Communism, as International Movement

1847–1889

The League of Communists (1847–1952) acted as the first internationalist and transnational workers’ organization, in accordance with Karl Marx's maxim in the Communist Manifesto (1848), “Workers of the world, unite!” yet of a clandestine nature. In 1864 the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), called the First International, was founded (based in London, later New York). Its foundational articulation was the Inaugural Address of the IWA, drafted by Marx and adopted by the General Council as its highest body. Strongly influenced by British union leaders, the left pluralistic IWA had also been firmly established in central and southern Europe. Apart from communist, it also amalgamated socialist, mutualistic, anarchist, and unionist intellectual currents (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Mikhail Bakunin, Paul Lafargue, Friedrich Engels, and Friedrich Adolf Sorge). After conducting seven congresses, the IWA was dissolved by the Philadelphia Congress in 1876, mainly as a consequence of the split between Marxists and Anarchists, called “Bakunists,” at the Hague Congress of 1872.

The IWA's strategic thrust toward a unification of the European and American workers, on the one hand, and then again the prevention of the use of foreign workers as blacklegs, on the other hand, can be regarded as globally significant and pathbreaking. The long-term objective was the abolishment of classes by eliminating wage through a combined social and political revolution. The Paris Commune (1871) empirically provided the global prototypes of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a new form of government, comprising direct democracy and a working class organized as political force.

The IWA acted as a school for the practice of global solidarity and equity, as well as a way of life and a normative identity code in times of the global growth of workingmen. Although the possibilities of realizing all of the IWA's goals were something of an illusion, the movement was charged with enthusiasm and an incentive for creativity in bringing these ambitious goals to fruition.

Historically, the IWA corresponded in time to the epoch of the second empire of Napoleon III, ending through the unification of Italy and Germany and the Paris Commune. After that, communism as an international movement acted as a global political and class-based movement, combating anarchist, mutualist, or syndicalist currents. The construction of solid political party organizations on a national scale became the next task to move beyond an International that served in many respects as a discussion club, with National Federations as anticipations of the ideal society, and to assemble a new and strengthened instrument for global change during the next stage of the communist movement.

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