune, to see a local section of the International Workers Association constituted in Buenos Aires.

In 1872 the French section was created, followed by the Italian and Spanish sections and later another in the interior of the country (in Córdoba). The Argentine sections of the International Workingmen's Association dissolved in 1876 following resolutions of the New York Council. There were also centers of the International Workers' Association in other countries, such as Peru and Brazil, with few forces, although important for their role in the formation of the first workers' unions.[X]

“Representative democracy” based on universal suffrage changed the terrain of political struggle in Europe. With parliament placed at the forefront of the political stage, the split between reformists and revolutionaries within the labor movement became inevitable and began to dominate the debates. In England, the trade unions evolved into the definitive form of unions, which had a slow evolution in their demands. Working hours had decreased, the purchasing power of wages had grown, but the situation in working-class neighborhoods remained very precarious.

As trade unions English unions were recognized as working class unions precisely in 1871. In terms of workers' political rights, achievements were slower: it was only with the electoral reform of Benjamin Disraeli (1867) and then with the parliamentary reform of William Gladstone (1884) , that the majority of English workers obtained the right to suffrage. On the other side of the English Channel, the wave of the Commune was still felt, even tacitly or implicitly. In the French elections of 1876, the Republicans emerged victorious, beating the monarchists. In 1879, the republican Jules Grévy was re-elected president; the Republicans, including many Freemasons, joined in the fight against the clergy; They not only intended to take education away from the congregations, but also to make secular schools, free and compulsory, the basis of the political regime.

In 1881, ten years after the Paris Commune, and just under two years before his death, a London magazine finally listed Karl Marx among the thought leaders of his time, although only at number 23... The so-called International Association dos Trabalhadores survived in its anarchist dissent, which considers itself as heir to that which was founded in 1864. Its existence today is mainly symbolic. The social democratic parties developed mainly in the union and electoral field, which changed for a long period (until the end of the First World War) the terrain on which the political struggle of the working class took place.

The “old mole”, however, continued his underground work and, at the end of the “First World War”, it was the example and lessons of the Commune (the government of the working class) and the First International (communism) that inspired the Russian Bolsheviks leading a new “assault on heaven”.

The International Workers' Association had a decisive historical importance: “It impressed on the consciousness of the proletarians the conviction that their liberation from the yoke of capital could not be achieved within the confines of a single country; it was a global issue. Likewise, thanks to the International, the workers understood that their emancipation could only be achieved by themselves, through their ability to organize, and that it could not be delegated to others”.[xi]

An idea that was explicitly stated by Karl Marx: “Before the founding of the International all the various organizations were societies founded by some radicals of the ruling classes, while the International was constituted by the workers for themselves”. A simple assertion, which not only defines the historical role of the International Workers' Association, but also that of individualities (Marx included) and ideas in the great course of history and class struggle, a lesson that bureaucrats and sectarians of all kinds refuse to this day, and much more in force today than in the times of the International Workers' Association.

*Osvaldo Coggiola He is a professor at the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of Marxist economic theory: an introduction (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3tkGFRo]

Excerpt from the book The First International: from the origins of the labor movement to the International Workers' Association.

Notes

[I] Thomas Moore. Utopia. Brasília, University of Brasília, 2004 [1516].

[ii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Communist Manifesto. São Paulo, City of Man, 1980 [1848].

[iii] Wolfgang Abendroth. Social History of the European Labor Movement. Rio de Janeiro, Peace and Land, 1977.

[iv] Thomas de Quincey. The Logic of Political Economy. London, Kessinger, 2009 [1844].

[v] Karl Marx. The capital. Book 1, Vol. I.

[vi] Roland Barthes. mythologies. Sao Paulo, Difel, 1972.

[vii] GDH Cole. History of Socialist Thought. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976, vol. I.

[viii] Miklós Molnar. The slope of the Primera Internacional. Madrid, Edicusa, 1974.

[ix] Umberto Calamita. Il ciliegie time. The Contraddizione n° 135, Rome, April-June 2011.

[X] See Edgar Rodrigues. Workers' Dawn. Rio de Janeiro, Mundo Livre, 1979.

[xi] Marcello Musto (ed.). Prima Internazionale. Lavoratori di Tutto il Mondo, Unitevi! Indirizzi, risoluzioni, discorsi and documenti. Rome, Donzelli, 2014.

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