International Workingmen's Association

Timothy Messer-Kruse

INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN’S ASSOCIATION. Often referred to as the First International, the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was established in 1864 by a diverse coalition of English and French artisans and trade unionists, expatriate revolutionaries, and political reformers who found common ground for organizing in the threat of European militarism and the increasing use of imported foreign workers to break strikes. The IWA grew steadily through the accretion of labor and republican organizations throughout western and southern Europe and gained international renown after the Paris Commune of 1871, which it was accused of organizing but could not claim as its own. Standing at the ideological crossroads of the nineteenth century, the IWA attracted representatives of nearly every branch of anarchism, socialism, and the labor movement of its day.

Although he played no part in organizing it, Karl Marx was present at the IWA’s founding meeting in London and immediately perceived its potential to radicalize the British and European labor movements. From the beginning, Marx believed that his foremost task was to combat those elements that he deemed reformist, idealistic, or adventurous, a group that eventually came to include not only anarchists but leaders of the English trade union movement, Italian nationalists, Spanish syndicalists, and “Yankee” socialists (as Marx called native-born American radicals) of all stripes. Marx ultimately achieved his goal of gaining ideological leadership of the IWA, but not before his attempts to centralize the IWA under his own control had pushed most independent socialist and radical sections into an opposition headed by the anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin. The resulting factional feuding effectively destroyed the association by 1872.

The factional divisions that divided the General Council in London were exported along with the IWA to the United States in the late 1860s. While the official secretary for the United States corresponded with American radicals and labor leaders, Marx rallied his old comrades from the Communist League who had since emigrated to America. In the end, two distinct groups of Americans—on the one hand, native-born radicals with long experience in the movements for abolition, women’s rights, or labor reform, and on the other, German American Marxists, many of whom were veterans of the revolutions of 1848—declared their affiliation with the IWA. Owing to their differing social outlooks and the fact that each group’s contact in London represented rival factions on the General Council, each developed a unique understanding of the philosophy, rules, and purpose of the association.

In the late 1860s, New York City became the center of both American internationalist movements. Under the influence of Marx’s American correspondents, several dozen German American socialists were converted from their Lassallean faith in political contests to Marx’s strategy of working through the trade unions. Affiliating their New York Communist Club with the IWA, these men formed the first officially recognized section of the First International in United States. Their most active members, particularly Friedrich Sorge, reinvigorated the moribund Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (General German Labor Union) and turned its office in the Tenth Ward Hotel into the headquarters and informal training academy of American Marxism for a decade to come. Among its distinguished alumni were Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers, founders of the American Federation of Labor.

At about the same time, another handful of New York socialists whose radical experience was shaped by a variety of antebellum protest movements (the oldest of whom could remember working alongside Thomas Paine) organized the “New Democracy,” an organization devoted to political reform (including women’s rights), land redistribution, and state ownership of basic industries. The New Democracy turned to the remnants of antebellum radicalism, to pacifists, spiritualists, and labor and land reformers, to find recruits for its cause.

After the uprising and bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, the IWA gained international notoriety; it was even accused in the American press of setting the fire that destroyed Chicago. The tragedy of the Commune only served to lift the prestige of the IWA in the eyes of old-line American radicals, such as Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton, as they viewed the Commune as a struggle against political tyranny in the mold of the American Revolution. In the wake of the Commune the IWA spread steadily among native-born radicals and soon drew to its banner the famous sister stockbrokers, spiritualists, and feminists Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull, who placed their eclectic weekly journal at the International’s disposal. “Yankee” chapters of the IWA were formed in over a dozen cities from San Francisco to Boston over the following year.

All of this flew in the face of the strategy that Marx and his German American cohorts had hammered out for America. Marx had called for organizing a coalition of German and Irish workers who would together radicalize the American proletariat as it was represented in trade unions. In the context of the existing labor movement, the strategy became a mandate to leave unchallenged, both in industry and in society as a whole, currently hardening attitudes in favor of racial and sexual exclusion.

Yankee Internationalists pursued their own broad egalitarian goals from under their new red umbrella. In New York, native American Internationalists symbolically marched in commemoration of the Paris Commune with African American Civil War veterans in their foremost ranks. They organized Blacks into the International and railed against discrimination of all kinds in their newspapers. They nominated Victoria Woodhull and Frederick Douglass for the highest offices in the land. In Washington they worked with the National Woman Suffrage Association and submitted a legal brief asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed to women the right to vote. To Sorge and his allies at the Tenth Ward Hotel, these were diversionary, even embarrassing, idealistic and moralistic tendencies that must be eradicated.

And so they were. Purged first from the Central Committee by a rump meeting of Sorge’s German American faction, the Yankee Internationals were then denounced by Marx as “bogus reformers, middle-class quacks and trading politicians” and suspended by the General Council. In spite of the personal appeals of New Democracy founder William West, who spent all his meager savings on a one-way steerage ticket to attend the Hague Congress of 1872, the Yankee Internationals were thrown out of the IWA. Sorge was rewarded with the job of general secretary, and the General Council was moved from London to New York to separate it from its increasingly powerful Continental dissenters.

The “Yankees” disregarded the order and continued to call themselves the true representatives of the International in the United States. They published their own party journal, the Worker, and held several poorly attended congresses of their own. With the onset of depression in 1873 they achieved some success in organizing the unemployed, a movement that culminated in the police riot at Tompkins Square in 1873.

But within a couple years of the Hague Congress most sections had collapsed and most members had drifted on to other reform projects. The former members of the section in Philadelphia continued on as one of the founding chapters of the Sovereigns of Industry, the urban equivalent to the growing Patrons of Husbandry. Several former Yankee Internationalists became active in the Knights of Labor, particularly in that hotbed of radicalism and power politics known as the Home Club. Many eventually joined in the Greenback enthusiasm of the late 1870s, and some, including William West himself, could be found in the membership rolls of the Socialist Labor Party in the 1880s. For the most part, however, these were the individual efforts of a collection of dauntless American radicals. Their importance as an ideological and institutional connection with the deep history of American radicalism was lost to the American Left.

Sorge’s forces kindled the fading light of the IWA for several more years. In spite of their isolation from the native streams of radicalism and their failure to make inroads among the existing trade unions, the resolute socialists of the Tenth Ward Hotel stuck by their trade unionist strategy to the dismay of those who wanted to redirect the International toward electoral action. In 1874 the remaining shard of the International split again as “Lassallean” socialists formed their own organizations in Chicago and New York. Soon afterwards, Sorge himself fell victim to the continued infighting and was forced to step down from the General Council. When the two sides finally reconciled at the “Unity Congress” in 1876, what remained of the International was formally dissolved.

Forty years later Friedrich Sorge published a collection of his extensive correspondence with Marx, Engels, and other important nineteenth-century socialists. In his preface to the Russian edition of the letters, V. I. Lenin called attention to their value in highlighting the dangers of sectarianism and the isolation of American socialism from the working-class movement. In spite of his appreciation of these dangers, Lenin was not aware of the degree to which Sorge and Marx themselves had contributed to creating the pattern, indeed the culture, of sectarianism and isolation that plagued the American Left from the very beginning of the First International. Marx’s and Sorge’s dream of establishing a centralized, ideologically focused association was doomed to fail among American workers and American radicals who refused to compromise their moral principles or republican beliefs for a distant strategic purpose.

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International Workingmen's Association

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