This Day in Labor History: September 28, 1864

On September 28, 1864, the first meeting of the International Workingmen’s Association, took place in London. Better known as the First International, this was a critically important point in the next phase of European revolutionary movements that over the decades would lead to communism.

Early revolutionary movements struggled with any particularly ideological program. Europe had seen plenty of periods of revolution by this point–1789, 1830, 1848. After the latter, forces of reaction really took over on the continent and a lot of political radicals fled to the United States and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. Quite a few of those radicals would play key roles in building the American labor movement, opposing slavery, and other causes, but few at this point were actually that radical by twentieth century definitions.

The mid nineteenth century is when intellectuals began working out ideas of socialism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels obviously became the most important of these figures, but they hardly dominated the proceedings. The Communist Manifesto was a critically important document, but it’s pretty vague and its meanings still needed to be worked out, a process by which Marx especially, who was one of the most disputatious figures in human history, participated.

So by 1864, a lot of radicals decided it was time for a meeting. London, less oppressive than other parts of Europe, was a good place for it. So they met and created the International Workingmen’s Association. A lot of leading radicals attended, including Marx. Many followers of Owenite ideas, mostly English, were there. various nationalist groups, including Irish nationalists, attended. Many people followed the early anarchist ideas of Proudhon. Others followed the violent conspiracism of Louis Auguste Blanqui, who articulated an early vanguardism idea of small sects of secret operators conducting revolutionary activity, rejecting Marx’s idea of the proletariat rising up by itself. Smart man, that was never going to happen, as Lenin would later realize.

The First International met in London every week from 1864 to 1872. In 1865, it admitted women, radical for the time. They mostly agreed on absolutely nothing. Marx was writing Kapital at this time and working out his ideas, largely by denouncing everyone else. Ideologically, this was a mess–the nationalists and the Blanqui followers and the Proudhon followers and the British moderates and the Marxists had little in common. But they did share one basic principle–workers of the world (and here they mostly meant Europe and the U.S.) were being exploited by this still pretty new system of industrial capitalism and they needed to unite to fight for each other. They believed all workers should come under one banner–that of the IWA–to fight capital. What would happen after that might be open to deeply felt and often obscure argument, but the principle–basically the principle of solidarity–began developing here.

One thing I really liked about the early IWA is the motto it created in 1864: “No Rights Without Duties, No Duties Without Rights.” I really feel like activists today could learn a lot here. Too often today, the idea of rights has been fetishized, but what about duty? What do you owe someone else? Why would someone commit an act of solidarity for you when you have not committed an act of solidarity for someone else? Again, there’s much to learn here for basically everyone today.

In 1866, the IWA held its first ever major congress, in Geneva, another relatively safe place for radicals. Marx wrote out the instructions for the IWA’s general council: “It is one of the great purposes of the Association to make the workmen of different countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army of emancipation.” Mikhail Bakunin also contributed thought on this, asking the Swiss to establish “in their own groups, and after that in other groups, a genuine fraternal solidarity of theory and action, not just for times of crisis…but also a feature of daily life. Every member of the International should be able to feel, and should in practice be convinced, that every other member is his brother.”

Now, it was one thing to talk about solidarity and another thing to do it. To be clear, plenty of workers movements did, especially in raising funds for each other when one was on strike or in need. Creating solidarity as a daily practice requires daily work and few unions or other radical organizations have really ever done it nearly to the extent that they talked about it. But worker internationalism really was a thing. This is something radicals sometimes talk about today, but without really anything behind it. It’s mostly just rhetoric and a desire for some sort of hazy IWW-esque past. But with the IWA, there was a real effort to create it. That strikes rose significantly between 1867 and 1872 throughout Europe helped create opportunities to engage in the kind of mutual aid at the heart of international solidarity in practice.

But the disputatious radicals did not mellow with age. Things were hard to run anyway. The organization never had any money and were often in debt to people such as Engels. Leadership also operated with significant secrecy, which had the advantage of stopping police forces from really knowing what’s going on but also kept everyone in the dark too. It all pretty much broke apart in 1872. To be fair to everyone, the Paris Commune did challenge everything they had done. At that point, Bakunin went after Marx and said his ideas, if ever implemented, would lead to an authoritarian state as awful as any of those they were fighting against. This was of course true. However, Bakunin had no possible idea for any successful revolution, so shrug, I guess. IWA national chapters in Spain and Portugal split, the anarchists in the organization held a separate congress in Switzerland that year, etc. Marx also started going much harder after Bakunin’s ideas by 1874. Such is the history of the left. The First International fell apart, but these groups would start working together more in the 1880s and in 1889, the Second International began.

I borrowed from Nicholas Delalande’s astoundingly great Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity, to write this post. If you have any interest in what solidarity actually meant as the term developed, this is what you need to read.

This is the 536th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.