International Workingmen’s Association. Minute Book 1864-66
1 The International’s leading body, the Central Council, as it was named on October 18, 1864, was elected by a big international meeting held in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on September 28, 1864. The meeting, which had been called by leaders of the London trade unions jointly with a group of Paris Proudhonist workers, and attended by representatives of the German, Italian and other foreign workers living in London at the time, as well as by prominent European petty-bourgeois and revolutionary-democratic emigres, adopted the resolution to found the International Working Men’s Association — (afterwards known as the First International). The Central Council consisted of noted British trade-unionists like G. Odger, W. R. Cremer, B. Lucraft, G. Howell, R. Shaw, Blackmore, W. Stainsby, W. Pidgeon and J. Longmaid; men prominent in the British labour and democratic movement of the sixties, among them the bourgeois radicals W. Dell, G. W. Wheeler, J. Osborne, W. Worley, T. Facey, J. Nieass and E. Whitlock. Other members were: J. Weston, an Owenist; J. Leno, a former Chartist, active in the electoral reform movement of the 1860s; R. Hartwell, one of the editors of The Bee-Hive, weekly organ of the trade unions, and also a former Chartist; P. Fox, an English journalist and active participant in the labour and democratic movement of the sixties; Le Lubez, J. B. Bocquet and J. Denoual, representatives of the French petty-bourgeois emigres in London; L. Wolff and D. Lama, members of the London organisation of Italian workers, the Mazzini Association of Mutual Progress. K. Marx and J. G. Eccarius were elected to the Council as the representatives of the German workers. The meeting had empowered the Central Council to co-opt new members. Later on, the Council, which at the end of 1866 finally came to be known as the General Council, was elected at the respective congresses of the International Working Men’s Association.
From The Bee-Hive Newspaper report of October 8, 1864 (No. 156), it is evident that about 40 people were present at this meeting of the General Council.
2 Here and elsewhere the word “amendment” is used in the sense adopted in British parliamentary procedure.
3 The reference is to the Universal League for the Welfare of the Industrious Classes, founded in London in December 1863. The London Trades Council took an active part in the founding of this League. Its leadership included persons who were elected after. wards to the General Council of the International — Facey, Taylor, Worley, Dell, Odger. The League whose programme was bourgeoisphilanthropic and cultural-educational in character had as its object to promote “the moral, social and physical welfare of the industrious classes of the whole world, without regard to the differences of nationality or of religious or political opinions.” The League had its headquarters at 18, Greek Street, Soho, London. This was also the meeting place of the General Council of the Association from October 5, 1864 to January 2, 1866.
4 The reference is to the German Workers’ Educational Association (Deutscher-Arbeiter-Bildungs-Verein), founded in London in February 1840 by Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll and other leaders of the League of the Just. In the early period of its existence the Association was strongly influenced by the utopian, equalitarian communism of Wilhelm Weitling. With the organisation of the Communist League, leadership of the Association passed entirely to the League’s local sections. The Educational Association was in close connection with the English Socialists and Chartists, with the organisations of the Fraternal Democrats and the French Social-Democrats. Marx and Engels actively participated in its work in 1847 and in 1849-50. During November 1849-September 1850, Marx read a series of lectures there on political economy and on the basic ideas of the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
On September 17, 1850, Marx and Engels and several of their followers withdrew from the Association when it came out in support of the minority in the dispute between the majority of the Communist League’s Central Committee, led by Marx and Engels, and the sectarian adventurist minority (the Willich-Schapper faction). At the close of the fifties Marx again took an active part in the work of the Association.
Besides its headquarters at 2, Nassau Street, Soho, in the tavern of G. Bolleter, a member of the Association, the latter, in the sixties, had two branches in the East and South of London, viz., the Eintracht and the Teutonia. After the founding of the International
many of the Association’s members, including Eccarius, Kaub, Lessner, Bolleter and Lochner, were elected to the General Council where they played a notable role. For the Association’s affiliation to the International see pp. 62-64 of the present volume.
5 The reference is to the Association of Mutual Progress (Associazione di Mutuo Progresso), founded at the end of June 1864 by Italian workers resident in London. The society which had a membership of about 300 workers at the time it was established was under the influence of Mazzini. Garibaldi was elected honorary chairman. For the Association’s affiliation to the International see pp. 60-61 of the present volume.
6 The Sub-Committee was appointed to draft the programme documents of the International Working Men’s Association. After it had completed this work it continued to meet once a week, as a rule, subsequently becoming the executive body of the General Council. In the summer of 1865 it also began to be called the Standing Committee. The Committee members included the General Council president, which post was abolished in September 1867 on Marx’s proposal, the honorary general secretary, and the corresponding secretaries for different countries. Marx virtually led the work of the Standing Committee. In the spring of 1865 Le Lubez and Wolff left the General Council, followed by Pidgeon. Fox began to take an active part in the Standing Committee’s work, as well as Dupont, Corresponding Secretary for France, and Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland. Shortly before the London Conference in 1865 the Standing Committee was reorganised and its composition renewed (see p. 129 of the present volume).
7 Being unwell at the time, Marx was unable to attend this meeting of the Sub-Committee and the General Council meeting of October 11, 1864. On October 12 Eccarius wrote to Marx: “The letter of excuse sent me by your dear little daughter reached me only this morning at one o'clock, when I came home, and thus could not serve to explain your absence in the Committee. I am very sorry to learn that you are not feeling well, but hope with all my heart that your indisposition is not serious, and that it won’t last long. You must absolutely impress the stamp of your terseness, full of content, upon the first-born child of the European workmen’s organisation.
“Last Wednesday you were elected to the Sub-Committee, after we had left. Major Wolff could not explain your absence; your absence last night seemed even more incomprehensible; everyone asked why you hadn’t come. I could give no positive answer, of course, but with regard to the Sub-Committee, guessed that they probably hadn’t notified you of the election nor of the time and place of its meeting, which proved to be true upon investigation. Mr. Cremer will let you know of the next meeting.” See also Marx’s letter to Engels of November 4, 1864.
8 The text of the programme of the International Working Men’s Association as drafted by the Owenist Weston has not been preserved. In his letter to Engels of November 4, 1864, Marx described this document as “full of the most extreme confusion” and “indescribable breadth.”
9 The Rules submitted by Wolff to the Sub-Committee meeting were an English translation of the “Brotherly Agreement Between the Italian Working Men’s Associations,” which had been published in Il Giornale delle Associazioni Operaie in July 1864, and adopted by the congress of Italian working men’s associations, held in Naples at the end of October 1864. In recommending these Rules, which were bourgeois-democratic in substance, to the International Working Men’s Association, Mazzini and his followers had reckoned on seizing leadership of the international working-class movement.
10 In his letter to Marx, dated October 12, Eccarius described in detail the discussion on the drafts submitted by Weston and Wolff at this meeting of the General Council:
“Regarding the absolute necessity of your being present at the next Sub-Committee meeting, I feel compelled to give you some information.
“You will remember that even last Wednesday Mr. Weston moved that the preliminaries for the platform of principles be discussed, and that he said he had drawn something up and was prepared to lay the material before the Committee for discussion. As it turned out yesterday evening, he had an elaborate paper, which under a sack of chaff contained a handful of grains, themselves of no decisive character. In the Sub-Committee he was commissioned to condense his paper, but his abbreviated product is no better than the original; it is a sentimental declamatory editorial on the matter, not the matter itself. Cremer publicly said that the paper would have to be shortened by three-quarters. Moreover, Major Wolff has translated a draft of by-laws for the Italian workmen’s organisation and handed it in, which was received with approval on the whole. Both these documents were returned to the Sub-Committee, to make use of what was useful in them, to put them in shape, etc., and to draw up a single document, containing the platform of principles and rules at the same time. After the meeting, Cremer said privately that Weston ought to have nothing to do with the matter, that the editing of the draft must be turned over to a commission of three at most, which could make use of the available material or could not as they saw fit. Odger and others agreed. ‘The right man in the right place’ will undoubtedly be Dr. Marx.
“Weston is an old Owenist, who confines the sentimental doctrine of the old school to the workmen, to be sure, and hates the oppressors instinctively, but seems to know no other basis for labour movements than the hackneyed phrase, truth and justice.”
11 After the unsuccessful attempt at this Council meeting to unite the International Working Men’s Association and the Universal League for the Welfare of the Industrious Classes (see Note 3), two of the League’s leaders, Taylor and Facey, left the General Council (see p. 42 of the present volume).
12 The Naples Congress of the Italian working men’s associations was held on October 25-27, 1864; representatives from 25 organisations attended it. The congress adopted the Rules, called “Brotherly Agreement Between the Italian Working Men’s Associations” (see Note 9). Wolff was not present at the congress.
13 The reference is to the document adopted by the Sub-Committee at its meeting of October 15, 1864. It consisted of a preamble to the rules (programme) and the rules themselves, drafted originally by Weston and Wolff, and then rewritten by Le Lubez. The minutes of this meeting have not been preserved. Marx was not present, for Cremer’s note informing him of the Sub-Committee meeting, posted on the day of the meeting, had not reached him in time. Cremer wrote:
“The Sub-Committee meet this Saturday evening at the house of Mr. Weston, 80. White Cross St., and I am instructed to say, they will be very pleased with your presence; perhaps you are not aware that the General Committee in your absence elected you on the Sub-Committee; I was not aware or had forgotten that you had left the room when the Sub-Committee were elected, or I should have sooner communicated to you the fact of your election. I am, Sir, yours very respectfully,
W. R. Cremer,
14 An analysis of the General Council minutes for October 1864 and of Marx’s letter to Engels of November 4, 1864, makes it possible to retrace how Marx drew up the International’s programme documents. On October 8, at the first Sub-Committee meeting, Weston submitted his draft of a declaration of principles (see Notes 8 and 10) and Wolff — the Rules of the Italian working men’s associations, which he had translated into English (see Note g). On October 11, the General Council, after considering these two documents, referred them back to the Sub-Committee to be revised. At the Sub-Committee meeting of October 15, Le Lubez read the version he had drawn up on the basis of Weston’s and Wolff’s drafts. This version, which was discussed by the General Council at its meeting of October 18, consisted of a preamble, claiming to be a declaration of principles, and rules.
It was only at this meeting that Marx first had the opportunity to familiarise himself with the said documents, his opinion of which he expressed in his letter to Engels of November 4, 1864. Following a discussion, the declaration of principles and the rules were approved in the main by the General Council. Marx, however, managed to have them referred back to the Sub-Committee for final editing. On October 20 the Sub-Committee met at Marx’s house; at that meeting they managed to edit only the first point of the rules. The next meeting of the Sub-Committee was to be held on October 27. This gave Marx the needed time to revise completely the documents in question. He wrote the Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association, which was not in the original drafts; he altered the whole preamble, throwing out the declaration of principles written by Le Lubez, and reduced the 40 points of the rules to 10, changing the very principle of organisation and only retaining some points of a purely formal character (the name of the organisation, the decision to hold a congress in Brussels in 1865. help to members of the organisation when changing their places of residence, etc.).
On October 27 the Sub-Committee approved the Address and the Rules as drawn up by Marx.
15 On November 2, the Liberal London daily The Morning Star, No. 2703, and on November 5, the trade-union weekly The Bee-Hive, No. 160, published a report of the General Council meeting of November 1, 1864, carrying inaccurate information. In particular, they reported that the General Council had passed a resolution to convene a congress of the International Working Men’s Association in Brussels in 1865, although no such resolution had been adopted; the compiler of the report had simply taken this information from Point 3 of the Provisional Rules. Furthermore, the same issue of The Bee-Hive had published the Inaugural Address without the knowledge of the General Council.
The Bee-Hive was published in London from 1861 to 1876 under the titles: The Bee-Hive, The Bee-Hive Newspaper, The Penny Bee-Hive; the paper was under the strong influence of bourgeois radicals and reformists. On November 22, 1864, the General Council decided to make The Bee-Hive the organ of the Association. The paper published the official documents of the International Working Men’s Association and the reports of the Council meetings. On repeated occasions, however, Marx had been obliged to protest against the distorted or abridged version in which it printed the International’s documents. In 1869 The Bee-Hive became, in effect, a bourgeois organ. On April 26, 1870, the General Council, on Marx’s suggestion, decided to sever their connection with it.
16 The reference is to the misprints made by The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 160, November 5, 1864, in the text of the Inaugural Address. By the word “Programme” is meant the preamble to the Rules (see pp. 288-89 of the present volume).
17 What is meant here is holding the position, but without pay.
18 An inaccuracy. The Provisional Rules were not published in The Bee-Hive. They formed part of a separate pamphlet, put out by The Bee-Hive publishers in the latter part of November 1864, under the title: Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men’s International Association, Established September 28, 1864 at a Public Meeting held at St. Martin’s Hall, Long Acre, London.
19 In The Bee-Hive Newspaper (No. 163, November 26, 1864) report of this meeting, the second resolution, submitted by Marx, is formulated as follows: “It was also decided that societies in London who join the Association shall have the power to elect a representative to sit on the Central Council, the Council reserving to itself the power to receive or reject such representative. With regard to societies in the provinces who may join, it was decided that they should have the power to elect a corresponding member of the Association.”
20 The address to Abraham Lincoln on his re-election as President of the United States was written, as is evident from Marx’s letter to Engels, dated December 2, 1864, by Marx and then endorsed by the Standing Committee and the said General Council meeting. In the same letter Marx gives a detailed account of the discussion that followed of how to present the address. A manuscript copy of the address signed by the Council’s 57 members was sent to Adams, the American Minister in London.
The address to Lincoln was first published on December 23 in the London Daily News, then in Reynolds’s Newspaper, No. 750, December 25, 1864, and subsequently in the German papers: Der Social-Demokrat, No. 3, December 30, 1864, Berliner Reform; No. 4, January 5, and Hermann, No. 314, January 7; 1865.
21 The report about this General Council meeting, published in The Bee-Hive, No. 164, December 3, 1864, states that the resolution was also supported by Marx.
22 The address of the British members of the General Council on Poland, drawn up by Fox in pursuance of the General Council decision of November 29, 1864, had first been discussed by the Sub-Committee on December 6. The address, which has not been preserved, was drawn up in a bourgeois-democratic spirit. As is evident from Marx’s letter to Engels of December 10, 1864, Fox had argued that it was the traditional foreign policy of France to support Poland’s independence. Marx emphatically took issue with this. He showed that France’s ruling classes, beginning with the reign of Louis XV and right up to the time of Napoleon III, had demagogically exploited the struggle for the independence of Poland in their own selfish interests and had systematically betrayed the Poles to meet these interests. The Sub-Committee endorsed Fox’s address on condition that he amend it in accordance with the proposals made by Marx. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland, said that he would propose to the General Council that it should reject Fox’s address because of its bourgeois character.
23 In the summer of 1863 a group of British trade-unionists, who later became members of the General Council (Cremer, Odger, Facey, Howell, Worley, Wheeler and others), started a movement for electoral reform in England. In September 1863 they founded the Trade Unions’ Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association. Odger was elected its president, Hartwell — secretary, and Trimlett — treasurer.
24 The reference is to the weekly, Saturday morning papers.
25 Marx has in mind the publication of the Inaugural Address in Der Social-Demokrat, No. 2, December 21, and No. 3 (Beilage), December 30, 1864 under the heading: “Manifest an die arbeitende Klasse Europa’s.” The German translation of the Inaugural Address was made by Marx.
26 Sections of the International began to be formed in Switzerland immediately following press reports about the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall. On October 11, 1864, a group of Geneva workers, headed by Dupleix, a bookbinder, addressed a letter to Tolain informing him of the formation of a provisional committee in Geneva to establish contact with workers of other countries and asking him to send them the necessary instructions. This letter forwarded by Tolain to London was, as is apparent from Jung’s letter of January 10, 1865 to Dupleix, read by Marx at the said meeting and received with much satisfaction. Jung sent Dupleix the Rules of the Association and recommended, on behalf of the General Council, that the Swiss workers form a central committee for the whole of Switzerland and that they establish regular contact with the General Council in London.
27 The General Council’s address to President Lincoln appeared in the English press in the latter part of December 1864 (see Note 20). The Bee-Hive Newspaper, although the Council’s organ, published it only on January 7, 1865 (No. 169), after the said decision had been passed.
28 The address of the British members of the General Council to the Polish people, which was drawn up by Fox (see Note 22), was the subject of a long discussion at the Council meetings of December 13 and 20, 1864, and January 3, 1865. Marx took the floor on this question twice — on December 13 and January 3. On the basis of a wealth of factual material on the relations between Poland and France Marx showed that Fox idealised the traditional foreign policy of France’s ruling classes towards Poland, and exposed the reactionary nature of the policy pursued by the governments of Russia, Prussia and Austria on the Polish question. Marx attached great importance to the discussion of the Polish question in the International for it enabled the workers in the respective countries to criticise the foreign policy of their own governments. Furthermore, he regarded the Polish national-liberation movement as a force capable of undermining Russian tsarism and accelerating the development of the revolutionary-democratic movement in Russia herself.
The speech made by Marx at this meeting was not published.
29 The decision to invite the bourgeois radicals Beesly, Beales and Harrison to the soiree to celebrate the founding of the Association had been taken by the General Council at its meeting of December 29, 1864 and recorded in the minutes of that meeting (see p. 58 of the present volume). The report of that meeting was not published, and Cremer, when he sent the report of the meeting of January 3, 1865 to the papers, included the said decision in it and recorded it for a second time in the Minute Book. Besides, he inserted in the decision, on his own initiative, Grossmith’s name who, as a General Council member, did not have to be specially invited. The report appeared on January 7 in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169 and in The Miner and Workman’s Advocate, No. 97. Marx who was visiting Engels in Manchester at the time sent Jung a letter on January 8 in which he protested against the inclusion of Grossmith’s name in the minutes and warned the General Council against the attempts of some leaders to use it as an instrument for furthering their own petty ambitions. As is evident from Jung’s reply of January 11, 1865, Marx’s protest was read at the General Council meeting of January 10. Cremer admitted his mistake and Grossmith’s name was crossed out of the minutes of January 3.
30 The resolution was also published in Der Social-Demokrat, No. 7, January 11, 1865.
31 The British National League for the Independence of Poland was founded in London on July 28, 1863. Its establishment was preceded by the famous meeting held in St. James’s Hall on July 22, 1863, in connection with the suppression of the Polish insurrection. The meeting, which was one of the harbingers in the founding of the International, was attended by British trade-unionists and democrats, as well as by a French workers’ delegation from Paris. The meeting resolved to send a delegation to the Foreign Secretary, John Russell, to hand in a protest against the British Government’s double-faced policy towards the Polish insurgents. Russell refused to receive the delegation, and a second meeting was called on July 28, 1863, this time on the premises of The Bee-Hive Newspaper, at which the League was founded. Edmond Beales was elected president and John R. Taylor — honorary secretary. Jan Kurzyna, who was connected with the democratic wing of the Polish emigres (Bobczynski, Oborski, Zabicki and others), was the London representative of the National Government of Poland which had directed the insurrection of 1863-64.
32 The reference is to a meeting held in Greenwich, London, on January 15, 1865, at which the General Council members Le Lubez, Odger, Morgan and Nusperli had expounded the aims and tasks of the International Working Men’s Association. The meeting had recognised the need for an international organisation of the working class and pledged to further the success of the Association in every possible way. It resolved to establish a branch of the Association in Greenwich and elected a committee of seven which was empowered to co-opt new members. Nusperli was elected a member of the committee.
33 Dupleix’s letter from Switzerland, dated January 17, was in reply to Jung’s letter of January 10, 1865 (see Note 26). Dupleix reported that the Geneva Committee was campaigning for the establishment of sections of the International Association in Switzerland and asked that all General Council publications therefore be forwarded to him.
34 The reference is to Wilhelm Liebknecht’s letter to Marx, dated January 21, 1865 (see p. 263 of the present volume). The affiliation of the General Association of German Workers to the International was impeded not only by the police regime in Prussia, but also by the sectarian stand of the Lassallean leadership in the Association. (For more details see Liebknecht’s report, sent to the London Conference, on pp. 251-60 of the present volume.)
35 The reference is to a letter, dated January 2, 1865, from Joseph Weydemeyer, a former member of the Communist League and friend of Marx and Engels. After the defeat of the 1848-49 Revolution Weydemeyer emigrated to the United States where he fought in the Civil War of 1861-65, on the side of the North. Towards the close of 1864 he was appointed military commander of St. Louis. On November 29, 1864, Marx wrote to Weydemeyer informing him of the founding of the International Working Men’s Association and sent him four copies of the Inaugural Address. Weydemeyer in his letter wrote that he was going to publish the Inaugural Address in the local workers’ paper St. Louis Daily Press as well as in the New York democratic paper World. p.66
36 The Paris section of the International Association was formed at the end of 1864. It was founded by the Proudhonist workers, Henri Tolain and Charles Limousin, both of whom had participated in the inaugural meeting held at St. Martin’s Hall on September 28, 1864. Early in January 1865 the section put out a French translation of the Provisional Rules, which contained a number of inaccuracies and distortions; in particular, in the third paragraph of the Preamble (“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”), the words “as a means” were omitted.
Besides the Tolain group, Henri Lefort, a French lawyer, who had also taken part in the inaugural meeting of September 28, likewise laid claim to being one of the founders of the International and the representative of the French workers. Lefort was in touch with Le Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France, and with French petty-bourgeois emigres in England. On January 13, 1865, the Lassallean organ Der Social-Demokrat, No. 8, printed a statement by Moses Hess in which he accused Tolain of being in contoct with Bonapartist circles. When Marx, upon his return from Manchester on January 16, read this he immediately wrote to J.-B. Schweitzer in Berlin and to Victor Schily in Paris. In his letter to Schily he asked the latter to look into the matter; in his letter to Schweitzer he strongly protested against Hess’s insinuations against the International Working Men’s Association and warned that he would publicly break with the paper if such accusations were repeated. On January 19 Schily informed Marx that the slanderous accusation against Tolain emanated from persons close to the journal L'Association, the organ of the French co-operative societies, whose editorial board included Lefort. Schily promised to send additional information in the near future.
The proposal temporarily to postpone the sending of membership cards to Paris was made by Marx at this meeting, as his letter to Engels, dated January 25, 1865, indicates.
37 The corresponding place in the minutes of January 24, 1865 carries no alterations. Cremer most probably recorded the minutes in the Minute Book after they had been confirmed at the said meeting.
38 Adams’s letter to Cremer was published in The Times, February 6, 1865. In a letter to Liebknecht, written in February 1865, Marx noted that Lincoln’s reply to the Association’s address on his re-election as President was the only one of all his replies to the congratulatory messages that “was not merely a formal confirmation of receipt.”
39 The reference is to the editorial in the St. Louis Daily Press. The same issue published excerpts from the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association. Marx received the paper from Weydemeyer on January 31, 1865.
40 The Brussels letter from Leon Fontaine, a member of the democratic Universal Federation in Belgium, written on January 29, 1865, was in reply to a letter, dated January 18, from Le Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for Belgium, pro tem., in which he had enclosed the Inaugural Address and the Rules. Fontaine’s letter was included in the report of the said General Council meeting, published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 173, February 4, 1865.
41 The reference is to the preliminary meeting of electoral reformers that was being called by a group of bourgeois radicals on February 6, 1865 in London Tavern, in preparation for a bigger meeting to be held in St. Martin’s Hall on February 23, 1865.
42 In a letter to Engels, dated February 1, 1865, Marx gives a detailed account of the consistently democratic stand on the electoral reform movement upheld by the General Council at this meeting. After informing Engels of the invitation received by the Council from the bourgeois radicals to attend the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, Marx writes: “Without the trade unions no mass meeting is possible and without us the trade unions are not to be had. This is also the reason why the gentlemen are applying to us.... On my motion it was decided: 1) To send the deputation merely as ‘observers’ (in my motion I excluded foreigners, but Eccarius and Lubez were elected as ‘English’ and as silent witnesses); 2) So far as the meeting is concerned, to act with them if, in the first place, manhood suffrage is directly and openly proclaimed in the programme, and in the second, if people elected by us are brought on to the regular Committee, so that they can watch the fellows and when the fresh treachery, which, as I made clear to them all, is certainly planned, takes place can compromise them.”
43 The letter was from Fribourg. In it he informed Le Lubez that in connection with the General Council decision of January 24, Tolain had expressed his readiness to resign if this would expedite the receipt of membership cards from London.
44 Lefort’s appointment as the International’s literary defender in Paris had been made on his own request (see p. 266 of the present volume). Marx supported his candidacy because he had assumed from Schily’s letter (February 5, 1865) that the conflict in the Paris section was settled, and hoped to draw into the International French workers active in the co-operative movement, and also to utilise the journal L'Association to propagate the ideas of the International.
45 Marx’s information was based on a letter from Ernest Jones, dated February 13, 1865, in which he wrote:
“My dear Marx! I forgot to ask you in my last letter to enrol me as a member of the International Association; and if you send me a dozen cards I dare say I could get a dozen members.”
46 Jones’s letter, dated February 10, 1865, was in reply to Marx’s letter of February 1 (the letter has not been preserved), in which Marx outlined a plan for drawing the broad mass of British workers into the electoral reform movement under the leadership of the General Council. In his reply, written with a view to being read at the Council, Jones expressed his agreement with the measures outlined, and stressed, in particular, the need to counter the propaganda conducted by the liberal-bourgeois National Reform Union, which had its headquarters in Manchester, with a broad working-class movement under the slogan of manhood suffrage.
47 The reference is to the German weekly, Nordstern, published in Hamburg from 1860 to 1866. In 1863 the weekly became the organ of the Lassalleans; J. Ph. Becker’s reports about the International’s sections in Switzerland appeared in its columns in 1865-66.
On February 11, 1865, the Nordstern, No. 296, carried Becker’s report of February 4 about the Geneva section’s meeting held on January 27 (the section was founded in October 1864. See Note 26). The meeting had also been attended by representatives of the German social-republican people’s union of which Becker was the President. The meeting approved the Provisional Rules of the International Association and elected a committee of seven. Subsequently it was resolved to enlarge the committee with representatives from the different working men’s associations in Geneva.
48 The reference is to Tolain’s letter to Le Lubez, dated February 10, 1865, in which he strongly objected, in connection with Lefort’s appointment as the Association’s literary defender in Paris, to the appointment of non-workers as Association officials. p. 72.
49 The London branch of the Operative Society of Bricklayers, founded in England in 1829, had about 4,000 members at the beginning of the sixties. Edwin Coulson was the Society’s General Secretary. Howell was appointed the London branch’s representative on the General Council on February 21, 1865.
50 From Marx’s letter to Engels, dated February 25, 1865, it is evident that when Marx informed Schily of his appointment he gave him special instructions which, judging from Schily’s reply of February 25-28, were as follows: to see to it that the General Council retained the right to keep a cheek on the affairs of the Paris section and on no account to allow the Paris section, which had the support of a sizeable part of the Paris proletariat, to withdraw from the International.
51 Beales’s letter contained an invitation to the General Council members to take part in a big public meeting in London that was being sponsored by the electoral reformers. The meeting which was held in St. Martin’s Hall, on Thursday, February 23, 1865, with the active participation of General Council representatives, passed a decision to found a Reform League. It also elected a delegation which included, besides trade-unionists and bourgeois radicals, several Council members — Odger, Cremer, Weston, Dell, Hartwell, Wheeler, Leno, Nieass and Howell — to negotiate with the representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie, regarding joint struggle for electoral reform. Marx considered the results of the meeting to be most satisfactory. In his letter to Engels of February 25 he wrote: “The International Association has managed to constitute the majority in the committee, elected to found the new Reform League, in such a way that the entire leadership is in our hands.”
52 In the report about this meeting of the General Council, published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 176, February 25, the discussion that followed on the suffrage movement is dealt with in greater detail. The report reads: “A long discussion followed relative to the suffrage movement which is being inaugurated, and it was unanimously agreed that nothing short of Manhood Suffrage would receive the consideration or support of the Council. It was also agreed to keep a watchful eye on those who are to be in the front ranks. Working men have been so often deceived, it becomes their duty to be doubly watchful.”
53 Marx attached the utmost importance to the adoption of this resolution. In his letter to Engels of February 25, 1865, he wrote:
“Incidentally, other parliamentarians, like Taylor, etc. (gentlemen who are connected with Mazzini), have the temerity to inform us that it was inopportune at present to hold a Polish meeting. I replied through our Council that the working class has its own foreign policy and is not at all guided by what the middle class consider opportune or inopportune. The middle class always thought it the right thing to goad on the Poles at the beginning of a new outbreak, to betray them during its progress by their diplomacy, and to desert them when Russia had thrown them down. In fact, the purpose of the meeting is primarily to obtain financial support. Do these unfortunate emigres (this time mostly working men and peasants, which is why they are not receiving any support from Prince Zamoiski and Co.) have to starve to death because the English middle class just now think it inopportune to mention even the name of Poland?”
54 The reference is to Jones’s letter to Marx, dated February 25, 1865, in which he wrote about the success of the suffrage movement in Manchester, welcomed the founding of the Reform League (see Note 51) and invited a delegation of the League to be present at a big meeting to be held in Manchester in support of manhood suffrage.
55 Der Social-Demokrat, organ of the General Association of German Workers, was published in Berlin from December 15, 1864 to 1871, at first three times a week and then, beginning with July 1865, daily. Schweitzer was the paper’s editor in 1864-65. Not having any other press organ for the propaganda of their ideas in Germany, Marx and Engels had agreed to collaborate with Der Social-Demokrat when it was launched. A further inducement was the fact that its platform contained no specifically Lassallean slogans, and that Liebknecht was to be its unofficial editor. Der Social-Demokrat published the Inaugural Address of the Association and also an article on Proudhon, written specially for the paper by Marx on Schweitzer’s request. However. it soon became clear to Marx and Engels that Schweitzer was pursuing a policy of compromise with Bismarck’s Junker government and in their statement of February 23, 1865, they publicly announced their refusal to collaborate any further with Der Social-Demokrat.
56 The Sub-Committee meeting, held together with the French delegates Tolain and Fribourg, met on March 4 and 6, 1865. The Sub-Committee adopted the following resolutions which were drafted by Marx and are extant in his note-book:
“1) The present Paris branch Administration, consisting of Citizens Tolain, Fribourg, and Limousin, is confirmed in its functions by the London Central Council, which also expresses them its thanks for their zeal and activity;
“2) The adjunction of Citizen Pierre Vinçard to the Paris branch Administration is thought desirable;
“3) While thanking Citizen Lefort for the part he took in the foundation of the International Society, and earnestly wishing for his collaboration, as homme de conseil, with the Paris branch Administration, the London Central Council at the same time consider themselves not entitled to impose Citizen Lefort in any official capacity upon the Paris branch Administration.
“4) Citizen Victor Schily is appointed the Paris delegate of the London Central Council.
“In this character he has to act only with the Paris branch Administration. He will exercise that droit de surveillance which the Paris branch themselves have thought proper to acknowledge as a necessary attribute of the Central Council under the present political conjuncture.”
The final text of the resolutions was confirmed by the General Council on March 7 and recorded in the Minute Book.
57 On February 24, 1865, the Paris section of the International called a meeting in connection with the appointment of Lefort as the Association’s literary defender in Paris. The meeting, while recognising the General Council’s right to supervise the activities of the local branches, strongly protested against the attempts of the bourgeois republican Lefort to exploit the General Council decision in. order to seize leadership of the Paris section. The meeting adopted a resolution, drafted by Limousin, to the effect that if the purely working-class character of the Association and of the forthcoming congress was to be preserved, only workers should hold leading positions in the organisation. The meeting unanimously endorsed the activities of Fribourg, Tolain and Limousin. The resolution, which was signed by 32 members of the Paris section, was brought to London by Tolain and Fribourg.
58 Marx, judging from his letter to Jung, dated March 13, 1865, was dissatisfied with the final wording of the said resolution; he believed that too many concessions were being made to Lefort.
59 The Proudhonists’ erroneous view that only workers should hold official positions in working-class organisations was finally smashed at the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866. During the discussion of the Rules and Regulations, Tolain, a French delegate, proposed that Point 11, which reads “that every member of the International Working Men’s Association has the right to elect and to be elected,” should be amended, declaring that only persons directly engaged in manual labour should be elected delegates to congresses of the International. Tolain met with a decisive rebuff on the part of the rest of the delegates. Cremer and Carter in their speeches emphasised that the International owed its existence to many citizens not engaged in manual labour. In this connection they particularly noted Marx’s services who, as Cremer stated, had made the triumph of the working class his life’s work. Tolain’s amendment was rejected.
60 The co-operation of Pierre Vinçard, working-class publicist and veteran of the 1848 Revolution, to the Paris Administration was meant to make the revolutionary and socialist traditions of the French working-class movement of the forties more widely known to the International’s members in France. Vinçard, however, as is evident from his letter to Dupont, dated April 30, 1865, declined this appointment for reasons of health.
61 When this resolution was sent to Paris, private instructions to Schily were enclosed to the effect that the Lefort group could, depending upon the circumstances, be allowed to form an independent section of the International in Paris.
62 Schily did not accept his appointment as General Council representative on the Paris Administration and informed Marx of this in a letter, dated March 20, 1865.
63 The meeting at Radleys Hotel between the delegation, elected at the meeting of February 23 (see Note 51), and representatives of the bourgeoisie, was attended by some 20 trade-union delegates, among them several General Council members, and as many representatives of the bourgeoisie, including four M.P.s. John Bright, Free-Trade leader, proposed campaigning only for household suffrage. The demand for manhood suffrage was turned down by the representatives of the bourgeoisie, and consequently no agreement was reached on joint action.
On March 16 Odger reported, on behalf of the delegation, on the results of the Radleys Hotel meeting to a special trade-union meeting in St. Martin’s Hall. The meeting endorsed the resolution of February 23 to found the Reform League and elected a committee to draft the League’s rules.
64 At the preliminary electoral reform meeting held in St. Martin’s Hall on February 23, 1865 some trade-union leaders had declared that they were prepared to make some concessions to the bourgeoisie. In view of this The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 177, March 4, 1865, published a letter by Weston in which he urged the delegates who had been elected on February 23 to insist on the demand for manhood suffrage in their forthcoming talks with the bourgeois liberals.
65 On May 9, 1865 Odger was elected a member of the General Council delegation to the Manchester Conference instead of Howell who was sent as the Reform League’s representative.
66 Fribourg’s letter dealt with the conflict in the Paris section and, in particular, with Le Lubez’s negative attitude to the appointment of Schily. Our knowledge of Fribourg’s letter comes from Jung’s letter to Marx, dated March 22, 1865.
67 In April 1865, Lefort wrote a letter to L'Association, No. 6, in which he announced his withdrawal from the International.
68 The reference is to A. A. Walton’s History of the Landed Tenures of Great Britain and Ireland, from Norman Conquest to the Present Time, London, 1865, 20 copies of which the author presented to the General Council on August 1, 1865. Marx refers to Walton’s book in Capital, Vol. III, Part VI, “Transformation of Surplus — Profit into Ground-Rent,” Chapter XXXVIL — Introduction.
69 The Lyons section of the International was founded in the beginning of 1865 by a group of Left republicans, participants in the 1848 Revolution; some of the members were Blanquists. Adrien Schettel, a mechanic, was elected the section’s correspondent, in which capacity he informed the General Council of its establishment. The General Council sent the Lyons section about 500 membership cards.
70 The report of this meeting, published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 181, April 1, 1865, gives a more detailed account of Cremer’s report of the deputation’s visit to the Shoemakers’ Union: “Citizen Cremer, General Secretary, reported the result of an interview between a deputation from the Central Council, consisting of Citizens Cremer, Eccarius, Weston, Jung, Fox, Le Lubez, Morgan, Dell, and Wheeler, and the delegates of the National Shoemakers’ Union, lately sitting at the Bell, Old Bailey. The delegates were 38 in number, and represented societies numbering about 5,000 members. Mr. Thomas, the delegate from Birmingham, moved, and the delegate from Hull seconded the following resolution, which was carried unanimously, after one or two other delegates had expressed themselves in favour of the same.” Then follows the text of the resolution.
71 Whitlock was apparently reporting on the Rules of the Reform League. These Rules, drawn up with the direct participation of members of the General Council, were discussed by the special ,drafting committee at its meeting of March 20 (see Note 63) and adopted at a public meeting held in St. Martin’s Hall, on March 23, 1865. The League’s objects were formulated as follows in the Rules:
“1. — To procure the extension of the election franchise to every resident and registered adult male person of sound mind, and unconvicted of crime.
“2. — To obtain for the voter the protection of the ballot.
“The League will endeavour to accomplish the above objects by means of branch associations, public meetings, lectures, conferences, requiring pledges from candidates, and such other means as the Executive Council may from time to time determine.”
72 On March 22, 1865, at a meeting of the General Association of German Workers in Hamburg, its president, Bernhard Becker, made a slanderous speech against the International, as well as against Marx, Engels and Liebknecht. The speech was published in the supplement to Der Social-Demokrat, No. 39, March 26, 1865. The International’s reply, signed by Bolleter, appeared in Nordstern, No. 306, April 22, 1865. Marx administered a rebuff to Becker in an article “The President of Mankind,” which was printed in Berliner Reform, No. 88, April 13, 1865.
73 The questions submitted by Weston were discussed in the General Council during May-August 1865 (at its meetings of May 2, 20 and 23, June 20 and 27, July 4 and 18, and August 15, 1865). In the course of this discussion Marx, to refute Weston’s erroneous views, read a report known as “Wages, Price and Profit” (see Note 108).
74 On April 15, 1865, Marx wrote Fontaine a letter in which he enclosed the text of the General Council’s official decision appointing Marx corresponding secretary, pro tem., for Belgium instead of Le Lubez who had resigned from the post.
75 The reference. is to Charles Longuet, editor of the democratic weekly La Rive Gauche, which started publication in Paris on October 20, 1864. On March 12, 1865 the paper published Longuet’s pamphlet “La Dynastie des La Palice,” which was directed against the Second Empire. The author was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment and the paper was suppressed. Publication was renewed on May 14, 1865 in Brussels where continued to appear up to August 5, 1866. The paper published documents of the General Council and information about the International Association’s activities.
76 The reference is to a letter written jointly by Dupleix and Falconnet to Jung on April 9, 1865. Besides the information recorded in the said minutes, they wrote that the Rules of the International Working Men’s Association had been discussed and adopted at a general meeting of the Geneva section. The letter further noted that the membership of the sections which were being formed in Switzerland was still small but there was every likelihood that it would increase.
The letter was signed by the members of the committees of the Geneva section.
77 The reference is, apparently, to one of the two letters Jones wrote to Marx on April 22 and 24, 1865, in which he informed him about the headway being made by the suffrage movement in Manchester and about the Reform Conference to be held in Free Trade Hall on Tuesday, May 9, 1865.
78 Soon it became clear that Fontaine had no contacts with the working masses and had taken no steps to propagate the International in Belgium; in the letter read by Marx he sought to justify his inactivity. The International’s first section in Belgium was founded on July 17, 1865 with the direct participation of De Paepe, Belgian Socialist and working-class publicist.
79 At a general meeting on March 21, 1865, the Leipzig compositors passed a decision to demand higher wage rates. In reply to the refusal of the employers to meet their demand, the Leipzig Compositors’ Union declared a strike involving some 650 workers. On April 15, the Berlin Compositors’ Union, of which Liebknecht was one of the leaders, sent a letter to the General Council asking it to support the Leipzig compositors.
This letter is quoted in the report of the said Council meeting, published in The Bee-Hive, No. 185, April 29, 1865.
80 The Emancipation Society was founded in London in November 1862 by a group of bourgeois radicals. It supported the London Trades Council in its campaign against Britain entering the American Civil War (1861-65) on the side of the slave-owning South. Beales was an active member of the Society.
81 The reference is to the reorganisation of the Paris Administration; Marx communicated this information on the basis of Schily’s letter to him, dated April 27, 1865. As a result of this
reorganisation the International strengthened its ties with local workers’ organisations, and several new members, among them Varlin and Camelinat, entered the Paris Administration.
82 During their visit to London at the end of February and the beginning of March 1865, Tolain and Fribourg gave Le Lubez a letter which the Paris Administration had received from Lefebvre, the Association’s correspondent in Neufchâteau. As Corresponding Secretary for France, Le Lubez had corresponded with Lefebvre and tried to set him against the General Council and Paris Administration. Le Lubez’s intrigues were discovered only after Dupont had been appointed the new corresponding secretary for France. The issue became a particularly sharp one when Le Lubez tried again to become a member of the General Council as the representative of the Greenwich branch of the Association. The question was discussed at the Sub-Committee meeting of May 6, 1865 (see pp. 95-96 of the present volume).
83 See Note 73.
84. See Note 79.
85 The address of the International Working Men’s Association to President Johnson was written by Marx between May 2 and 9 and published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 188, May 20, 1865 (see pp. 294-96 of the present volume).
86 The Reform League’s leading bodies (see Notes 51, 63 and 71) — the Council and the more narrow Executive Committee — were elected at the end of March 1865. The Executive Committee, which originally consisted of 12 members, included six General Council members (Cremer, Lino, Nieass, Odger, Howell and Eccarius). Howell was elected honorary secretary. In a letter to Engels, dated May 13, 1865, Marx wrote: “Without us this Reform League would never have been founded or would have fallen into the hands of the middle class.” In connection with the convocation of the Manchester Conference the League issued an address to the working class to campaign for manhood suffrage (see The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 187, May 13, 1865).
87 The reference is to the Orsini plot (January 14, 1858) to assassinate Napoleon III. The plot miscarried and Orsini and two of his accomplices were sentenced to death.
88 The special General Council meeting to discuss Weston’s questions (see Note 73) was held, as resolved, on May 20, at 8 o'clock in the evening. The minutes of this meeting are not extant. In a letter to Engels, dated May 20, 1865, Marx gave the substance of Weston’s propositions and his chief objections to them. Marx wrote: “. . This evening a special session of the International. A good old fellow, an old Owenist, Weston (carpenter) has put forward the following two propositions, which he is continually defending in The Bee-Hive: 1) that a general rise in the rate of wages would be of no use to the workers; 2) that therefore, etc., the trade unions have a harmful effect. If these two propositions, in which he alone in our society believes, were accepted, we should be turned into a joke both on account of the trade unions here and of the infection of strikes which now prevails on the Continent.... I am of course expected to supply the refutation. I therefore ought really to have worked out my reply for this evening, but thought it more important to write on at my book [Capital] and so shall have to depend upon improvisation.
“Of course I know beforehand what the two main points are: 1) that wages determine the value of commodities; 2) that if the capitalists pay 5 instead of 4 shillings today, they will sell their commodities for 5 instead of 4 shillings tomorrow (being enabled to do so by the increased demand).
“Inane though this is, attaching itself only to the most superficial external appearance, it is nevertheless not easy to explain to ignorant people all the economic questions which compete with one another here. You can’t compress a course of political economy into one hour. But we shall do our best.”
89 The New York Daily Tribune — a bourgeois newspaper that appeared from 1841 to 1924; advocated a progressive policy in the forties and fifties of the nineteenth century. Marx collaborated with the paper from October 1851 to March 1862; Engels wrote a large number of the articles for it on Marx’s request. This collaboration with the paper discontinued in the early period of the American Civil War. One of the main reasons that impelled Marx to sever all relations with The New York Daily Tribune was its growing advocacy of compromising with the slave-holding South and, in consequence, its departure from its progressive positions.
The paper published the General Council’s address to President Johnson on June 1, 1865, under the heading: “The Working Men of Europe to President Johnson.”
90 The reference is to the electoral reform movement in England.
91 See The Manchester Guardian, May 16, 1865.
92 The reference is to a letter from Schettel, the Association’s correspondent in Lyons: excerpts from it were printed in The Bee Hive Newspaper report (No. 189, May 27, 1865) of the said meeting. In his letter Schettel wrote about the strike of the Lyons operatives, and asked that 500 membership cards of the International Association be sent to him as soon as possible. He also informed the Association that the Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules had been printed in Lyons.
93 The reference is to Le Lubez’s letter to Lefebvre, excerpts from which the latter communicated to Dupont (see Note 82).
94 The national Reform Conference was held in Manchester on May 15-16, 1865. The General Council which had received an invitation to take part in it had appointed its delegation on March 21 (see pp. 82-83 and 96-97 of the present volume) and instructed it to insist on the demand for manhood suffrage. The conference was attended by about 200 delegates, the bulk of whom represented the bourgeoisie. The point at issue was the nature of reform. As distinct from the amorphous, vague demands for electoral reform advanced by the bourgeoisie, Cremer declared that the London working men had instructed their delegates to vote for nothing short of manhood suffrage and that they would agree to nothing less. Cremer was supported by Jones and Howell. The representatives of the bourgeoisie, however, rejected Cremer’s proposal by 95 votes to 50. Because of the indecision of Taylor, Beales and other bourgeois radicals the conference carried a resolution to extend the franchise only to householders who paid local poor-rates. The report on the Manchester Conference was published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 188, May 20, 1865.
95 See Notes 73 and 88.
96 The resolution on this question was published together with the report of the General Council meeting in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 190, June 3, 1865.
97 The publication of this paper which was to be called The Commoner did not materialise (see p. 106 of the present volume).
98 Marx read his report “Wages, Price and Profit” at two General Council meetings — on June 20 and 27, 1865.
99 On May 25, 1865, Mulchinock, Secretary of the Deptford and Greenwich branch, had inquired of Le Lubez, who represented the branch in the General Council, why contact had been broken off between the branch and the General Council. On Sunday, May 28, the branch held a special meeting which, following Le Lubez’s communication, resolved to ask the General Council to look into the matter. On May 29 Mulchinock sent the said resolution to Cremer.
100 The leaflet inviting working men’s societies in Britain to join the International Association was issued in the summer of 1865 under the heading “International Working Men’s Association. Central Council, 18, Greek Street, London, W. Trade, Friendly, or any Working Men’s Societies are invited to join. . ..” The text was based on the resolutions on the conditions of affiliation to the International Association, adopted by the General Council on Marx’s proposal (see p. 49 and pp. 297-98 of the present volume. The General Council simultaneously printed a special application form for organisations wishing to join the Association.
101 The reference is to the letter written by Falconnet and Dupleix to Jung on June 2, 1865.
102 La Tribune Ouvriere — French labour weekly. The editorial staff included members of the International’s section in Paris — Tolain, Fribourg, Varlin and others; Limousin was the publisher. The first four issues were printed in Paris in June 1865; after the paper was suppressed in France its publication was transferred to Brussels where one more number appeared on July 9, 1865. Publication was stopped because of the difficulties of getting it into France.
103 The reference is to Bagnagatti’s letter to Cremer, dated June 14, 1865.
104 See Note 100.
105 In taking issue with Weston’s erroneous views (see Note 88) Marx showed in his report that Weston was, in effect, advocating passivity and submission by the proletariat to capitalist exploitation. Marx’s criticism of Weston was at the same time a criticism of the Proudhonists, as well as of the Lassalleans, since they too underestimated the importance of the economic struggle of the proletariat and took a negative stand on the trade unions. In his report, which is a classical example of a comprehensive explanation of complex theoretical propositions of political economy in a form accessible to the workers, Marx substantiated the role and significance of the economic struggle and its relation to the ultimate goal of the proletariat — abolition of the wage system. Marx’s report was directed also against the narrow outlook and reformism of the British trade-unionists who reduced the tasks of the working-class movement merely to a struggle for day-to-day needs.
106 The reference is to the vote taken at the General Council meeting of June 13, 1865, (see p. 108 of the present volume) on Wolff’s re-admission to the International Working Men’s Association.
107 In conclusion Marx proposed the following resolutions:
“Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities.
“Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages.
“Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system” (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 447).
108 Regarding the suggestion made by General Council members that the discussion material should be published, Marx wrote to Engels on June 24, 1865:
“On the one hand this would perhaps be useful f or they are connected with John Stuart Mill, Professor Beesly, Harrison, etc. On the other hand I am hesitant for 1. to have ‘Mr. Weston’ as an opponent is not very flattering, 2. the second part of my report contains, in an extremely condensed, but relatively popular form, much that is new, taken in advance from my book, while at the same time it has necessarily to slur over all sorts of things. The question therefore arises, is it advisable to anticipate things in such a way?”
Marx’s report was published only in 1898 by his daughter, Eleanor Marx, under the title “Value, Price and Profit.”
109 Fox has in mind the House of Commons’ debate on July 3, 1865, when the Speaker called Hennessy, M. P., to order for trying to have a third proposal debated before the initial resolution and amendment to it had been voted on.
110 In connection with the strike of the Lyons tulle operatives (see p. 99 of the present volume), the Association’s correspondent in Lyons, Adrien Schettel, had asked the General Council for information about the price and the manufacture of tulle in England. As is evident from the General Council minutes, Dupont managed to send the requisite information to Lyons in the first part of June 1865. Cremer’s trip to Norwich did not yield the needed results.
The reference is apparently to the copper plate with the form of application for organisations wishing to join the International Working Men’s Association (see pp. 297-98 of the present volume).
Fribourg’s letter is not extant. But from Schily’s letters to Marx and from the correspondence between Marx and Engels, it is evident that the members of the Paris section were pressing for a congress to be held in 1865, in Brussels. On July 7 they issued an appeal to the members of the International Association in which they submitted the following congress programme:
“1. What is the Association’s object — what can be its means of action?
“2. Labour and its consequences on hygiene and morality; labour is the duty of all.
“3. Female and child labour at the factories from the viewpoint of hygiene and morality.
“4. Unemployment and the means of combating it.
“5. Strikes; their effect.
“6. Association, its principles and their application.
“7. Primary and vocational education.
“8. Relation between capital and labour.
“9. Foreign competition. Trade agreements.
“10. Standing armies from the viewpoint of production.
“11. Is morality distinct from religion?”
The appeal was published in Presse, July 7, Opinion nationale, July 15, 1865, and in several other French papers.
113 The reference is to the labour weekly, The Miner and Workman’s Advocate, organ of the British miners’ union, published in London from 1863 to 1865. At the end of July 1865, J. B. Leno, a member of the General Council, acquired the copyright of the paper and became its editor. It was then that the paper offered its services as the International’s official organ. It did not publish a report of the debate.
114 The Standing Committee’s report on the questions of a congress and conference was the result of the energetic steps taken by Marx in the matter. In his letter to Engels of July 31, 1865, Marx wrote: “According to our Rules a public congress should have been held in Brussels this year. The Parisians, the Swiss and some of the people here pressed for this in every way. I believe that in the present circumstances this would only compromise us, especially considering that I have not even got the time to prepare the necessary documents for the Central Council. In spite of strong resistance by the opposite side, I succeeded in getting them to agree to a private prealable [preliminary — Ed.] conference in London (September 25), instead of a public congress in Brussels, at which only delegates of the administrative committees will be present and which will make the preparations for the coming congress.”
115 The programme of the London Conference was reproduced in two leaflets issued by the General Council (see the illustration between pp. 122 and 123, and pp. 305-06 of the present volume); it was also published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 200, August 12, 1865.
116 See Note 112.
117 See Note 68.
118 The reference is to the French labour paper La Presse Ouvriere which the editors of La Tribune Ouvriere (see Note 102) intended to publish after the latter had been suppressed. La Presse Ouvriere however appeared only once, in Brussels, on August 13, 1865, the entire issue being confiscated when they tried to smuggle it into France.
119 The minutes are not exact: it was apparently a matter of forming a shareholders’ company not only for the purpose of purchasing premises for the Association but also for the purpose of financing The Miner and Workman’s Advocate (see p. 124 of the present volume).
120 The report of this meeting in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 200, August 12, 1865, carries an excerpt from Talbot’s letter asking for 50 membership cards of the International.
121 The reference is to a Geneva letter from Falconnet and Dupleix, under date August 19, 1865; in it they reported on the International’s sections in Vevey, Montreux, Lausanne and La Chaux-de-Fonds, and on the preparations under way for the forthcoming London Conference.
122 Information about the conditions of the tulle operatives was requested in Schettel’s letter to the General Council, dated August 19, 1865; the first application had been made in May of the same year (see p. 99 of the present volume).
123 In pursuance of this decision Cremer drew up, on September 6, 1865, the following circular letter: “Dear Citizen, if you can by any means get information on, or answers to, the following questions, which our members in Lyons are deeply interested in having answered ... you will greatly oblige.” The following questions were listed in the circular: “1. Whether the [workers] who are engaged in the manufacture of tulle are paid by the day or piece. 2. If by the day, what amount of wages per day, and how many hours constitute their day. 3. If by the piece, say whether per yard, if so, how many per yard. 4. The market price of the raw material. 5. Is there any export duty on British manufactured tulle. or import duty on French, if so, what amount of duty.” The copy of the circular Cremer sent to Marx is extant.
124 The reference is to the formation of a shareholders’ company for the publication in London of a newspaper that would be the organ of the International Working Men’s Association. At the end of July 1865, J. B. Leno, proprietor of The Miner and Workman’s Advocate (see Note 113), proposed placing the paper at the service of the General Council. The proposal met with the full support of the Council members who discussed the matter on August 8 and 15. The details of the discussion at the meeting on August 15 are known to us from Eccarius’s letter of August 16, 1865, to Marx who did not attend the Council meetings for three weeks being busy on his book Capital. In this letter Eccarius wrote:
“You evidently know that there have been certain changes on The Miner. The Editorial Board of The Bee-Hive offered Leno £25 for the copyright, but he turned down the offer. As things stand presently the paper is published at a weekly deficit of £5. Since there is a prospect of being able to increase the circulation at least to the amount needed to cover the absolute expenses, we have decided to establish a limited company with a capital of £1,000, divided into 1,000 shares, to purchase the copyright and to change or shorten the name, that is, to delete the word ‘Miner’. Many yesterday evening also favoured changing the format. Leno will receive 50 shares as payment for the copyright, and he promised to take up another 50 as a shareholder. Another 55 shares were distributed yesterday evening. Friend Weston took up 5 shares, Wheeler, I believe, 10 and Lessner — 2. In all, there will be a committee of 18 shareholders. Odger, Wheeler. Worley, Kaub and Eccarius will form a sub-committee which is to draw up the statutes and submit them to a shareholders’ meeting at Greek Street on Tuesday after 9 o'clock in the evening. Once the statutes are adopted a board of directors will be elected. All those who will have taken up shares by Tuesday will have the right to vote at the meeting. It was decided that on the same evening 2s. 6d. be deposited for every share. I hope that no unsurmountable obstacles will prevent you from attending in person.”
On Tuesday, August 22, following the regular General Council meeting, the shareholders in the Industrial Newspaper Company held their foundation meeting. The meeting, which was attended by Marx, approved the text of an address to the working men and the Company’s prospectus (see pp. 299-304 of the present volume). On September 25, 1865, the London Conference declared the paper, which on September 8 had been renamed The Workman’s Advocate, an official organ of the International. In the first part of November 1865 the newspaper became the property of the Industrial Newspaper Company.
125 The article “The Great Naval Review at Cherbourg” appeared in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 202, August 26, 1865, unsigned.
126 After the exchange of letters between Marx and Fontaine in April 1865 ;(see Notes 74 and 78), the General Council was not in touch with Belgium for a while. In the summer of 1865 a group of Brussels workers, Proudhonists and collectivists (supporters of collective ownership of land), De Paepe among them, dissatisfied with Fontaine’s inactivity, proceeded themselves to organise sections of the International in Belgium. On July 17 they called a meeting which elected a provisional committee of the Brussels section. On July 24 the newly-elected committee, which included Vandenhouten and other workers, held its first meeting. Fontaine demanded that the members of the section recognise him as the sole representative of the General Council and connecting link with it, on the grounds that the General Council had elected him its corresponding secretary, pro tem., in Belgium. The members of the committee, however insisted on the right themselves to elect their representative. Marx, upon learning of these events from Limousin’s letter to Dupont, dated July 1865, wrote Fontaine a letter on July 25, in which he made it clear to him that the General Council recognised the right of its sections to elect their own representatives and that it had appointed Fontaine in January 1865 only because there had been no section of the Association in Belgium at the time. Marx also informed Fontaine of the forthcoming London Conference. It was Fontaine’s reply of July 28, 1865 to Marx that was read at the meeting.
127 Fontaine had obviously not informed the Brussels section of Marx’s letter of July 25, and it had considered it necessary to send to the General Council, to clear up matters, two of its representatives, Duthy and Cheval, who attended the Council meeting on September 5, 1865. In a letter read at a meeting of the Brussels section on September 16, Cheval recommended establishing direct contact with Marx.
128 On September 11, 1865, Marx sent a letter to Liebknecht in Hannover inviting him to attend the London Conference as a delegate from Germany. Liebknecht replied that he would not be able to come but would send a detailed report (see pp. 251-60 of the present volume).
129 The reference is to the soiree to celebrate the founding of the International, in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on September 28, 1865 (see pp. 307-09 of the present volume). Jones had promised to attend, but was unable to do so. On September 28 he wrote Marx the following letter from Manchester: “My dear Marx, so much as I desire to attend the soiree tonight, I find it utterly impossible — it is no matter of choice with me, I assure you, — or you know I would have attended.
“I trust the soiree will be a great success — for the Union of all peoples for one object is, and ever will be, the only means of attaining and securing liberty for each.
My dear Marx
130 In a letter to Jung, dated September 13, 1865, Letoquart, Secretary of the French section in Geneva, informed him of the election of Dupleix and J. Ph. Becker as delegates to the London Conference. Becker had also received the following mandate from Germany:
“The meeting held this morning of persons living in Solingen district, who are wholly dedicated to the cause of Social-Democracy and desiring to make the International Association as widely known as possible, hereby instructs Mr. J. Ph. Becker in Geneva to represent them at the conference of delegates that is being convened in London on the 25th of this month. and to inform the undersigned thereof. On behalf of the meeting, Karl Fr. Dultgen. Grafrath, Solingen district. September 24, 1865. P.S. It would be advisable to discuss the following questions: 1) What is the object of the International Working Men’s Association and what can be its means? 2) Unemployment and the means of combating it. 3) Association, its principles and their application. 4) Standing armies from the viewpoint of production. Karl Fr. Dultgen.”
131 See Note 6.
132 The minutes of the Standing Committee meeting are not extant. The London Conference opened on September 25, 1865 (see pp. 229-50 of the present volume).
133 This decision was reversed by the General Council on November 21, 1865, on Marx’s proposal (see p. 142 of the present volume).
134 The reference is to the National League for the Independence of Poland (see Note 31).
135 The reference is to an anonymous article that appeared in Le Courrier International, October 12, 1865, under the title “The International Working Men’s Association.” In this article its author criticised the London Conference resolution on the Polish question from Proudhonist positions and argued that the International Association should concern itself with questions of industrial associations and workers’ credit and not with political issues.
136 Notices of General Council meetings were published in The Workman’s Advocate only beginning with January 6, 1866. The form was standard: “THE MEMBERS of the CENTRAL COUNCIL of the INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN’s ASSOCIATION are requested to attend a Meeting on Tuesday evening next, at Eight o'clock, at 18, Bouverie-street, Fleet-street, where the future meetings of the Council will take place.”
137 The French delegates’ report on the London Conference of 1865 appeared in Opinion nationale, October 8, Avenir national, October 12, and in other French papers.
138 On November 25, 1865, a notice, signed by P. Fox, appeared in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 142, to the effect that although the anniversary of the Polish Insurrection of 1830 would not be observed anywhere officially, the Polish emigres in London would meet in private on November 29, to keep alive the glorious memories of the heroic struggle.
139 In accordance with a decision of the London Conference, the International Working Men’s Association would hold its congress in May 1866 in Geneva (see pp. 242-43 of the present volume).
140 The activities of the International Working Men’s Association met with bitter opposition in Germany on the part of the Lassallean leaders to whom the ideas of proletarian internationalism were quite alien. Matters were further complicated by the Prussian law of 1850 on associations, and similar laws in other of the German states, which prohibited workers’ organisations joining societies in other countries. Marx therefore proposed, early in 1865, individual membership which made it possible to circumvent the law of 1850. The International Association’s members in Germany contacted the General Council directly or through the German section in Geneva. This is how contact was established with the workers in Mainz and Berlin. At the London Conference of 1865 J. Ph. Becker officially represented the International’s section in Solingen. Marx’s communication to the General Council meeting about the headway being made by the Association in Germany was based on Liebknecht’s letter to him, dated November 16, and on the letter from Metzner, S. Meyer and A. Vogt of November 13,1865.
141 The proclamation to the workers of Switzerland to join the International was issued by the German section in Geneva in November 1865. Excerpts from the proclamation were published in English in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 145, December 16, 1865.
142 The reference is to the following two journals: Journal de l'Association des Travailleurs — the monthly organ of the International’s sections in Romance Switzerland, published in French in Geneva from December 1865 to September 1866, and Der Vorbote — the monthly organ of the German sections, published in Geneva from January 1866 to December 1871 and edited by J. Ph. Becker. Der Vorbote generally propagated the platform of Marx and the General Council, published the documents of the International and information about the activities of the International’s sections in various countries.
143 The reference is to the benefit and co-operative society founded in Geneva on November 7, 1865. It came directly under the Central Committee of the German sections in Switzerland. The rules of this society in Becker’s handwriting and signed by him are extant.
144 The final text of the appeal of the British members of the General Council to the working men of the United Kingdom in connection with the Geneva Congress was written by Cremer and approved by the General Council on January 16, 1866. The appeal was published in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 152, February 3, 1866; it was also put out as a leaflet between March 27 and April 3, 1866 (see pp. 313-16 of the present volume).
145 The reference is to the French branch in London, formed in the autumn of 1865. Besides representatives of the proletarian element (Dupont, Jung and Lafargue), it included petty-bourgeois emigres (Le Lubez and, later, Pyat). After the General Council adopted, on July 7, 1868, a resolution proposed by Marx, condemning the provocative actions of Pyat, the branch split, the representatives of the proletarian element withdrawing from it.
146 On December 16 and 18, 1865, an anonymous article appeared in the Belgian bourgeois-democratic newspaper L'Echo de Verviers, Nos. 293 and 294, which gave a distorted picture of the General Council’s activities and of the London Conference of 1865. Its author was Pierre Vésinier, French publicist and republican and mouthpiece of the petty-bourgeois element in the French branch in London, who were in opposition to Marx and the General Council. In the fight against Vésinier and Le Lubez, Dupont, Corresponding Secretary for France, had the support of the representatives of the proletarian element in the branch (Longuet and Crespelle). Jung, on behalf of the General Council, wrote a letter to the editor of L'Echo de Verviers, in reply to Vésinier’s slanderous attacks. The letter was edited by Marx (see pp. 317-26 of the present volume).
147 In the late fifties of the nineteenth century a secret Fenian organisation, known as the Irish Revolutionary (or Republican) Brother-hood, was founded among the Irish immigrants in America and later extended to Ireland, to fight for the independence of Ireland. The Fenians who objectively voiced the interests of the Irish peasantry came mainly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Because of their conspiracy tactics and their sectarian and bourgeois-nationalistic outlook the Fenians were out of touch with the mass of the Irish people and did not link up their movement with the general democratic movement that was developing in England. Marx and Engels more than once pointed to the weaknesses of the Fenian movement; still they highly appreciated its revolutionary character and sought to guide it along the path of mass struggle and joint action with the English working class. In 1865 the Fenians made plans for an armed uprising but in September of the same year the British Government succeeded in arresting the leaders of the movement (Luby, Murphy and O'Donovan Rossa); the Fenian newspapers were suppressed and the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended. The General Council supported the campaign started in England in defence of the convicted Fenians (see pp. 327-34 of the present volume).
148 The Irishman — a bourgeois-nationalistic weekly, published from 1858 to 1885, at first in Belfast and then in Dublin. The paper supported the Fenians.
149 The appeal was published in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 148, January 6, 1866.
150 The reference is to the first issue of the Journal de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs (see Note 142).
151 On December 27, 1865, L'Echo de Verviers published the draft of new rules which their authors proposed to submit to the Geneva Congress in 1866 and eventually get the International to accept. This draft, which reflected the federalist views of some of the petty-bourgeois democrats in the French branch in London, turned the General Council from a leading body into merely an auxiliary body of statistical inquiry and information.
152 The Inaugural Address and Rules of the International Working Men’s Association were not reprinted in The Workman’s Advocate.
153 See Note 144.
154 The appeal recast by Fox as an editorial was published in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 152, February 3, 1866.
155 The reference is to the Belgian democratic paper La Tribune du Peuple which appeared in Brussels from May 1861 to April 1869. The paper was founded by a group of workers and representatives of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, adherents of utopian socialism and members of the atheist society The People. It, in effect, became the International’s organ in Belgium in August 1865, but officially so in January 1866, as the editorial in La Tribune du Peuple, No. 1, January 7, 1866, informed its readers. De Paepe, Lafargue and other Association members collaborated with the paper.
156 See Note 146.
157 The General Council’s official decision to celebrate the anniversary of the Polish Insurrection of 1863 was published in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 149, January 13, 1866.
158 Fox wrote three articles on the Irish question which were published in the October 1865 issues of The Workman’s Advocate: “The British Coup d'Etat in Ireland” (No. 136), “The Influence of Irish National Feeling Upon the Relations Between Great Britain and the United States” (No. 137), “The Irish Difficulty, Continued” (No. 138). The paper also regularly carried information about the Fenian movement. On January 6, 1866, in pursuance of a General Council decision, The Workman’s Advocate reprinted the appeal to the women of Ireland to collect funds for the imprisoned Fenians (see p. 151 of the present volume).
159 The meeting to celebrate the third anniversary of the Polish Insurrection of 1863 was held on January 22, 1866 in St. Martin’s Hall, London, under the chairmanship of the noted Polish democrat Oborski, an emigre in London. Glos Wolny, organ of the democratic wing of the Polish emigration, wrote in this connection that the meeting had been held on the initiative of the International Working Men’s Association and the Polish emigres in London. The meeting unanimously adopted a resolution, proposed by Fox and seconded by Marx, expressing sympathy with Poland’s liberation struggle.
A report of the meeting was published in Glos Wolny, No. 93, January 31, The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 225, February 3, and in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 151, January 27, 1866.
160 In this letter, dated January 18, 1866, Liebknecht wrote Marx that the Leipzig Workers’ Educational Society was going to form a branch of the International. He also wrote that Hofstetten, editor of Der Social-Demokrat, had again tried to get Marx, Engels and Liebknecht to collaborate with the paper. From Marx’s letter to Engels, dated February 10, 1866, it is evident that Marx strongly objected to the attempts of the Lassalleans to use his and Engels’s name, and sharply criticised Liebknecht for his conciliatory attitude.
161 The reference is to De Paepe’s letter to Marx, dated January 14, 1866. Regarding La Tribune du Peuple and the society The People see Note 155.
162 The reference is to La Voix de l'Avenir, a Swiss weekly published in La Chaux-de-Fonds from 1865 to 1868; in 1867 the paper became the official organ of the Association’s Romance sections in Switzerland; it published the documents of the General Council and of the local sections; was under the influence of the Proudhonists.
163 The data cited by Jung were published in La Voix de l'Avenir, No. 1, December 31, 1865 and in Vorbote, No. 1, January 1866.
164 The reference is to the reply drawn up by Jung, on behalf of the General Council, to Vésinier’s slanderous article in L'Echo de Verviers (see pp. 317-26 of the present volume).
165 The bill introduced in Parliament by Lord St. Leonards provided for the establishment of standing arbitration-boards, in place of the sporadic arbitration-courts, for the settlement of insurance and wages disputes between employers and employees. On February 5, 1866, Jung wrote to Marx: “On Tuesday a deputation was appointed, composed of Dupont and myself, to attend the Trades Council next Wednesday in order to supply them with every information in our power, concerning arbitration-courts, conseil de Prud'hommes. Dupont wrote to Paris and received the conseil de Prud'hommes statutes and the relevant laws; I am now making a study of them so as not to be taken in. Dupont is thoroughly conversant with this question and I think we'll make out pretty well.” Jung asked Marx to send him all the available information on the subject.
166 The Provisional Rules of the International were published in the Journal de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, No. 1, December 17, 1865, the Inaugural Address — in No. 2, January 28, 1866, which issue also carried a report about the headway being made by the Association’s section in Lausanne. In the General Council minutes this information is erroneously ascribed to the Geneva section.
167 The report of the congress of Spanish co-operative societies, held in Barcelona in December 1865, was published in l'Association, No. 19, February 4, 1866.
168 El Obrero, a Spanish labour weekly, appeared in Barcelona from 1864 to 1869 when its publication was transferred to Palma (Majorca). In 1870 the paper became the official organ of the International Association in Spain. El Obrero was suppressed by the government in January 1871.
169 The reference is to the Reform League conference arranged for February 28-March 1, 1866, in St. Martin’s Hall, London (see Note 182). During the preparations for the conference some British trade-union leaders showed a tendency to go back on the initial demand for manhood suffrage. Cremer, for instance, at a meeting of the Reform League on February 13, said that he considered working men would be quite satisfied with extension of household suffrage.
170 On February 7, 1866, the London Trades Council called a trade-union delegates’ meeting in the Bell Inn, Old Bailey, to discuss the arbitration-board Bill (see Note 165). Dupont and Jung reported, on behalf of the General Council, on the conseil de Prud'hommes in France. The meeting, which was adjourned till February 21, 1866, was attended besides Dupont and Jung by two other General Council members — Coulson and Howell.
171 The reference is to the open letter written by John Hennessy, Irish political figure, on February 2, 1866 and published in the London Pall Mall Gazette, February 3; the letter was also reprinted in full by the General Council in The Commonwealth, No. 157, March 10, 1866 (see pp. 327-32 of the present volume).
172 The reference is to an article on the solitary confinement of the Fenians printed in the medical journal Lancet, February 10, 1866.
173 The reference is to Fox’s article “The Irish Question” published in The Commonwealth, Nos. 153 and 154, of February 10 and 17, 1866, respectively.
174 The reference is to a letter written by Limousin, Tolain, Varlin and Fribourg on February 10, 1866, to the editor of L'Espiègle in reply to Vésinier’s slanderous article which the paper had published on October 29, 1865. In this article Vésinier had again accused the members of the Paris Administration of Bonapartism. As is evident from Vésinier’s letter of March 15, 1866, the editor of L'Espiègle refused to publish the letter of Limousin, Tolain, Varlin and Fribourg alleging that it was rude in tone.
175 In 1861 joint intervention by Anglo-Franco-Spanish troops began in Mexico, directed against the country’s progressive republican government. In 1863 the French interventionists, who sought to establish a colonial regime in Mexico, seized its biggest towns and set up a puppet Mexican empire at the head of which Napoleon III placed his tool, Maximilian, the Archduke of Austria.
On February 10, 1866, Marshall Forey delivered a speech in the French Senate in which he alleged that the men and officers of the Mexican republican army under the command of Mexico’s President Juáres had committed excesses. In reply to this General Paz of the Mexican republican army sent a letter to Forey on February 20, calling him to account for his libellous statement. He also sent an open letter to the press on February 26 refuting Forey’s insinuations and explaining the objects and tasks of the liberation struggle of the Mexican people. Paz’s letter was published in La Rive Gauche, No. 9, March 4, and in La Tribune du Peuple, No. 11, March 18, 1866.
176 Beginning with February 10, 1866, The Workman’s Advocate (see Note 124) appeared under the name The Commonwealth. This change of name, which followed a reorganisation of the editorial staff, reflected a certain strengthening of the position of the bourgeois-radical element on the Board of the Industrial Newspaper Company. Marx was able nevertheless to get Eccarius appointed editor, and the paper, as the official organ of the International Association, continued to publish the reports of the General Council meetings and other documents of the International. The opportunist trade-union leaders, however, contrived to paralyse the influence of Marx’s supporters, and in April 1866 appointed Odger editor-in-chief. Marx resigned from the Board of Directors on June 9, 1866. On September 8, 1866 (No. 183), The Commonwealth became the organ of the reform movement and as such was virtually under the influence of the radical bourgeoisie. The paper discontinued publication on July 20, 1867. Paz’s letter was not published in The Commonwealth.
177 The statement, drawn up by Fox and signed by Odger, was published in The Commonwealth, No. 157, March 10, 1866 (see pp. 327-34 of the present volume).
178 Paul Lafargue when still a medical student in Paris was expelled from the University at the end of 1865 along with a group of other students for political actions against the Second Empire (collaboration with La Rive Gauche, participation in the students’ congress at Liège, etc.).
179 See Note 146.
180 Le Lubez and Wolff, taking advantage of Marx’s absence at this General Council meeting, hastened to get the resolution passed.
By upholding Mazzini they tried to discredit the proletarian policy pursued by Marx in the General Council; Wolff was supported by Odger, Howell, Cremer and several other British members of the Council. Only a few corresponding secretaries for the European countries had been present at the said meeting and, as Marx wrote to Engels on March 24, 1866, not a single one of them had voted for the resolution. On March 10 the corresponding secretaries Dupont, Jung, Longuet, Bobczynski and also Lafargue met in conference with Marx. It was decided that at the next General Council meeting, on March 13, Marx would, in their name, protest the resolution and rebuff the attempts of Mazzini ,and his followers to distort the proletarian character of the International and to bring it under bourgeois influence. As a result of the stand taken by Marx and his supporters in the General Council the Le Lubez-Wolff resolution was withdrawn at the meeting of March 13 (see pp. 170-72 and 174 of the present volume.
181 The reference is to the appeal of the British members of the General Council in connection with the Geneva Congress (see pp. 313-16 of the present volume).
182 The Reform Conference, sponsored by the Reform League, was held on February 28-March 1, 1866, in St. Martin’s Hall, London, under the chairmanship of Beales. The General Council had sent a delegation composed of Fox, Carter, Jung, Williams, Shaw and Lessner. Other Council members (Cremer, Eccarius, Odger, Dell, Leno, Longmaid and Hartwell) had attended as the representatives of various organisations. The conference had declared for manhood suffrage. A report of the conference proceedings was published in The Commonwealth, Nos. 156 and 157, March 3 and 10, respectively, and in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 229, March 3, 1866.
183 Jung made his report on the basis of Dupleix’s letter of March 7, 1866, in which he informed Jung of the appointment of the Geneva section’s new secretary, Rochat, and the increase in the Lausanne section’s membership up to 250.
184. This information was published in Der Vorbote, No. 3, March 1866.
185 In March 1866 the London tailors put forward a demand for a wage increase. Most of the employers had been prepared to come to terms, except for a Mr. Poole of Saville Row. A meeting in support of the tailors was thereupon held on March 26, in Cambridge Hall, attended by 1,200 people. Poole retaliated by declaring a lock-out; Morgan, Stultz and several other employers followed suit; 15,000 tailors were under the threat of a lock-out. On March 27 the London tailors went on strike. The Executive Committee of the Journeymen Tailors’ Protective Association, formed at the national conference of British tailors held in Manchester on March 12-17, 1866, appealed to the tailors of Britain to support the strike.
The General Council’s warning to the journeymen tailors was printed in the Journal de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, No. 5, April 8, in La Rive Gauche, No. 15, April 15, and in several other papers. The General Council’s support of the strike played a decisive role in the victory won by the London tailors in April 1866, and added to the popularity and prestige of the International Working Men’s Association in the British working class. On April 17 the Tailors’ Protective Association joined the International (see p. 179 of the present volume).
186 The plan which the Lausanne section of the International submitted to the General Council for raising money to build co-operative houses in Lausanne was published in La Voix de l'Avenir, No. 13, April 1, and reprinted in the Journal de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, No. 5, April 8, 1866. The plan was not discussed at the Geneva Congress.
187 The reference is to the preparations for the Geneva Congress of the International Working Men’s Association in Switzerland; the communication was published in the Journal de I'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, No. 5, April 8, 1866.
188 Shaw had acted as the Council’s General Secretary, pro tem., from March 20 to April 24, 1966.
189 On April 23. 1866, the London wire-workers went on strike, demanding a 10 per cent wage increase. The same day the strike committee sent out letters to the wire-workers of England, Scotland and Ireland urging them to refuse to be recruited for work in London during the strike. With the help of the General Council similar letters were sent to France and Germany.
190 The eleventh congress of the Italian working men’s associations, held in Naples on October 25-27, 1864, had instructed the associations’ Central Council to ensure the organisation’s representation at the international working men’s congress. It was in pursuance of this decision that the Central Council sent Gaspare Stampa, one of its members, to the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866. The congress of Italian working men’s associations, mentioned by Dupleix and Becker in their letter of April 21, 1866, did not take place as planned in the summer of 1866.
191 The Address and Rules were reprinted in London in August 1866 under the heading: “Address and Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s Association” Printed by the Westminster Printing Company, 56 and 132, Drury Lane.
192 On April 29, 1866 La Tribune du Peuple, No. 17, carried the following appeal: “The London wire-workers have gone on strike. We would remind you of what we said at the time about the tailors’ strike, viz., that the Continental workers should not agree to go to work in London because when their English fellow-workers returned to their former jobs the Continental workers would find themselves on the street and without any means.
“The tailors’ strike ended to the supreme satisfaction of the tailors and to the great dissatisfaction of the employers, and it ended that way precisely because the International Working Men’s Association had printed a warning in many papers (and incident ally in Le Siècle as well) which prevented the employers from hiring foreign workers as they had planned to. Many English papers commented, some with pleasure, others with chagrin, on the splendid results achieved thanks to the initiative of the International Working Men’s Association.” A similar appeal was printed in the Journal de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, No. 6, May 13, 1866.
193 The reference is to the pamphlet Congrès Ouvrier, which the International’s Paris section put out early in 1866. It contained the French translation of the Provisional Rules (see Note 36), the appeal of the Paris section to the members of the International Association, issued in the summer of 1865 (see Note 112), the French delegation’s report of the London Conference of 1865, the programme of the Geneva Congress of 1866, endorsed by the London Conference, and other material.
194 As Jung’s letter of May 2, 1866 to Becker indicates, Marx too seconded the proposal to postpone the congress to September 3 considering that this delay would allow for making better arrangements for the congress.
195 On March 26, 1866, 1,000 tailors went on strike in Edinburgh. The employers tried to replace them with tailors from Germany, 57 of whom were brought over in April. With a view to preventing the further import of foreign workers and to supporting the strikers, the German tailors living in London formed a committee of which Lessner was appointed president and Haufe secretary. On May 4, 1866 this committee issued the following appeal to the German tailors:
“Fellow-Workers! The employers have succeeded in bringing in tailors from Germany to Edinburgh, to supplant those who are demanding higher wages and a shorter working day. Upon setting foot on English soil these men signed a contract to work for a specified period of time; violation of this contract holds the threat of imprisonment. In order to show our comrades at home why the employers in Britain want to use German workers, and in order to make impossible this modern trafficking in human beings, a committee has been formed which has as its object to frustrate the plans of the employers. The committee needs support if it is to be a success. We therefore call on all our compatriots to give us their every support. It is in our own interests as working men resolutely to check-mate the employers’ plans and to prove to our British comrades that we travel to other countries not for the purpose of obligingly helping to lower wages. As soon as means permit we will call a joint public meeting to discuss the measures necessary for achieving our object. The committee meets every Tuesday at 8 o'clock in the evening at the Crown Public House, Hedden Court, Regent Street, to receive voluntary contributions. On behalf of the Committee: F. Lessner — President, A. Haufe — Secretary. London, May 4, 1866.”
196 On May 3, 1866, Marx received the requested material from the German Tailors’ Committee in London and on May 4 wrote, on behalf of the General Council, the item “A Warning” which he mailed to Liebknecht the same day. The item was published in several German papers, among them the Oberrheinischer Courier, Mitteldeutsche Volkszeitung and the Deutsches Wochenblatt (see pp. 335-36 of the present volume).
197 Canessa was one of the leaders of the Federation of Working Men’s Co-operative Associations of Genoa and the editor (1865-66) of Il Giornale delle Associazioni Operaie Italiane, organ of the Italian working men’s associations, which began publication in Genoa in January 1864. He got in touch with the General Council through J. Ph. Becker. On April 29, 1866 he wrote to Jung that he was prepared to form a section of the International in Genoa. The General Council intended to avail itself of the journal to publish the Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules in Italian. On May 26, 1866, Canessa however informed the Council that he was joining Garibaldi in his Venice expedition and that therefore he would not be corresponding with the Council for a while.
198 This information was published in Der Vorbote, No. 4, April 1866.
199 Gaspare Stampa’s letter was published in Der Vorbote, No. 4, April 1866. In the paper the letter was dated March 30, 1866.
200 The reference is to the eleventh congress of the Italian workingmen’s associations held in Naples in October 1864.
201 Fox has in mind Engels’s third article, “The Doctrine of Nationalities in Relation to Poland,” in his series of articles “What Have the Working Class to Do with Poland?,” which were published in The Commonwealth, Nos. 159, 160 and 165, of March 24, 31 and May 5, 1866, respectively. Engels wrote these articles in January-April 1866, on Marx’s request, in connection with the dispute that arose in the General Council following the London Conference’s (1865) decision to include the question of Poland’s independence in the agenda of the forthcoming Geneva Congress. To substantiate the International’s policy on the national question it was necessary, on the one hand, to show the fallacy of the Proudhonists’ nihilist views on the national question and, on the other, to expose the reactionary essence of the so-called “principle of nationalities” demagogically expounded by Bonapartist circles.
202 The reference is to “A Warning” (“Warnung”) written by Marx (see pp. 335-36 of the present volume).
203 Der Vorbote, No. 5, May 1866.
204 Reports about the strike of the Geneva bootmakers were published in La Voix de l'Avenir, No. 21, May 27, and in the Journal de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, No. 7, June 10, 1866.
205 The Commonwealth report of this General Council meeting (No. 168, May 26, 1866) gives Dell’s communication in greater detail:
“The Financial Secretary of the International Working Men’s Association hereby acknowledges the receipt of the following sums, contributed to defray the expenses of the forthcoming Congress of Working Men at Geneva:
— £ s. d.
“Eight Dewsbury Shoemakers, per William Tinkler — 0 7 0
“Operative Bricklayers’ Society (Wolverhampton Lodge), per F. W. Jones — 0 4 9
“Men’s Section of Amalgamated Cordwainers, Birmingham, per Thomas Hallam — 0 5 0
“West End Ladies’ Shoemakers’ Society, per Mr. Wallace — 1 0 0
“Tunbridge — Wells Section of the Amalgamated Cordwainers, per Peter Knight — 0 8 0
“Cheltenham Section of Amalgamated Cordwainers, per John Saunders — 0 2 6.”
206 Weekly reports of the General Council’s meetings began to be published in The Commonwealth from April 17, 1866 onwards.
207 Haufe and Hansen had been sent to Edinburgh by the General Council. In a letter, dated May 10, 1866, Marx wrote Engels as follows about the results of the steps taken by the Council in connection with the Edinburgh tailors’ strike: “In view of the importation of German and Danish tailors to Edinburgh we, firstly, sent a German and a Dane (both of them are tailors) to Edinburgh; they have already upset the harmony between the importers and imported; secondly, I published, on behalf of the International Association, ‘A Warning’ to the German tailors in Germany. This whole affair has greatly benefited us in London.”
208 The reference is to the American Ironmoulders’ International Journal, organ of the iron and steel workers, published in Philadelphia.
209 La Gironde — French republican paper, published in Bordeaux in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century.
210 Le Courrier Français — newspaper of the Left republicans; published in Paris from 1861 to 1868, at first as a weekly and from June 1867 onwards as a daily. Vermorel, a Proudhonist, was editor from 1866 on. On May 20 of the same year Le Courrier Français became the International’s organ in France. As such it published the documents of the General Council and of the local sections and Dupont’s reports from England. It also published Marx’s preface to the first German edition of his Capital, Vol. I, translated by Paul and Laura Lafargue. In its issue of May 20, No. 15, it carried the appeal of the Paris students to the students of Germany and Italy in connection with the threat of war between Prussia and Austria.
211 A translation of the Inaugural Address and an article by Lafargue, “A Summary of the Development of the International Working Men’s Association,” were sent to La Rive Gauche which it published on June 17, 1866, No. 24.
212 The reference is to Il Giornale delle Associazioni Operaie Italiane, organ of the working men’s associations of Italy (see Note 197).
213 The appeal to the students of Germany and Italy (see Note 210) strongly reflected Proudhonist ideas. In his letter to Engels of June 7, 1866, Marx wrote: “The Proudhonist clique among the students in Paris (Courrier Français) preaches peace, declares war to be obsolete and nationalities to be an absurdity, attacks Bismarck and Garibaldi, etc. As polemics against chauvinism their doings are useful and explicable. But as believers in Proudhon (Lafargue and Longuet, two very good friends of mine here, also belong to them), who think all Europe must and will sit quietly on their hindquarters until the gentlemen in France abolish ‘poverty and ignorance’, under the latter of which they themselves labour in direct proportion to their vociferations about ‘social science’, they are grotesque. ...”
214 The appeal of the working men of all countries to the students of Paris and the students and young people of all countries (see pp. 337-39 of the present volume), was published in La Rive Gauche, No. 23, June 10, and in Le Courrier Français, June 10 and 17, 1866. Marx was not present at this General Council meeting, and, as is evident from his letter to Engels of June 20, 1866, he was dissatisfied with the appeal.
215 The reference is to the Conference of Trades’ Delegates of the United Kingdom held in Sheffield on July 17-21, 1866 (see Note 245).
216 The reference is to Lafargue’s article “A Summary of the Development of the International Working Men’s Association,” which he had written specially for La Rive Gauche.
217 The letter was from Liebknecht, under date of May 25, 1866. Liebknecht asked for membership cards and wrote that “the leaders of the working men’s associations here have expressed a desire to become members.”
218 The nature of Marx’s speech at this meeting and of the discussion on the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 may be gathered from his letter to Engels of June 20, 1866. In it Marx wrote: “Yesterday there was a discussion in the International Council on the present war. The question had been announced beforehand and our room was very crowded. The Italian gentry too had sent delegates. The discussion wound up, as was to be foreseen, with the ‘question of nationality’ in general and the attitude we take towards it. This subject was adjourned till next Tuesday.
“The French, who were numerously represented, gave vent to their cordial dislike of the Italians.
“Moreover, the representatives of ‘Young France’ (non-workers) came out with the announcement that all nationalities and even nations were ‘antiquated prejudices’. Proudhonised Stirnerism. Everything is to be dissolved into small ‘groups’ or ‘communes’, which in turn are to form an ‘association’, but no state. And this ‘individualisation’ of humanity and the corresponding ‘mutualism’ are to go on while history comes to a stop in all other countries and the whole world waits until the French are ripe for a social revolution. Then they will demonstrate the experiment to us, and the rest of the world, overwhelmed by the force of their example, will follow suit. Exactly what Fourier expected of his model phalanstery. Anyhow, whoever encumbers the ‘social’ question with the ‘superstitions’ of the old world is a ‘reactionary’.
“The English laughed very much when I began my speech by saying that our friend Lafargue and others, who had done away with nationalities, had spoken ‘French’ to us, i.e., a language which nine-tenths of the audience did not understand. I also suggested that by the negation of nationalities he appeared, quite unconsciously, to understand their absorption by the model French nation.
“As for the rest the situation is difficult now, because on the one hand silly English Italianism and on the other the erroneous French polemics against it must be equally combated. In particular every demonstration that would involve our Association in a one-sided course must be prevented.”
219 The English translation of the appeal “To the Working Men of All Countries! — The Youth of France,” issued in reply to the appeal of the working men of all countries to the students of Paris and the students and youth of all countries (see pp. 337-39 of the present volume), was printed in The Commonwealth, No. 172, June 23, 1866.
220 The letter was published in The Commonwealth, No. 172. June 23, and in La Rive Gauche, No. 26, July 1. 1866.
221 Le Courrier Français of June 10 and 17, 1866 was seized for publishing the appeal of the working men of all countries to the students of Paris and the appeal, written in reply, of the youth of France to the working men of all countries.
222 The reference is to Lafargue’s article “A Victory of the Plebeians” published in La Rive Gauche, No. 22, June 3, 1866. The article was devoted to the victory of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners over the employers. The article began as follows: “At a time when the bourgeois press is filling its columns with diplomatic notes and stories about the exploits of Bismarck, Mazzini, Garibaldi and other heroes, about great men, some better others worse, we socialists and revolutionaries should be writing about the slow but powerful movement that is taking place under this bright and sparkling, but empty shell.”
223 In his letter to J. Ph. Becker, dated July 4, 1866, Jung gives a more detailed account of his speech. He believed that the General Council should, considering the international situation at the time, intensify its activities, especially in London, to enlist the support of various workers’ societies. This would enable it in the event of a revolution in Germany, or in any other country, to bring pressure to bear upon the British Government through mass meetings, and prevent it from siding with the counter-revolutionary governments, thereby helping the revolution on the Continent. Jung’s speech met with objections on the part of the British members of the Council who held that the question of revolution had no relation to the questions under discussion. In his letter to Becker, Jung wrote that Marx had supported his viewpoint but wrote nothing further about Marx’s speech.
224 The resolutions on the Austro-Prussian War, submitted to the said meeting, were voted on by the General Council at its meeting of July 17, 1866, at which Marx spoke. Following Marx’s speech, the resolution submitted by Cremer and Dutton, which, although correct in its condemnation of wars of conquest, made no mention of the proletariat’s paramount task — to organise the fight for their political and social emancipation — and Fox’s resolution which suffered from the same shortcoming and, moreover, did not reflect the proletariat’s attitude towards war, were withdrawn. The General Council unanimously adopted the Bobczynski-Carter resolution, after certain amendments had been introduced (see pp. 212-13 of the present volume).
225 At the General Council meeting of June 5, 1866 — It was reported that the Alliance Cabinet-Makers’ Association had affiliated to the International and that the Council’s deputation had been well received by the Operative Bricklayers in Commercial Road. The proposal to nominate their representatives, Yarrow and Ayers, to the Council was not recorded in the minutes of June 5 (see pp. 197-99 of the present volume).
226 The reference is to Lafargue’s article “The War Has Saved the Empire” that appeared in La Rive Gauche, No. 26, July 1, 1866. In this article Lafargue wrote that the wave of chauvinism that swept over France during the war of 1866 had saved the government from imminent revolution.
227 The branch of the International at Fleurieux (near Neuville-sur-Saône) was organised by Louis Baudrand. He was appointed the Association’s correspondent at this Council meeting (see Note 234).
228 Emile Aubry organised the International’s section at Rouen.
229 Carter, Odger, Eccarius and Jung represented the General Council at the Geneva Congress in 1866. Three other Council members, Dupont, Lawrence and Cremer, attended the Congress as delegates from the French branch in London, the London Tailors’ Society and the London Society of Carpenters, respectively.
230 In the spring of 1866 the bourgeois-radical element on The Commonwealth strengthened their influence on the Editorial Board by utilising the paper’s financial difficulties. In view of this Marx withdrew from the Board of Directors of the Industrial Newspaper Company on June 9 (see Notes 124 and 176). Fox left the Editorial Board the following month. From July 1866 onwards The Commonwealth ceased, in effect, to be the organ of the International Association.
231 Lawrence represented the London tailors at the British trades union conference held in Sheffield (see Note 245).
232 Charles Longuet was arrested in Bagneres-de-Bigorre on July 18, 1866.
233 Vésinier was arrested by the Belgian police on July 7, 1866, as the author of several pamphlets against Napoleon III and prosecuted for lese majesté with reference to the monarch of a foreign country.
234 The communication about the founding of a section of the International in Neuville-sur-Saône had been read by Jung at the General Council meeting of July 10, 1866 (see p. 208 of the present volume). Due to an oversight, the communication appeared, in greater detail, in the report of the General Council meeting of July 17, published in The Commonwealth, No. 176, July 21, 1866. A clipping from this issue is pasted into the Minute Book on the page carrying the minutes of July 17.
235 Fribourg’s letter was published in Le Courrier Français, No. 28, July 15, 1866, under the heading: “The International Working Men’s Association.” Fribourg wrote that the working people who were opposed to the war of 1866 realised that their prime concern was to solve the social problem, and that they were devoting all their attention and efforts to preparing for the Geneva Congress.
236 The resolution was published in La Rive Gauche, No. 29, July 22, 1866.
237 On July 16, 1866 the Committee of the Romance section in Geneva met to discuss questions on the organisation of the Congress. Dupleix and Rochat, the secretary of the section, informed Jung of the Committee’s decisions on July 18, 1866.
238 In a letter to Dupleix, dated August 14, 1866, Jung asked him to urge the Italian societies to send their delegates to the Geneva Congress.
239 On September 8, 1866, the Geneva Congress resolved that London should remain the seat of the General Council in 1866-67.
240 The report of the General Council meeting, published in The Commonwealth, No. 180, August 18, 1866, gives the following sums contributed to defray the expenses of the Geneva Congress:
“Cordwainers’ Amalgamated Council — £5 0 0
“Carpenters and Joiners, Silver Cup — 1 0 0
“Deputation attending ditto — 0 4 0
“Coopers Hand-in-Hand, per Messrs. Reynolds and Long — 6 0 0
“Bricklayers, per Mr. Ayers — 0 8 1”
241 The Transatlantic telegraph cable laid between Newfoundland and Ireland in 1866, was put into operation in June 1866.
242 The reference is to the Congress programme, published in Le Courrier Français, June 24, and in La Rive Gauche, No. 27, July 8, 1866. Point 12 of the programme read: “Formation of mutual aid societies, material and moral support for the orphans of Association members.” The Swiss sections were instructed to elaborate the question. Marx, when drawing up “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council” to the Geneva Congress, included this point, in pursuance of the said General Council decision, in Point 1 of the “Instructions” — “Organisation of the International Association” (see pp. 340-41 of the present volume). At its evening sitting of September 8, 1866, the Geneva Congress adopted a resolution on the question which recognised the desirability of establishing insurance and mutual aid societies but considered it still too early to pass any general resolutions on the matter.
243 The scheme of inquiry was drawn up by Marx and included by him in Point 2 of the “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council” (see p. 342 of the present volume). At the Geneva Congress Dupont reported on the scheme of inquiry.
244 Sely did not attend the Geneva Congress.
245 The reference is to the British trades union conference held in Sheffield from July 17 to 21, 1866. The conference was attended by 138 delegates representing 200,000 organised workers. Odger and Lawrence represented the International Association. The chief question discussed at several sittings was how to fight the lockouts. The conference called on the trade unions to join the International, and adopted the following resolution on this question:
“That this conference, fully appreciating the efforts made by the International Association to unite in one common bond of brotherhood the working men of all countries, most earnestly recommend to various societies here represented, the advisability of becoming affiliated to that body, believing that it is essential to the progress and prosperity of the entire working community.” (See “Report of the Conference of Trades’ Delegates of the United Kingdom held in ... Sheffield, on July 17th, 1866, and Four Following Days,” ... Sheffield, 1866, p. 72.)
246 The reference is to the “Memorandum of the Geneva German Branch of the International Working Men’s Association,” which was discussed in September 1865 at meetings of the Committee and at a general meeting of the branch, and submitted to the London Conference. The “Memorandum” was printed in Vorbote, Nos. 2-8, February-August 1866.
247 Coulson, Secretary of the London branch of the Operative Bricklayers’ Society, had been appointed to the General Council’s Auditing Committee on April 17, 1866, together with Fox and Le Lubez (see p. 180 of the present volume).
248 The proposal that the work of the General Secretary should be paid was included by Marx in Point I of the “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The Different Questions” (see p. 340 of the present volume).
249 General Council member, Lawrence (a tailor by trade) represented the Tailors’ Society at the Geneva Congress.
250 The question of the clash between the English and Belgian excavators was discussed at length by the General Council at its meeting of August 28, 1866 (see Note 254).
251 At the beginning of August 1866 the tailors of Manchester put forward the demand to regulate working time and several other economic demands. The employers replied by declaring a lock-out at 40 workshops; 700 tailors were left without work. The Manchester Journeymen Tailors’ Society printed an appeal in The Commonwealth, No. 182, September 1, 1866, addressed to the journeymen tailors of the United Kingdom in which they wrote: “The men of Manchester, to the number of seven hundred, have been thrown out of employment through asking for remuneration for time and trouble in preparing work for machines. They have sought to make machinery, as it should be, a help to both master and men, instead of a means of speedy fortune to one and long and lingering starvation to the others.”
252 The question of international postal rates was again discussed by the General Council in 1867 at its meeting of July 16. A report, drawn up by Fox, was sent to the British Postmaster-General who informed the Council in a letter dated August 24, 1867, that he would look into the matter.
253 The question of curtailment of the working day was discussed at the Geneva Congress of 1866 whose detailed resolution adopted on September 7 included the basic demand for the 8-hour working day.
254 The minutes of the General Council meeting of August 28, 1866 are not recorded in the Minute Book. A report of this meeting was published in The Commonwealth, No. 182, September 1, 1866. The report reads:
“INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN’s ASSOCIATION
“The Central Council met on Tuesday evening at 18, Bouverie Street, when Mr. Lee, the secretary of the Excavators’ Society, attended to report to the Council the cause of the late disturbances between the English and Belgian Excavators. Mr. Lee said an agent of Waring Brothers had succeeded in inducing 430 Belgian workmen to come to England and work for less wages than the English workmen were being paid, and the result had been that several Englishmen had been forced out of employment to make way for the cheaper labour of the Belgians. The 430 were made up of excavators, carpenters, and blacksmiths. The Belgians were receiving from 2s. 4d. to 3s. per day, while the wages of the Englishmen, were from 3s. 9d. to 4s. per day. This lowering of wages by the Belgians had caused the late disturbances, which he and his brother members regretted. They were ready to receive the Belgians into their society. He also wished to ask on what terms the Excavators’ Society which numbered several thousands could join the International Working Men’s Association. After the question had been answered, and the whole matter fully discussed, it was resolved — ‘That in case the Excavators’ Society take steps to form a branch in the district where the disturbance occurred, that the Central Council send a delegate speaking the Belgian language to accompany the excavators’ delegates to induce the Belgians to join the Excavators’ Society, also that the Central Council use its influence to prevent the importation of any more Belgians at such reduced prices.’
“Cit. Jung reported that the Cigar Makers’ Association had agreed to join and had sent Citizens Walker and Church as their special delegates; they had also voted five pounds towards the Geneva Congress.
“Cit. Cremer reported that — the Amalgamated Society of Saddlers and Harness Makers had joined and elected Cit. G. Peate as their delegate to the Central Council, they had also voted four pounds towards the Geneva Congress.
“Resolutions admitting both societies as affiliated societies and their delegates to the Council were carried unanimously.
“THE GENEVA CONGRESS
“The delegates to the above from England, will be Cits. Lawrence, Dupont, Carter, Cremer Jung, and Eccarius.
“Cit. Odger was also appointed if circumstances would permit him to attend.
“The delegates leave London on Saturday morning, arriving in Geneva on Sunday evening, and the Congress will open on Monday morning, at 9 o'clock.
“The following sums of money have been received by the Council during the past week:
“Alliance Cabinet — Makers — £10 0 0
“West End Ditto — £ 5 0 0
“Cigar Makers’ Association — £ 5 0 0
“Amalgamated Saddlers and Harness Makers — £ 4 0 0
“Arbeiter — Bildungs — Verein — £ 2 0 0
“Spoke’s Tin Factory, Tottenham Court Road. — £ 0 11 9.”
255 The London Conference of the International was held from September 25 to 29, 1865. The morning sittings were attended by the Standing Committee members together with the Continental delegates, the evening sittings — by all members of the General Council and the Continental delegates. The Conference proceedings terminated with a soirée, held on September 28, to celebrate the first anniversary of the founding of the International Association (see Note 287), which adopted the address to the people of the United States of America (see pp. 310-12 of the present volume). The Conference minutes, which were recorded by Cremer, Le Lubez and Howell, are extant. A report of the Conference was also published in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 134, September 30, 1865, which gives some facts omitted in the minutes. The supplementary newspaper material is given in the following explanatory notes.
256 The report in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 134, September 30, 1865 states: “The delegates of the several nationalities first met at 3 o'clock, at the Freemason’s Arms, Long Acre, for mutual introduction, and preliminary matters of business and finance.
“The following delegates gave in their credential s: — France, Messieurs Schily, Fribourg, Tolain, Varlin, Limousin and Clarion; Switzerland, Dupleix and Becker; Belgium, César De Paepe; also Dumesnil-Marigny, Dr. Marx, Eccarius, Lessner, Kaub, Schapper, Vésinier, Dupont, Le Lubez, Jung, Major Wolff, Bobczynski, Lochner, Bolleter, &c., from the various French, German, Italian, Swiss, and Polish societies in this country; together with the various English delegates as Cremer, Dell, Odger, Weston, Howell, Shaw, Wheeler, &c., &c, representing their central and affiliating bodies.”
257 Concerning the establishment of the International’s French section in Switzerland see Notes 26 and 76.
258 Concerning the formation of the Belgian section see Notes 78 and 126.
259 In The Workman’s Advocate: “After some business of a preliminary character, the delegates adjourned to 8, Adelphi-terrace, Strand, where the Conference was held.”
260 The reference is to the appeal issued by the committee of the Geneva section on February 5, 1865, in the German and French languages, under the headings: “Aufruf an alle Arbeiter, Arbeitervereine und Arbeiterassociationen in der Schweiz zum Beitritt der Internationalen Arbeiter-Association,” and “A Monsieur le Président et A Messieurs les Membres de la Société.” The appeal in German was printed as a separate leaflet and reprinted in the Hamburg labour paper Nordstern, No. 300, March 11, 1865. The French text was lithographed in leaflet form. The German and French texts are not identical.
261 In The Workman’s Advocate: “.. . [They] had been the means of bringing an employer to justice for a breach of contract, and an infringement of their laws.”
262 In The Workman’s Advocate: “They had already done good service in their country, through the International Association, and would work still harder in the future. They were in favour of Polish nationality as a political question, and of co-operative labour as a social one, capable of great good for working men. They were opposed to private property in land.”
263 In The Workman’s Advocate: “Several foreign delegates spoke in favour of a recognised International organ, to communicate their views to their fellow-workers throughout Europe, and indeed the world.... Several delegates remarked that no weekly paper had a foreign correspondence, whereas their paper would be able to produce the best in the world.”
264 In The Workman’s Advocate: “Dr. Marx and others were elected as conductors of this department.”
265 The law on the expulsion of undesirable foreigners was passed in Belgium in 1835 and renewed every three years. Despite the broad protest movement carried on by the Belgian press and the public this law was renewed, for the tenth time, at the end of June 1865.
266 Concerning the situation in Germany see Liebknecht’s written report to the London Conference, pp. 251-60 of the present volume.
267 The First Congress of the International Working Men’s Association was held in Geneva from September 3 to 8, 1866; the decision to postpone the congress was taken by the General Council on May 1, 1866 (see pp. 183-84 of the present volume).
268 See Note 129.
269 In the report in The Workman’s Advocate: “who shall bring credentials properly authenticated by the citizens deputing them.”
270 The report in The Workman’s Advocate says that Cremer’s resolution was seconded by Eccarius.
271 In The Workman’s Advocate: “[of] not less than thirty workingmen. ...”
272 The report in The Workman’s Advocate gives the speeches of some of the Conference delegates which were not recorded in the minutes by Le Lubez: “Fribourg opposed any society being present, except those belonging to the Association. But would allow all members the privilege of attending and taking part in the deliberations of the Congress.
“Lassassie, was not in favour of open doors; the French people knew little of open discussion or they would not support it. With open doors it would last six months. No, delegates only must speak and vote.
“Mr. Cremer, was in favour of open doors in the same sense as our House of Commons, but none but representatives should take any part in speaking or voting. The plan advocated by the French delegates would destroy its representative character altogether. If it were representative in character, the people of Europe would pause to listen to its deliberations, but if not it would be looked upon with derision and scorn. He could not understand the Parisian delegates objecting to such a system, for upon any other basis the Congress would be a farce.”
273 The Workman’s Advocate reports the further discussion as follows: “Schily would vote in favour of the proposition. Bonapartism, if it sought to influence our deliberations, would sail under our colours.
“Howell urged those present to well consider before they destroyed the representative character of the Congress. Would it be right to allow a man who only paid his shilling, and had no delegated authority, to outvote another man sent by five hundred members? Would they have been satisfied if the Conference had been filled with English delegates, so as to overpower the voice and authority of the Continental representatives? Yet this was the meaning of the proposition. He should vote for the amendment.,
“The question was further discussed by Mr. Weston and others.”
274 In The Workman’s Advocate the report reads: “... Ultimately the following amendment of Mr. Shaw was carried unanimously, ‘That the Congress shall consist of representative men only, who shall bring credentials properly authenticated by the branches of the Association deputing them’.”
275 The minutes of the Standing Committee’s afternoon meeting with the Continental delegates on September 27. 1865 are not extant.
276 The proposal was submitted to the Conference by J. Ph. Becker.
277 The proposal to establish international credit societies was made by Carter and seconded by Le Lubez. In the report in The Workman’s Advocate the proposal is recorded as follows: “That an international credit fund, or banking system, be established, its form and mode of operation to be settled hereafter.”
278 The proposal was made by Bobczynski, seconded by Wheeler. In The Workman’s Advocate: “... and to re-establish that country upon its native democratic basis.”
279 De Paepe had in mind the widespread movement of the Russian peasantry deceived and robbed by the Reform of 1861. The watchword “land and liberty,” which voiced the interests of the peasant masses, had been advanced in the article “What Do the People Need?” written by Ogaryov, a Russian revolutionary democrat, in collaboration with representatives of the revolutionary organisation in Russia and published in Herzen’s Kolokol (The Bell), June 1, 1861. To the question asked in the heading the article gave the answer: “very simply, the people need land and liberty.” The revolutionary organisation. Land and Liberty, active in Russia in the early sixties of the nineteenth century took this watchword for its name. Obviously De Paepe knew of the facts relating to the development of the peasant movement in Russia and to the existence and activities of this organisation from the magazines Kolokol and Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty), and from other sources.
280 In The Workman’s Advocate De Paepe is quoted as follows: “The watchwords of the Russian peasants were ‘Land and Liberty’, and should be the watchwords of the Polish peasant also... the French Government was quite as dangerous to liberty as the Russian. It was their influence which procured the passing of that abominable act against foreigners in Belgium which rendered necessary the removal of the Congress to Geneva. ...”
De Paepe’s proposal that the question should not be discussed was seconded by Bordage.
281 In The Workman’s Advocate Bobczynski’s speech is reported in greater detail: “In France, Hungary, and Italy, her sons fought heroically in the cause of European liberty. Her sons wanted to be free; that was the key to their earnest, but, alas, almost useless, struggles. International sympathy makes no distinction between peoples; but we select Poland because she has striven most in her own cause. She has tried to fulfil the condition of the poet:
A nation to be free,
Herself must strike the blow.
“If she had failed, cowardice was not the cause, for she had struck nobly and well. They must not separate social and political questions, for political reforms must be the precursor of social advancement, they are inevitably bound up together and cannot be separated. Poland is the keynote to European freedom; she is democratic or nothing; she declares for freedom for all.”
282 The reference is to the large meeting held on July 22, 1863, in St. James’s Hall, London, in protest against the suppression of the Polish insurrection. The meeting had been organised by leaders of the British trade unions. Cremer, Odger, Stainsby and other trade-unionists, and a delegation of French workers composed of Tolain, Perrachon, Bibal, Cohadon and Murat had been present. The meeting was one of the precursors of the Inaugural Meeting held in St. Martin’s Hall on September 28, 1864.
The report of the meeting was published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 93, July 25, 1863.
283 The Workman’s Advocate erroneously reports that Marx proposed the religious question for discussion. This subsequently gave Howell cause for alleging in his slanderous article on the history of the International, published in the Nineteenth Century (July 1878), that Marx “sowed the seeds of discord and decay by the introduction of the Religious Idea.” Exposing Howell, Marx wrote (see The Secular Chronicle, August 4, 1878):
“The programme of the General Council contained not one syllable on ‘Religion’, but at the instance of the Paris delegates the forbidden dish got into the bill of fare in store for the prospective Congress, in this dressing: — ‘Religious ideas (not ‘The Religious Idea’, as Howell’s spurious version has it), their influence on the social, political and intellectual movement.’
“The topic of discussion thus introduced by the Paris delegates was left in their keeping; in point of fact, they dropped it at the Geneva Congress of 1866, and no one else picked it up.”
284. The Workman’s Advocate quotes Fribourg as saying: “They were neither materialists nor brutes. The question was an important one, and must be entertained.”
285 The Workman’s Advocate contains the following passage: “De Paepe was in favour of the proposition, but it must not be viewed through a fanatic’s eye belonging to either the Romish or Protestant churches.”
286 The report in The Workman’s Advocate adds: “Tolain thought if it were left out it would be a sign of weakness. It was necessary to retain it to complete our programme. We shall then stand on the broad basis of social, political, and religious progress.”
287 On the following day, September 28, 1865, a soirée was held in St. Martin’s Hall, to celebrate the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association (for the programme of the soirée see pp. 307-09 of the present volume). The Workman’s Advocate, No. 135, October 7, 1865, carried the following report of the soirée:
“The Conference (a full report of which appeared in our last issue) terminated its proceedings by a most successful soirée on Thursday evening, in St. Martin’s Hall.
“The hall was most appropriately decorated with flags of the different nationalities, the place of honour being assigned to the Stars and Stripes of America. The soirée served a threefold purpose — first, to celebrate the anniversary of the Association; secondly, to welcome the Continental delegates; and, thirdly, to adopt an address to the people of America congratulating them on the success of the Federal arms and the extinction of slavery. Over 300 sat down to tea, the social qualities of which seemed equally to be appreciated by the Continental delegates and their English friends.
“Tea being over Citizen Odger (the President) was called to the chair. He explained that the Association originated in a desire ,that was felt by the working classes in this country,. and different parts of Europe, to unite for the purpose of effecting a combination of the peoples, with a view to put an end to the tyranny that prevailed in reference to Poland and other oppressed nations. From its humble origin by a few working men, it had now grown into a great organisation, and included amongst its members French, German, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, and Polish representatives, and had enrolled a large number of members in these countries. The Association had issued an Address, which was extensively circulated, and the principles embodied in it had received the concurrence of a large number of the thinking portion of the industrious classes. One of the prominent objects of the Association was to create such a fraternal feeling amongst the peoples, to get rid of national antipathies, so as to lessen the chances of Governments engaging in wars which only served their nefarious designs and bred discord among nations and peoples whose interests it was to be united. If that union had long since been effected, would the liberties of Poland and Hungary have been trampled out, or would the French Government have interfered in Italy and crushed the Roman Republic, the purest form of government ever established in that country. (Applause.) He concluded by an earnest appeal to the meeting, and to the country through the press, to forward the progress of the Association, whose object was the enfranchisement of all nations, and the elevation of our common humanity. (Cheers.)
“The President then called on Citizen Cremer to propose the adoption of the Address to the People of America, which we are compelled, from the pressure on our space, to postpone the publication of till next week.
After having read the address, which was much applauded, Citizen Cremer said, twelve months ago today, under this very roof, but in a very much smaller hall than the noble one in which we are now assembled, the International Working Men’s Association was ushered into existence, and we were here today to congratulate each other on the glorious results which had been achieved in the short space of twelve months — then we were quite unknown, now we were known all over Europe, and had many friends in America; then we were units now we were thousands; then we had no well-defined public principles, now we have a common platform accepted throughout Europe; then we were isolated from each other, now we are united, and he believed the Association had a bright and happy future. At one soirée which he had attended at that hall, and which purported to be a working men’s demonstration, there were none but the middle and upper classes to address the meeting, but at this the order of things was reversed, and none but working men were to address the meeting; this was in fact the secret of the success; they had no need for patronage, but had determined to do their own work themselves. (Cheers.) They had given the American flag the place of honour that evening, as they had done on a former occasion, because it represented the land of liberty and the home of the free. There the exile and the oppressed toiler could find a haven of rest. The Association whose anniversary they celebrated that evening had a peculiar right to congratulate the American people. They had addressed them before; when interest and a hatred of free institutions in this country had reviled their government and insulted their people, then the members of that Association, true to their principles, had addressed words of sympathy to their transatlantic brethren, and received their grateful acknowledgments in return. America was now free from the pollution of slavery. The South had appealed from the ballot to the bullet, and are now beaten at both. The men who took a prominent part in this Association, had never, in the darkest hour of the republic, despaired of its ultimate triumph — and when told that ‘democratic institutions were on their trial’, they accepted the challenge, and abided the issue, which had now arrived. Democracy had triumphed, slavery had perished, the republic was saved; and the flag, which had for four years been so often insulted by the privileged classes of Europe, will yet proudly wave throughout the world, the emblem of liberty, and the hope of the oppressed. He echoed every sentiment of congratulation contained in the address which he had the pleasure to propose for their adoption. He would conclude with the beautiful lines so forcibly realised in the late American contest:
Freedom’s battle, once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won. (Cheers.)
“Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, in seconding the adoption of the address, said, — It did not merely represent that meeting, but the working men of Europe. They were assembled that night in their representative character, and spoke in the name and by the authority of thousands of earnest toilers throughout Europe. He deeply sympathised with the sentiments of the address, and with the objects of the Association generally. Not only had they the American flag over their heads, but he could see one mutely expressing their deepest and most earnest longings — the freedom of Venice and Rome. (Loud and long continued cheering.) To effect universal liberty, men must know their duties and take their rights. There must be something higher in our aspirations than mere nationality. To live on the banks of the Po, the Seine, or the Thames does not confer the right to greatness or freedom. No; it must be honesty, integrity, and ability. We must not suffer crowned heads to use us as tools for their own purpose and the oppression of other peoples. Yet so they have used us in the past: let it never return. (Cheers.) The gilded thing called a crown could in a moment be pulverised by the strong, stern arm; yet in its hesitation its strength is lost, and the bauble resumes its power over the weak, the superstitious, and the ignorant, and by the aid of the self-interest of court parasites, again oppresses the people. (Cheers.) Let them be true to their principles, and these things will become a thing of the past, and truth and justice will triumph. (Applause.)
“The address was then adopted by acclamation.
“M. Tolain, one of the French delegates, then addressed the meeting in French, and was very enthusiastically received. He assured the Association that their efforts were duly appreciated in France, where their movements were watched with the greatest interest.
“Philipp Becker, a tried champion of democracy, spoke in German. He said, — For the first time in history, delegates have assembled in the name of the working men of the world. The aim of the International Working Men’s Association was the emancipation of the labouring poor. Under emancipation he understood no piecemeal reform, but the entire liberation from all forms of oppression, social, political, and religious. The emancipation of the working class meant peace between labour :and capital; it meant that the men of labour should also be the men of capital — not in their individual capacity, but as co-operative bodies working for themselves. He farther gave a brief sketch of the wrongs of Poland, and spoke of the paramount interest Europe had to put a stop to Russian aggression by a restoration of the independence of Poland.
“Citizen De Paepe, the delegate from Belgium, next addressed the meeting. He said that the Association would leave its mark on the nineteenth century. Its influence, even up to the present, has been such that it can never be effaced. The lot of the workman has been to sweat, to pay, and to die a premature death. Whereas, before eternal justice, the fruits of labour belong to the producer alone. He alone ought to possess wealth, as he alone produces it. Now the things were precisely the reverse. Numbers of workers were condemned to starve, in order that a few non-producers may die with plethora. In Belgium, the Catholic clergy were very bad; he did not [know] how the Protestants were; he had been told they were even more intolerant, that he did not know, but he knew they were all partizans, as bodies, to the present state of things. After a very eloquent speech, he concluded by expressing a wish: — ‘That this Association may become the link by which all men of heart may be united, and by their union cause pauperism, misery, ignorance, vice, and crime to disappear, as well as all class distinctions, and that all men may become honourable workers.’ (Loud cheers.)
“Citizen Bobczynski, delegate from the Polish Association, also addressed the meeting in a brief but eloquent speech.
“At the conclusion of the speeches a very large and handsome tri-coloured flag was hung over the end gallery with the following names — Italy, Poland, Hungary, Mazzini, Garibaldi, which created an immense burst of cheering, which was again and again repeated.
“The speaking was interspersed with music and singing by the Garibaldian Band and the German Working Men’s Choir, which gave the Marseillaise and other pieces with much effect.
“The hall was then cleared for dancing, which amusement was followed up with much spirit for some hours.
“At two o'clock the Committee and delegates assembled in the Committee room, where Citizen Cremer was most warmly received, and the thanks of the delegates accorded to him for the able manner in which the soirée had been got up and the splendid success they had that night witnessed.”
288 The reference is to the address to the people of the United States of America, adopted at the anniversary meeting of September 28, 1865 (see pp. 310-12 of the present volume).
289 The report on the working-class movement in Germany which Liebknecht had written in English was not read at the London Conference. “As regards your report,” Marx wrote to Liebknecht on November 21, 1865, “I did not read it at the Conference since too much prominence is given in it to me.” Liebknecht’s report, which was found among Marx’s papers, is published in English in the present volume for the first time.
290 The reference is to the London German Workers’ Educational Association (see Note 4) which every year commemorated, together with the French émigrés, the 1848 June uprising of the Paris proletariat.
291 The report to the General Council meeting of January 24, 1865 (see p. 66 of the present volume) was made by Marx on the basis of a letter from Liebknecht, dated January 21, 1865. He wrote the draft of his report in English between the lines of Liebknecht’s letter.
292 The reference is to Der Social-Demokrat (see Note 55).
293 The notes are extant in Marx’s note-book and are a translation of portions of Schily’s detailed letter to him of February 25-28, 1865. From Marx’s letter to Engels, dated March 4, 1865, it is evident that the notes were for his report to the Standing Committee meeting of March 4. In the brackets Marx gives the pages of Schily’s letter. The note-book also contains the original resolution on the conflict in the Paris section drafted by Marx (see Note 56).
294 As is evident from Schily’s letter, on the morning of February 24 Lefort expressed his misgivings that the “Bonapartists might deceive” the members of the Paris Administration, and thought that a guarantee against this would be his appointment as the Association’s defender in Paris. The events ascribed to February 25 in the notes took place on the 24th.
295 On March 12, 1865, Jung informed Marx that he had been instructed to draw up a summary of the conflict in the Paris section for the information of the International’s members in France and asked Marx to help him in the matter. On March 13 Marx, let him know that he would, and on March 18 he met Jung and gave him his remarks, written on three leaves of paper. The final text, following their discussion, appeared on the back of the first leaf, partly in Marx’s hand and partly in Jung’s (see pp. 269-70 of the present volume).
296 The reference is to the protest against the appointment of Schily as the General Council’s representative on the Paris Administration. The protest was signed by a group of French petty-bourgeois democrats (Le Lubez, Bordage, Leroux, Denoual, Bocquet) and read at the General Council meeting of March 14, 1865. As is evident from a letter to Marx, dated March 22, Jung, following Marx’s memorandum, explained the situation to the General Council members; he succeeded in splitting the Le Lubez group, as a result of which Le Lubez and Denoual withdrew from the Council on April 4.
297 See Note 57.
298 The note is a summary of Ernest Jones’s letter to Marx, under date March 16, 1865. Owing to his departure for Germany Marx was unable himself to report on the letter to the General Council. The summary is written on the back of one of the leaves of the memorandum to Jung apropos of the conflict in the Paris section of the International.
299 See Note 94.
300 These notes were made by Marx in his note-book in connection with his report on wages, price and profit which he delivered at the General Council meetings of June 20 and 27 (see Note 73). For the final text of the resolutions submitted by Marx see Note 107.
301 The minutes of the General Council meeting of January 16, 1866 were taken down by Marx on a separate piece of paper.
302 The Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association, which was written by Marx, was adopted by the General Council at its meeting of November 1, 1864 (see p. 44 of the present volume). It was printed together with the Provisional Rules as a separate pamphlet by The Bee-Hive publishers (see Note 18). A list of the General Council members was given at the end of the pamphlet.
“Names and Nationalities of the Central Provisional Council.
“English: Longmaid, Worley, Leno, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Shearman, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Odger, Howell, Osborne, Carter, Gray, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Cremer, Dick.
“French: Denoual, Le Lubez, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Boequet, Talandier, Dupon.
“Italian: L. Wolff, Fontana, Setacci, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri. “Swiss: Nusperli, Jung.
“German: Eccarius, Wolff, Otto, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Marx, Kaub, Bolleter.
“Polish: Holtorp, Rybczinski.
GEORGE ODGER, President of Central Council.
GEORGE W. WHEELER, Honorary Treasurer.
KARL MARX, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Germany.
G. P. FONTANA, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Italy.
J. E. HOLTORP, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Poland.
HERMANN F. JUNG, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland.
P. V. LE LUBEZ, Honorary Corresponding Secretary f or France.
WILLIAM R. CREMER, Honorary General Secretary.”
303 The Provisional Rules of the International Association, drawn up by Marx, were adopted by the General Council at Its meeting of November 1, 1864 (see p. 44 of the present volume).
304 The meeting referred to in the “Berichtigung” (“Correction”), which was written by Marx, was held in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on March 1, 1865. The General Council played a notable part in this meeting commemorating the Polish insurrection of 1863-64 (see Note 53). The English bourgeois press, including the London liberal Daily News, had covered the speeches made at the meeting by Beales, Leverson and other bourgeois radicals, but had passed over in silence the resolution submitted on behalf of the International and the speeches made by the General Council members Fox and Eccarius. A full report of the meeting appeared in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 177, March 4, 1865; Marx used this report for his “Correction” sent to the Zurich Der weisse Adler which had published the garbled report reprinted from the English press.
The manuscript of the “Correction,” which Marx enclosed in a letter to Jung, dated April 13, 1865, is extant. As Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland Jung had to send it to the newspaper with a covering letter. The “Correction,” signed by Jung, was printed in Der Weisse Adler, No. 48, April 22, 1865.
305 The address of the International Working Men’s Association to President Johnson was drawn up by Marx in pursuance of the General Council’s decision of May 2, and was adopted by the Council at its meeting of May 9, 1865.
306 The decision to address an invitation to working men’s societies in Britain to join the International was taken by the General Council at its meeting of June 6, 1865 (see p. 105 of the present volume).
307 The address of the Industrial Newspaper Company (see Note 124) was drawn up in the latter part of August 1865 by a special committee composed of five General Council members: Odger, Wheeler, Worley, Kaub and Eccarius, and was approved by the Company’s Board of Directors at its meeting of August 22, 1865, which Marx attended. The address was printed in The Miner and Workman’s Advocate, No. 130, September 2, 1865.
308 This document was drawn up at the same time as the Industrial Newspaper Company’s address to the workers of Great Britain and Ireland (see foregoing note). The prospectus was printed in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 132, September 16, 1865, and in subsequent issues.
309 The General Council printed its announcement about the convocation of the London Conference in two leaflets, the texts of which are practically identical. The second leaflet listed the names of the General Council members from whom tickets could be obtained for the soirée on September 28, to celebrate the founding of the International Working Men’s Association (see the illustration between pp. 122-23). The announcement was also printed, but without the programme, in The Workman’s Advocate, Nos. 131-33, September 9, 16 and 23, 1865, respectively.
310 The announcement about the soirée to he held in St. Martin’s Hall on September 28, 1865 (see Note 287), was printed by the General Council in leaflet form.
311 The address to the people of the United States of America was adopted at the soirée held on September 28, 1865, which was attended by the British members of the International the delegates to the London Conference from France , Switzerland and Belgium and by representatives of the democratic and revolutionary emigration. The address, which Cremer proposed on behalf of the General Council, was carried by acclamation. At a meeting of the Standing Committee with the Continental delegates on September 29, it was resolved to send copies of the address to all the Association’s sections. The address appeared in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 136, October 14, 1865.
312 The appeal of the British members of the General Council to the workers of the United Kingdom in connection with the Geneva Congress was drawn up by Cremer on the instructions of the Standing Committee and approved by the Council on January 16, 1866. The appeal was published in The Workman’s Advocate, No. 152, February 3, 1866, and also put out as a separate leaflet.
313 After the meeting of July 22, 1863 (see Note 282), a committee was elected to write an address, on behalf of the English workers, to the workers of France. The address, drawn up by Odger, was approved by a meeting of trade-unionists held in the Bell Inn, Old Bailey, in November 18,63, and published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 112, December 5, 1863.
314. The letter to the editor of Echo de Verviers was written by Jung by decision of the General Council and edited by Marx, as is evident from Jung’s letters to Marx of January 15 and 26, 1866. The letter was in reply to Vésinier’s slanderous attacks in the paper against the General Council (see Note 146).
315 Société du Dix Decembre (Society of December 10) — a Bonapartist society, founded in 1849; consisted mainly of declassed elements.
316 Société du Grütli (Grutli Society) — a Swigs petty-bourgeois reformist organisation, founded in 1838.
317 The said document was drawn up by Fox following the General Council discussion, on February 20 and March 6, 1866, of the question of the Irish state prisoners. The document, signed by Odger, was published by decision of the Council in The Commonwealth, No. 157, March 10, 1866.
318 “Warnung” (A Warning”) was written by Marx by decision of the General Council in connection with the importation into Scotland of German and Danish tailors during the strike of the Endinburgh tailors (see Notes 195 and 196).
319 The appeal was discussed at the General Council meeting, June 5, 1866 (see Note 214).
320 See Note 213.
321 The “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council” were drawn up by Marx for the delegates to the First Congress of the International Association, held in Geneva on September 3-8, 1866. On July 17 the General Council decided that the Congress programme should be elaborated and discussed; on July 31 Marx reported on the programme, on behalf of the Standing Committee; the Instructions were drawn up a little later in English and translated into French by Lafargue; they were read at the Geneva Congress as the official report of the General Council..
322 At its convention in Baltimore in August 1866, the National Labour Union declared that the demand for the 8-hour day was an indispensable condition for freeing labour from capitalist slavery.