Address of the General Council of the International
Working Men’s Association to the Workmen of Europe
and the United States

The Belgian Massacres.
To the Workmen of Europe and the United States.

There passes hardly a week in England without strikes—and strikes upon a grand scale. If, on such occasions, the Government was to let its soldiers loose upon the Working Class, this land of strikes would become a land of massacres, but not for many a week. After a few such physical force experiments, the powers that be would be nowhere. In the United States, too, the number and scale of strikes have continued to increase during the last few years, and even sometimes assumed a riotous character. But no blood was spilt. In some of the great military states of continental Europe, the era of strikes may be dated from the end of the American civil war. But here, again, no blood was spilt. There exists but one country in the civilised world where every strike is eagerly and joyously turned into a pretext for the official massacre of the Working Class. That country of single blessedness is Belgium! the model state of continental constitutionalism, the snug, well-hedged, little paradise of the landlord, the capitalist, and the priest. The earth performs not more surely its yearly revolution than the Belgian Government its yearly Working Men’s massacre. The massacre of this year does not differ from last year’s massacre, but by the ghastlier number of its victims, the more hideous ferocity of an otherwise ridiculous army, the noisier jubilation of the clerical and capitalist press, and the intensified frivolity of the pretexts put forward by the Governmental butchers.

It is now proved, even by the involuntary evidence of the capitalist press, that the quite legitimate strike of the puddlers in the Cockerill Ironworks, at Seraing, was only converted into a riot by a strong posse of cavalry and gendarmerie suddenly launched upon that place in order to provoke the people. From the 9th to the 12th of April these stout warriors not only recklessly charged with sabre and bayonet the unarmed workmen, they indiscriminately killed and wounded harmless passers by, forcibly broke into private houses, and even amused themselves with repeated furious onslaughts on the travellers pent up in the Seraing Railway Station. When these days of horror had passed away, it became bruited about that Mr. Kamp, the mayor of Seraing, was an agent of the Cockerill Joint Stock Company, that the Belgian Home Minister, a certain Mr. Pirmez, was the largest shareholder in a neighbouring colliery also on strike, and that His Royal Highness, the Prince of Flanders, had invested 1,500,000 francs in the Cockerill concern. Hence people jump to the truly strange conclusion that the Seraing massacre was a sort of joint stock company coup d’état, quietly plotted between the firm Cockerill and the Belgian Home Minister, for the simple purpose of striking terror unto their disaffected subjects. This calumny, however, was soon after victoriously refuted by the later events occurring in Le Borinage, a colliery district where the Belgian Home Minister, the said Mr. Pirmez, seems not to be a leading capitalist. An almost general strike having broken out amongst the miners of that district, numerous troops were concentrated, who opened their campaign at Frameries by a fusillade, which killed nine and grievously wounded twenty miners, after which little preliminary exploit the riot act, singularly enough styled in French “les sommations préalables” was read, and then the butchery proceeded with.

Some politicians trace these incredible deeds to motives of a sublime patriotism. While just negotiating on some ticklish points with their French neighbour, the Belgian government, they say, were bound in duty to show off the heroism of their army. Hence that scientific division of arms, displaying, first, the irresistible impetuosity of the Belgian cavalry at Seraing, and then the steady vigour of the Belgian infantry at Frameries. To frighten the foreigner, what means more infallible than such homely battles, which one does not know how to lose, and such domestic battle fields, where the hundreds of workmen killed, mutilated, and made prisoners, shed so glorious a lustre upon those invulnerable warriors, who, all of them, to a man, get off with their skins safe.

Other politicians, on the contrary, suspect the Belgian ministers to be sold to the Tuileries, and to periodically enact these horrible scenes of a mock civil war, with the deliberate aim of affording Louis Bonaparte a pretext for saving society in Belgium as he has saved it in France. But was Ex-Governor Eyre ever accused of having organized the negro massacre at Jamaica in order to wrest that island from England and play it into the hands of the United States? No doubt the Belgian ministers are excellent patriots of the Eyre pattern. As he was the unscrupulous tool of the West Indian planter, they are the unscrupulous tools of the Belgian capitalist.

The Belgian capitalist has won fair fame in the world by his eccentric passion for what he calls, the liberty of labour (la liberté du travail). So fond is he of the liberty of his hands to labour for him all the hours of their life, without exemption of age or sex, that he has always indignantly repulsed any factory law encroaching upon that liberty. He shudders at the very idea that a common workman should be wicked enough to claim any higher destiny than that of enriching his master and natural superior. He wants his workman not only to remain a miserable drudge, overworked and underpaid, but, like every other slaveholder, he wants him to be a cringing, servile, broken-hearted, morally prostrate, religiously humble drudge. Hence his frantic fury at strikes. With him, a strike is a blasphemy, a slave’s revolt, the signal of a social cataclysm. Put, now, into the hands of such men—cruel from sheer cowardice—the undivided, uncontrolled, absolute sway of the state power, as is actually the case in Belgium, and you will no longer wonder to find the sabre, the bayonet, and the musket working in that country as legitimate and normal instruments for keeping wages down and screwing profits up. But, in point of fact, what other earthly purpose could a Belgian army serve? When, by the dictation of official Europe, Belgium was declared a neutral country, it ought, as a matter of course, have been forbidden the costly luxury of an army, save, perhaps, a handful of soldiers, just sufficient to mount the royal guard and parade at a royal puppet-show. Yet, within its 536 square leagues of territory, Belgium harbours an army greater than that of the United Kingdom or the United States. The field service of this neutralised army is fatally computed by the number of its razzias upon the working class.

It will easily be understood that the International Working Men’s Association was no welcome guest in Belgium. Excommunicated by the priest, calumniated by the respectable press, it came soon to loggerheads with the Government. The latter tried hard to get rid of it by making it responsible for the Charleroy Colliery strikes of 1867-68, strikes wound up, after the invariable Belgian rule, by official massacres, followed by the judicial prosecution of the victims. Not only was this cabal baffled, but the Association took active steps, resulting in a verdict of Not Guilty for the Charleroy miners, and, consequently, in a verdict of Guilty against the Government itself. Fretting at this defeat, the Belgian ministers gave vent to their spleen by fierce denunciations from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies, against the International Working Men’s Association, and pompously declared they should never allow its General Congress to meet at Brussels. In the teeth of their menaces the Congress met at Brussels. But now at last the International is to succumb before the 536 square leagues of Belgian Omnipotence. Its culpable complicity during the recent events has been proved beyond the possibility of doubt. The emissaries of the Brussels Central Committee for Belgium and some of the Local Committees stand convicted of several flagrant crimes. In the first instance, they have tried hard to calm the excitement of the workmen on strike, and warn them off the Government traps. In some localities they have actually prevented the effusion of blood. And last, not least, these ill-boding emissaries observed on the spot, verified by witnesses, noted carefully down and publicly denounced the sanguinary vagaries of the defenders of order. By the simple process of imprisonment they were at once converted from the accusers into the accused. Then the domiciles of the members of the Brussels Committee were brutally invaded, all their papers seized, and some of them arrested on the charge of belonging to an association “founded for the purpose of attempting the lives and properties of individuals”. In other words, they were impeached of belonging to an Association of Thugs, commonly styled the International Working Men’s Association. Hunted on by the raving capucinades of the clerical and the savage howls of the capitalist press, this swaggering pigmy government is decidedly anxious to drown itself in a morass of ridicule, after having weltered in a sea of blood.

Already the Belgian Central Committee at Brussels has announced its intention to institute and afterwards publish the results of, a full inquiry into the massacres of Seraing and Le Borinage. We will circulate their revelations all over the world, in order to open the eyes of the world on the pet fanfaronade of the Belgian capitalist: La liberté, pour faire le tour du monde, n’a pas besoin de passer par ici (la Belgique).*

Perhaps, the Belgian government flatters itself that having, after the revolutions of 1848-9, gained a respite of life by becoming the police agent of all the reactionary governments of the continent, it may now again avert imminent danger by conspicuously playing the gendarme of capital against labour. This, however, is a serious mistake. Instead of delaying, they will thus only hasten the catastrophe. By making Belgium a bye-word and a nick-name with the popular masses all over the world, they will remove the last obstacle in the way of the despots bent upon wiping that country’s name off the map of Europe.

The General Council of the International Working Men’s Association hereby calls upon the workmen of Europe and the United States to open monetary subscriptions for alleviating the sufferings of the widows, wives and children of the Belgian victims, and also for the expenses incident upon the legal defence of the arrested workmen, and the inquiry proposed by the Brussels Committee.

By order of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association,
R. APPLEGARTH, Chairman
R. SHAW, Secretary for America.
BERNARD, Secretary for Belgium.
EUGENE DUPONT, Secretary for France.
KARL MARX, Secretary for Germany.
JULES JOHANNARD, Secretary for Italy.
A. ZABICKI, Secretary for Poland.
H. JUNG, Secretary for Switzerland.
COWELL STEPNEY, Treasurer.
J.G. ECCARIUS, Secretary to the General Council.

London, May 4th, 1869.
All Contributions for the victims of the Belgian massacre to be sent to the Office of the General Council, 256, High Holborn, London, W.C.

* ‘Liberty in travelling round the world has no need of passing through Belgium.’

Manifesto of the General Council of London.

To all members of the International Working Men’s Association.

Not a week passes in England without strikes, and strikes on a large scale. If on these occasions the government were to launch its soldiery against the proletarians, this land of strikes would turn into a land of massacres; but after a few experiments of that sort, the established powers would have disappeared.

In the United States, too, strikes have continued to expand over these last years, and have often even degenerated into turbulent demonstrations. Yet not a drop of blood has been spilled.

In several of the great military states of continental Europe, the era of strikes dates roughly from the end of the Civil War in America. Here, again, they proceed without bloodshed.

There is only one country in the civilised world where the pretext of strikes is eagerly and joyfully seized upon in order to assassinate the workers. That unique country is Belgium, the model land of continental constitutionalism, the snug little paradise of the landlord, the capitalist and the priest. The earth does not accomplish its annual revolution more reliably than the Belgian government does its annual massacre. This year’s massacre differs from last year’s only by the larger number of victims, the more hideous licence of the soldiery, the more raucous jubilation of the clerical and capitalist press, and the more brazen frivolity of the pretexts advanced by the official butchers.

It is now established, and that through the very indiscretions of the bourgeois press, that the perfectly legitimate strike of the puddlers and heaters of the Cockerill Company ironworks at Seraing

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was converted into a riot by the cavalry, the infantry and the gendarmerie, perfidiously thrown upon that spot to provoke the people. From the 9th to the 12th of April, these valiant warriors, armed from head to foot, assassinated unarmed workers, killed and wounded passers-by, invaded private houses, and even amused themselves by making frantic charges against travellers shut up in the railway station.

Once those days of carnage were over, it was recalled that highly placed personages in Belgium were shareholders in the Cockerill company, and that certain communal authorities acted at the same time as agents of the same company. From these facts, some have desired to draw the truly strange conclusion: that the Seraing massacre was a sort of financial coup d’état, shrewdly concerted with the simple aim of striking terror into the discontented slaves. This calumny has, however, been victoriously refuted by the later events which occurred in the Borinage district, where those personages have, it seems, not deigned to place their money. An almost general strike having broken out in this district, the government concentrated its faithful troops there. They opened the campaign at Frameries with a fusillade, killing seven mining workers and seriously wounding twenty others, which fine preliminary exploit was followed by the statutory summons, and, after the summons, the butchery resumed its course.

There are also political people who persist in finding motives of high patriotism for these incredible acts. Since relations were strained with the Gaul, the duty of the Belgian government, they say, was clearly mapped out. It had, at all costs, to give incontestable proofs of the heroism of its army. To this end, that learned division of arms displayed the irresistible impetuosity of the Belgian cavalry at Seraing and the tenacious vigour of the Belgian infantry at Frameries. To strike fear into the foreigner, what more infallible means than these great battles … which one could not lose, and these fields of combat where the hundreds of workers mutilated, killed or taken prisoner cast so singular a lustre upon those invulnerable warriors, not one of whom was killed, nor even seriously incommoded. Ah! we forget that a rural constable, likewise representing the public force, succumbed or nearly succumbed to a bullet received, not from a striker, but from a soldier.

There are other people, no less political, but of the contrary opinion, who give us to understand that it might well be that Belgian statesmen are in connivance with the Tuileries and stage these horrible scenes of civil war periodically only in order to give Louis Bonaparte the pretext to save society in Belgium, as he saved it in France. But has anyone ever suspected ex-Governor Eyre

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The Massacres in Belgium

of having organised the massacre of the Negroes of Jamaica in order to deliver that island into the hands of the Yankee? No doubt! The Belgian statesmen are every bit as excellent patriots as ex-Governor Eyre. Just as Eyre was the pitiless instrument of the planters, they are the pitiless instrument of the capitalist.

The Belgian capitalist has acquired a great renown through his exaggerated love of the liberty of labour. He is so jealous of the liberty of his workers to work for him during every hour of their lives, without exception of age or sex, that he has always angrily rejected the factory laws limiting the working day, laws introduced even in the most backward countries. He shudders at the mere idea that a common worker could be perverse enough to aspire to a higher destiny than that of enriching his master, his natural superior. In his view, the worker must not only always remain a serf of misery, exhausted by labour and reduced to the minimum of wages; he further wants him servile, broken, humble of heart, grovelling before the master and the foreman. Hence his ferocious hatred of strikes. To him a strike is a blasphemy, the revolt of the slave, the signal of social cataclysm. Place now in the hands of this trembling capitalist, cruel through cowardice, the undivided, unchecked, absolute management of the public powers, which is the case in Belgium, and you will cease to be astonished that, in this country, the sabre, the bayonet and the rifle function legitimately and regularly as machines for depressing wages and raising profits. And, after all, to what other earthly end could a Belgian army serve? When official Europe constituted Belgium a neutral country, it would have been mere common sense to forbid it the extravagant luxury of an army, with the exception of a handful of parade soldiers indispensable as royal plaything. Yet, within its 2,500 square leagues of territory, Belgium currently harbours an army larger than that of England or that of the United States. The field services of this neutralised army are fatally counted by the number of its expeditions at home.

It is immediately understandable that the International Working Men’s Association is not welcome in Belgium. Excommunicated by the priests, denigrated by the bourgeois press, it soon came to grips with the government, which sought to hold it responsible for the miners’ strikes of 1868-69, strikes culminating, according to the invariable rule in that country, in massacres followed by judicial prosecutions. The Association not only thwarted the governmental cabal; its active intervention manifested itself in the acquittal of the incriminated miners and, consequently, in the condemnation of the Belgian government by a Belgian jury. Then the ministers proceeded to inveigh against the Association in the lower chamber and

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pompously declare that they would never permit the meeting of its General Congress at Brussels. Despite these threats, the General Congress was held at Brussels.

But, after all, the International must finally succumb before the omnipotence of the 2,500 square leagues. Its culpable complicity in the recent events is placed beyond doubt. The emissaries of the central committee of Brussels and of other local committees have been caught in flagrante delicto: In the first place, they did their utmost to calm the excitement of the workers on strike and to warn them of the traps laid for them. In several localities they actually prevented bloodshed. Finally, these ill-omened emissaries observed on the spot, verified through witnesses, recorded in protocols and publicly denounced the fantastical enormities of the defenders of order. By the simple procedure of their arrest, the government transformed them from accusers into accused. Then, the domiciles of the members of the central committee of Brussels having been brutally invaded and all their correspondence seized, several “ringleaders” were arrested, on the charge of “association for the purpose of attacking persons and properties”! In a word, they are accused of belonging to an association of Thugs, that is to say, to the International Working Men’s Association! Goaded by the capuchinades of the clerical press and the howlings of the capitalist press, this pygmy government is decidedly going to drown itself in ridicule, after wallowing in blood.

Already the central committee of Brussels has announced its resolution to institute and publish a full enquiry into the massacres of Seraing and the Borinage. We, for our part, will circulate its revelations in all countries and in all languages, so as to open the eyes of everyone to this piece of braggadocio of the Belgian bourgeoisie: “To go round the world, liberty has no need to pass our way,” that is to say, through Belgium.

The Belgian government flatters itself, perhaps, that, having obtained, after the revolutions of 1848, a reprieve of its existence as the police agent of all the reactionary governments, it may yet escape imminent dangers by posing as the gendarme of capital against labour. Let it undeceive itself. It will accelerate its fall instead of retarding it. By making the name of Belgium cursed by the popular masses of all countries, it invites the despots of Europe to erase that cursed name from the map of Europe.

The General Council of the International Working Men’s Association requests all members of the Association, in Europe and in the United States, to make collections to relieve the sufferings of the widows, wives, and children of the massacred workers, and likewise to contribute to the costs either of the defence of the arrested workers or of the enquiry proposed by the central committee of Brussels.
In the name of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association:
R. APPLEGARTH, Chairman of the meeting.
R. SHAW, Secretary for America.
KARL MARX, Secretary for Germany.
BERNARD, Secretary for Belgium.
EUG. DUPONT, Secretary for France.
JULES JOHANNARD, Secretary for Italy.
A. ZABICKI, Secretary for Poland.
H. JUNG, Secretary for Switzerland.
COWELL STEPNEY, Treasurer.
J. G. ECCARIUS, General Secretary.
London, 4 May 1869.
Office of the General Council: 256, High Holborn, W.C., London.

N.B. – This manifesto has been printed in English in several thousand copies for England and the United States. It will be translated into the various languages of Europe.

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Preface to the Second Edition of
“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”

[I] Preface.

My friend Joseph Weydemeyer,* who died too soon, intended to bring out a political weekly in New York from 1 January 1852. He invited me to supply the history of the coup d’état for it. I therefore wrote articles for him weekly up to the middle of February under the title: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”. Meanwhile, Weydemeyer’s original plan had come to grief. Instead, he published a monthly, Die Revolution, in the spring of 1852; its second issue consists of my “Eighteenth Brumaire”. At the time a few hundred copies of it found their way to Germany, without, however, coming into the actual book trade. A German bookseller of extremely radical pretensions, to whom I offered the distribution, replied with truly moral horror at a “demand so contrary to the times”.

|IV| It will be seen from these particulars that the present work took shape under the immediate pressure of events and that its historical material does not extend beyond the month of February (1852). Its present re-publication is due in part to the demand of the book trade, in part to the urging of my friends in Germany.

Of the writings which dealt with the same subject at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le Petit and Proudhon’s Coup d’État.

Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible publisher of the coup d’état. In his work, the event itself appears like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative that would stand without parallel in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to present the coup d’état as the result of an antecedent historical development. However, in his hands, the historical construction of the coup d’état imperceptibly turns into a historical apology for the hero of the coup d’état. He thus falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, by contrast, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and conditions that permitted a mediocre and grotesque personage to play the hero’s part.

|V| A reworking of the present work would have robbed it of its distinctive colouring. I have therefore confined myself to the mere correction of misprints and to striking out allusions that are no longer intelligible.

The concluding sentence of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally falls upon the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column,” has already been fulfilled.

Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Since then, and especially in recent years, French literature has finished off the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit. Outside France this violent break with traditional popular belief, this immense spiritual revolution, has been little noticed and even less understood.

In conclusion, I hope that my work will contribute to eliminating the now current catchword of so-called Caesarism, especially in Germany. In this superficial historical analogy one forgets the main point, namely that in ancient Rome the class struggle played itself out only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the merely passive pedestal for those combatants. One forgets Sismondi’s significant dictum: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern ||VI| society lives at the expense of the proletariat. Given such total dissimilarity between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggle, its political offspring can have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury with the High Priest Samuel.

London, 23 June 1869.

Karl Marx.

* During the American Civil War military commander of the district of St. Louis.

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Karl Marx
Report of the General Council
of the International Working Men’s Association

on the right of inheritance

Report of the General Council.

I.— The right of inheritance is only of social import, in so far as it leaves to the heir the power which the deceased wielded during his lifetime, viz., the power of transferring to himself, by means of his property, the produce of other people’s labour. For instance, land gives the living proprietor the power to transfer to himself, under the name of rent, without any equivalent, the produce of other people’s labour. Capital gives him the power to do the same under the name of profit and interest. The property in public funds gives him the power to live without labour upon other people’s labour, &c.

Inheritance does not create that power of transferring the produce of one man’s labour into another man’s pocket—it only relates to the change in the individuals who wield that power. Like all other civil legislation, the laws of inheritance are not the cause, but the effect, the juridical consequence of the existing economical organization of society, based upon private property in the means of production, that is to say, in land, raw material, machinery, &c. In the same way the right of inheritance in the slave is not the cause of slavery, but, on the contrary, slavery is the cause of inheritance in slaves.

II.— What we have to grapple with, is the cause and not the effect, the economical basis—not its juridical superstructure. Suppose the means of production transformed from private into social property, then the right of inheritance—(so far as it is of any social importance)—would die of itself, because a man only leaves after his death what he possessed during his lifetime. Our great aim must, therefore, be to supersede those institutions which give to some people, during their lifetime, the economical power of transferring to themselves the fruits of the labour of the many. Where the state of society is far enough advanced, and the working class possesses

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Report of the General Council on the right of inheritance

sufficient power to abrogate such institutions, they must do so in a direct way. For instance, by doing away with the public debt, they get of course, at the same time, rid of the inheritance in public funds. On the other hand, if they do not possess the power to abolish the public debt, it would be a foolish attempt to abolish the right of inheritance in public funds.

The disappearance of the right of inheritance will be the natural result of a social change superseding private property in the means of production; but the abolition of the right of inheritance can never be the starting point of such a social transformation.

3. It was one of the great errors committed about 40 years since by the disciples of St. Simon, to treat the right of inheritance, not as the legal effect, but as the economical cause of the present social organization. This did not at all prevent them from perpetuating in their system of society private property in land, and the other means of production. Of course elective and life-long proprietors, they thought, might exist as elective kings have existed.

To proclaim the abolition of the right of inheritance as the starting point of the social revolution, would only tend to lead the working class away from the true point of attack against present society. It would be as absurd a thing as to abolish the laws of contract between buyer and seller, while continuing the present state of exchange of commodities.

It would be a thing false in theory, and reactionary in practice.

4. In treating of the laws of inheritance, we necessarily suppose that private property in the means of production continues to exist. If it did no longer exist amongst the living, it could not be transferred from them, and by them, after their death. All measures, in regard to the right of inheritance, can therefore only relate to a state of social transition, where, on the one hand, the present economical base of society is not yet transformed, but where, on the other hand, the working masses have gathered strength enough to enforce transitory measures calculated to bring about an ultimate radical change of society.

Considered from this standpoint, changes of the laws of inheritance form only part of a great many other transitory measures tending to the same end.

These transitory measures, as to inheritance, can only be: —

(a) Extension of the inheritance duties already existing in many states, and the application of the funds hence derived to purposes of social emancipation.

(b) Limitation of the testamentary right of inheritance, which—as distinguished from the intestate or family right of inheritance—appears an arbitrary and superstitious exaggeration even of the principles of private property themselves.

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Karl Marx
Report of the General Council to the
Fourth Annual Congress of the
International Working Men’s Association

|[71| Report of the General Council

To the Fourth Annual Congress of the
International Working Men’s Association.

Citizens,

The delegates of the different sections will give you detailed reports on the progress of our Association in their respective countries. The report of your general council will mainly relate to the guerilla fights between capital and labour—we mean the strikes which during the last year have perturbed the continent of Europe, and were said to have sprung neither from the misery of the labourer nor from the despotism of the capitalist, but from the secret intrigues of our Association.

A few weeks after the meeting of our last Congress, a memorable strike on the part of the ribbon-weavers and silk-dyers occurred in Basle, a place which to our days has conserved much of the features of a mediaeval town with its local traditions, its narrow prejudices, its purse-proud patricians, and its patriarchal rule of the employer over the employed. Still, a few years ago a Basle manufacturer boasted to an English secretary of embassy, that “the position of the master and the man was on a better footing here than in England,” that “in Switzerland the operative who leaves a good master for better wages would be despised by his own fellow-workmen,” and that “our advantage lies principally in the length of the working time and the moderation of the wages.” You see, patriarchalism, as modified by modern influences, comes to this—that the master is good, and that his wages are bad, that the labourer feels like a mediaeval vassal, and is exploited like a modern wages-slave.

That patriarchalism may further be appreciated from an official Swiss inquiry into the factory employment of children and the state of the

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Report of the General Council to the Fourth Annual Congress

primary public schools. It was ascertained that “the Basle school atmosphere is the worst in the world, that while in the free air carbonic acid forms only 4 parts of 10,000, and in closed rooms should not exceed 10 parts, it rose in Basle common schools to 20-81 parts in the forenoon, and to 53-94 in the afternoon.” Thereupon a member of the Basle Great Council, Mr. Thurneysen, coolly replied, “Don’t allow yourselves to be frightened. The parents have passed through schoolrooms as bad as the present ones, and yet they have escaped with their skins safe.”

Report of the General Council to the Fourth Annual Congress

It will now be understood that an economical revolt on the part of the Basle workmen could not but mark an epoch in the social history of Switzerland. Nothing more characteristic than the starting-point of the movement. There existed an old custom for the ribbon-weavers to have a few hours’ holiday on Michaelmas. The weavers claiming this small privilege at the usual time in the factory of Messrs. Dubary and Sons, one of the masters declared, in a harsh voice and with imperious gesticulation, “Whoever leaves the factory will be dismissed at once and for ever.” Finding their protestations in vain, 104 out of 172 weavers left the workshop without, however, believing in their definite dismissal, since master and men were bound by written contract to give a fourteen days’ notice to quit. On their return the next morning they found the factory surrounded by gendarmes, keeping off the yesterday’s rebels, with whom all their comrades now made common cause. Being thus suddenly thrown out of work, the weavers with their families were simultaneously ejected from the cottages they rented from their employers, who, into the bargain, sent circular letters round to the shopkeepers to debar the houseless ones from all credit for victuals. The struggle thus begun lasted from the 9th of November, 1868, to the spring of 1869. The limits of our report do not allow us to enter upon its details. It suffices to state that it originated in a capricious and spiteful act of capitalist despotism, in a cruel lock-out, which led to strikes, from time to time interrupted by compromises, again and again broken on the part of the masters, and that it culminated in the vain attempt of the Basle “High and Honourable State Council”, to intimidate the working people by military measures and a quasi state of siege.

During their sedition the workmen were supported by the International Working Men’s Association. But that was not all. That society the masters said had first smuggled the modern spirit of rebellion into the good old town of Basle. To again expel that mischievous intruder from Basle became, therefore, their great pre-occupation. Hard they tried, though in vain, to enforce the withdrawal from it as a condition of peace, upon their subjects. Getting generally worsted in their war with the International they vented their spleen in strange pranks. Owning some industrial branch establishments at Lörrach, in Baden, these republicans induced the grand-ducal official to suppress the International section at that place, a measure which, however, was soon after rescinded by the Baden Government. The Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, a paper of world-wide circulation, presuming to report on the Basle events in an impartial spirit, the angry worthies threatened it in foolish letters with the withdrawal of their subscriptions. To London they expressly sent a messenger on the fantastic errand of ascertaining the dimensions of the International general “treasury-box”. Orthodox Christians as they are, if they had lived at the time of nascent Christianity, they would, above all things, have spied into St. Paul’s banking accounts at Rome.

Their clumsily savage proceedings brought down upon them some ironical lessons of worldly wisdom on the part of the Geneva capitalist organs. Yet, a few months later, the uncouth Basle vestrymen might have returned the compliment with usurious interest to the Geneva men of the world.

In the month of March there broke out in Geneva a buildings’ trade strike, and a compositors’ strike, both bodies being affiliated to the International. The builders’ strike was provoked by the masters setting aside a convention solemnly entered upon with their workmen a year ago. The compositors’ strike was but the winding-up of a ten years’ quarrel which the men had during all that time in vain tried to settle by five consecutive commissions. As in Basle, the masters transformed at once their private feuds with their men into a state crusade against the International Working Men’s Association.

The Geneva State Council dispatched policemen to receive at the railway-stations, and sequestrate from all contact with the strikers, such foreign workmen as the masters might contrive to inveigle from abroad. It allowed the “Jeunesse Dorée”, the hopeful loafers of “La Jeune Suisse”, armed with revolvers, to assault in the streets and places of public resort, workmen and workwomen. It launched its own police ruffians on the working people on different occasions, and signally on the 24 May, when it enacted at Geneva, on a small scale, the Paris scenes which Raspail has branded as “Les orgies infernales des casse-têtes”. When the Geneva workmen passed in public meeting an address to the State Council, calling upon it to inquire into these infernal police orgies, the State Council replied by a sneering rebuke. It evidently wanted, at the behest of its capitalist superiors, to madden the Geneva people into an émeute, to stamp that émeute out by the armed force, to sweep the International from the Swiss soil, and to subject the workmen to a Decembrist régime. This scheme was baffled by the energetic action and moderating influence of our Geneva Federal committee. The masters had at last to give way.

And now listen to some of the invectives of the Geneva capitalists and their press-gang against the International. In public meeting they passed an address to the State Council, where the following phrase occurs: “The International Committee at Geneva ruins the Canton of Geneva by decrees sent from London and Paris; it wants here to suppress all industry and all labour.” One of their journals stated, “That the leaders of the International were secret agents of the Emperor, who, at the opportune moment, were very likely to turn out public accusers against this little Switzerland of ours.”

And this on the part of the men who had just shown themselves so eager to transplant at a moment’s notice the Decembrist régime to the Swiss soil, on the part of financial magnates, the real rulers of Geneva and other Swiss towns, whom all Europe knows to have long since been converted from citizens of the Swiss republic into mere feudatories of the French Crédit Mobilier and other International swindling associations.

The massacres by which the Belgian Government did answer in April last to the strikes of the puddlers at Seraing and the coalminers of Borinage, have been fully exposed in the address of the General Council to the workmen of Europe and the United States. We considered this address the more urgent since, with that constitutional model government, such working men’s massacres are not an accident, but an institution. The horrid military drama was succeeded by a judicial farce. In the proceedings against our Belgian general committee at Brussels, whose domiciles were brutally broken in by the police, and many of whose members were placed under secret arrest, the judge of instruction finds the letter of a workman, asking for 500 “Internationales”, and he at once jumps to the conclusion that 500 fighting-men were to be dispatched to the scene of action. The 500 “Internationales” were 500 copies of the Internationale, the weekly organ of our Brussels Committee.

A telegram to Paris by a member of the International, ordering a certain quantity of powder, is raked up. After a prolonged research, the dangerous substance is really laid hand on at Brussels. It is powder for killing vermin. Last, not least, the Belgian police flattered itself, in one of its domiciliary visits, to have got at that phantom treasure which haunts the great mind of the continental capitalist, viz.: the International treasure, the main stock of which is safely hoarded at London, but whose offsets travel continually to all the continental seats of the Association.

The Belgian official inquirer thought it buried in a certain strong box, hidden in a dark place. He gets at it, opens it forcibly, and there was found—some pieces of coal. Perhaps, if touched by the hand of the police, the pure International gold turns at once into coal.

Of the strikes that, in December, 1868, infested several French cotton districts, the most important was that at Sotteville-les-Rouen. The manufacturers of the Department de la Somme had not long ago met at Amiens, in order to consult how they might undersell the English manufacturers in the English market itself. Having made sure that, besides protective duties, the comparative lowness of French wages had till now mainly enabled them to defend France from English cottons, they naturally inferred that a still further lowering of French wages would allow them to invade England with French cottons. The French cotton-workers, they did not doubt, would feel proud at the idea of defraying the expenses of a war of conquest which their masters had so patriotically resolved to wage on the other side of the channel. Soon after it was bruited about that the cotton manufacturers of Rouen and its environs had, in secret conclave, agreed upon the same line of policy. Then an important reduction of wages was suddenly proclaimed at Sotteville-les-Rouen, and then for the first time the Normand weavers rose against the encroachments of capital. They acted under the stir of the moment. Neither had they before formed a trades union nor provided for any means of resistance. In their distress they appealed to the International committee at Rouen, which found for them some immediate aid from the workmen of Rouen, the neighbouring districts, and Paris. Towards the end of December, 1868, the general council was applied to by the Rouen Committee, at a moment of utmost distress throughout the English cotton districts, of unparalleled misery in London, and a general depression in all branches of British industry. This state of things has continued in England to this moment. Despite such highly unfavourable circumstances, the general council thought that the peculiar character of the Rouen conflict would stir the English workmen to action. This was a great opportunity to show the capitalists that their international industrial warfare, carried on by screwing wages down now in this country, now in that, would be checked at last by the international union of the working classes. To our appeal the English workmen replied at once by a first contribution to Rouen, and the London Trades Council resolved to summon, in unison with the general council, a metropolitan monster meeting on behalf of their Normand brethren. These proceedings were stopped by the news of the sudden cessation of the Sotteville strike. The miscarriage of that economical revolt was largely compensated for by its moral results. It enlisted the Normand cotton-workers into the revolutionary army of labour, it gave rise to the birth of trades unions at Rouen, Elboeuf, Darnetal, and the environs; and it sealed anew the bond of fraternity between the English and French working classes.

During the winter and spring of 1869 the propaganda of our Association in France was paralysed, consequent upon the violent dissolution of our Paris section in 1868, the police chicaneries in the departments, and the absorbing interest of the French general elections.

The elections once over, numerous strikes exploded in the Loire mining districts, at Lyons, and many other places. The economical facts

during these struggles between masters and men, struck the public eye like so many dissolving views of the high-coloured fancy pictures of working-class prosperity under the auspices of the Second Empire. The claims of redress on the part of the workmen were of so moderate a character, and so urgent a nature that, after some show of angry resistance, they had to be conceded, one and all. The only strange feature about those strikes was their sudden explosion after a seeming lull, and the rapid succession in which they followed each other. Still, the reason of all this was simple and palpable. Having, during the elections, successfully tried their hands against their public despot, the workmen were naturally led to try them after the elections against their private despots. In one word, the elections had stirred their animal spirits. The governmental press, of course, paid as it is to misstate and misinterpret unpleasant facts, traced these events to a secret *mot d’ordre* from the London General Council, which, they said, sent their emissaries from place to place to teach the otherwise highly satisfied French workmen that it was a bad thing to be overworked, underpaid, and brutally treated. A French police organ, published at London, the “*International*”—(see its number of August 3)—has condescended to reveal to the world the secret motives of our deleterious activity. “The strangest feature”, it says, “is that the strikes were ordered to break out in such countries where misery is far from making itself felt. These unexpected explosions, occurring so opportunely for certain neighbours of ours, who had first to apprehend war, make many people ask themselves whether these strikes took not place on the request of some foreign Machiavelli, who had known how to win the good graces of this all-powerful association.” At the very moment when this French police print impeached us of embarrassing the French government by strikes at home, in order to disembarrass Count Bismarck from war abroad, a Prussian paper accused us of embarrassing the Northern German Bund with strikes, in order to crush German industry for the benefit of foreign manufactures.

The relations of the International to the French strikes we shall illustrate by two cases of a typical character. In the one case, the strike of St. Etienne and the following massacre at Ricamarie, the French Government itself will no longer dare to pretend that the International had anything whatever to do with it. In the Lyons case, it was not the International that threw the workmen into strikes, but, on the contrary, it was the strikes that threw the workmen into the International.

The miners of St. Etienne, Rive-de-Giers, and Firminy had calmly, but firmly, requested the managers of the mining companies to reduce the working day, numbering 12 hours hard underground labour, and revise the wages tariff. Failing in their attempt at a conciliatory settlement, they struck on the 11th of June. For them it was of course a vital question to secure the co-operation of the miners that had not yet turned out to combine with them. To prevent this, the managers of the mining companies requested and got from the Prefect of the Loire a forest of bayonets. On the 12th of June, the strikers found the coal pits under strong military guard. To make sure of the zeal of the soldiers thus lent to them by the government, the mining companies paid each soldier a franc daily. The soldiers paid the companies back by catching, on the 16th June, about 60 miners eager to get at a conversation with their brethren in the coalpits. These prisoners were in the afternoon of the same day escorted to St. Etienne by a detachment (150 men), of the fourth regiment of the line. Before these stout warriors set out, an engineer of the Dorian mines distributed them 60 bottles of brandy, telling them at the same time, they ought to have a sharp eye on their prisoners’ gang, these miners being savages, barbarians, ticket-of-leave men. What with the brandy, and what with the sermon, a bloody collision was thus prepared for. Followed on their march by a crowd of miners, with their wives and children, surrounded by them on a narrow defile on the heights of the Moncel, Quartier Ricamarie, requested to surrender the prisoners, and, on their refusal, attacked by a volley of stones, the soldiers, without any preliminary warning, fired with their chassepots pell-mell into the crowd, killing 15 persons, amongst whom were 2 women and an infant, and dangerously wounding a considerable number. The tortures of the wounded were horrible. One of the sufferers was a poor girl of 12 years, Jenny Petit, whose name will live immortal in the annals of the working-class martyrology. Struck by two balls from behind, one of which lodged in her leg, while the other passed through her back, broke her arm, and escaped through her right shoulder. “Le chasse-pot avait encore fait merveille.”

This time, however, the government was not long in finding out that it had committed not only a crime, but a blunder. It was not hailed as the saviour of society by the middle class. The whole municipal council of St. Etienne tendered its resignation in a document, denouncing the scoundrelism of the troops, and insisting upon their removal from the town. The French press rung with cries of horror! Even such conservative prints as the *Moniteur Universel* opened subscriptions for the victims. The government had to remove the odious regiment from St. Etienne.

Under such difficult circumstances, it was a luminous idea to sacrifice on the altar of public indignation a scapegoat always at hand, the International Working Men’s Association. At the judicial trial of the so-called rioters, the act of accusation divided them into 10 categories, very ingeniously shading their respective darkness of guilt. The first class, the most deeply tinged, consisted of workmen more particularly suspected to have obeyed some secret *mot d’ordre* from abroad, given out by the International. The evidence was, of course, overwhelming, as the following short extract from a French paper will show:—“The interrogatory of the witnesses did not allow ‘neatly’ to establish the participation of the International Association. The witnesses affirm only the presence, at the head of the bands, of some unknown people, wearing white frocks and caps. None of the unknown ones have been arrested, or appear in the dock. To the question: do you believe in the intervention of the International Association? a witness replies: I believe it, but without any proofs whatever!“

Shortly after the Ricamarie massacres, the dance of economical revolts was opened at Lyons by the silk-winders, most of them females. In their distress they appealed to the International, which, mainly by its members in France and Switzerland, helped them to carry the day. Despite all attempts at police intimidation, they publicly proclaimed their adhesion to our Society, and entered it formally by paying the statutory contributions to the general council. At Lyons, as before at Rouen, the female workers played a noble and prominent part in the movement. Other Lyons trades have since followed in the track of the silk-winders. Some 10,000 new members were thus gained for us in a few weeks amongst that heroic population which more than thirty years ago inscribed upon its banner the watchword of the modern Proletariat: “*Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!*”

Meanwhile the French Government continues its petty tribulations against the International. At Marseilles our members were forbidden meeting for the election of a delegate to Basle. The same paltry trick was played in other towns. But the workmen on the Continent, as elsewhere, begin at last to understand that the surest way to get one’s natural rights is to exercise them at one’s personal risk.

The Austrian workmen, and especially those of Vienna, although entering their class movement only after the events of 1866, have at once occupied a vantage-ground. They marched at once under the banners of socialism and the International, which by their delegates at the recent Eisenach congress, they have now joined *en masse*.

If anywhere, the liberal middle-class has exhibited in Austria its selfish instincts, its mental inferiority, and its petty spite against the working class. Their ministry, seeing the empire distracted and threatened by an internecine struggle of races and nationalities, pounces upon the workmen who alone proclaim the fraternity of all races and nationalities. The middle-class itself, which has won its new position not by any heroism of its own, but only by the signal disaster of the Austrian army, hardly able as it is, and knows itself to be, to defend its new conquests from the attacks of the dynasty, the aristocracy, and the clerical party, nevertheless wastes its best energies in the mean attempt to debar the working class from the rights of combination, public meeting, free press and free thought. In Austria, as in all other states of continental Europe, the International has supplanted the *ci-devant spectre-rouge*. When, on the 13th of July, a workmen’s massacre on a small scale was enacted at Brunn the Cottonopolis of Moravia, the event was traced to the secret instigations of the International, whose agents, however, were unfortunately invested with the rare gift of rendering themselves invisible. When some leaders of the Vienna work-people figured before the judicial bench, the public accuser stigmatized them as tools of the foreigner. Only, to show how conscientiously he had studied the matter, he committed the little error of confounding the middle-class League of Peace and Liberty with the working men’s International Association.

If the workmen’s movement was thus harassed in Cis-Leithanian Austria, it has been recklessly prosecuted in Hungary. On this point the most reliable reports from Pesth and Presburg have reached the general council. One example of the treatment of the Hungarian workmen by the public authorities may suffice. Herr von Wenckheim, the Hungarian Home Minister, was just staying at Vienna on public business. Having for months been interdicted from public meetings and even from entertainments destined for the collection of the funds of a sick club, the Presburg workmen sent at last delegates to Vienna, then and there to lay their grievances before the illustrious Herr von Wenckheim. Puffing and blowing his cigar, the illustrious one received them with the bullying apostrophe, “Are you workmen? Do you work hard? For nothing else you have to care. You do not want public clubs; and if you dabble in politics, we shall know what measures to take against you. I shall do

Report of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association to the Fourth Annual Congress in Basle

Report of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association to the IVth Annual Congress in Basle. |

|B]| The delegates of the various sections will render you detailed reports on the progress of our Association in their respective countries. The report of your General Council refers principally to the guerilla fights between capital and labour—we mean the strikes which during the past year have agitated the continent of Europe, and which are alleged to have sprung neither from the distress of the worker nor from the despotism of the capitalist, but from the secret intrigues of our Association.

A few weeks after the holding of our last Congress a memorable strike broke out among the ribbon-weavers and silk-dyers of Basle. Basle is a place which has preserved to this day many traits of a mediaeval town, with its local traditions, its narrow prejudices, its patricians proud of their money-bags, and its patriarchal relation between employer and workman. Only a few years ago a Basle manufacturer boasted to an English attaché that “the mutual position of master and men is far more favourable here than in England”, that “in Switzerland a workman who left a good master for better wages would be despised by his own fellow-workers”, and that “our advantage over England consists principally in the long hours of labour and the moderate wages.” It will be seen that this patriarchal regime in its form modified by modern influences amounts to this, that the master is good and his wages are bad, that the workman feels like a mediaeval vassal and toils like a modern wage slave.

This patriarchalism may further be judged from an official Swiss inquiry into the consumption of children in the factories and the condition of the public elementary schools. It turned out that “the Basle school | atmosphere is the worst in the world, that whereas in the open air carbonic acid forms 4 parts in 10,000, and in closed rooms ought not to exceed 10 parts, it rises in the ordinary Basle schools to 20–81 parts in the forenoon, and to 53–94 parts in the afternoon.” Upon this a member of the Basle Grand Council, Herr Thurneisen, very coolly remarked: “Do not be frightened. The parents sat in just as bad schoolrooms as the children do now, and yet they came out of it with a whole skin.”

It will now be readily understood that an economic revolt on the part of the Basle workmen makes an epoch in the social history of Switzerland. Nothing is more characteristic than the starting-point of this movement! In Basle, according to old custom, the workmen had a half-holiday on the last day of the late autumn fair. When, on 9 November 1868, the workmen of the ribbon factory of Debary and Sons claimed it as usual, one of the manufacturers, in a harsh tone and with a commanding look, declared to them: “Whoever goes away and does not continue to work is discharged at once and for ever.” After some fruitless protests 104 out of 172 weavers at once left the factory. They did not, however, believe in the definitive dismissal, because a mutual fortnight’s notice was stipulated by written contract. On their return next morning they found the factory surrounded by gendarmes, who excluded the rebels. The weavers who had not taken the half-holiday now likewise refused to enter. The universal watchword was: “All or none.”

Thus suddenly thrown out of work, the weavers were at the same time driven with their families from the dwellings they rented from their manufacturers. The latter at the same time sent round circulars to butchers, bakers, and grocers, to cut off all credit for provisions from the insurgents. The struggle thus opened lasted from 9 November 1868 until the spring of 1869. The limits of our report do not allow us to

To go into further details. Enough, the movement originated in a frivolous and hateful act of capitalist despotism, in a cruel lockout, ran out into strikes, interrupted from time to time by compromises, again and again broken by the masters, and culminated in the vain attempt of the high-and-mighty Grand Council of Basel to intimidate the workers by military measures and a kind of state of siege.

During this uprising the workers were supported by the International Working Men’s Association. In the opinion of the masters, this society had first smuggled the modern rebellious spirit into the good old imperial city of Basel. To throw this insolent intruder out of Basel again now became the goal of their endeavours. They sought to impose the withdrawal from the society upon their subjects as a condition of peace. But in vain. When, on the whole, they came off second best in the war with the International, they gave vent to their ill-humour in farcical capers. These republicans, who own larger factories in the Baden border town of Lörrach near Basel, induced the bailiff there to dissolve our section in that place, a measure which, however, was soon rescinded by the Baden government. When the *Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung* took it upon itself to report impartially on the Basel events, the “respectability” threatened, in foolish letters, to cancel their subscriptions. To London they sent an emissary with the fantastic mission of taking the dimensions of the international general cash-box. Had these good orthodox Christians lived in the early days of Christianity, they would above all have spied out the Apostle Paul’s bank credit in Rome.

Their clumsy, barbarous procedure drew them some ironical lectures on worldly wisdom from the Geneva capitalists. A few months later, the Basel philistines had the satisfaction of paying back the Geneva men of the world with compound interest.

In the month of March two strikes broke out in Geneva, on the part of the building workers and the compositors, both of whose societies form sections of the International. The building workers’ strike was provoked by the masters, who broke the contract solemnly concluded with their workers the previous year. The compositors’ strike was the last word of a 10-year dispute which the workers had tried in vain to settle through five successive commissions. As in Basel, the masters at once converted their private feud with the workers into a crusade of the state power against the International Working Men’s Association.

The Geneva Council of State employed police officers to collect workers imported from a distance by the masters at the railway station and to shut them off from all contact with the strikers. It allowed the Geneva *jeunesse dorée*, armed with revolvers, to attack workers, men and women, in the streets and other public places. It hurled its own police scum at the workers on various occasions, and particularly on 24 May, when in Geneva, on a small scale, the Paris scenes were enacted which Raspail branded as “*les orgies infernales des casse-têtes*”. When the Geneva workers in a public meeting resolved upon an address to the Council of State, demanding an inquiry into these infernal police orgies, the Council of State curtly rejected their request. They obviously intended to incite the Geneva workers to a riot, to crush the riot by force, to sweep the Internationals from Swiss soil and to subject the proletarians to a December regime. The plan was frustrated by the energetic measures and the moderating influence of our Swiss Federal Committee. The masters finally had to give way.

Now hear some of the invectives of the Geneva capitalists and their press gang against the Internationals! In a public meeting they issued an address to the Council of State, in which it says among other things: “They are ruining the Canton of Geneva by decrees from London and Paris; they want to suppress all labour and all industry here.” And a Swiss paper printed that the leaders of the International were “secret agents of the Emperor Napoleon, who at the opportune moment will appear as public accusers against our little Switzerland.”

And this from the same gentlemen who had shown themselves equally eager to transplant the December regime to Swiss soil; from those financial agents who dominate Geneva like other Swiss towns, and of whom all Europe knows that they have long ago transformed themselves from citizens of the Swiss Republic into wage-labourers of the *Crédit Mobilier* and other international swindling associations!

The massacres with which the Belgian government answered the strikes of the puddlers at Seraing and the colliers of the Borinage in the month of April were exposed in detail in an address of the General Council to the workers of Europe and the United States. We considered such an address all the more urgent because in this model constitutional state a workers’ massacre is no accident, but an institution. The abominable military drama was followed close on its heels by the judicial farce. In his investigations against our Belgian General Committee in Brussels, whose premises were brutally raided by the police and several of whose members were arrested, the examining magistrate found the letter of a worker ordering “500 Internationals.” He at once concluded that 500 fighting-men were being requested for the battlefield. The 500 Internationals were 500 copies of the *Internationale*, the weekly organ of the Brussels Committee. He then picked up a telegram to Paris, in which a certain quantity of powder was demanded. After a long house-search the dangerous substance was discovered in Brussels. It was rat poison. Finally, the Belgian police flattered itself that it had caught the treasure-ghost which haunts the brains of the continental capitalists, whose main stock lies in London and from which offshoots are constantly shipped across the sea to all the central seats of our society. The Belgian official investigator imagines it hidden in an iron chest in a dark corner. His henchmen pounce on the chest, break it open by force, and find—a few pieces of coal. Perhaps, touched by police hands, the pure international gold instantly turns into coal.

Of the strikes that afflicted various seats of the French cotton industry in December 1868, the most important was the one at Sotteville-lès-Rouen. The manufacturers of the Department of the Somme had not long before held a meeting at Amiens to deliberate how they could undersell their English rivals on the English market itself. Agreement was reached that, apart from tariffs, the relative low level of wages had been the main protection of France against English cotton goods. It was naturally concluded that a still further lowering of wages would allow England to be invaded by French cotton goods. There was never a doubt that the French cotton workers would be proud to defray the costs of a war of conquest which their patriotic masters had resolved to wage on the other side of the Channel. Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the manufacturers of Rouen and its environs had, in a secret conclave, come to a similar agreement. Soon after, a considerable reduction of wages was suddenly enforced at Sotteville-lès-Rouen, and now the Norman weavers rose for the first time against the encroachments of capital. They acted in the heat of the moment. They had neither previously formed trades unions nor provided any kind of means of resistance. In their embarrassment they appealed to the International Committee at Rouen, which procured them the first necessary help from the workers of Rouen, the neighbouring localities, and Paris. Towards the end of December the Rouen Committee turned to the General Council, at a time of extreme distress in the English seats of the cotton industry, unprecedented misery in London, and general pressure in all branches of production. This state of affairs continues in England to this moment. Despite such thoroughly unfavourable circumstances the General Council believed that the peculiar character of the Rouen conflict would spur the English workers to special efforts. Here was a great opportunity to prove to the capitalists that their international industrial war, waged by screwing down wages, now in this country, now in that, would finally be broken by the international union of the working classes. The English workers responded to our appeal immediately with a first contribution for Rouen, and the London General Council of Trades Unions resolved, together with us, to summon a monster meeting on behalf of the Norman brothers. The news of the sudden end of the Sotteville strike prevented further steps.

The material failure of this economic revolt was compensated for by great moral results. It enlisted the Norman cotton workers in the revolutionary army of labour, gave the impetus to the foundation of trades unions at Rouen, Elbeuf, Darnétal, etc., and once again sealed the compact of brotherhood between the English and French working classes. During the winter and spring of 1869 our propaganda in France remained paralysed by the suppression of our Paris Committee in 1868, the police chicaneries in the departments, and the overwhelming interest of the general elections.

The elections were hardly over when numerous strikes broke out in the mining districts of the Loire, at Lyons, and in many other places. The highly coloured fantasy pictures of the prosperity of the workers under the Second Empire faded away like phantasmagoria before the economic facts which these struggles between the capitalists and workers brought to light. The demands of the workers were so modest and so incontrovertible that, after a few often shameless attempts at resistance, they all had to be granted. There was nothing at all striking about these strikes except their sudden explosion after an apparent calm, and the speed with which they followed one another blow upon blow. Nevertheless, the cause was palpably simple. During the elections the workers had successfully risen against their public despots. What more natural than, after the elections, to rise against their private despots?

The elections had set men’s minds in motion. It is in the natural order of things that the government press, paid as it is for the falsification of facts, found the key in the secret words of command of the London General Council, which sends its emissaries from place to place to reveal to the previously perfectly contented French workers the secret that it is an evil thing to be overworked, underpaid, and brutally treated. A French police organ which appears in London, *l’International*, reveals to the world in its number of 3 August the secret mainspring of our nefarious activity.

“The strangest thing,” it says, “is that the strikes were ordained to break out in such countries where misery is still far from

is to make itself felt. These unexpected explosions came so extremely opportunely for a certain neighbour of France, who was just then fearing war, that many people are asking themselves whether these strikes did not occur at the request of some foreign Machiavelli, who knew how to win the favour of that all-powerful society.” At the same time as this French police rag accused us of harassing the French government at home with strikes in order to roll the burden of a foreign war off Count Bismarck’s shoulders, a Rhineland-Prussian manufacturers’ paper hinted that we were shaking the North German Confederation with strikes in order to cripple German industry for the benefit of foreign manufacturers.

We shall now examine the relations of the International to the French strikes by reference to two cases of a typical character. In the one case, the strike of St-Etienne and the subsequent massacre at Ricamarie, the French government itself will no longer dare to assert any interference on the part of the International.

In the events at Lyons, it was not the International which threw the workers into strikes, but, on the contrary, the strikes which threw the workers into the arms of the International.

The coal miners of St-Etienne, Rive-de-Giers and Fumery had quietly but firmly demanded of the directors of the mining companies a revision of the wage tariff and a limitation of the working day, which counted 12 full hours of hard, underground labour. Their attempt at an amicable settlement having failed, they declared a strike on 11 June. It was naturally a matter of life and death for them to secure the cooperation of those comrades who were still working. To prevent this, the directors requested and obtained from the prefect of the Loire a forest of bayonets. On 12 June the strikers found the coal mines under heavy military occupation. In order to ensure the zeal of the soldiers whom the government thus lent them, the mining companies paid each soldier 1 franc a head per day. The soldiers repaid the companies by capturing about 60 colliers who were trying to reach their comrades in the pits. That afternoon these prisoners were escorted to St-Etienne by 150 men of the Fourth Line Regiment. Before the brave warriors set off, an engineer of the Dorian Company distributed 60 bottles of cognac among them and impressed upon them the necessity of keeping a sharp eye on the prisoners. These miners, he said, were savages, barbarians, released galley slaves. The brandy and the sermon paved the way for a bloody collision. On their march, followed by a crowd of coal workers with women and children, and surrounded by them in a narrow pass on the heights of Moncel, in the district of Ricamarie, called upon to hand over the prisoners; upon their refusal, attacked with a hail of stones, the soldiers, without any preliminary warning, fired straight into the tightly packed crowd, killing 15 persons, including 2 women and an infant, and wounding a large number. The tortures of the wounded were dreadful; among them was a poor girl of 12, Jenny Petit, whose name will live forever in the martyrology of the working class. She was hit from behind by two bullets, one of which lodged in her loin, while the other flew through her back, broke her arm, and came out through her right shoulder. “Les chassepots avaient encore fait merveille.”

This time, however, the government soon found that it had committed not only a crime but a blunder. It was not hailed as the saviour of society by the middle class. The municipal council of St-Etienne resigned en masse in a document in which it charged the soldiery with inhumanity and demanded the removal of the regiment from the town. The French press broke out in a cry of horror. Even such conservative papers as the *Moniteur universel* took up collections for the victims. The government had to remove the hated regiment from St-Etienne.

Under these difficult circumstances, it was a bright idea to sacrifice a scapegoat on the altar of public indignation — the International Working Men’s Association. At the trial of the alleged insurgents, the indictment divided them into 10 categories, very artfully shading the degrees of their guilt. The first category, the darkest, consisted of 5 workers, especially suspected of having received their secret watchword from outside, from the International. The evidence was of course overwhelming, as the following extract from a French court report shows: “The examination of witnesses has not made it possible to establish precisely the participation of the International Association. The witnesses merely affirm that there were unknown persons at the head of the bands, dressed in white smocks and caps. But none of these unknowns has been arrested, and none sits in the dock. Asked: Do you believe in the intervention of the International Association? a witness answered: I believe it, but I have absolutely no proof.”

Shortly after the Ricamarie massacre, the dance of economic revolts in Lyons was opened by the silk winders, mostly females. In their distress they appealed to the International, which helped them to victory, thanks in particular to its members in France and Switzerland. Despite all attempts at intimidation by the police, they publicly declared their adhesion to our society and formally joined it by paying the statutory contributions to the General Council. In Lyons, as previously in Rouen, the women workers played a magnanimous and prominent role.

Other branches of industry in Lyons followed hard on the heels of the silk winders. Thus our society gained, in a few weeks, more than 10,000 new adherents among that heroic population which, more than 30 years earlier, had inscribed on its banner the watchword of the modern proletariat: “vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant” (live working, or die fighting).

Meanwhile the French government continued with its petty harassments against the International. In Marseilles it forbade our members to meet for the election of a delegate to the Basle Congress. The same trick was repeated in other towns, but the workers of the Continent, as elsewhere, are at last beginning to realise that the surest way to acquire one’s natural rights is to exercise them without permission, each at his own personal risk.

The workers of Austria, especially those of Vienna, are already coming to the fore, although they only entered the movement after the events of 1866. They immediately rallied under the banner of Socialism and the International, which they joined en masse through their delegates at the recent Eisenach Congress. If anywhere, the liberal middle class in Austria has displayed its selfish instincts, its intellectual inferiority, and its petty rancour against the working class. Its ministry, seeing the empire torn and threatened by the racial and national struggle, persecutes the workers, who alone proclaim the fraternisation of all races and nationalities. The middle class itself, which owes its new position not to its own heroism but exclusively to the misfortunes of the Austrian army, which is hardly capable, as it well knows, of defending its new gains against the attacks of the dynasty, the aristocracy, and the clergy, this middle class nonetheless wastes its energies in the miserable attempt to exclude the working class from the right of combination, of public meetings, and of the press.

In Austria, as in all other continental states, the International has displaced the erstwhile red spectre. When, on 13 July, a workers’ massacre on a small scale was enacted at Brno, the main cotton town of Moravia, the event was explained by the secret incitements of the International, whose agents, however, are in possession of the cap of invisibility that makes them unseen. When certain Viennese popular leaders stood trial, the public prosecutor branded them as foreign agents. As proof of his profound expertise, he merely committed the little error of confusing the bourgeois Liberty and Peace League of Berne with the proletarian International.

While the labour movement is thus persecuted in Cisleithanian Austria, it is openly and shamelessly hunted down in Hungary. On this point the General Council has before it the most reliable reports from Pest and Pressburg. One example of the treatment of Hungarian workers by the authorities will suffice. Herr von Wenckheim, Royal Minister of the Interior in Hungary, was just then with the Hungarian Delegation in Vienna. The Pressburg workers, who for months have been forbidden to hold meetings and who were even prohibited from organising a festival whose net proceeds were to go to the foundation fund of a sick benefit society, sent a few days ago several workers, among them the well-known agitator Niemtzik, to Vienna to lodge a complaint with the Minister of the Interior. It was with difficulty that they gained access to the high gentleman, and when at last the ministerial door opened, the workers were received by the Minister in a manner offensive to all decency: “Are you workers? Do you work diligently?” asked the Minister, turning his steaming cigar about in his mouth; “well, beyond that you have nothing to worry about, you need no associations, and if you meddle with politics, we shall know how to put a stop to it. I shall do absolutely nothing for you. Let the workers grumble as they please!” To the question whether everything was thus left to the arbitrariness of the authorities, the Minister replied: “Yes, on my responsibility.” After a lengthy and fruitless exchange, the workers finally left the Minister with the declaration: “Since the political conditions determine the situation of the workers, the workers must occupy themselves with politics, and they will do so.”

In Prussia and the rest of Germany, the past year was distinguished by the formation of trades unions throughout the whole country. At the recent Congress in Eisenach, the delegates of more than 150,000 workers from Germany proper, Austria, and Switzerland founded a new social-democratic party with a programme into which the leading principles of our Statutes were incorporated verbatim. Prevented by law from forming formal sections of our Association, they resolved to take individual membership cards from the General Council.

New branches of the Association have been formed in Naples, Spain, and Holland. In Barcelona and Amsterdam weekly organs are being issued.

Report of the General Council to the Fourth Annual Congress in Basle

The laurels of the Belgian government on the glorious battlefields of Seraing and Frameries seem to disturb the sleep of our great powers. No wonder, then, that England, too, this year can boast of its workers’ massacre. The Welsh colliers at the Leeswood Great Pit near Mold in Denbighshire were suddenly given notice of a wage reduction by the manager of the colliery, who had long been hated by them as a petty and incorrigible tyrant. They collected people from the neighbouring works, drove him out of his house, dragged all his furniture to the nearest railway station. These unfortunate people, in their childish ignorance, imagined they could thus get rid of him for good. On 28 May, 2 leaders were transported to the court at Mold by the police and under the escort of a detachment of the 4th Infantry Regiment, “the kings own”. On the way, a crowd of colliers tried to free them. Upon the resistance of the police and the soldiers, a hail of stones fell upon them. Without previous warning, the soldiers answered the hail of stones with a hail of bullets from their breech-loaders. Five persons, among them two women and a child, were killed and a great number wounded. Up to this point there exists a great analogy between the massacres of Mold and Ricamarie; there it ceases. In France, the soldiers were only responsible to their commanders; in England they had to pass through the purgatory of a coroner’s jury, but the coroner was a deaf, half-simple old man, into whose ear-trumpet the testimonies had to be shouted, and the Welsh jury was a narrow-minded, prejudiced class jury. They declared the killing “justifiable homicide”. In France, the rioters were sentenced to imprisonment of 3 to 18 months and soon afterwards amnestied; in England they were sentenced to 10 years’ penal servitude with irons.

In the whole French press, a cry of rage against the troops. In England, the press had only smirks for the soldiers and only frowns for their victims. Nevertheless, the English workers have gained a great deal through the loss of a great and dangerous illusion. Until now they believed themselves more or less protected by the formality of the Riot Act and the subordination of the military to the civil authority. They are now taught better. Mr Bruce, the Liberal Home Secretary, declared in the House of Commons that any magistrate, the first fox-hunter or parson that comes to hand, could have troops fire upon crowds appearing riotous to him without previous reading of the Riot Act. Secondly, however, the soldiers could also fire on their own initiative under the pretext of self-defence. The Liberal minister forgot to add that under such circumstances everyone would have to be armed at the expense of the state with a breech-loader for self-defence against the soldiers.

The following resolution was drawn up on 30 August at the general congress of the Trades Union in Birmingham:

“Considering that the local organisation of labour has almost disappeared before an organisation of a national character; that the extension of the principle of free trade calls forth such a competition of capitalists that in this international steeplechase the interest of the worker is lost sight of and sacrificed; that the workers’ organisation must be further extended and made international; considering further that the International Working Men’s Association aims at the common representation of the interests of the workers and that the interests of the working classes are everywhere identical, this Congress recommends that Association heartily to the support of the workers of the United Kingdom and in particular to the organised labour bodies and earnestly urges them to affiliate with that Association. The Congress is at the same time convinced that the realisation of the principles of the International will lead to lasting peace among the nations of the Earth.”

Last May, war threatened between the United States and England. Your General Council therefore sent an address to Mr Sylvis, the president of the American National Labour Union, in which it called upon the American working class, in the face of the war clamour of the ruling class, to command peace.

The sudden death of Mr Sylvis, that valiant champion of our cause, entitles us, in remembrance of him, to close our report with his reply letter:

“Philadelphia, 26 May 1869.

I received your address of 12 May yesterday. I am very happy to receive such cordial words from our fellow-workers across the ocean. Our cause is a common one: it is the war between poverty and wealth. Labour everywhere occupies the same low position and capital is the same tyrant in all parts of the world. Therefore I say: Our cause is a common one. I extend to you, in the name of the working classes of the United States, the hand of fellowship. I extend it through you to all those you represent and to all the downtrodden and oppressed sons and daughters of toil in Europe. Go forward in the good work you have undertaken until the most glorious success crowns your efforts. That is also our resolve. Our last war has resulted in the building up of the most infamous money aristocracy on the face of the earth. This money power eats out the marrow of the people. We have declared war upon it and feel sure of victory. If possible, we will win through the ballot; if not, we must resort to more serious means. A little blood-letting is sometimes necessary in desperate cases.”

On behalf of the General Council:
Robert Applegarth, Chairman
Cowell Stepney, Treasurer
J. George Eccarius, General Secretary.
London, 1 September 1869.
Office: 256, High Holborn, W.C.

Karl Marx
Circular of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland, 1 January 1870

The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland.

At its extraordinary meeting of 1 January 1870 the General Council resolved:
1) We read in *L’Égalité* No. of 11 December 1869:
“it is certain that it (the General Council) neglects things extremely important… We remind it (the obligations of the General Council) of them with the first article of the rules, etc.”; “The General Council is obliged to carry out the resolutions of the Congress”… “We should have enough questions to put to the General Council for its replies to constitute a fairly long bulletin. They will come later.” … “In the meantime etc.” …

The General Council knows of no article, either in the statutes or in the rules, which obliges it to enter into correspondence or polemic with *L’Égalité* or to give “replies” to the “questions” of newspapers.

It is only the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland which, vis-à-vis the General Council, represents the sections of Romance Switzerland. When the Romance Federal Council addresses demands or reprimands to us through the only legitimate channel, i.e. through its secretary, the General Council will always be ready to answer them. But the Romance Federal Council has the right neither to abdicate its functions into the hands of *L’Égalité* and *Le Progrès* nor to let these newspapers usurp its functions.

Generally speaking, the correspondence of the General Council with the national and local committees could not be published without great prejudice to the general interest of the Association. Therefore, if the other organs of the International were to imitate *Le Progrès* and *L’Égalité*, the General Council would find itself placed in the alternative, either of discrediting itself before the public by remaining silent or of violating its duties by answering publicly.

*L’Égalité* joins forces with *Le Progrès* (a newspaper which is not sent to the General Council) to invite *Le Travail* (a Parisian newspaper which so far has not declared itself an organ of the International and which is not sent to the General Council) to summon the General Council. It is almost a league of the public weal.

2) Now, admitting that the questions raised by *L’Égalité* proceed from the Romance Federal Council, we are going to answer, although on the reserve that such questions be no longer communicated to us in this manner.

3) Question of the Report: In the resolutions of the Lausanne Congress inserted in the rules, it is prescribed that the national committees shall send to the General Council documents on the proletarian movement and that the General Council shall then publish a report in the different languages as often as its means permit it (“As often as its means permit, the General Council shall publish a report, etc.”).

The obligation of the General Council was therefore linked to conditions which have never been fulfilled. Even the statistical enquiry, ordered by the statutes, decided on by successive general congresses, annually requested by the General Council, has never been carried out. No documents have been sent to the General Council. As to means, the General Council would long since have ceased to exist without the “regional” contributions from England and without the personal sacrifices of its members.

Thus, the regulation passed at the Lausanne Congress has been a dead letter. As for the Basle Congress, it did not discuss the execution of this existing regulation; it discussed the advisability of a report to be produced and took no resolution (see the German report printed at [Basle] under the eyes of the Congress).

Besides, the General Council believes that the original purpose of the report is at this moment perfectly fulfilled by the different organs of the International published in the different languages and exchanging among themselves. It would be absurd to do, by means of costly reports, what is already done without expense. On the other hand, a report which would publish what is not said in the organs of the International would only serve to admit our enemies behind the scenes.

4) Question of the separation of the General Council from the Regional Council for England.

Long before the founding of *L’Égalité*, this proposal was periodically made within the General Council itself by one or two of its English members. It was always rejected almost unanimously. Although the revolutionary initiative will probably start from France, England alone can serve as lever for a seriously economic revolution. It is the only country where there are no longer any peasants and where landed property is concentrated in few hands. It is the only country where the capitalist form – that is to say, associated labour on a large scale under capitalist masters – has seized hold of almost the whole of production. It is the only country where the great majority of the population consists of wage labourers (wages labourers). It is the only country where the class struggle and the organisation of the working class by Trades Unions have acquired a certain degree of maturity and universality. On account of its domination of the world market, it is the only country where every revolution in economic facts must immediately react upon the whole world. If landlordism and capitalism have their classic seat, in this

15 countries, by repercussion, the material conditions of their destruction are the ripest. The General Council being now in the fortunate position of having its hand directly on this great lever of the proletarian revolution, what folly, we would almost say what crime, to let it fall into purely English hands!

The English have all the material necessary for the social revolution. What they lack is the generalising spirit and the revolutionary passion. It is only the General Council that can supply this, that can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement in this country and consequently everywhere. The great effects we have already produced in this sense are attested by the most intelligent and best accredited journals among the ruling classes, such as e.g. the *Pall Mall Gazette*, the *Saturday Review*, the *Spectator* and the *Fortnightly Review*, not to speak of the so-called radical members of the Commons and the Lords, who, a short time ago, still exercised a great influence on the leaders of the English workers. They publicly accuse us of having poisoned and almost extinguished the English spirit of the working class and of having pushed it into revolutionary socialism.

The only way to bring about this change is by acting as the General Council of the International Association. As General Council we can initiate measures (e.g. the foundation of the Land and Labour League) which later, in the execution, appear before the public as spontaneous movements of the English working class.

If a Regional Council were formed apart from the General Council, what would be the immediate effects? Placed between the General Council and the General Council of Trade Unions, the Regional Council would have no authority. On the other hand, the General Council of the International would lose the handling of the great lever. If we preferred to substitute for serious, underground action the glitter of the stage, we might have committed the mistake of answering publicly the question of the *Égalité*, why the General Council submits to this “most unfortunate cumulation” of functions!

England must not be treated simply as one country among others. It must be treated as the metropolis of capital.

5) Question on the General Council’s Resolution on the Irish Amnesty.

If England is the bulwark of European landlordism and capitalism, the only point where the great blow can be struck against official England is Ireland. In the first place, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in Ireland, it would fall in England. In Ireland the operation is a hundred times easier, because the economic struggle is exclusively concentrated on landed property, because this struggle is at the same time national, and because the people is more revolutionary and more exasperated than in England. Landlordism in Ireland is maintained exclusively by the English army. The moment the forced union between the two countries were to cease, a social revolution, albeit in backward forms, would at once break out. English landlordism would not only lose a great source of its wealth, but also its greatest moral force, namely, that of representing the domination of England over Ireland. On the other hand, by maintaining the power of its landlords in Ireland, the English proletariat renders them invulnerable in England itself.

In the second place, the English bourgeoisie has not only exploited Irish misery to depress the working class in England by the forced immigration of poor Irishmen. But it has, in addition, divided the proletariat into two hostile camps. The revolutionary fire of the Celtic worker does not combine with the solid but slow nature of the Anglo-Saxon worker; on the contrary, in all the great industrial centres of England there is a profound antagonism between the Irish proletarian and the English proletarian. The ordinary English worker treats the Irish worker as a competitor who depresses wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies towards him. He looks upon him roughly as the poor whites of the Southern States of North America looked upon the black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this division is the true secret of the maintenance of its power.

Again, this antagonism is reproduced on the other side of the Atlantic. The Irish, driven from their native soil by oxen and sheep, find themselves in North America where they constitute a formidable and constantly growing portion of the population. Their only thought, their only passion, is hatred of England. The English government and the American government (that is, the classes they represent) feed these passions in order to eternalise the underground struggle between the United States and England, and thus prevent the sincere and serious alliance, consequently the emancipation of the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Further, Ireland is the only pretext of the English government for maintaining a large standing army which, in case of need, as has been seen, is launched upon the English workers after having served its soldierly apprenticeship in Ireland.

Finally, what ancient Rome showed us on a monstrous scale is repeated in England in our own day. The people that subjugates another people forges its own chains.

Thus the position of the International Association vis-à-vis the Irish question is very clear. Its first need is to push the social revolution in England. To that end the great blow must be struck in Ireland.

The resolutions of the General Council on the Irish amnesty only serve to introduce other resolutions which will affirm that, apart from all international justice, it is a preliminary condition of the emancipation of the English working class to transform the present forced Union (that is, the enslavement of Ireland) into an equal and free Confederation, if possible, into complete Separation, if necessary.

The difficulties and even the personal dangers the General Council incurs by placing itself on this ground may be judged by the manoeuvres of the *Bee Hive*. That journal has suppressed in the report of our meetings our resolutions and even the fact that we were taking up the Irish question. The Council was thus obliged to have these resolutions printed and to send them to all the trade unions.

Moreover, the naive doctrines of the *Égalité* and the *Progrès* on the connection or rather the non-connection between the social movement and the political movement have never, to our knowledge, been canonised by any of our International Congresses. They are contrary to our statutes. There we read: “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.”

These words – “as a means”, “comme moyen” – were suppressed in the French translation made in 1864 by the Paris committee. When questioned by the General Council, the Paris committee excused itself on account of the miseries of its political situation.

There are other mutilations of the authentic text. The first recital of the statutes reads thus: “The struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means … a struggle … for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.”

The Paris translation reproduces the “equal rights and duties”, that is, the general phrase which is found in almost all democratic manifestos for a century and which has a different meaning in the mouths of different classes, but it suppresses the concrete thing, “the abolition of all class rule” (the abolition of classes).

Further, in the second recital of the statutes we read: “That the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopoliser of the means of labour, that is the sources of life etc.”

The Paris translation puts “capital” in place of “the means of labour, that is the sources of life”, an expression which includes the land as well as the other means of labour.

Moreover, the original and authentic text was restored in the French translation published in Brussels by the *Rive Gauche* (1866) and printed as a pamphlet.

6) Liebknecht–Schweitzer Question.

The *Égalité* says: “These two groups belong to the International.”

That is false. The Eisenach group (which the *Progrès* and the *Égalité* are pleased to transform into the group of citizen Liebknecht) belongs to the International. The Schweitzer group does not belong to it.

Schweitzer has even explained at length in his journal (the *Sozial-Demokrat*) why the Lassallean organisation could not merge into the International without destroying itself – without knowing it, he spoke the truth. His artificial sect organisation is opposed to the historical and spontaneous organisation of the working class.

The *Progrès* and the *Égalité* have called upon the General Council to give publicly its “opinion” on the personal differences between Liebknecht and Schweitzer. Since citizen Johann Philipp Becker (who is as much calumniated in Schweitzer’s journal as Liebknecht) is one of the members of the editorial committee of the *Égalité*, it appears really strange that its editors should not be better informed about the facts. They ought to know that Liebknecht, in the *Volksstaat*, publicly invited Schweitzer to take the General Council as arbitrator of their differences, and that Schweitzer no less publicly repudiated the authority of the General Council.

The General Council for its part has neglected nothing to put an end to this scandal. It instructed its secretary for Germany to correspond with Schweitzer, which was done for two years, but all the Council’s attempts failed thanks to Schweitzer’s firm resolution to preserve at all costs, together with the sect organisation, his autocratic power. It is for the General Council to determine the favourable moment when its public intervention in this quarrel will be more useful than harmful.

7) As the accusations of the *Égalité* are public and could be considered as emanating from the Romand Committee of Geneva, the General Council will communicate this reply to all the committees corresponding with it.

By order of the General Council.