08/06/2015
Defending Karl Marx‘s ideas in the international labor movement.
Dé Bhatti’s Production ®
Socialism and internationalism
Socialism is internationalist, or it is nothing. Already at the dawn of our movement, in the pages of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote the famous words: “The workers have no country.” The internationalism of Marx and Engels was not a caprice, or the result of sentimental considerations. It flowed from the fact that capitalism develops as a world system—out of the different national economies and markets there arises one single, indivisible and interdependent whole—the world market.
Today this prediction of the founders of Marxism has been brilliantly demonstrated, in almost laboratory fashion. The crushing domination of the world market is the most decisive fact of our epoch. Not a single country, no matter how big and powerful—not the USA, not China, not Russia—can stand apart from the mighty pull of the world market.
There is no more modern book than Marx and Engels' Manifesto. It explains the division of society into classes; it explains the phenomenon of globalization, global crises of overproduction, the nature of the state and the fundamental motor forces of historical development.
However, even the most correct ideas can achieve nothing unless they find an organizational and practical expression. That is why the founders of scientific socialism always fought for the creation of an international organization of the working class. Marx and Engels had already been active in the Communist League, which was, from the beginning, an international organisation, but the formation of the IWA represented a qualitative step forward.
The International developed and grew in the period preceding the Paris Commune. It did not stand apart from the everyday problems of the working class. On the contrary, it was constantly engaged in practical work in the workers’ movement. The International inscribed on its banner the struggle for equality and fought for the improvement of the conditions of women and young people that suffered the greatest oppression under capitalism. At first the IWA had mostly male membership, but in April 1865 membership was opened to women and the International developed a series of demands for women workers.
The headquarters of the General Council were in London and several unions affiliated to it. It was present in many strikes and other labour disputes. The International aimed to prevent the import of foreign strikebreakers and collected money to give direct aid to strikers and their families. This made the new organisation immensely popular with the workers, who began to realize that the International was the champion of the proletariat, and was fighting to defend its interests.
Despite these successes, or rather because of them, the reformist trade unionists were increasingly alarmed at the growing influence of the International in Britain. They accepted its help but had no sympathy with its socialist and revolutionary ideas. Nevertheless, the International was popular with the British working class movement. The Trade Union Conference at Sheffield adopted a resolution thanking the international Workingmen’s Association for its attempts to unite the workers of all lands in a fraternal league, and recommending the unions represented at the Conference join the International.
