The first international, and Marx's ideological struggle against anarchists

By: M. Contreras 

The I International or International Workers Association (IWA) was born on September 28, 1864, at a meeting held in London with delegations of workers from England, France, Germany and Italy. The foundation of the IWA was given after a long period of setbacks, result of the defeat of the revolutions of 1848-49.

Marx's pivotal role

Marx succeeded in both the inaugural message and the statutes to maintain the most important ideas formulated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848: the need for an independent working-class organization, the fight for full liberation in the Economic terrain that can only be reached by means of political struggle, the need for the unity of workers of the different economic branches and the different countries to confront capitalism. Marx was able to do this in a way that was acceptable to the workers' movement of that moment, which was more widespread and developed in all countries, but was less aware of revolutionary ideas, after years of regression. For Marx This was the starting point for the further advancement of workers' consciousness. The IWA fulfilled two fundamental functions: first, it allowed to group all the real workers ' organizations that existed at that time. At the same time, it helped them to advance in a clear awareness of their goals. First international was developed in a context marked by the emergence of a new labor movement, a boom in its struggles and its organization, and the members of the international will be active protagonists. At the same time, in the working class there was an important process of ideological and political clarification, expressed in the International Workers ' Association (IWA) in the debates between the different currents that comprised it. Among the main were: the current represented by Marx, Engels and his group; That of anarchists who were based on the theories of Proudhon; That constituted the leaders of the English trade unions; And the anarchist current led by Mikhail Bakunin who joined the IWA in 1868.

Emancipation of workers and class struggle

Among the currents that comprised the IWA, one of the most influential was the anarchist tendency that was based on the ideas of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who had died in 1865. Proudhon was a worker, a self-taught intellectual, a scathing critic of bourgeois property which he defined as a robbery. However, it argued that the improvement of the workers ' situation was becoming small landowners through mutual aid workers ' associations, credit and consumer cooperative species.

This approach, supported by its followers in the ranks of the first international, kept workers away from the need for class struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state and connected with the illusions of a major sector of the new workers ' movement French to achieve emancipation by peaceful means.

Marx and Engels faced this current by pointing out that it is not possible to move towards the emancipation of workers by leaving the existing capitalist society in peace, because it is the one that does not leave, nor will it ever leave in peace to the workers to freely associate themselves as Producers. Class struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie cannot be circumvented because the exploitation of the worker is the source of the profit of the capitalists and the foundation of the system.

In turn, this struggle necessarily takes a political character because the State is an instrument for the oppression of the workers and goes to the crossroads where the workers ' movement decisively fights for their rights.

As a result of these intense debates a bloc is formed between Marx and the English leaders of the trade unions that defeats the Proudhonianos, making the IWA pronounce in favour of the strikes and the organization of unions.

Thanks to these definitions adopted their first two Congresses in 1866 and 1867, the IWA will be ready to converge and to intervene boldly in the extended process of strikes that would cross Europe since 1868. The first international will put all its efforts to make every one of these conflicts succeed and many of its members will be at the forefront. So broad were the international campaigns that made the IWA.

Political struggle "of pressure" or revolutionary political struggle.

Around this fight there was another important debate in the IWA, this time between Marx and the leaders of the trade unions. Marx criticized them for having confidence in the sectors of the bourgeoisie that were said to be democratic. The working class could not rely on the goodwill of the capitalists but exclusively on their own strength. The workers had to defend their political independence against the exploiters and their state.

Marx was right. The "democratic" bourgeoisie committed themselves to abandoning the movement as soon as they got the vote for them. However, in order to curb mobilizations, the government also had to grant the right to vote to a working class sector. The maneuver consisted of leaving out the electoral reform to the workers who did not have a piece of their own where to live and to the rural workers.

In certain circumstances the bourgeoisie may agree to grant certain partial concessions to the workers to defuse large movements such as the one who starred in the English working class in 1866. But against the illusions lodged by the representatives of the trade unions, Marx warned that the emancipation of the working class cannot come by a progressive accumulation of partial conquests that the bourgeoisie would always try to reverse as soon as it was Favorable the relationship of forces.

Unlike the English representatives of the trade unions, for Marx the political struggle was not a struggle to pressure the parliament as a complement to the Union struggle, but a struggle for the power of the workers involved in the preparation of the class Worker in each partial bout for an inevitable revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state. The capitalists had already demonstrated in the revolutions of 1848 that they were capable of anything to maintain their domination and, as we will see later, they would return it to show a few years later in front of the insurrection of the Workers of Paris in 1871.

Controversy with Bakunin as far as the state is concerned.

Bakunin was opposed to any political action of the working class. Bakunin considered that workers should not organise their own political parties. He rejected all political struggles in the existing society, such as the struggle for the democratic right to vote that the English workers had played, because according to him he did nothing but strengthen the state. Marx harshly criticized this abstentionism because it left, in fact, political action in the hands of bourgeois parties.

These differences were also expressed when thinking about the conquest of the power of the workers. According to Bakunin the bourgeois have the economic power only because the state exists, if the state ceases to exist the capitalist society collapses without further, opening directly the step to the emancipation of the oppressed. For Marx, the dominance of the bourgeoisie is not confined to the state, but its power is part of the private ownership of the means of production (they are the owners of the factories, the transports, the raw materials, etc.). Whereupon the resistance of the capitalists, continues and even deepens once the revolution manages to break the apparatus of the capitalist state.

For all this, Marx posed that the working class should oppose the bourgeois state its own state power to impose its domination on the bourgeoisie and to concentrate in its hands the means of social production, and put them according to an economic plan, where It would produce for the needs of the majorities and not for the profit of the capitalists.

However, it was not for Marx of any state power. While every state exists for the domination of one class on the other, in this case, the state that must build the working class for the first time in history, will not seek to dominate the majority but on the contrary, that the great majorities truly participate in the Daily Government, and that the mechanisms of domination fall on the small minority of former oppressors and their agents.

As participation in this new state of workers is broadened and progress is made to meet social needs, it is losing its raison d'être. As Marx said, "It is a transitory state that seeks to extinguish itself along with the forms of exploitation and oppression." To this transient state governed by the workers, based on the wider democracy for the majorities and where domination falls on the minority of the capitalists, Marx called it "dictatorship of the proletariat".