The International Workingmen's Association, 1868

The Fourth Annual Report of the General Council

Adopted by the General Council on September 1, 1868


The year 1867-68 will mark an epoch in the history
of the Association. After a period of peaceable development it has assumed
dimensions powerful enough to provoke the bitter denunciations of the ruling
classes and the hostile demonstrations of governments.
It has entered upon the phases of strife.

The French Government took, of course, the lead in the
reactionary proceedings against the working classes. Already last year
we had to signalise some of its underhand manoeuvres. It meddled with our
correspondence, seized our Statutes, and the Congress documents.
After many fruitless steps to get them back, they were at last given up
only under the official pressure of Lord Stanley, the English Minister
of Foreign Affairs.

But the Empire has this year thrown off the mask and tried to
directly annihilate the International Association by coups de police
and judiciary prosecution. Begot by the struggle of classes, of which the
days of June, 1848, are the grandest expression, it could not but assume
alternately the attitudes of the official saviour of the Bourgeoisie and
of the paternal protector of the Proletariat. The growing power of the
International having manifested itself in the strikes of Roubaix, Amiens,
Paris, Geneva, &c., reduced our would-be patron to the necessity of
turning our Society to his own account or of destroying it. In the beginning
he was ready enough to strike a bargain on very moderate terms.
The manifesto of the Parisians read at the Congress of Geneva
having been seized at the French frontier, our Paris Executive demanded
of the Minister of the Interior the reasons of this Seizure.
M. Rouher then invited one of the members of the Committee
to an interview, in the course of which he declared himself ready to authorise
the entry of the manifesto on the condition of some modifications being
inserted. On the refusal of the delegate of the Paris
Executive, he added,

"Still, if you would introduce some words of gratitude to the Emperor,
who has done so much for the working classes, one might see what could
be done."

M. Rouher's, the sub-Emperor's, insinuation was met by a blank rebuff.
From that moment the Imperial Government looked out for a pretext to suppress
the Association. Its anger was heightened by the anti-chauvinist agitation
on the part of our French members after the German war. Soon after, when
the Fenian panic had reached its climax, the General Council addressed
to the English Government a petition demanding the
commutation of the sentence of the three victims of Manchester, and qualifying
their hanging as an act of political revenge. At
the same time it held public meetings in London for the defence of the
rights of Ireland. The Empire, always anxious to deserve the good graces
of the British Government, thought the moment propitious for laying hands
upon the International. It caused nocturnal perquisitions
to be made, eagerly rummaged the private correspondence, and announced
with much noise that it had discovered the centre
of the Fenian conspiracy, of which the International was denounced as one
of the principal organs. All its laborious researches, however, ended in
nothing. The public prosecutor himself threw down
his brief in disgust. The attempt at converting
the International Association into a secret society of conspirators having
miserably broken down, the next best thing was to prosecute our Paris branch
as a non-authorised society of more than 20 members. The French judges,
trained by the Imperialist discipline, hastened, of course, to order the
dissolution of the Association and the imprisonment of its Paris Executive. The tribunal had the naiveté to declare
in the preamble of its judgment that the existence of the French Empire
was incompatible with a working men's association
that dared to proclaim truth, justice, and morality as its leading principles. The consequences of these prosecutions made themselves
felt in the departments, where paltry vexations on the part of the Prefects
succeeded to the condemnations of Paris. This Governmental chicanery, however,
so far from annihilating the Association, has given it a fresh impulse by forcing the Empire to drop its patronising airs
to the working classes.

In Belgium, the International Association has made immense
strides. The coal lords of the basin of Charleroi, having driven their
miners to riots by incessant exactions, let loose upon those unarmed men
the armed force which massacred many of them. It
was in [the] midst of the panic thus created that our Belgian branch took
up the cause of the miners, disclosed their miserable economical condition, rushed to the rescue of the families of the dead
and wounded, and procured legal counsel for the prisoners, who were finally
all of them acquitted by the jury. After the affair of Charleroi the success
of the International in Belgium was assured. The Belgian Minister of Justice,
Jules Bara, denounced the International Association in the Chamber of Deputies
and made of its existence the principal pretext for the renewal of the
law against foreigners. He even dared to threaten he should prevent the
Brussels Congress from being held. The Belgian
Government ought at last to understand that petty States have no longer
any raison d'être in Europe except they be the asylums of
liberty.

In Italy, the progress of the Association has been impeded
by the reaction following close upon the ambuscade of Mentana; one of the
first consequences was the restriction put upon the right of association
and public meeting. But the numerous letters which have come to our hands
fully prove that the Italian working class is more and more asserting its
individuality quite independently of the old parties.

In Prussia, the International cannot exist legally, on
account of a law which forbids all relations with foreign societies. Moreover
in regard to the General Union of the German Working Men, the Prussian
Government has imitated Bonapartism on a shabby scale. Always ready to
fall foul of each other, the military Governments are cheek by jowl when
entering upon a crusade against their common enemy, the working classes.
In spite, however, of all these petty tribulations, small groups spread
over the whole surface of Germany had long since rallied round our Geneva
centre. The General Union of the German Working Men, whose branches are
mostly confined to Northern Germany, have in their recent Congress held
at Hamburg decided to act in concert with the International Working Men's
Association 23 although debarred from joining it officially.
In the programme of the Nuremberg Congress, representing upwards of 100
working men's societies which mostly belong to Middle and Southern Germany,
the direct adhesion to the International has been put on the order of the
day. At the request of their leading committee
we have sent a delegate to Nuremberg.

In Austria, the working-class movement assumes a more and
more revolutionary aspect. In the beginning of
September a congress was to meet at Vienna, aiming at the fraternisation
of the working men of the different races of the Empire. They had also
sent an address to the English and French working men, in which they declared
for the principles of the International. Your General
Council had already appointed a delegate ~ to Vienna
when the Liberal Government of Austria, on the very point of succumbing
to the blows of the feudal reaction, had the shrewdness to stir the anger
of the working men by prohibiting their congress.

In the struggle maintained by the building trades of Geneva the
very existence of the International in Switzerland was put on its
trial. The employers made it a preliminary condition of coming to any terms
with their workmen that the latter should forsake the International. The
working men indignantly refused to comply with this dictate. Thanks to
the aid received from France, England, Germany,
&c., through the medium of the International, they have finally obtained
a diminution of one hour of labour and 10 per cent increase of wages. Already deeply rooted in Switzerland,
the International has witnessed since that event a rapid increase in the
number of its members. In the month of August last the German working men
residing in Switzerland (about 50 societies) passed at their Congress in
Neuenburg a unanimous vote of adhesion to the International.

In England, the unsettled state of politics,
the dissolution of the old parties, and the preparations for the coming
electoral campaign have absorbed many of our most active members, and,
to some degree, retarded our propaganda. Nevertheless, we have entered
into correspondence with numerous provincial trades' unions, many of which
have sent in their adhesion. Among the more recent London affiliations
those of the Curriers' Society and the City Men's Shoemakers are the most
considerable as regards numbers.

Your General Council is in constant communication with the National
Labour Union of the United States. On its last Congress of August,
1867, the American Union had resolved to send a delegate to the Brussels
congress, but, pressed for time, was unable to
take the special measures necessary for carrying out the vote.

The latent power of the working classes of the United States has
recently manifested itself in the legal establishment of a working day
of eight hours in all the workshops of the Federal Government, and in the
passing [of] laws to the same effect by many State Legislatures. However,
at this very moment the working men of New York, for example, are engaged
in a fierce struggle for enforcing the eight hours' law, against the resistance
of rebellious capital. This fact proves that even under the most favourable
political conditions all serious success of the proletariat depends upon
an organisation that unites and concentrates its forces; and even its national
organisation is still exposed to split on the disorganisation of the working
classes in other countries, which one and all compete in the market of
the world, acting and reacting the one upon the other. Nothing but an international
bond of the working classes can ever ensure their definitive triumph. This
want has given birth to the International Working Men's Association. That
Association has not been hatched by a sect or a theory. It is the spontaneous
growth of the proletarian movement, which itself is the offspring of the
natural and irrepressible tendencies of modern society. Profoundly convinced
of the greatness of its mission, the International Working Men's Association
will allow itself neither to be intimidated nor misled. Its destiny, henceforward,
coalesces with the historical progress of the class that bear in their
hands the regeneration of mankind.

London, September 1