Confronted by the concentrated power of capital which for the individual worker each capitalist represents, the workers' only defence is to organize themselves to oppose their collective solidarity to the bourgeoisie's money. Workers' associations and their permanent Workers' associations and their permanent form -the unions-are thrown up spontaneously in the course of the class struggle.
For a strike to succeed, the workers in struggle must win over the majority of their workmates. To break this strike capital calls in the reserve army of labour whose miserable living conditions and lack of political experience makes them play the role of strikebreakers. These reserves tend to disappear however, since the experience of class struggle rapidly moves in the direction of establishing a more even level of consciousness in each country. Capital then has to fall back on foreign reserves of labour.
The workers' struggle to organize workers all over the world in a single solidarity movement is the answer to these efforts of the bosses. Proletarian internationalism sprung up in this way as a spontaneous result of the class struggle. PRACTICAL INTERNATIONALISM The first attempt at Union organization came in the first country to establish large industries, Great Britain. The British trade unions, established around 1860 were to suffer a great deal from strikebreakers imported from across the Channel and from the bosses' efforts tp push wages down by relying on immigrant labour. They thus quickly revived the old tradition of plebeian solidarity which had sprung up during the French Revolution and which had caused an association of English workers to conduct a campaign against the counter-revolutionary war which the English reaction wanted to stifle the revolution. In 1862 means of communication and that each day will see the forging of a new link in the armour chain which will unite the workers of the world".
THEORETICAL INTERNATIONALISM Fifteen years before in 1847 two young Germans ended their "Appeal" with almost the same words, "Workers of the world unite !".
Proletarian internationalism is not just an emprrical given revealed in the course of the class struggle but a basic element of class consciousness, which was formulated in the communist programme even before the workers' vanguard became conscious of it through their concrete experience.
Since 1845 Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion that communist society could only development of productive forces realized by capitalism through the world market.
When they wrote the "Communist Manifesto" they had become internationalists in action through their membership of the Communist League, the first international workers' organization which lasted from 1836 to 1852.
The First International was created from the fusion of these two internationalist currents, the em pirical current which the British trade unionists represented and the politically conscious current which Marx and his friends represented. THE DUAL FUNCTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL From its creation in 1864 Marx defined the "International Workingmen's Association" as having a dual function: on the one hand to gather together all genuine workers' organizations and nist consciousness and to bring the best elements of the different tendencies in the International to marxism.
Two distinct stages of the development of the that the International then represented the actual movement of the working class: at the sam organizational setback.
time a political international (the movement for universal suffrage in Britain;the struggle against war) and an international federation of unions (no strike took place without the strikers contacting it).
THE PARIS COMMUNE The most brilliant success of the International in action was unexpected and unprepared:
the Paris Commune. Although the members of the International did not play a decisive role in the preparation and leadership of the revolt itself, the influence of the International over the ceding months and years was sufficient for one be a world society, since it would be based on the to be able to consider the first proletarian revolution in the world as the logical crowning of their work.:
"..the success was the Commune which was intellectually undeniably the daughter of the International, although the International had played no part in its preparations and the International was, with justification in this case, held responsible for it. When the International had become as a e result of the Commune a moral power In Europe, discord immediately broke out". (Engels, Letter to Sorge 1874).
The Paris Commune ushered in the second of intense ideological struggle which rapidly led to the organization's decline.
IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE From its very beginning the International had been a "marriage of convenience" between the on the other to infuse them with a clear commu- British trade unionists and the weaker but more politicized continental workers' movement. The Commune put an end to this alliance. As they were trying to win seats in parliament, the Commune was altogether too revolutionary for the • International workers' movement suffe Within this framework the struggle b the different tendencies became the pri characteristic of the International's last The ideological struggle between mar the anarchist currents(Bakhuninist, Pro ist etc) in essence: represented the strug tween the sectarian utopian petty bour of the workers' movement and its com future. The rapid collapse of the Intern after 1871 should not make us lose sigh importance of this struggle and of its re to unify on an internation. al scale the p rise of the French workers' movement in the pre ideas and principles of the workers' van THE BALANCE SHEET When the International was formed, groups which constituted it had a mass fering and unformed political ideas. In 1 and thereafter in each of these countries existed a conscious determined marxist In 1864 Marx and Engels had only a gro personal friends around them. In 1872 was a nucleus of organized marxists in al every European country.
This balance sheet is all the more ren when one remebers that, with the excep the German party, there was not one sin anized national workers' party in Europe phase of the International's existence, the phase time of the founding of the Internation those who pretend with good vulgar sen "to begin with it's necessary to build a n organization" the example of the I.W.A. that it's precisely through the building of international organization that the tasks structing national organizations can be fu It's true that the International split up national parties had developed. But that argument against the organizational effic an international it only chowe tho limito