*Fourth Annual Report of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association*

The year 1867–68 marks an epoch in the International Working Men’s Association. After a period of quiet progress its sphere of action swelled powerfully enough to call forth bitter denunciation from the ruling classes and governmental persecutions. It entered the stage of struggle.

The French government naturally took the lead in the reaction against the working class. Already in the previous year we had to denounce individual hostile manoeuvres on its part—misappropriation of letters, confiscation of our statutes, interception of the documents of the Lausanne Congress at the French frontier. The latter, long demanded in vain from Paris, were finally returned to us only under the official pressure of Lord Stanley, the British Foreign Secretary.

This year, however, the Empire has thrown off the mask entirely. It has openly sought to destroy the International Working Men’s Association through its police and its courts. The December dynasty owes its existence to the class struggle, whose most grandiose manifestation was the June insurrection of 1848. It therefore necessarily played by turns the roles of saviour of the bourgeoisie and patriarchal patron of the proletariat. As soon as the growing power of the International Working Men’s Association emerged clearly in the strikes at Amiens, Roubaix, Paris, Geneva, etc., the self-appointed worker-patron was confined to the alternative of either taking hold of our society or crushing it. At first not much was demanded. A manifesto, which the Paris delegates had read at the Congress at Geneva (1866) and published the following year in Brussels, was confiscated at the French frontier. In response to an inquiry from our Paris committee as to the reasons for this act of violence, Minister Rouher invited a committee member to a personal discussion. During the ensuing meeting he first demanded the toning down and alteration of certain passages of the manifesto. Upon the negative reply he retorted: “Nevertheless one might come to an understanding if you would only let slip a few words of thanks to the Emperor, who has done so very much for the working class.” This delicate hint from Rouher, the Vice-Emperor, did not meet with the expected comprehension. From that moment the December regime lay in wait for some pretext to forcibly remove the Association. Its annoyance grew in consequence of the anti-chauvinist agitation of our French members after the Austro-Prussian War. Shortly afterwards, when the Fenian panic reached its peak in England, the General Council of the I.W.M.A. addressed a petition to the British government in which the imminent execution of the three Manchester martyrs was characterised as judicial murder. At the same time we held public meetings in London in defence of the rights of Ireland. Ever anxious to court England’s favour, the French government now considered the circumstances ripe for a blow against the I.W.M.A. on both sides of the Channel. During the night its police broke into the homes of our Paris committee members, rummaged through their private letters, and noisily announced in the English press that the centre of the Fenian conspiracy had at last been discovered—one of its main organs being the I.W.M.A. Much ado about nothing! Despite the best will in the world, the judicial investigation found not a shadow of a *corpus delicti*. After the attempt to transform the I.W.M.A. into a secret conspiratorial society had failed so ignominiously, recourse was had to the readiest subterfuge. The Paris committee was prosecuted as an unauthorised society of more than 20 members. The French judges, schooled in imperial discipline, naturally dissolved the society without further ado and sentenced the committee members to fines and imprisonment. However, in the considerations of its judgment the court had the naivety to proclaim two things: on the one hand, the growing power of the I.W.M.A., and, on the other, the incompatibility of the December Empire with the existence of a workers’ society that seriously treats truth, justice, and morality as guiding principles. The consequences of these events soon made themselves felt in the departments, where petty prefectural harryings followed hard on the heels of the Paris convictions. Instead, however, of collapsing before these governmental chicanes, the I.W.M.A. drew new vital energy from them. Nothing has done more to promote its influence in France than that it finally drove the December regime to an open breach with the working class.

In Belgium our society can boast great progress. The mine-owners in the Charleroi basin, through incessant vexations, drove their coal-workers into a riot in order then to let loose armed force upon the unarmed multitude. In the midst of this provoked panic the Belgian branch of the I.W.M.A. took up the cause of the coal-workers, exposed their wretched economic condition in the press and at public meetings, supported the families of the fallen and wounded, and furnished legal assistance for the prisoners. In the end they were all acquitted by the jury. Since the events in Charleroi our success in Belgium has been assured. Meanwhile the Minister of Justice, Jules Bara, denounced the I.W.M.A. in the Belgian Chamber of Deputies and made its existence the chief pretext for the renewal of the Aliens Act. He even threatened to prohibit the Brussels Congress. The Belgian government ought finally to realise that small states no longer have any other *raison d’être* in Europe than to be asylums of freedom.

In Italy the Association was paralysed by the reaction in the wake of the butchery at Mentana. One of the direct consequences was police restrictions on the right of association and assembly. Nevertheless our extensive correspondence proves that the Italian working class is increasingly winning an individuality independent of all the old parties.

In Prussia the I.W.M.A. cannot legally exist, because a law prohibits any connection of Prussian workers’ societies with foreign societies. Moreover, the Prussian government repeats Bonapartist policy on a petty scale, e.g., in its cavillings with the “Allgemeiner deutscher Arbeiterverein”. Ever on the point of flying at one another’s throats, the military governments are always united when it comes to a crusade against their common enemy, the working class.

Nevertheless, despite all legal obstacles, small branches scattered all over Germany have for a long time grouped themselves around our committee in Geneva.

At its last congress in Hamburg the “Allgemeiner deutscher Arbeiterverein”, which is especially widespread in North Germany, resolved to act in concert with the I.W.M.A., although legally unable to affiliate with it officially. The forthcoming Nuremberg Congress, representing about 100 workers’ societies belonging mainly to Central and South Germany, has placed direct affiliation to the I.W.M.A. on its agenda. At the request of its leading committee we have sent a delegate to Nuremberg.

In Austria the labour movement is acquiring a more and more pronounced character. A congress was convened from Vienna for the beginning of September for the fraternisation of the workers of the various nationalities of the Empire. At the same time an invitation was published to Englishmen and Frenchmen in which the principles of the I.W.M.A. are proclaimed. Your General Council had already appointed a delegate for Vienna when the present liberal Austrian cabinet, on the point of succumbing to feudal reaction, was sufficiently clearsighted to court the enmity of the workers by prohibiting their congress.

In the struggles of the building workers in Geneva the existence of the I.W.M.A. in Switzerland was at stake in a certain sense. For the building masters made the withdrawal of the workers from the I.W.M.A. the preliminary condition of any compromise. The workers decisively rejected this presumption. Thanks to the help they received in Switzerland itself, as well as, through the medium of the I.W.M.A., from France, England, Germany, and Belgium, they finally conquered a shortening of the working day and a rise in wages. Already deeply rooted in Swiss soil, the I.W.M.A. now rapidly spread. Among other things, 50 German workers’ educational societies, perhaps the oldest in Europe, resolved unanimously last autumn at their congress in Neuenburg to affiliate with the I.W.M.A.

In England the political movement, the dissolution of the old parties, and the preparation for the coming electoral struggle have absorbed many of our best forces and thereby slowed down our propaganda. Nonetheless we opened a lively correspondence with the provincial trades unions. A number of them have already declared their adhesion. Among the newly won branches in London the trades unions of the leather workers and the City shoemakers hold the first rank in terms of membership.

Your General Council maintained a constant connection with the “National Labour Union of the United States”. At its last congress, August 1867, the American Union had voted to send a representative to this year’s Brussels Congress but, from lack of time, failed to take the necessary measures to carry out the resolution.

The latent power of the North American working class shines forth from the legal introduction of an eight-hour working day in the public workshops of the federal government and from the enactment of a general eight-hour law in eight or nine individual states of the Federation. Nevertheless the American working class is at this moment undergoing, in New York for example, a desperate struggle against rebellious capital, which seeks to frustrate the enforcement of the eight-hour law by all the great means at its disposal. This fact proves that even under the most favourable political conditions every serious success of the working class depends on the maturity of the organisation that trains and concentrates its forces.

And even its national organisation easily founders on the lack of its organisation beyond the national frontiers, since all countries compete on the world market and hence mutually influence one another. Only an international bond of the working class can secure its definitive victory. It was this need that created the International Working Men’s Association. It is not the hot-house plant of a sect or of a theory. It is a spontaneous outgrowth of the proletarian movement, which in turn springs from the normal and irresistible tendencies of modern society. Deeply imbued with the greatness of its calling, the I.W.M.A. allows itself neither to be intimidated nor led astray. Its destiny is from now on inseparably entwined with the historical progress of the class that bears in its bosom the regeneration of humanity.

London, 1 September 1868.

For the General Council
Robert Shaw Chairman
J. George Eccarius General Secretary |

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