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Notes
1. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Karl Marx-Frederick Engels, Collected Works. New York: International Publishers [MECW], Vol. 29, 1987: 257–419.
2. Ibid., 540–542, n. 57.
3. Marx's letters of 1860 are preoccupied with Vogt's calumnies, widely reported in Germany, including the astonishing claim that Marx had run a racket during the 1848 Revolution, extorting money from vulnerable communists in Germany (MECW, Vol. 41, 1985), 43. The whole matter is documented in Marx's Herr Vogt (MECW, Vol. 17, 1981), 21–329.
4. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63 (MECW, Vol. 30, 1888), 455, n. 1.
5. Marx to Engels, 8 Dec. 1861 (MECW, Vol. 40, 1983), 217.
6. Marx to Engels, 4 Nov. 1864 (MECW, Vol. 42, 1987) 15–18, nn. 18, 19. For a brief history of the International, and a selection of its most important documents (including those that are cited here) see Marcello Musto, ed., Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
7. Engels to Marx, 8 April 1863 (MECW, Vol. 41), 465.
8. Marx to Engels, 9 April 1863 (MECW, Vol. 41), 468.
9. Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath, 29 Feb. 1860 (MECW, Vol. 41), 81–82.
10. Marx to Engels, 4 Nov. 1864 (MECW, Vol. 42) spells out his view of the meeting and his intentions in what followed.
11. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (MECW, Vol. 6, 1976), 505.
12. Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association” (MECW, Vol. 20, 1985), 5.
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Karl Marx, “Provisional Rules of the Association” (MECW, Vol. 20), 14.
15. The original Rules of the Association referred specifically to Europe, which only was changed in the revised rules written by Marx and Engels in 1871.
16. David Fernbach, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, The First International and After. London: Penguin/NLR, 1974, 10–13.
17. I have discussed this in virtually all my previous work, and will cite here only George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution. London: Verso, 1987; and “Critical Thinking and Class Analysis: Historical Materialism and Social Theory,” Socialism and Democracy, 27 (1) (March 2013): 19–56. The foundation for this historical conception lies in the work of Robert Brenner, most notably two articles collected (with rejoinders) in T.H. Aston, and C.H.E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Ellen Meiksins Wood has contributed importantly to these ideas in Democracy Against Capitalism: Rethinking Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991; and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, 2002. A recent book by Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution. Leiden: Brill, 2013, provides a lengthy historical analysis of the long development and late realization of industrial capitalism in England.
18. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital. London: Sphere, 1977, 56; F. Crouzet, “The Historiography of French Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 56 (2): 223.
19. Karl Marx “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland” (MECW, Vol. 21, 1985), 86.
20. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (MECW, Vol. 35, 1996), 511. There is an enormous literature on this issue, drawing particularly on a chapter in Marx's original manuscript analysing the formal and real “subsumption” of labour to capital, which was not included in Capital. I take account of the published text alone here simply because it is entirely sufficient to the point.
21. I am indebted for much of what follows on France to the analysis of Xavier Lafrance in his as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, Citizens and Wage-Labourers: Capitalism and the Formation of a Working Class in France. York University, 2013.
22. Alain Cottereau, “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail: une évolution contrastée entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle,” Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle, 33 (2) (Relations sociales et espace public, 2006), 101–120. (Published in English as “Industrial tribunals and the establishment of a kind of common law of labour in nineteenth-century France,” in Willibald Steinmetz, ed., Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.)
23. Ibid., 103, 113–114.
24. Ibid., 105–109.
25. Ibid., 109, my translation.
26. Ibid., 112.
27. Ibid., 116.
28. See my analysis in Rethinking the French Revolution, 200–203.
29. For a classic typology of the forms of working-class organization in France, see Louis Levine, Syndicalism in France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1914, 26–33. On the compagnonnages, and particularly their political role after the Revolution, see William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
30. There were 14,000 prosecutions between 1825 and 1864, and 9,000 strikers were imprisoned (Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in 19th Century Europe. New York: Routledge, 2010, 58.
31. Roger Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914,” in Dick Geary, ed., Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914. Oxford: Berg, 1989, 49. Magraw offers an excellent overview of the role of syndicalism in French politics.
32. Karl Marx, “Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party” (MECW, Vol. 24, 1989), 340; Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, “The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm. See also Engels' letter to Eduard Bernstein, 25 Oct. 1881 (MECW, Vol. 46, 1992), 144–151.
33. A remark to Paul Lafargue that Engels reported to Bernstein (MECW, Vol. 46), 356.
34. Magraw, “Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour before 1914,” 49.
35. Dick Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914,” in Geary, Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, 102–103.
36. Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 199ff.
37. Ibid., 206–207.
38. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (MECW, Vol. 24, 1989), 75–99.
39. Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914,” 101.
40. Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution provides an excellent history of this struggle over control of production. The are many histories of English unions and working-class organization, but one would be hard pressed to recommend any work ahead of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
41. See Gordon Phillips, “The British Labour Movement Before 1914,” in Geary, Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914.
42. Though Belgium was far more developed in industry on a per capita basis than either France or Germany, and its workers played a crucial role in the International, its small size undercut the impact it might otherwise have had.
43. Phillips, “The British Labour Movement Before 1914,” 39.
44. Geary, “Socialism and the German Labour Movement Before 1914,” 125.
45. Proudhon anticipated the transformation of society largely through the formation of producer cooperatives, and it was largely to the end of realizing this that he strongly advocated the idea of “the People's Bank.”
46. Albert S Lindemann, A History of European Socialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983, 106.
47. Fernbach does see the history of the IWA in these terms, “Introduction” (note 16), 16–19.
48. Marx to Engels, 4 Nov. 1864 (MECW, Vol. 42, 1987), 18–19.
49. In 1874–75, Marx commented importantly on the text of Bakunin's Statehood and Anarchy, throughout which Bakunin criticized Marx explicitly (MECW, Vol. 24), 485–526. Bakunin died in 1876. The literature on Marx and Bakunin is enormous.
50. Frederick Engels, “Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees” (MECW, Vol. 24), 13.
51. For more on Blanquism as a political force, see Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981.
52. Engels, “Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees,” 13.
53. This was, however, evident as early as his first letter to Engels on the founding of the IWA, in which he related finessing a dreadful statement of principles through his unanticipated preparation of the Inaugural Address, which was then met with unanimous approval in its stead.
54. Karl Marx, “To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America” (MECW, Vol. 20), 20.
55. Karl Marx, “Address to the National Labour Union of the United States” (MECW, Vol. 21, 1985), 53–55. The threat of war loomed in 1869 as the US pressed claims against Britain for damages resulting from the Alabama, a ship built in Britain and delivered to the Confederacy, and other violations of neutrality. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sought the enormous sum of $2 billion, with the possible alternative of annexation of British Columbia, the Red River Colony, and Nova Scotia. The claims ultimately were resolved through arbitration.
56. Marx did not himself attend any of the Congresses until the last, at The Hague, in 1872, but he submitted resolutions through the General Council. There were, of course, other resolutions as well.
57. Office of General Council, International Working Men's Association, Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, 1866, and the Congress of Brussels, 1868. London: IWMA, 1868.
58. Karl Marx, Synopses of Speeches on Education (August 10 and 17, 1869), in General Council, International Workingmen's Association, The General Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964, 140–141, 146–147.
59. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Resolutions of the Conference of Delegates of the International Working Men's Association” (MECW, Vol. 22, 1986 ), 424.
60. Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit [sometimes published as Wages, Price and Profit] (MECW, Vol. 20), 102–159.
61. Marx to Engels, 8 Aug 1870 (MECW, Vol. 44, 1989) p. 39.
62. Marx to Kugelmann, 12 April 1871 (MECW, Vol. 44), 131.
63. Aside from The Civil War in France (MECW, Vol. 22), 307–359, see Marx's letters of 12, 17 and 26 April, 13 May and 12 June, 1871 (MECW, Vol. 44).
64. Karl Marx, “Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance,” in General Council of the First International, Minutes, 1868–1870, 322–324.
65. Jacques Freymond, et al. eds., La Première Internationale, Vol. II (Geneva: E. Droz, 1962), 191–193.
66. International Workingmen's Association, 5th Congress, The Hague Congress of the First International: September 2–7, 1872, Vol. 1, Minutes and Documents. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976, 282.
67. Which in any case would also have to take account of Lenin as a Marxist – an entirely different matter – as well as the unique historical context created by the Bolshevik Revolution.
68. Bernstein did not deny that Marx was a revolutionary, especially originally, but saw a second, reformist current in his ideas, which he sought particularly to develop. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1912.
69. George C. Comninel, “Emancipation in Marx's Early Work,” Socialism and Democracy, 24 (3) (November 2010), 72.
70. That is, socialist or communist – not “libertarian” – anarchism.
71. On Lenin's conception of the party, see V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? in Collected Works, Vol. 5. Moscow: Progress, 1961, 347–530. On the organization of the Third International see Helmut Gruber (ed.), International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967; and Fernando Claudin, The Communist movement: from Comintern to Cominform. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
72. General Council, Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva (note 57), emphasis in original.
73. Karl Marx, “General Rules of the International Working Men's Association” (MECW, Vol. 23, 1988), 7.