Revolutions 10-1 - The International Working Men's Association

Speaker 1
Then beyond them, there were those representing the spirit of 17 92, radical democratic republicans who believed 17 89 was the unsatisfying precursor to the much more important and much more glorious revolution of 17 92, which ushered in real political liberty and social equality. Finally, there was this weird and obscure minority representing what we might call the spirit of 17 96, those who saw 17 89 as a step to 17 92, but who so saw 17 92 as a step towards the aborted promise of 17 96, represented by gracchus babeuf and the conspiracy of equals. They believed that the liberty and equality espoused even by the radical republicans would be impossible without economic equality. That it was not enough to declare the rights of man if the wealth of the nation was still unequally distributed. That simply transferringand in capital from a dying aristocracy to a rising bourgeoisie was no revolution at all, especially not as the idealism of the revolution gave way to the cynicism and despotism of the directory, and then the consulate and then the empire. It was this last group that first asked the social question, and as the nineteenth century progressed, their demands for an answer only grew louder. And it is from that tiny seed, from the spirit of 17 96, that we find the origins of the russian revolution, a social revolution to match the size and scope of the merely political french revolution.

Speaker 1
Saint simon, no less than porfirio dias, wanted not much politics and a lot of administration. A younger contemporary of saint simon's was charles furier, a trenchant and witty social critic of post revolutionary france who developed full blown and very detailed theories about the ideal environment for the flourishing of both individuals and the community in which they lived. That the individual should not be moulded to fit society, but that society should be moulded to fit the individual. Like saint simon, fourier believed that his great project was to discover laws of human relations to match newton's physics. And he thought he cracked it with a very complicated metaphysics based on types of human attraction and passion that, onceenize and set free, would allow human communities to fall into a voluntary, natural and harmonious balance. To help this process along, fourier developed schemes for networks of four story complexes where one thousand, 620 members would work and live doing work that was tailored to their own proclivities and talents and passions, so that labor would cease to be labor, and instead, om pleasure. Again, armed with capital or reason, human conflict, poverty and misery would be overcome.

Speaker 1
Those assembled in saint martin's hall voted unanimously to found an international workingmen's association, which they then creatively dubbed the international working men's association. This is a bit of a mouthful, so in time, it became known as simply the international, and is known to us to day as the first inter national. Because in the decades to come, there would be a second international, and a third international and a fourth international. But let's not worry about them, because nobody at the meeting at saint martin's hall in 18 64 knew that they were forming merely the first international. So among the small contingent of ponderous and philosophically inclined german socialists at this meeting was an exile from the revolution of 18 forty eight, who had been living in london with his family since 18 forty nine. This guy was not particularly important. He didn't even know about the meeting until a week before it was held, and was invited practically just because the organizers wanted the meeting to be as international as possible, and they needed some more germans. He was, at that point known principally as a radical journalist and polemacist with a penchant for indulging in cat fights with other members of the emigre and exile communities where he had lived in germany, belgium, france and the u. K. If you haven't guessed by now, i am, of course, talking about forty six year old karl marx.

Speaker 1
Marks also drafted the general s of the international which were prefaced by more strong language that followed from his own analysis of the situation. He wrote that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. That is, they can't rely on any other class or group, neither friendly aristocrats nor charitable bourgeois liberals. They must do it for themselves. He also wrote that the conomical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor that is the source of life lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all its social misery, mental degradation and political dependence. That the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means. So clearly, the social question must always take precedence, that mere political rights and constitutions aren't going to be enough to magically solve the problem. But that said, political power was a key component of the answer to the social question. But though what every one would later understand to be very marxus language being coted into the dna of the first international, the actual rules of the organization were very clear that this was meant to attract as many affiliates as possible and not have some doctrinal lipmis test for membership. The inaugural address was just that and nothing more. The general council in london would be there to act as a co ordinating and correspondence bureau, not some central executive handing down orders from on high. In fact, all somebody had to do to join was acknowledge tr justice and morality as the basis of their conduct toward each other and toward all men, without regard to color, creed or nationality.