International Workingmen’s Association 1866
From the Minute Book of the General Council
Source: MECW, Volume 20;
First published: in Russian, in Generalny Sovet Pervogo Internatsionala. 1864-1866 and 1866-1868, 1961 and 1963.
Citizen Marx stated that the notice of the Manchester tailors’ strike[315] had been inserted in the democratic journals in the North, South, and Centre of Germany; he gave a list of those journals.
Lawrence moved that Marx be President for the ensuing twelve months; Carter seconded that nomination. [316] Marx proposed Odger: he, Marx, thought himself incapacitated because he was a head worker and not a hand worker. Weston seconded Odger. A ballot was taken and Odger was carried by 15 v. 3. [...]
Marx proposed to constitute this Committee [The Standing Committee] provisionally only, for the present. The Committee to consist of the office-holders and secretaries already appointed. Agreed to by common consent.
Carter contended that affiliation and membership were two different things and that the Congressional Rules applied only to the latter.
Marx, on the authority of the Minutes, contradicted Carter and said that the Congress refused to recognise any affiliation as distinct from membership. [317]
On the motion of Marx the General Secretary [Fox] was ordered to write to the French Ministre de l'Interieur complaining of the seizure of the Association’s papers and requesting that they be restituted.[318]
Citizen Dupont read a letter from Citizen Fribourg of Paris asking for the Minutes of the Congress to enable them to publish a report of the Congress.
Marx protested against the latter step, inasmuch as the duty of publishing an account of the Congress was devolved by that body exclusively on the Central Council. Further, the Parisians had kept their Mémoire .[319] in violation of the Congressional order, which ordained that this and other documents should be handed over to the Central Council.
The General Secretary was ordered to write to Fribourg in this sense.
The Secretary then brought up the following resolution from the Standing Committee:
1. “That any member of the Central Council who shall be absent for more than four sittings from Council meetings without giving satisfactory reasons therefor, shall be liable to have his name erased from the list of the Council.
2. “This resolution to be immediately communicated to every member of the Council.”
A lively discussion sprang up on this resolution, Carter, Lessner, Hales, and Jung being in favour of it and Eccarius, Fox, and Weston against it.
Weston thought that at least so important a resolution should not be carried in so thin a meeting and until notice had been given in the Commonwealth. He moved that the debate be adjourned until next week; Lessner seconded this, and’ the adjournment was carried unanimously.
On the resolution from the Standing Committee being read with regard to absentees, the following amendment was carried:
That a book be provided for the members of the Council to sign their names in; the said book to be presented to [the] Congress for inspection; and, if any delegate from a society should be absent more than four nights without assigning [a] reason for so doing, the Secretary shall write to the society he represents and inform them of the neglect. [...]
It was proposed by Citizen Marx and seconded by Citizen Jung:
That the anniversary of the Polish Insurrection be celebrated on the 22nd of January a Carried unanimously.
Fox then proceeded to say that the French Government had, since the close of the Geneva Congress, departed from its policy of neutrality towards them and was levying war upon them. The French Government had allowed us two years’ growth and we were now able to defy the Continental blockade which the French and the Prussian governments had declared against us. We could no longer trust the French and Prussian post-offices; we must seek indirect and secret means of communication with our Continental friends.
Marx said that we must force Bonaparte to declare himself, in order that any credit he may have gained for his liberality in letting us flourish unmolested might be lost to him.
Marx reported that Revue des deux Mondes and Revue contemporaine had been commenting on the doings of the Association, and, although they did not agree with the objects of the Association entirely, still they acknowledged it to be one of the leading events of the present century. Marx also said that the Fortnightly Review had been commenting on the matter.
[A reference to Louis Reybaud’s “L'Economie politique des ouvriers – , Revue des deux Mondes, t. 66, November 1, 1866, J. E. Alaux’s “Une forme nouvelle du socialisme”, Revue contemporaine, t. 53, October 15, 1866 and an editorial in The Fortnightly Review, No. 37, December 1866]
292 Wilhelm Liebknecht informed Marx in a letter of January, 18, 1866 that the Leipzig Workers’ Educational Society was willing to form a branch of the International. [le also wrote that Hofstetten, an editor of Der Social-Demokrat, had tried again to get himself, Marx and Engels to contribute to the paper. Marx’s letter to Engels of February 10, 1866 shows that Marx strongly objected to these attempts by, the Lassalleans to use his name and that of Engels, and severely criticised Liebknecht for his conciliatory attitude (see present edition, Vol. 42).
293 The “People” (Peuple) – a Belgian atheist society consisting mainly of progressive intellectuals who advocated utopian socialism. It published a newspaper, La Tribune du Peuple, which became the organ of the International Working Men’s Association in Belgium in August 1865 (officially in January 1866) when the society joined the International.
306 On May, 3, 1866 Marx received from the German Tailors’ Committee in London material on German journeymen tailors being used as strike-breakers by Dutch and British employers. On May 4 he wrote the piece “A Warning” and sent it to Liebknecht on behalf of the Central Committee to be published in German papers.
Marx wrote this address on the instructions of the Central Council in connection with the importation into Scotland of German and Danish tailors to be used as strike-breakers. This issue was discussed at the Central Council meeting of May 1, 1866. Friedrich Lessner informed the meeting that London manufacturers also intended to have recourse to German workers. For this reason the German tailors living in London formed a committee headed by Lessner and Haufe and took a decision to act jointly with the Council in order to frustrate the plans of the manufacturers and their agents in Germany. The Central Council sent two representatives to Edinburgh who persuaded the newly-arrived workers to cancel their contracts and return home.
On Marx’s request, Lessner and Haufe sent him on May 3 details about the events in Edinburgh.
“A Warning” written by Marx on May 4 was published in several German newspapers.
The author’s rough and fair copies of this document have survived.
At the same time Lessner and Haufe published a leaflet which set forth the aims and tasks of the German tailors’ London Committee and contained an appeal to German workers in London to collect funds. In July. 1866 the committee issued a second leaflet, also signed by, Lessner and Haufe, and addressed to the tailors in Germany.
This document was published in English for the first time in The General Council of the First International. 1864-1866, 1962.
310 In his letters to Marx of May 2,5 and June 5, 1866 Liebknecht wrote that the leaders of Saxon workers’ associations were prepared to join the International and asked for membership cards. When the Austro-Prussian war began, the Central Council held a discussion on the International Working Men’s Association’s attitude towards it. The discussion began on June 19 and continued on June 26, July 3 and 17, 1866. The terse minutes convey the essence of the debate rather superficially,, in particular Marx’s speeches on June 19 and July 17. A more detailed impression of his first speech and the general trend of the discussion can be obtained from his letter to Engels of June 20, 1866 (see present edition, Vol. 42). The letter shows that Marx opposed the abstract pacifist approach to war taken by some participants in the working-class movement, the inability to understand the concrete historical nature of war, and the belittling or disregard of the question of German as well as of Italian unity being decided in the Austro-Prussian war, and the national question as a whole. This position was adopted, in particular, by the French Council members, Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet, who failed to overcome the Proudhonist nihilist attitude towards national problems and who declared that nations and national demands were “outmoded prejudices”. On the other hand, the reformist minded British trade unionists were inclined to identify the policy of the ruling circles of Prussia and Italy with the national interests of the Ger man and Italian peoples. When defining the International’s tactics during the Austro-Prussian war, Marx sought to warn the proletarian organisation against a one-sided approach. Marx and his followers thought it expedient for the International to pursue a neutral policy, bearing in mind that the world proletariat favoured the unification of Germany, as well as Italy, by revolutionary-democratic means and that in the 1866 war the struggle for unification in these two countries had been mixed up with the dynastic and narrow selfish strivings of the ruling circles. It was in this spirit that the resolution was drawn up and adopted by the Central Council on July 17.
312 The resolution was published in The Commonwealth, No. 176, July 21, 1866 and La Rive Gauche, No. 29, July 22, 1866.
313 The Italian workers’ societies (lid not succeed in being represented at the Geneva Congress. Italian delegates attended the congresses of the International Working Men’s Association beginning with the Lausanne (Congress (September 1867).
314 This decision was adopted during the discussion of the agenda for the Geneva Congress envisaged by, the Central Council’s resolution of July 17, 1866. In compliance with this decision, the Geneva Congress resolved on September 8, 1866 that London should remain the scat of the Central (General) Council of the International Working Men’s Association in 1866-67.
Preparations for the Geneva Congress continued at the Council’s subsequent meeting,,. On July 31, in particular, Marx moved a number of proposals on behalf of the Standing Committee concerning the agenda for the Congress, and later drew up “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional Central Council. The Different Questions”.
315 The notice concerned the dispute between Manchester employers and tailors. In August 1866, Manchester employers locked out over 700 tailors who were demanding shorter working hours and the regulation of rates for different operations in view of the widespread use of machinery in the clothing trade. The tailors applied for support to the Executive Committee of the London Operative Tailors’ Protective Association, whose President, Matthew Lawrence, represented it on the General Council (the name became current after the Geneva Congress). On September 12 a preliminary agreement was reached between the employers and the workers and the latter returned to their work.
316 By nominating Marx for the post of President of the General Council, the British Council members made a kind of challenge to the French Proudhonists, who tried at the Geneva Congress to have the view accepted that persons not engaged in manual labour should neither be admitted to workers’ organisations nor hold official posts in them.
317 Marx is presumably referring to Clause 4 of the Administrative Regulations adopted by the Geneva Congress. It stipulated that the general rules for paying dues also applied to members of the societies affiliated to the International.
318 Jules Gottraux, a Swiss-born subject of Great Britain and a member of the International, was detained by the French police on the French-Swiss frontier on September 30, 1866 when he was returning to London from his trip to Switzerland. The police confiscated some letters, printed matter, and other material entrusted to him by the International’s leaders in Geneva to be handed over to the General Council. The seized documents included the preliminary report on the work of the Geneva Congress which had been drawn up by Council member Frederick Card and published in French in Geneva as a pamphlet. (Later, this gave rise to a false rumour that the French authorities had confiscated the Congress minutes, which in reality had by that time been brought to London by Hermann Jung.) The General Council lodged a complaint with the French Minister of Home Affairs about this act of arbitrariness and demanded the return of the seized documents. And when he refused to reply to the complaint, written by Fox on the Council’s instructions, the General Council decided to use the fact to publicly expose the regime of the Second Empire (see also the record of Marx’s speech at the General Council meeting of November 27, 1866). At the beginning of December the Council addressed the British Foreign Secretary asking him to make a corresponding demarche to the French government, which forced the French au thorities to return, on December 21, the materials taken from Gottraux. Fox wrote a special article on the actions of the Bonapartist authorities. It was published in The Commonwealth on January 12, 1867 and in The Working Man on February 1, 1867.
319 The Mémoire of the Paris Section for the Geneva Congress containing a detailed exposition of Proudhonist views, was supported by the Lyons and Rouen sections and was read as the report of the French delegates at the congress on September 4. The full text of the Mémoire was published in Brussels in September 1866 under the title Congres de Geneve. Mémoire des délégués francais.