Tag: English

Focusing on the dissemination and reception history of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, this article will critically examine the famous controversy surrounding the relationship between Marx’s “early” and “mature” writings. A review of all the major books published worldwide (especially in Germany, France, the Soviet Union and English-speaking countries) on Marx’s early writings is followed by a plea for a new and rigorous reading of Marx’s Paris manuscripts, which have been wrongly considered by almost all interpreters as a finished work.

Careful textual analysis of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 alongside the so-called Paris Notebooks makes it possible to refute conceptions of the former as a fully fledged text either prefiguring Marx’s thought as a whole (as Landshut or the French existentialists argued) or advancing a well-defined theory opposed to that of Marx’s “scientific” maturity (as Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy or Althusser claimed).

1. The two editions of 1932
The [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] are among Marx’s most famous writings, and among those most widely published around the world. But although they have played a major role in the overall interpretation of his thought, they remained unknown for a long time and finally appeared in print nearly a century after their composition.

The publication of these manuscripts was by no means the end of the story. In fact, it triggered a lengthy dispute about the character of the text, some regarding it as an immature work in comparison with Marx’s subsequent critique of political economy, and others as the invaluable philosophical foundation for his thought, which lost its intensity over the years as he worked on the writing of Capital. Hence the field of research concerning the relationship between the ‘youthful’ theories of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and the ‘mature’ ones of Capital hinged on the following questions. Can the writings of the ‘Young Marx’ be considered an integral part of ‘Marxism’­­­­­­? Is there an organic unity of inspiration and realization throughout Marx’s work? Or should two different Marxes be identified in it?

The conflict of interpretation also had a political side. Marx scholars in the Soviet Union after the early Thirties, as well as most researchers close to Communist parties within or linked to the ‘socialist bloc’, offered a reductionist analysis of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], whereas those in a tradition of critical Marxism set a higher value on the texts and found in them the most powerful arguments (especially in relation to the concept of alienation) for breaking the monopoly that the Soviet Union had established over Marx’s work. In each case, the instrumentality of the reading provides a clear example of how theoretical and political conflicts have repeatedly distorted Marx’s work to serve purposes extraneous to it.

The first sections of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] to be published were those which David Ryazanov, the famous Marx scholar then in charge of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, brought out in Russian in 1927, as part of the third volume of the Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa [Marx and Engels Archive]. These appeared under the title ‘Preparatory Work for The Holy Family’,[1] comprising a large part of what would later be known as ‘the third manuscript’. [2] In an introductory article, Ryazanov underlined the rapid theoretical advances that Marx made in the period when he was working on this manuscript; in his view, the great value of publishing it was that, far from being a mere bibliographical curiosity, it marked an important stage in Marx’s trajectory and afforded new insight into his intellectual development.[3] This hypothesis – that the third manuscript consisted of preparatory materials for The Holy Family – proved to be erroneous, however. Its content, as well as Marx’s own indications, locate it rather as a quite different earlier text centred mainly on a critical analysis of political economy.

In 1929 a French translation of Ryazanov’s text was published in two parts in La Revue Marxiste: the February issue featured a section entitled [‘Notes on Communism and Private Property’], and the June issue one called [‘Notes on Needs, Production and the Division of Labour’]. [4] The texts were presented as fragments of a work by Marx from 1844 and arranged under various subheadings to make them easier to read.

In the same year, the first Soviet compilation of the works of Marx and Engels (K. Marks-F. Engels Sochineniya, 1928-47) contained a second Russian edition of the text in volume three, in the same fragmentary form and with the same misleading title as in 1927. [5] Then in 1931 the journal Unter dem Banner des Marxismus published for the first time in German the fragment entitled [‘Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy In General’].[6]

The first complete edition of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] was published in 1932, in German. In fact, two versions came out in the same year, and this added to the confusion about the text. The Social Democrat scholars Siegfried Landshut and Jacob Peter Mayer included the manuscripts in a two-volume collection entitled Historical Materialism. Early Writings,[7] Mayer having prepared the way for this in 1931 with an article that gave advance notice of a highly important ‘hitherto unknown text by Marx’. [8] The version that appeared in the collection was not complete, however, and contained a number of significant inaccuracies: the ‘first’ manuscript was missing altogether; the ‘second’ and ‘third’ were in a jumbled order; and a supposedly fourth manuscript was in fact no more than the compendium of the final chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, without any kind of commentary by Marx himself. Nor did the switched sequence of publication, III-II-IV, make the manuscripts any easier to understand.

Equally serious were the errors made in transcribing the original and the mistaken choice of title [‘Political Economy and Philosophy. On the Connection of Political Economy with the State, Law, Ethics and Civic Life’], which totally contradicted what Marx stated in the draft Preface included in the text: ‘It will be found that the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched upon in the present work only to the extent to which political economy itself expressly touches upon these subjects.’[9] Finally, one of the rare points on the text made in the editors’ preface suggested that it had probably been written in the period between February and August 1844.

The initial plan had been to publish the text in a separate edition entitled [On the Connection of Political Economy with the State, Law, Ethics and Civic Life, with a Critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit], with Mayer responsible for the editorial part and Friedrich Solomon for the interpretive section. However, after a second revision of the originals, it was inserted into the previously mentioned collection by Mayer and Landshut.[10] This edition, despite its major editorial and interpretive errors, was widely distributed in Germany and formed the basis for Jules Molitor’s French translation in 1937.

The second version of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] to appear in 1932 was the one edited by the IME in Moscow and published in the third volume of Part One of the works of Marx and Engels (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, or MEGA). This was the first full scholarly edition, and the first to bear the later famous name [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844].[11] Now the three manuscripts were published in the correct order, having also been transcribed with considerably greater accuracy than in the Landshut-Mayer edition. An introduction, also very limited in scope, reconstructed the genesis of the text, and each manuscript was preceded by a brief philological description. The volume bore the subtitle [For a Critique of Political Economy. With a Concluding Chapter on Hegel’s Philosophy] and placed the manuscripts under the following headings. First Manuscript:

[Wages], [Profit of Capital], [Ground Rent], [Estranged Labour]. Second Manuscript: [The Private Property Relationship]. Third Manuscript: [Private Property and Labour], [Private Property and Communism], [Need, Production and Division of Labour], [Money], [Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and His Philosophy in General]. The so-called fourth manuscript, containing the extracts from Hegel, was published as an appendix [Marx’s Extracts from the Last Chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit].

The MEGA editors, however, having to assign a name to the manuscripts, reorganized the whole and placed Marx’s Preface at the beginning (instead of in its original place in the third manuscript), so that they too ended up implying that Marx’s intention had always been to write a critique of political economy and that he had conceived his manuscripts as falling into chapters within such a work.[12]

Of particular significance in this edition was the inclusion of Marx’s notebooks from his period in Paris. Placed in the second part of the volume, under the heading From the Notebooks of Excerpts. Paris, Early 1844 to Early 1845, these also contained previously unpublished extracts from works by Friedrich Engels, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Skarbek, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, John R. MacCulloch, Antoine L. C. Destutt de Tracy and Pierre de Boisguillebert. The editors further provided an account of Marx’s nine Paris notebooks and an alphabetic index of all the works from which he copied extracts.[13] At the same time, the Soviet editors passed on to interpreters of Marx’s work the misconception that he wrote the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] only after he had read and compiled extracts from a large part of the corpus of works on political economy.[14] In reality, the composition process had involved an alternation of writing and extracting;[15] the excerpts had punctuated the whole of the Parisian period, from the articles for the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher [German-French Yearbooks] up to The Holy Family.

2. Later translations and reprints
Thanks to its superior philological quality, the MEGA version became the choice of preference on which nearly all translations into other languages based themselves. This was the case with the first Japanese translation (1946), the two Italian translations, by Norberto Bobbio (1949) and Galvano Della Volpe (1950), the first English and Chinese translations (both in 1956) and the French translation of 1962 (which replaced the unreliable one of 1937 referred to above).

The greater value of the MEGA version was also recognized by the Protestant theologian Erich Thier in his introduction to the variant German edition he brought out in 1950.[16] However, this turned out to be a hybrid of the MEGA and Landshut-Mayer editions, serving to create further misunderstandings. The text itself was taken from the MEGA edition, but – like the two Social Democrat scholars before him – Thier decided to omit the ‘first manuscript’. Similarly, he took over many of the MEGA explanatory notes but also reproduced some serious inaccuracies committed by Landshut and Mayer and followed them in their misguided choice of title. All these errors, it should be stressed, were made not when the MEGA edition was a recent acquisition but nearly two decades after its appearance in print.

A revised version of the Landshut-Mayer edition came out in 1953, this time under Landshut’s name alone and with the title Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts (1844).[17] This repeated the mistakes of 1932, however, and the only improvement, based on the MEGA edition, was a correction of some transcription errors. Two years later, a collection of ‘Short Economic Writings’[18] included the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] without the final chapter [Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and Philosophy in General]. It also made some corrections of the MEGA version of 1932.

While the limits of these new German editions marked a step back with regard to the MEGA version, the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] were subjected to veritable persecution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1954, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (IML) in Moscow – the new name for the IME – decided not to include Marx’s unfinished manuscripts in the new Russian edition of the K. Marks-F. Engels Sochineniya then in preparation, thereby omitting many of the works essential for an accurate account of the genesis of his thought. But this editorial policy was not followed through consistently. The second Sochineniya that eventually appeared between 1955 and 1966 contained many more writings than the first one of 1928-1947, but it excluded the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and the [Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy], better known as the [Grundrisse], more as an act of censorship than for cogent editorial reasons. On the other hand, it found room for other manuscripts by Marx, including his [Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right] in Volume One, and filled the whole of Volume Three with [The German Ideology].

The [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] appeared in 1956[19] in a separate book with the title Extracts from the Youthful Works;[20] the print run was only 60,000 (not very high in comparison with other of Marx’s writings at that time). Their first inclusion in the Sochineniya came nearly twenty years later, in 1974, as part of the supplementary volume XLII.[21] The work on the edition of 1974 involved rechecking photocopies of the original manuscripts from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which still today holds two-thirds of the Marx-Engels literary bequest.[22] This proved to be a wise decision, since it allowed a number of not unimportant corrections to be made to the MEGA version of 1932. For example, the last line in the ‘first manuscript’, previously transcribed as ‘Kollision wechselseitiger Gegensätze [clash of mutual opposites]’ was amended to the correct ‘feindlicherwechselseitiger Gegensatz [hostile mutual opposition]’; and in several passages Genuß (enjoyment) was rightly substituted for Geist (spirit). Some of Marx’s own mistakes in the manuscripts were also corrected: for example, his misquotation of Adam Smith’s ‘the three productive classes’ (earlier copied down correctly in his notebooks) as ‘the three primitive classes’.[23] Furthermore, all the quotations extracted by Marx – many of them very long, especially in the ‘first’ manuscript – were published in a smaller font size, so as to make it easier to identify their original author and to avoid any misattribution to himself.[24]

As in the case of the Soviet edition, the collection of writings by Marx and Engels published in the German Democratic Republic between 1956 and 1968 (the Marx-Engels-Werke or MEW) did not include the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] in its numbered sequence of 39 volumes. Chronologically they should have featured in Volume II, published in 1962, but instead they eventually appeared in a supplementary volume (Ergänzungsband) at the end of the project in 1968.[25] After remaining in this guise until 1981, the manuscripts then went through four successive editions in the years to 1985, as part of Volume XL of the MEW entitled ‘Writings and Letters from November 1837 to August 1844’. The edition in question was the MEGA version of 1932, with some transcription corrections and the critical apparatus from the 1955 volume of ‘Brief Economic Writings’.

After the original MEGA, the first edition of Marx’s works published in the ‘socialist bloc’ to include the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] in its numbered sequence of volumes was the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²). Publication of this began in 1975, and the Paris manuscripts were printed in Volume I/2 in 1982, exactly fifty years after their first publication. In this new form, they appeared in a historical-critical edition in two separate versions. The first (Erste Wiedergabe) reproduced the papers as originally left by Marx and therefore divided parts of the text of the ‘first manuscript’ into columns; the second (Zweite Wiedergabe) used the division into chapters and the pagination generally adopted by all previous editions.[26] Further improvements were made in the transcription of the originals, this time mainly referring to the [‘Preface’].[27] As an example of the classification difficulties posed by Marx’s various manuscripts (but also of certain limitations of the MEGA² edition), the prospectus of the final chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit appears both in Volume I/2 and in the later volume (IV/2) containing the notebooks of extracts from this period.[28] In 1981, indeed, MEGA² again offered the notebooks with the Paris extracts, and the extracts from works by Carl W. C. Schüz, Friedrich List, Heinrich F. Osiander, Guillaume Prevost, Senofonte and Eugène Buret, not previously published in the first MEGA, were printed for the first time in this volume. The publication of the [Paris Notebooks] finally came to an end in 1998 with Volume IV/3, which included Marx’s compilations from Jean Law, James Lauderdale and a Roman history manual of uncertain authorship. With MEGA², the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and all the notebooks of extracts from 1844 were finally in print in their entirety [29].

3. One or two Marxes? The dispute on the continuity of Marx’s thought
The two editions of 1932 gave rise to many controversies of a hermeneutic or political character, in which Marx’s text was often squashed between two interpretive extremes. One understood it as a mere expression of youthful theorizing negatively imbued with philosophical concepts and terminology, while the other considered it to be the highest expression of Marx’s humanism and the essential core of the whole of his critical theory.

With the passage of time, successive supporters of the two positions engaged in lively debate, offering different answers concerning the ‘continuity’ of his thought. Were there in fact two distinct thinkers: an early Marx and a mature Marx? Or was there only one Marx, whose convictions remained substantially the same over the decades?

The opposition between these two views became ever sharper. The first, uniting Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy with those in Western Europe and elsewhere who shared its theoretical and political tenets, downplayed or dismissed altogether the importance of Marx’s early writings; they presented them as completely superficial in comparison with his later works and, in so doing, advanced a decidedly anti-humanist conception of his thought. [30] The second view, advocated by a more heterogeneous group of authors, had as its common denominator a rejection of the dogmatism of official Communism and the correlation that its exponents sought to establish between Marx’s thought and the politics of the Soviet Union.

A couple of quotations from two major protagonists in the 1960s will do more than any possible commentary to elucidate the terms of the debate. For Louis Althusser:

First of all, any discussion of Marx’s Early Works is a political discussion. Need we be reminded that Marx’s Early Works […] were exhumed by Social-Democrats and exploited by them to the detriment of Marxism-Leninism? […] This is the location of the discussion: the Young Marx. Really at stake in it: Marxism. The terms of the discussion: whether the Young Marx was already and wholly Marx.[31]

Iring Fetscher, on the other hand, argued:

The early writings of Marx centre so strongly on the liberation of man from every form of exploitation, domination and alienation, that a Soviet reader must have understood these comments as a criticism of his own situation under Stalinist domination. For this reason then, the early writings of Marx were never published in large, cheap editions in Russian. They were considered to be relatively insignificant works by the young Hegelian Marx who had not yet developed Marxism.[32]

Both sides distorted Marx’s text in various ways. The ‘Orthodox’ denied the importance of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] (indispensable though they are for an understanding of the evolution of Marx’s thought) and carried this so far that they excluded them from Russian and German editions of the complete works of Marx and Engels. On the other hand, many representatives of so-called ‘Western Marxism’, as well as a number of existentialist philosophers, took this unfinished sketch by a young, inexpert student of economic theory and assigned to it a value greater than that of the product of more than twenty years of research: Das Kapital.

It is not possible here to give a full account of the vast critical literature on the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844]. Instead, we shall focus on the main works and try to show the major limitations of previous debate concerning both this text and Marx’s work as a whole.

4. Early interpretations of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844]
When they first appeared in print in 1932, the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] became one of the main bones of contention between ‘Soviet Marxism’ and ‘Western Marxism’. The introductions accompanying their publication brought out this sharp difference of approach. Viktor Adoratskii, the MEGA director who had replaced Ryazanov in 1931 after a purge of the Marx-Engels Institute (recently renamed the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute), presented the theme of the Manuscripts as an ‘analysis of money, wages, the interest of capital, and ground rent’; Marx, in his view, had put forward a ‘general characterization of capitalism’ (a term not yet used by Marx), which then reappeared in The Poverty of Philosophy and theManifesto of the Communist Party.[33] By contrast, Landshut and Meyer[34] spoke of a work that ‘in essence already anticipated Capital’,[35] since ‘no fundamentally new idea’ would subsequently appear in Marx’s oeuvre.

The [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], they wrote, was actually ‘Marx’s central work. It formed the crux of the development of his thought, deriving the principles of economic analysis directly from the idea of the “true reality of man”.’ It was so important because it lifted the veil on Marx’s philosophical terminology and made it possible to trace the theories developed in Capital back to concepts in his youthful period. The two German authors even asserted that Marx’s aim was not ‘the socialization of the means of production’ and the overcoming of ‘exploitation’ through the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’, but rather the ‘realization of man (die Verwirklichung des Menschen) […] without which everything else had no meaning.’[36] Despite the evidently forced character of their claim that the manuscripts of 1844 were the crux of Marx’s development,[37] this interpretation soon achieved great success and may be seen as the original source of the ‘Young Marx’ myth.

The first two authors to review the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and to join the debate on the importance of Marx’s early writings were Henri de Man and Herbert Marcuse, both of whom came to conclusions that were in some respects similar to those of Landshut and Meyer. In an article ‘The Newly Discovered Marx’, which appeared in Der Kampf in 1932, De Man referred to

a hitherto unknown work, of the utmost importance for a correct assessment of the development and significance of Marx’s theory. Rather more clearly than any other work by Marx, it revealed the ethical-humanist motives informing his socialist orientation and the value judgements expressed in his lifelong scientific activity.[38]

According to the Belgian writer, the key question that Marx’s interpreters had to address was ‘whether that humanist phase should be seen as a position he later overcame or, on the contrary, as an integral and lasting part of his theory’.[39] De Man clearly stated his own view that the Paris text already contained all the concepts on which Marx would later build. ‘In the Manuscripts,’ he argued, ‘and more generally in the writings from 1843 to 1846, Marx formulated positions and judgements that remained the basis of all his later works.’

Therefore, ‘the Marx of 1844 belonged to Marxism as much as did the Marx of 1867, or […] the Engels of 1890’.[40] Nevertheless, De Man held that two Marxisms were present in Marx: the humanist one of his youth and the later one of his maturity. The first, which had achieved the greatest theoretical breakthroughs, was allegedly superior to the second, which had marked ‘a decline in his creative capacities’. [41]

Marcuse too maintained that the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] brought to light the philosophical premises of Marx’s critique of political economy. In an essay ‘The Foundation of Historical Materialism’, first published in 1932 in Die Gesellschaft, Marcuse argued that ‘the publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written by Marx in 1844 [was destined] to become a crucial event in the history of Marxist studies’, since it placed ‘the discussion about the origin and original meaning of historical materialism […] on a new footing’. It was now possible to assert that ‘economics and politics have become the economic-political basis of the theory of revolution through a quite particular, philosophical interpretation of human existence and its historical realization’. The 1844 manuscripts had shown the falseness of the view, variously put forward by exponents of the Second International and Soviet Communism, that in Marx there was ‘simply […] a transformation from a philosophical to an economic basis and that in its subsequent (economic) form philosophy had been overcome and “finished” once and for all’. Since the publication of theManuscripts, it was no longer possible to think of Marxism as an essentially economic doctrine. [42]

A few years later, interest in the ‘Young Marx’ led on to study of his relationship to Hegel – a line of research encouraged by recent publication of the German philosopher’s manuscripts from his period in Jena.[43] Georg Lukács, in his work of 1938 The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, was one of the main Marxist theorists to compare these two sets of early writings – including Marx’s on philosophy and Hegel’s on economics – and to draw what he saw as certain analogies between them. In his opinion, Marx’s references to Hegel in the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] went well beyond the passages he directly quoted and commented on. Indeed, Marx’s economic analysis itself had been inspired by a critique of Hegel’s conception of philosophy.

The link between economics and philosophy […] in these manuscripts of Marx’s is a profound methodological necessity, the precondition for actually transcending Hegel’s idealist dialectic. For this reason it would be superficial to imagine that Marx’s concern with Hegel begins in the last portion of the Manuscript which contains the critique of the Phenomenology. The four preceding sections, which do not expressly concern themselves with Hegel at all, are nevertheless the foundation on which that criticism is built: they provide the economic clarification of the real nature of alienation. [44]

Alexandre Kojève was another writer who exerted a major influence on discussions of Marx and Hegel. In his lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit , which he gave in Paris between 1933 and 1939 at the École pratique des hautes études, Kojève went more deeply into the relationship between the two thinkers, although now it was Hegel’s work that was subjected to a Marxian reading.[45] Finally, Karl Löwith approached the theme in his book From Hegel to Nietzsche, without doubt one of the main studies of the time on Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy.[46]

The debate resumed in Germany after the end of the Second World War, and the early Fifties saw the publication in the Federal Republic of Erich Thier’s Anthropology of the Young Marx in the Paris Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts,[47] Heinrich Popitz’s Alienated Man[48] and Jacob Hommes’s The Eros of Technology.[49] These three books, though differing in nuances, helped to establish the view that the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] were the fundamental text of the whole Marxian oeuvre. In a short time, this reading won over many authors in various countries and disciplines, and one of the nodal points on which no serious student of Marx could fail to express an opinion was how the texts of the ‘Young Marx’ should be interpreted.

5. The ‘Young Marx’ Vogue in Postwar France
As the Second World War gave way to a sense of profound anguish resulting from the barbarities of Nazism and fascism, the theme of the condition and destiny of the individual in society acquired great prominence.[50] A growing philosophical interest in Marx was apparent everywhere in Europe, especially in France, where the study of his early writings was the most widespread.[51] As Henri Lefebvre put it, their assimilation was ‘the decisive philosophical event [of] the period’. [52] In this variegated process stretching into the Sixties, a number of writers from different cultural and political backgrounds sought to accomplish a philosophical synthesis of Marxism, Hegelianism, existentialism and Christian thought. The debate generated a lot of shoddy writing and, on more occasions than one, distorted Marx’s texts to fit the ideological convictions of those taking part.

In a work of 1948 entitled Sense and Non-sense, Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated that Marx’s early thought had been ‘existentialist’. [53] After reading the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], and under the influence of Kojève, he became convinced that genuine Marxism was a radical humanism completely unlike dogmatic Soviet economism, and that it was possible to reconstruct its basic premises from Marx’s writings of the early 1840s. A number of existentialist philosophers engaged in a similar reading, limiting themselves to that minor (and never finished) part of Marx’s intellectual output and often omitting almost entirely a study of Capital. [54]

The texts used to create the misleading image of a ‘philosophical Marx’ served others for the even less wieldy construction of a ‘theological Marx’. For the Jesuit writers Pierre Bigo and Jean-Yves Calvez, Marx’s thought had the features of an ethic very similar to the message of social justice contained in the most democratic and progressive strands of Catholicism. Indeed, some of their assertions are stupefying in their superficiality and confusion. In Marxism and Humanism, for example, Bigo wrote: ‘Marx is not an economist; he made no contribution to political economy. […] When he is indirectly led into considerations on such themes, he is strangely vague and self-contradictory.’[55] And Calvez could write in The Thought of Karl Marx, published in 1956, that although Marx ‘did not publish the work today called the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, what we now know of it allows us to say that he had already acquired the basic principles that he would develop in the later works.’[56] In this context, Roger Garaudy too claimed to have recognized the central importance of the humanist influences in Marx’s early writings, expressing himself in favour of dialogue between Marxism and other (especially Christian) cultures.[57]

Raymond Aron developed a pungent critique of such tendencies. Thus, in his book on ‘imaginary Marxisms’ published in 1969, he wrote of ‘jesuitical priests’ and ‘Parisian para-Marxists’ who, amid the success of phenomenological-existential philosophy, ‘interpreted the works of [Marx’s] maturity in the light of [an earlier] philosophical utopianism’ and even ‘subordinated Capital to his youthful writings (particularly the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844), whose obscurity, incompleteness and sometimes contradictory character were a source of fascination for readers instructed by A. Kojève and Father Fessard.’[58] What such writers failed to understand was that ‘if Marx had not had the hope and intention to ground the coming of communism with scientific rigour, he would not have needed to work for thirty years on Capital (still without finishing it). A few weeks and a few pages would have been enough.’ [59]

Pierre Naville took a very different line in relation to existentialist and Christian thinkers, arguing that Marx changed his ideas significantly in the course of his development, passing ‘from philosophy to science’.[60] Thus in 1954, in the first volume of his Le nouveau Léviathan, Naville took issue both with those who passed over ‘the Hegelian origins of Marx’s thought’ and with those who failed to understand that Marx ‘had had to move away from them in order to reach the analyses of Capital’. [61] And in a new preface written in 1967, Naville pointed out that Marx ‘gave up a number of seductive and fascinating concepts such as alienation’, which he ‘consigned to the museum of philosophy and replaced with a much more rigorous analysis of the relations of expropriation and exploitation’.[62]

Originally this had also been the view of Auguste Cornu, whose doctoral thesis Karl Marx – the Man and the Work,[63] first published in 1934 as the embryo of his four-volume magnum opus Marx and Engels, [64] had situated the [Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844] within the Soviet interpretive grid initiated by Adoratskii.[65] Later, however, in the third volume entitled Marx in Paris, which many consider the most complete intellectual biography of the early Marx, Cornu avoided comparing the youthful writings with the later critique of political economy and offered a more restrained assessment of the text of 1844.

In 1955, in his widely read Studies on Marx and Hegel, Jean Hyppolite emphasized the importance of Hegel for a rigorous analysis of the link between Marx’s early and mature writings. Pointing out that ‘Marx’s work presupposes an underlying philosophy whose various elements are not easily reconstructed’, he insisted that ‘it is not possible to understand Marx’s basic work, Capital, without a knowledge of the principal works which contributed to the formation and development of his thought, The Phenomenology of Spirit, the Logic, and the Philosophy of Right .’[66]

Maximilien Rubel too believed there was a theoretical continuum between the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and Marx’s later writings. In his book Karl Marx: Essai de biographie intellectuelle, published in 1957, he argued that the category of alienated labour in theManuscripts was ‘the key to all the subsequent work of [Marx] the economist and sociologist’, and that it ‘anticipated the central thesis of Capital’. So, one of the major Marxologists of the twentieth century also saw an ‘evident basic identity’ between ‘Marx’s positions in his first critique of private property and in his later analysis of the capitalist economy’.[67] In Alienation, Praxis and Technē in the Thought of Karl Marx (1961), Kostas Axelos went even further, claiming that the 1844 manuscripts ‘have been and remain the richest in ideas of all Marxian and Marxist writings’.[68]

Henri Lefebvre was among the few writers who adopted a more balanced approach to the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], always analysing their content in light of the fact that they were not a finished work. In his Critique of Everyday Life, first published in 1958, he wrote:

In his early writings, particularly in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1844, Marx had not yet fully developed his thought. It is there, however, germinating, growing, becoming. […] My view is that historical and dialectical materialism developed. It did not come into being abruptly, with an absolute discontinuity, after a break, at x moment, in the works of Marx (and in the history of humanity), and to think that it did produces false problems. To begin with, Marxism is made to appear like a system, a dogma. […] Any radical newness must be born, must grow and take shape, precisely because it is a new reality. […] The thesis which put a date on Marxism, or tries to, seriously runs the risk of dissecting it, and of interpreting it in a one-sided way. […] The mistake, the false option which must be avoided, is to overestimate or else tounderestimate Marx’s early writings. They already contain Marxism, but as a potential, and certainly not all Marxism. [69]

The writer who insisted more than any other on an ‘absolute discontinuity’ in Marx’s work was Louis Althusser. His collection of essays For Marx triggered numerous reactions and polemics following its publication in 1965, becoming the most widely discussed text on Marx’s early writings. Althusser’s position was that the [Theses on Feuerbach] and [The German Ideology] marked a clear ‘epistemological break’ (coupure épistemologique), ‘a critique of his [Marx’s] erstwhile philosophical (ideological) conscience’,[70] and that his work may thus be divided into ‘two long essential periods: the ‘ideological’ period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845’.[71] The relationship between Hegel and Marx had been of major importance, but only in relation to the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and hence for Marx’s ‘ideological-philosophical’ period.

[T]he Young Marx was never strictly speaking a Hegelian, …; rather, he was first a Kantian Fichtean, then a Feuerbachian. So the thesis that the Young Marx was a Hegelian, though widely believed today, is in general a myth. On the contrary, it seems that Marx’s one and only resort to Hegel in his youth, on the eve of his rupture with his ‘erstwhile philosophical conscience’, produced the prodigious ‘abreaction’ indispensable to the liquidation of his ‘disordered’ consciousness.[72]

Althusser therefore regarded the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] as pardoxically ‘the text the furthest removed from the day that is about to dawn’:[73]

[T]he Marx furthest from Marx is this Marx, the Marx on the brink, on the eve, on the threshold – as if, before the break, in order to achieve it, he had to give philosophy every chance, its last, this absolute empire over its opposite, this boundless theoretical triumph, that is, its defeat. [74]

Althusser’s curious conclusion was that ‘we cannot say absolutely that “Marx’s youth is part of Marxism”’. The Althusserian school made this one of the cardinal points of its interpretation of the split in Marx: there was the pre-1845 Marx, still tied to Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, and there was the Marx of [The German Ideology] and beyond, the scientific founder of a new theory of history. As for Jacques Rancière, his essay ‘The Concept of “Critique” and the “Critique of Political Economy” (from the 1844 Manuscript to Capital)’ – which appeared in the first French edition of Reading Capital and was one of the first and most important contributions in this connection – he believed that one of the main obstacles to a correct understanding of Marx was that ‘he never made a critique of his own vocabulary’. Thus, in Rancière’s judgement, ‘although we can identify in Marx’s theoretical practice the break that he did no more than assert, […] he never really grasped and theorized the difference’. Sometimes, as with alienation or fetishism, ‘the same words serve to express the anthropological concepts and the concepts of Capital, [… and] because Marx does not meet the demand for rigour the first figuration always threatens to gain entry where it no longer has a place’. [75]

Althusser always remained convinced that there were ‘two Marxes’. In his ‘Reply to John Lewis’, a response to the British Communist philosopher published in 1972 in Marxism Today, he reviewed self-critically some of the formulations in For Marx:

In my first essays, I suggested that after the ‘epistemological break’ of 1845 (after the discovery by which Marx founded the science of history) the philosophical categories of alienation and the negation of the negation (among others) disappear. John Lewis replies that this is not true. And he is right. You certainly do find these concepts (directly or indirectly) in The German Ideology, in the Grundrisse (two texts which Marx never published) and also, though more rarely (alienation) or much more rarely (negation of the negation: only one explicit appearance) in Capital.[76]

Despite this admission, however, he reaffirms the idea of a watershed in Marx’s theoretical development:

If you look at the whole of Marx’s work, there is no doubt that there does exist a ‘break’ of some kind in 1845. Marx says so himself. […] The whole work of Marx shows him to be right on this point. […] The epistemological break is a point of no return. […] It is true that Marx several times uses the term ‘alienation’. But all that disappears in Marx’s later texts and in Lenin. Completely. We could therefore simply say: what is important is the tendency: and Marx’s scientific work does tend to get rid of these philosophical categories. […] But that is not sufficient. And here is my self- criticism. […] I identified the ‘epistemological’ (= scientific) break with Marx’s philosophical revolution. More precisely, I did not separate Marx’s philosophical revolution from the ‘epistemological break’. […] That was a mistake. […] Since that time, I have begun to ‘put things right’. […] 1. It is impossible to reduce philosophy to science, and it is impossible to reduce Marx’s philosophical revolution to the ‘epistemological break’. 2. Marx’s philosophical revolution preceded Marx’s ‘epistemological break’. It made the break possible.[77]

In his revised thesis, Althusser now adds that 1845 there was a kind of ‘intermittent survival of categories like alienation’.

For alongside their tendency to disappear in Marx’s work, considered as a whole, there is a strange phenomenon which must be accounted for: their total disappearance in certain works, then their subsequent reappearance. […] For example, […] there are many references to alienation in the Grundrisse (preparatory notes made by Marx in the years 1857-58, and which he did not publish). [78]

According to Althusser, Marx came to use this category again only because he ‘had “by chance” re-read Hegel’s Logic in 1858 and had been fascinated by it’.[79] But this explanation is unconvincing, since in the Grundrisse he probably had recourse to the concept also in the parts written before he had re-read Hegel’s Logic. In any event, Marx’s treatment of alienation is very different from Hegel’s. Whereas, for Althusser, it is a ‘philosophical category’ that ‘Marx’s scientific work tended to get rid of’, the truth is that, not only in the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], but also in the [Grundrisse], Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, it plays an important role in characterizing labour and social relations in the capitalist system of economy and production. [80]

Contrary to Althusser’s claims, Marx never wrote of or hinted at the presence of a ‘break’ in his work. Even less is it possible to establish a theoretical or political continuum between the thought of Marx and Lenin in this regard, or to invoke Lenin’s failure to mention alienation as proof of an ‘epistemological break’ on Marx’s part.

In the end, the weightiest objections to the Althusserian account arise from a philological analysis of Marx’s actual writings: for, although the [Grundrisse] are ‘notes made by Marx in the years 1857-58 […] which he did not publish’, [81] it should be borne in mind that [The German Ideology] was also left unfinished, and that even its so-called First Chapter on Feuerbach, on which Althusser rests much of his case for an ‘epistemological break’, was assigned that position only when the MEGA editors published the manuscript in 1932 as if it constituted an almost complete work.[82] The point is not to deny that Marx’s thought underwent huge changes as it matured and grappled with the critique of political economy – that is evident enough, as it is for countless other authors – but to contest Althusser’s theorization of a rigid break according to which the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and the other writings prior to the [Grundrisse] are extraneous to Marxism rather than an integral part of its development.

Althusser did not modify his position on this even in the later Essays in Self-Criticism. He did point out, rightly, that in the [ German Ideology] manuscripts ‘fundamental theoretical concepts’ appear that one would look for in vain ‘in Marx’s earlier texts’ (‘mode of production, relations of production, productive forces’, etc.), but he still made the mistake of excluding ‘alienated labour’ from this process of development, attaching to it the label of a merely philosophical notion. For Althusser, the Marx of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] ‘does not modify’ the concepts of political economy and, ‘when he criticizes them, he does so “philosophically”, therefore from the outside.’ [83] The Marx of [The German Ideology], however, is considered the originator of an ‘unprecedented’ and ‘irreversible’ event: the opening up of the ‘continent of history’ – as if that event were something so utterly fixed that it had happened in the space of a few weeks.

One critic of this account was Ernest Mandel, who in his Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (1967) traced Althusser’s error back to his attempt ‘to present the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts as a work with a finished ideology, “forming a whole”.’ In his view, Althusser

is right to oppose the analytico-teleological method which examines the work of a young writer exclusively in order to see how close it comes to the “goal”, meaning the writer’s mature work. But he is wrong to set against a method that arbitrarily cuts up into ideologically coherent slices the successive phases in a writer’s evolution, on the pretext of regarding every ideology as a whole.

To the question of whether Marx, in the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], ‘rid himself of all the philosophical slag from a way of thinking that thenceforth became rigorously social and economic’, Mandel answered in the negative. For the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], mark

the transition of the young Marx from Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy to the working out of historical materialism. In this transition, elements from the past are inevitably combined with elements belonging to the future. Marx combines in his own way – that is, by profoundly modifying them – the dialectics of Hegel, the materialism of Feuerbach, and the social facts established by political economy. This combination is not a coherent one; it does not create a new ‘system’, a new ‘ideology’. It presents us with scattered fragments which contain many contradictions. [84]

In France, then, existentialists treated the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] as a highly stimulating text while Jesuits held them up as the banner of humanism; others scorned them as a youthful philosophical leftover or passed them over as a doubtful part of ‘Marxism’; and others still acclaimed them as the key text containing the philosophical premises of Marx’s later economic works. What is beyond doubt is that they captured huge attention, not only in Marxist circles, and were among the most widely sold philosophical works for more than two decades. In the postwar period, they informed French theoretical debate and helped to ensure that Marx was seen in a new way. To be sure, he thereby became less sharp in his features and more moralistic in tone, but he also appeared as an author more alert to the unease of the solitary individual generated by the social context. All this enabled him to speak to a wider audience.

6. The [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] in the ‘Socialist Bloc’ and the English-Speaking Countries
For many years, the most accredited Marxists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe or in the orthodox Communist parties either ignored the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] or gave a shallow, restricted interpretation of them. Stalinist ideology, with Stakhanovism as one of its banners, remained deeply hostile to the concept of alienation that figured so prominently in the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], and so Marx’s early writings, which commanded ever greater attention in ‘Western Marxism’ from the 1930s on, took a very long time to gain ground there [85].

The Development of Karl Marx from Revolutionary Democrat to Communist , a book by the GDR author Georg Mende, is a clear case in point. Neither the first edition of 1954 nor the second of 1955 gave any account of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], simply referring to them as ‘preparations for a major work’. [86] Only in 1960, when it was no longer possible to keep silent, did Mende decide to revise some parts of his book for a third edition.

Every other commentator displayed the same mixture of underestimation and aversion in the Forties and Fifties, but things began gradually to change from the late Fifties on. Even in the ‘socialist countries’, study of the manuscripts now got under way and resulted in accounts at a higher level such as D. I. Rosenberg’s Development of the Economic Theory of Marx and Engels in the 1840s, first published in 1958. [87]

In 1961 a special issue of Recherches Internationales à la Lumière du Marxisme entitled ‘The Young Marx’ published for the first time in a European language various essays by Soviet academics on the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844]. Along with articles by Soviet authors O. Bakouradze, Nikolai Lapin, Vladimir Brouchlinski, Leonid Pajitnov and A. Outbo, the volume contained work by the Polish researcher Adam Schaff, the Germans Wolfgang Jahn and Joachim Hoeppner, and the general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti. [88] Though reflecting the ideological approach of the time, these contributions were a first attempt on the Communist side to grapple with the problem of ‘the young Marx’ and to challenge the interpretive monopoly of ‘Western Marxists’. Some essays also offered food for thought about a possible non-systematic reading of Marx’s text. Pajitnov, for example, argued that in the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844]:

Marx’s fundamental ideas are still taking shape, and, together with noteworthy formulations in which the new worldview is present in nuce, there are very often unripe thoughts that bear the mark of the theoretical sources that served as material for Marx’s reflection, and which he took as his starting point for the elaboration of his doctrine.[89]

However, the stance of many authors in the collection was rather problematic. Unlike the interpretations in vogue at the time in France, which sought to rethink the concepts of Capital through the categories of the early works, the Soviet researchers generally made the opposite mistake: they analysed the early works on the basis of Marx’s later theoretical development. As Althusser saw in his review of this volume, also entitled ‘The Young Marx’ and later republished as a chapter in For Marx, they read the early works through the filter of the texts of his maturity. [90] This kind of anticipation of Marx’s thought prevented them from fully understanding the significance of his theoretical analyses in his earlier period:
Of course, we now know that the Young Marx did become Marx, but we should not want to live faster than he did, we should not want to live in his place, reject for him or discover for him. We shall not be waiting for him at the end of the course to throw round him as round a runner the mantle of repose, for at last it is over, he has arrived.[91]

Quite different in nature was the work of Walter Tuchscheerer. In fact, his book Before Capital, published posthumously in 1968, was the best of the studies of the economic thought of the young Marx to appear in the Eastern bloc countries, critically examining for the first time the Paris notebooks of extracts alongside the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844].[92]

While the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] made slow headway in the canons of dialectical materialism (‘Diamat’ in Soviet parlance), and only after facing a great deal of ideological and political resistance, their reception in the English-speaking countries experienced a similar delay. In fact, the first translation to arouse a discreet interest appeared only in 1961, in the United States. The cultural and political climate of the times, still marked by the oppressive wave of MacCarthyism, probably influenced the publisher’s decision to feature the name of Erich Fromm in the title and to print the text only after his long introductory essay presenting it as ‘Marx’s main philosophical work’[93] and arguing that ‘the concept of alienation was and remained the focal point in the thinking of the young Marx who wrote the Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the “old” Marx who wrote Capital.’[94] Numerous studies repeating this position appeared over a short period in the United States, invariably stressing Marx’s intellectual debt to Hegel. [95] But there were also discordant voices which, sometimes in order to challenge the excessive emphasis on the 1844 sketches, went too far in the opposite direction. Daniel Bell, for example, argued that the insistent twinning of Marx and Hegel was ‘only further myth-making’, since, ‘having found the answer to the “mysteries” of Hegel in political economy, Marx promptly forgot all about philosophy.’ [96]

One of the main books in this connection was Robert Tucker’s Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (1961), which argued that there was ‘a continuity of [Marx’s] thought from the early writings to Capital’[97] and a ‘centrality of the alienation theme throughout’.[98] So sure was he of this that he could write:

The explicit philosophy of alienation presented in the early writings was Marx’s final contribution to the subject. … the development of Marx’s thought from the early philosophical to the later mythic stage was prefigured in the manuscripts of 1844 themselves. Capital was the logical fruition of all his thought from the beginning.[99]

In the Sixties and Seventies, most of the Anglo-American interpreters of Marx leaned toward this thesis. Thus, although there was no link between the early Paris notes of a young researcher barely twenty-six years old and the magnum opus published a quarter of a century later, David McLellan felt able to state in Marx before Marxism (1970) that ‘during the summer of 1844, Marx began to compose a critique of political economy that was, in effect, the first of several drafts preceding Capital in 1867’.[100] And he concluded that ‘the early writings contain all the subsequent themes of Marx’s thought and show them in the making’.[101]

Bertell Ollman’s Alienation, published in 1971 and destined to be one of the most influential writings in the ‘Young Marx’ debate, also adopted a favourable attitude to the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844]. He wrote: ‘I do not emphasize alterations in Marx’s thinking because I do not see many there, especially when compared to the essential unity in Marxism from 1844 on.[102] […] Even in the published version of Capital, there is much more of Marx’s “earlier” ideas and concepts than is generally recognized.’ [103]

This thesis became very widely accepted everywhere, except among those under the hegemony of the Althusserian school. A version of it may be found in the work of the West German author Iring Fetscher, for example. One of the arguments of his book Marx and Marxism (1967) is:

The critical categories that Marx developed in the Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts and in his notebooks of the mid-forties […] are still the basis of the critique of political economy in the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1857-1858) as well as in Capital (1867) and were never disavowed by the old Marx. In other words [… not only does] an interpretation of the early writings help us to recognize the motives which led Marx to write a critique of political economy (Capital); but […] the critique of political economy implicitly and, in part, even explicitly, still contains that same critique of alienation and reification which was the very topic of his early writings. [104]

In 1968 the Israeli scholar Shlomo Avineri brought out his The Political and Social Thought of Karl Marx, which opposed ‘the totally unacceptable attitude sometimes taken by those who write off – according to preference – either the “young” or the “old” Marx as wholly irrelevant’. [105] And two years later István Mészáros, a pupil of Lukács who had left Hungary to teach in England, also argued for the essential unity of Marx’s thought. One of his merits was to insist that ‘the rejection of the “young Marx versus mature Marx” dichotomy does not mean the denial of Marx’s intellectual development. What is turned down is the dramatized idea of a radical reversal of his position in the aftermath of the Manuscripts of 1844.’[106] However, Mészáros fell into a twofold error. The first was to consider the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] as ‘a coherent system of ideas’, as ‘Marx’s first comprehensive system’. [107] Instead of suggesting to him something preliminary and incomplete, the fragmentary character of Marx’s Paris manuscripts seemed to mark it out as ‘one of the most complex and difficult works of philosophical literature’.[108] Indeed, according to Mészáros, ‘as Marx proceeds with his critical inquiry in theParis Manuscripts, the depth of his insight and the unparalleled coherence of his ideas become more and more evident’. [109] They seem to him to have ‘adequately anticipated the later Marx’, so that the ‘concept of “transcendence (Aufhebung) of labour’s self-alienation” provides the essential link with the totality of Marx’s work, including the last works of the so-called “mature Marx”.’[110] And he concludes:

With the elaboration of [… the] concepts [of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 – MM], Marx’s system in statu nascendi is virtually brought to its accomplishment. His radical ideas concerning the world of alienation and the conditions of its supersession are now coherently synthesized within the general outlines of a monumental, comprehensive vision. […] All further concretizations and modifications of Marx’s conception – including some major discoveries of the older Marx – are realized on the conceptual basis of the great philosophical achievements so clearly in evidence in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.[111]

Adam Schaff, one of the most influential Marxists in the ‘socialist camp’ to address Marx’s early writings with intense interest and an open mind, committed a similar mistake. In his Alienation as a Social Phenomenon, published in 1977, he correctly opposed ‘the various attempts to construct a theory of “two Marxes”, ’[112] but, while underlining that only the [Grundrisse] finally grasped the ‘distinction between objectification and alienation […] in their historical conditioning’, he wrongly asserted that ‘an embryo even of the concept of commodity fetishism […] is to be found in the Manuscripts’.[113]

The dissemination of the [Grundrisse], beginning in Germany in 1953[114] and spreading to the rest of Europe and North America in the late Sixties, shifted the attention of researchers and political militants from Marx’s early writings to this ‘new’ unpublished text. In the Eighties and Nineties, however, when work on Marx’s thought became much rarer, a few studies did appear on the Hegel-Marx relationship that stressed the importance of the Paris manuscripts.[115] And more recently, proving that their fascination is still alive, new studies have appeared that again take up the work of interpreting those theoretically dazzling pages from 1844. [116]

7. Superiority, Break or Continuity?
Whatever their academic discipline or political affiliation, interpreters of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] may be divided into three groups. The first consists of all those who, in counterposing the Paris manuscripts to Capital, stress the theoretical pre-eminence of the former work. A second group attaches little significance in general to the manuscripts, while a third tends toward the thesis that there is a theoretical continuum between them and Capital.[117]

Those who assumed a split between the ‘young’ and the ‘mature’ Marx, argued for the greater theoretical richness of the former, presented the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] as his most valuable text and sharply differentiated it from his later works. In particular, they tended to marginalize Capital often without studying it in any depth – a book altogether more demanding than the twenty odd pages on alienated labour in the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], about which almost all advanced various philosophical cogitations. The originators of this line of interpretation were Landshut and Meyer, shortly followed by Henri de Man. In casting Marx’s thought as an ethical-humanist doctrine, these authors pursued the political objective of opposing the rigid orthodoxy of 1930s Soviet Marxism and contesting its hegemony within the workers’ movement. This theoretical offensive resulted in something very different, tending to enlarge the potential field of Marxist theory. [118] Though the formulations were often hazy and generic, Marxism was no longer considered merely as an economic determinist theory and began to exert a greater attraction for large numbers of intellectuals and young people.

This approach began to make headway soon after the publication in 1932 of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and continued to win converts until the late 1950s, partly thanks to the explosive effect of a new text so unlike the dominant canon of Marxism. Its main sponsors were a motley group of heterodox Marxists, progressive Christians and existentialist philosophers,[119] who interpreted Marx’s economic writings as a step back from what they saw as the centrality of the human person in his early theories. After the Second World War, the main figures were Thier, Poppitz and Hommes in Germany and – although they did not clearly endorse the claim to superiority of the 1844 manuscripts – Merleau-Ponty, Bigo, Calvez and Axelos in France, and Fromm in the United States. Raymond Aron, who in 1968 took sharp issue with those who saw the manuscripts as the centre of gravity of Marxism, perfectly summed up their most striking paradox: ‘Twenty years ago, Latin Quarter orthodoxy regarded the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as the last word in Marxist philosophy, even though, if one sticks to the texts, Marx himself ridiculed the language and types of analysis he had adopted in his early works.’[120]

The second group of interpreters, who regarded the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] as a transitional text of no special significance in the development of Marx’s thought. Since Adoratskii’s preface to the 1932 MEGA edition, this was the most widely read account in the Soviet Union and its later satellite countries. The failure of the manuscripts to mention the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, together with the presence of themes such as human alienation and the exploitation of labour that highlighted some of the most glaring contradictions of ‘actually existing socialism’, led to their ostracization at the top of the ruling Communist parties. Not by chance were they excluded from editions of the works of Marx and Engels in various countries of the ‘socialist bloc’.[121] Moreover, many of the authors in question wholly endorsed Lenin’s definition of the stages in the development of Marx’s thought – an approach later canonized by Marxism-Leninism, which, apart from being in many respects theoretically and politically questionable, made it impossible to account for Marx’s important work newly published for the first time eight years after the death of the Bolshevik leader.

As the influence of the Althusserian school grew in the 1960s, this reading also became popular in France and elsewhere in Western Europe. But, although its basic tenets are generally attributed to Althusser alone, the seeds were already there in Naville: that is, the belief that Marxism was a science and that Marx’s early works, still imbued with the language and preoccupations of Left Hegelianism, marked a stage prior to the birth of a ‘new science’ inCapital.[122] For Althusser, as we have seen, the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] represented the Marx most distant from Marxism.

A philologically unfounded counterposition of Marx’s early writings to the critique of political economy is shared by dissident or ‘revisionist’ Marxists eager to prioritize the former and by orthodox Communists focused on the ‘mature Marx’. Between them, they contributed to one of the principal misunderstandings in the history of Marxism: the myth of the ‘Young Marx’.[123]

The third and last group of interpreters of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] consists of those who, from different political and theoretical standpoints, identify a substantive continuity in Marx’s work. Going back to Marcuse or Lukács in German and Hyppolite or Rubel in French, this approach became hegemonic in the English-speaking world through the work of Tucker, McLellan and Ollman, then spread to most other parts of the world more widely from the late Sixties on, as the writings of Fetscher, Avineri, Mészáros and Schaff testify. The idea of an essential Marxian continuum, as opposed to a sharp theoretical break that completely discarded all that came before, was the inspiration for some of the best interpretations of the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], such as the non-dogmatic works of Lefebvre and Mandel that could appreciate its value with all its contradictions and incompleteness. Even then, however, there were a number of errors of interpretation – most notably, in certain authors, an underestimation of Marx’s huge advances of the 1850s and 1860s in the field of political economy. This went together with a diffuse tendency to reconstruct Marx’s thought through collections of quotations, without taking any account of the different periods in which the source texts had been written. All too often, the result was an author assembled out of pieces corresponding to the interpreter’s particular vision, passing backwards and forwards from [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] to Capital, as if Marx’s work were a single timeless and undifferentiated text. [124]

To underline the importance of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] for a better understanding of Marx’s development cannot involve drawing a veil of silence over the huge limits of this youthful text. Its author had scarcely begun to assimilate the basic concepts of political economy, and his conception of communism was no more than a confused synthesis of the philosophical studies he had undertaken until then. Captivating as they are, especially in the way they combine philosophical ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach with a critique of classical economic theory and a denunciation of working-class alienation, the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] are only a very first approximation, as is evident from their vagueness and eclecticism. They shed major light on the course Marx took, but an enormous distance still separates them from the themes and argument not only of the finished 1867 edition of Capital Volume 1, but also of the preparatory manuscripts for Capital, one of them published, that he drafted from the late Fifties on.

In contrast to analyses that either play up a distinctive ‘Young Marx’ or try to force a theoretical break in his work, the most incisive readings of the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] have known how to treat them as an interesting, but only initial, stage in Marx’s critical trajectory. Had he not continued his researches but remained with the concepts of the Paris manuscripts, he would probably have been demoted to a place alongside Bauer and Feuerbach in the sections of philosophy manuals devoted to the Hegelian Left.[125] Instead, decades of political activity, uninterrupted study and constant critical work on hundreds of volumes of political economy, history and other disciplines turned the young scholar of 1844 into one of the most brilliant minds in the history of humanity. As a result, the first stages of his theoretical progress, prominently featuring the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], acquired a significance that would stimulate whole generations of readers and researchers.

Appendix: Main editions of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] from 1927 to 1998 [126]
1. 1927. In Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa, vol. III. Translation of part of the ‘third’ manuscript entitled Preparatory Work for The Holy Family.
2. 1929. In La Revue Marxiste, with the titles Notes sur le communisme et la propriété privée and Notes sur les besoins, la production et la division du travail. Translated from the Russian of No. 1 by Albert Mesnil.
3. 1929. In K. Marks i F. Engel’s Sochineniya, vol. III. Same version as No. 1.
4. 1931. In Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, vol. V. First publication in German of the fragment Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik und der Philosophie überhaupt.
5. 1932. Under the title Nationalökonomie und Philosophie, in Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus. Die Frühschriften, edited by Siegfried Landshut and Jacob Peter Mayer.
6. 1932. In MEGA, vol. III, ed. by Viktor Adoratskii, with the title Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844. This edition also included the notebooks of extracts from Levasseur, Engels, Say, Skarbek, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, MacCulloch, de Tracy and de Boisguillebert.
7. 1932. First partial Japanese translation. This version included the fragment [Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole] from the ‘third’ manuscript and the section [Wages] from the ‘first’ manuscript.
8. 1937. In Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. VI, entitled Manuscrits économico-philosophiques de 1844. The translation, by Jules Molitor, was based on the Landshut-Mayer edition (No. 5).
9. 1946. First Japanese translation, by Togo Kusaka.
10. 1947. In La Revue Socialiste. Translation by Maximilien Rubel of two fragments from the ‘first’ manuscript not previously published in French.
11. 1947. In Three Essays by Karl Marx. Selected from the Economic Philosophical Manuscripts, translation by Ria Stone. First partial English translation from the MEGA.
12. 1949. Italian translation, Manoscritti economico-filosofici del 1844, by Norberto Bobbio from the MEGA edition.
13. 1950. Italian translation, Manoscritti economico-filosofici del 1844, by Galvano della Volpe.
14. 1953. Revised edition of the 1932 text Nationalökonomie und Philosophie, ed. by Landshut e Mayer (No. 5).
15. 1953. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844. New Dietz Verlag edition, with important corrections of MEGA transcription errors in parts of the ‘third’ manuscript.
16. 1955. In Kleine ökonomische Schriften. Edition containing corrections of the main inaccuracies in the MEGA version.
17. 1956. First edition in Chinese.
18. 1956. Iz rannikh proizvedennii. Russian translation from the MEGA version.
19. 1956. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. English translation by Martin Milligan from the Russian version (No. 18).
20. 1960. Spanish translation from the English version (No. 19).
21. 1962. Manuscripts de 1844. Translation by Émile Bottigelli from the MEGA version, incorporating corrections from the editions in Nos. 15 and 16.
22. 1962. In Marx-Studienausgabe, vol. I. Edited by Hans-Joachim Lieber and Peter Furth.
23. 1966. In Texte zu Methode und Praxis. Edited by Günther Hillmann. Version very similar to No. 22.
24. 1968. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, ed. by Joachim Höppner. Edition following Marx’s own pagination of the three manuscripts, with the addition of his remarks on the text by James Mill.
25. 1968. In Marx-Engels Werke. Edition based on the MEGA version, incorporating the revisions in No. 16.
26. 1968. In Oeuvres. Économie. II. Translation by Maximilien Rubel. This version, which appeared with the title Ébauche d’une critique de l’économie politique, was based on the MEGA edition and also included the Notes de lecture (that is, Marx’s comments on works he read during his period in Paris).
27. 1974. Publication of the text in the second K. Marks i F. Engel’s Sochineniya, vol. XLII.
28. 1975. Publication of the text in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. III.
29. 1976. Publication of the Della Volpe version (No. 13) – and of the remarks on James Mill – in Marx Engels Opere, vol. III.
30. 1981. In MEGA², vol. IV/2: first publication of the extracts from Senofonte, Prevost, Schüz, List, Osiander and Buret.
31. 1982. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte in MEGA², vol. I/2. The edition contained two versions of the text, one respecting the exact page sequence of the original manuscripts, the other following the repagination generally used by previous editions.
32. 1990. La scoperta dell’economia politica. Partial Italian translation of Marx’s comments in the Paris notebooks of extracts.
33. 1998. MEGA² vol. IV/3: first publication of the extracts from Law and Lauderdale.

References
1. Karl Marx, ‘Podgotovitel’nye raboty dlya Svyatogo Semeistva’, ed. by David Ryazanov, in Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, 3, 1927, pp. 247-86.
2. The surviving parts of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] consist of three manuscripts, the first totalling 27 pages, the second 4 pages and the third 41 pages. To these should be added a prospectus of the last chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which Marx inserted into the third manuscript.
Karl Marx, ‘Podgotovitel’nye raboty dlya Svyatogo Semeistva’, ed. by David Ryazanov, in Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, 3, 1927, pp. 247-86.
3. See David Ryazanov, ‘Ot reinskoi Gazety do Svyatogo Semeistva (Vstupitel’naya stat’ya)’, in ibid., pp. 103-42.
4. Karl Marx, ‘Notes sur le communisme et la propriété privée’, La Revue Marxiste, no. 1 (February 1929), pp. 6-28 and Karl Marx, ‘Notes sur les besoins, la production et la division du travail’, La Revue Marxiste, no. 5 (June 1929), pp. 513-38.
5. Karl Marx, ‘Podgotovitel’nye raboty dlya Svyatogo Semeistva’, ed. by David Ryazanov, in K. Marks-F. Engels Sochineniya, vol. 3, 1929, Moscow-Leningrad, pp. 613-70.
6. Karl Marx, ‘Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik und der Philosophie überhaupt’, Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, vol. 5 (1931), no. 3, pp. 256-75.
7. ‘Nationalökonomie und Philosophie. Über den Zusammenhang der Nationalökonomie mit Staat, Recht, Moral, und bürgerlichem Leben (1844)’, in Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus. Die Frühschriften (eds. Siegfried Landshut and Jacob Peter Mayer), Leipzig: Kröner, pp. 283-375.
8. Jacob Peter Mayer, ‘Über eine unveröffentlichte Schrift von Karl Marx’, Rote Revue, vol. 5 (1930-31), pp. 154-7.
9. Karl Marx, ‘Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, in Marx Engels Collected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975- , vol. 3, pp. ????
10. See Landshut and Mayer, ‘Vorwort der Herausgeber’, in Marx, Der historische Materialismus, op. cit., pp. vi-vii.
11. Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, MEGA I/3, Berlin: Marx-Engels-Verlag, 1932, pp. 29-172.
12. See Jürgen Rojahn, ‘Der Fall der sog. “Ökonomisch-philosophischen Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844”’, International Review of Social History , April 1983, vol. 28/1, p. ????; and Jürgen Rojahn, ‘The Emergence of a Theory: the Importance of Marx’s Notebooks Exemplified by Those from 1844’, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 14 (2002), no. 4, p. 33.
13. See MEGA, vol. I/3, op. cit., pp. 411-16.
14. See David McLellan, Marx before Marxism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd rev. edn., 1972, p. 210; or Jacques Rancière, Jacques Rancière, ‘The Concept of “Critique” and the “Critique of Political Economy” (from the 1844 Manuscript to Capital)’, Economy and Society, 5:3, pp. 352-76.
15. Nikolai Lapin, Der junge Marx, Berlin: Dietz, 1974, pp. 303-5.
16. Karl Marx, Nationalökonomie und Philosophie (ed. Erich Thier), Cologne: Kiepenheuer, 1950.
17. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften (ed. Siegfried Landshut), Stuttgart: Kröner, 1953. This edition, which was reprinted a good seven times, finally acquired a short historical-philological apparatus in 2003: Oliver Heins and Richard Sperl, ‘Editorische und überlieferungsgeschichtliche Anmerkungen’, in ibid., Stuttgart: Kröner, 2003, pp. 631-52.
18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Kleine ökonomische Schriften, Berlin: Dietz, 1955, pp. 42-166.
19. Idem, Iz rannikh proizvedennii, Moscow: Marx-Engels-Verlag, 1956, pp. 519-642.
20. See Vladimir Brouchlinski, ‘Note sur l’histoire de la rédaction et de la publication des Manuscrits économico-philosophiques de Karl Marx’, in varii, Sur le jeune Marx, special issue of the journal Recherches Internationales à la lumiere du marxisme, vol. V-VI (1960), no. 19, p. 78.
21. K. Marx and F. Engels, Sochineniya, vol. XLII, Moscow: Politizdat, 1974, pp. 41-174.
22. Maria Hunink, De Papieren van de Revolutie, Amsterdam: International Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1986.
23. See MEGA I/3, op. cit., p. 472 (line 2) and MEGA I/3, op. cit., p. 68 (line 19).
24. Brouchlinski, ‘Note sur l’histoire…’, p. 79.
25. Karl Marx, ‘Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844’, in Marx-Engels-Werke. Ergänzungsband. Erster Teil, Berlin: Dietz, 1968, pp. 465-588.
26. See MEGA² I/2, Berlin: Dietz, 1982, pp. 187-322 and 323-438.
27. According to the editors’ introductory note to Vol. I/2, these consisted of ‘essential corrections to previously published editions’: see ibid., p. 35*. For all details concerning transcription amendments, see the list of variants of the [‘Preface’] in ibid, pp. 842-52.
28. See MEGA² I/2, op. cit., pp. 439-44 and MEGA² IV/2, Berlin: Dietz, 1981, pp. 493-500.
29. See Marcello Musto, “Marx in Paris. Manuscripts and Notebooks of 1844”, Science & Society, vol. 73, n. 3 (July 2009): 386-402.
30. Cf. David McLellan, Marx, 2nd edn., London: Fontana, 1986, p. 80.
31. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 51 and 53. A few years later, in defending his concept of an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work, Althusser insisted that the discussion on the ‘Young Marx’ was ‘in the last resort, political. … This is not a debate about philology! To hang on to or to reject these words, to defend them or to destroy them — something real is at stake in these struggles, whose ideological and political character is obvious. It is not too much to say that what is at stake today, behind the argument about words, is Leninism. Not only the recognition of the existence and role of Marxist theory and science, but also the concrete forms of the fusion between the Labour Movement and Marxist theory, and the conception of materialism and the dialectic.’ Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, London: New Books, 1971, pp. 114-15.
32. Iring Fetscher, Marx and Marxism, New York: Herder and Herder, 1971, p. 314.
33. Victor Adoratskij, ‘Einleitung’, in MEGA I/3, op. cit., p. xiii.
34. In reality, the introduction signed by the two editors was the work of Landshut alone, who published it the same year as a separate short work: Siegfried Landshut, Karl Marx, Lübeck: Charles Coleman, 1932. For a critique of this position, see Georg Lukács, Der junge Marx, Pfullingen: Neske, 1965, pp. 12-13.
35. Siegfried Landshut and Jacob Peter Mayer, ‘Vorwort der Herausgeber’, op. cit., p. vi.
36. Ibid., p. xxxviii.
37. Ibid., p. xiii.
38. Henri de Man, ‘Der neu entdeckte Marx’, Der Kampf, vol. XXV (1932), nos. 5-6, p. 224.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., p. 276.
41. Ibid., p. 277.
42. Herbert Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy, London: New Left Books, 1972, pp. 3f. Cf. the following assertion, one of many of this type: ‘In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscript the original meaning of the basic categories is clearer than even before, and it could become necessary to revise the current interpretation of the later and more elaborated critique in the light of its origins.’ Ibid.
43. Georg W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Logik, Metaphysik und Naturphilosophie, ed. by Georg Lasson, Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923; and Georg W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie, ed. by Johannes Hoffmeister, Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1931.
44. The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics , London: Merlin Press, London 1975, pp. 548-9. Another important text that helps us to appreciate the revolutionary impact of the [ Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] is Lukács’s biographical interview with New Left Review: ‘Reading these manuscripts changed my whole relationship with Marxism and transformed my philosophical perspective.’ ‘Lukács on his Life and Work’, New Left Review, No. 68 (July-August 1971), p. 57. Cf. Georg Lukács, Towards the Ontology of Social Being, 3 vols., London: Merlin Press, 1978-1980.
45. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Cornell University Press, 1980.
46. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 3rd rev. edn., London: Constable, 1965.
47. This essay took the form of a substantive editorial introduction (‘Einleitung’) to Karl Marx, Nationalökonomie und Philosophie, op. cit, pp. 3-127 and was later reprinted as a separate book: Erich Thier, Das Menschenbild des jungen Marx, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957.
48. Heinrich Popitz, Der entfremdete Mensch. Zeitkritik und Geschichtsphilosophie des jungen Marx, Basle: Verlag fur Recht und Gesellschaft, 1953.
49. Jakob Hommes, Der technische Eros: Das Wesen der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung, Freiburg: Herder, 1955.
50. See Adam Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, Chapter 1.
51. See Ornella Pompeo Faracovi, Il marxismo francese contemporaneo fra dialettica e struttura (1945-1968), Milan: Feltrinelli, esp. pp. 12-18, where it is recalled that ‘postwar French philosophical culture was for a long time interested almost exclusively in the thought of the young Marx’.
52. Henri Lefebvre, ‘Le marxisme et la pensée française’, Les Temps Modernes, nos. 137-138 (1957), p. 114.
53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern, 1964, esp. the chapter on ‘Marxism and Philosophy’. Cf. Lars Roar Langset, ‘Young Marx and Alienation in Western Debate’, Inquiry, vol. 6 (1963), no. 1, p. 11.
54. Raymond Aron made fun of this position, suggesting that ‘in the speculations of the young Marx’ the existentialists found ‘the secret of an “untranscendable” Marxism that Marx claimed to have “transcended” from the age of thirty’. D’une Sainte Famille à l’autre. Essais sur les marxismes imaginaires, Paris: Gallimard, 1969, p. 44.
55. Pierre Bigo, Marxisme et humanisme, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, p. 248.
56. Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx, Paris: Seuil, 1956, p. 25????????.
57. Roger Garaudy, From Anathema to Dialogue: The Challenge of Marxist-Christian Cooperation, London: Collins, 1967.
58. Aron, D’une Sainte Famille à l’autre, op. cit., p. 74.
59. Ibid., p. 119. Aron’s book is full of polemical references to the paradoxes of French interpreters of Marx (‘our Parisian philosophers prefer sketches to finished works, are fond of rough copies so long as they are obscure’, p. 172) and to the success they managed to obtain (‘Jupiter, it is said, first drove mad those he wished to destroy. In Paris, Marx – a benevolent Jupiter – promises fashionable success to those he leads’, p. 286). On the role of Gaston Fessard in the French debate of the time, see Fessard, Le dialogue catholique-communiste est-il possible?, Paris: Grasset, 1937.
60. Pierre Naville, Le nouveau Léviathan 1. De l’aliénation à la jouissance, Paris: Anthropos, 1967, p. 23.
61. Ibid., p. 22.
62. Ibid., pp. 12-13.
63. Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx – L’homme et l’oeuvre. De l’hégélianisme au matérialisme historique, Paris: Felix Alcan, 1934.
64. Auguste Cornu, Marx et Engels, 4 vols., Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955-1970.
65. This was also true of Émile Bottigelli, who wrote the introduction to the new translation of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ] that appeared in the early Sixties. See Émile Bottigelli, ‘Présentation’ to Karl Marx, Manuscrits de 1844, Paris : Éditions Sociales, 1962, esp. pp. lxvi-lxix.
66. Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, New York: Harper & Row, 1969, pp. 148, 150.
67. Maximilien Rubel, Karl Marx: Essai de biographie intellectuelle, Paris: Rivière, 1957, p. 121-3.
68. Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis and Technē in the Thought of Karl Marx, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976, p. 45.
69. Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, London: Verso, 1991, pp. 79-80.
70. Louis Althusser, For Marx, London: Allen Lane, 1969, p.33.[71] Ibid., p. 34.
72. Ibid., p. 35.
73. Ibid., p. 36.
74. Ibid., p. 159.
75. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Concept of “Critique” and the “Critique of Political Economy” (from the 1844 Manuscript to Capital’, Economy and Society, 5:3, pp. 352-76.
76. ‘Reply to John Lewis’, in Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, London: New Left Books, 1976, p. 65.
77. Ibid., pp. 65-6.
78. Ibid., p. 70.
79. Ibid., p. 70.
80. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, New York: Humanity Books, 1999, p. 258: ‘[A]ll the philosophical concepts of Marxian theory are social and economic categories. … Even Marx’s early writings are not philosophical. They express the negation of philosophy, though they still do so in philosophical language.’
81. ‘Reply to John Lewis’, p. 70.
82. See Terrell Carver, ‘The German Ideology Never Took Place’, History of Political Thought, XXXI (2010), 1, pp. 107-27.
83. Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, op. cit., p. 109.
84. Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 158.
85. See Marcello Musto, “Revisiting Marx’s Concept of Alienation”, Socialism and Democracy, vol. 24, n. 3 (November 2010): 79-101.
86. Georg Mende, Karl Marx’ Entwicklung von revolutionären Demokraten zum Kommunisten, Berlin: Dietz, 1960, p. 132.
87. D. I. Rosenberg, Die Entwicklung der ökonomischen Lehre von Marx und Engels in den vierziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Dietz, 1958.
88. The essay ‘Per una giusta comprensione del pensiero di Antonio Labriola [For a correct understanding of the thought of Antonio Labriola]’, published for the first time in 1964 in Rinascita, the theoretical journal of the Italian Communist Party, contains a statement that shows how the importance of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] had become apparent also to Marxists such as Togliatti who were linked to the Soviet Union. In his view, the Paris manuscripts had ‘opened the way to the critique of bourgeois society as a whole, which would be carried through in works in later years and culminate in Capital, but which may be said to have already been largely complete. … Despite its form, which is not simple, one feels that the whole of Marxism is already contained here’ (in Sur le jeune Marx, op. cit., pp. 48-9). By contrast, Galvano Della Volpe argued in Rousseau e Marx (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1956) that the main work of Marx’s youth was not the Paris manuscripts of 1844 (a kind of economic-philosophical ‘author’s notebook’) but the [Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right], which contained ‘the general premises of a new philosophical method’ (p. 150).
89. Léonide Pajitnov, ‘Les Manuscrits économico-philosophiques de 1844’, in Sur le jeune Marx, op. cit., p. 98.
90. Althusser, For Marx, op. cit., pp. 56f.
91. Ibid., p. 70.
92. Walter Tuchscheerer, Bevor “Das Kapital” entstand: die Entstehung der ökonomischen Theorie von Karl Marx, Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1973.
93. Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961, p. iv.
94. Ibid., p. 50. It is striking that this book, which aims to synthesize Marx’s thought as a whole (not only his early work), has no more than six references to Capital, compared with thirty-six to the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844]. A similar point could be made about quite a few authors during this period. To appreciate how widespread was this tendency, we might also quote such a rigorous researcher as István Mészáros: ‘In discussing Marx’s theory of alienation the centre of analysis must be, needless to say, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.’ Marx’s Theory of Alienation, London: Merlin Press, 1975, p. 24.
95. The precursor of this tendency was Sidney Hook, in his Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx, London: Gollancz, 1933.
96. Daniel Bell, ‘The “Rediscovery” of Alienation: Some Notes along the Quest for the Historical’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 56, no. 24, pp. 935 and 944.
97. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy & Myth in Karl Marx, London: Transaction, 2001, p. 7.
98. Ibid., 169.
99. Ibid., p. 238. Three years earlier, Raya Dunayevskaya had put forward a very similar argument in Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today, London: Pluto Press, 1975: ‘What Marx expressed in the early writings is the essence of Marxism as it was to remain and develop through the remaining thirty-nine years of his life. Marxism became richer, of course […, but] nothing from his early Humanism was ever jettisoned by him when at another period, he called it communism’ (p. 64).
100. David McLellan, Marx before Marxism, op. cit., p. 162.
101. Ibid., p. 256.
102. Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. xiv.
103. Ibid., p. xv.
104. Iring Fetscher, op. cit., p. 9.
105. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge: CUP, 1968, p. 13.
106. Mészáros, op. cit., p. 232.
107. Ibid., p. 17.
108. Ibid., p. 11.
109. Ibid., p. 20.
110. Ibid., 23.
111. Ibid., pp. 112-13.
112. Adam Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980, p. 49.
113. Ibid., p. 102.
114. The first edition of 1939-42 remained almost unknown: see Ernst Theodor Mohl, ‘Germany, Austria and Switzerland’ and Lyudmila L. Vasina, ‘Russia and the Soviet Union’, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 189-201 and 202-12.
115] The books worthy of note during this period include: Solange Mercier-Josa, Pour lire Hegel et Marx, Paris: Éditions sociales, 1980 andRetour sur le jeune Marx. Deux études sur le rapport de Marx à Hegel, Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1986; Christopher J. Arthur,Dialectics of Labour. Marx and His Relation to Hegel, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986; and Nasir Khan, Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx’s Writings. March 1843 to August 1844, Oslo: Solum, 1995.
116. Takahisa Oishi, The Unknown Marx, London: Pluto, 2001; and Jean-Louis Lacascade, Les métamorphoses du jeune Marx, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.
117. Other surveys of the literature on the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] may be found in Aldo Zanardo, Filosofia e socialismo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974, in the chapter entitled ‘Il giovane Marx e il marxismo contemporaneo’, pp. 421-551; Ernest Mandel, Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, op. cit., pp. 206ff.; and Jürgen Rojahn, ‘Il caso dei cosiddetti “manoscritti economico-filosofici dell’anno 1844”’, Passato e Presente, 3, 1983, pp. 39-46.
118. See Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, op. cit., p. 5.
119. See Tucker, Philosophy and Myth, op. cit., p. 168.
120. Aron, D’une Sainte Famille à l’autre, op. cit., p. 285.
121. Apart from the previously mentioned context of the USSR and GDR, see Stanislav Hubik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, which recalls (on p. 241) that the Czech Capital had a print run of 50,000 and the complete works of Marx and Engels between 15,000 and 20,000, whereas the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] was printed in only 4,000 copies (p. 241). Hungary and Yugoslavia were exceptions in this general panorama, since the official Marxism was less dogmatic than elsewhere in Eastern Europe and presented less of an obstacle to the introduction of the critical ideas in the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] and the [ Grundrisse]. See, e.g., Giovanni Ruggeri (ed.), La rivolta del ‘Praxis’, Milan: Longanesi 1969.
122. See Henri Lefebvre, Marx, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972, pp. 24 and 26.
123. This counterposition also gave rise to conflicts about the terminology and fundamental concepts of Marxian theory – for example, historical materialism versus historicism, or exploitation versus alienation. Cf. Aron, D’une Sainte Famille à l’autre, op. cit., p. 129.
124. See the critical points made in this connection by Schaff and Aron. For the former, ‘Marx’s texts from the 1840s cannot be quoted indiscriminately alongside those from the 1870s, as if they carried equal weight for our knowledge of Marxism and had an equal right of abode in our analysis’ ( Marxism and the Human Individual, p. 28, trans. modified). For the latter, ‘In the years after the war, during the existentialist period, the Jesuit priests Bigo and Calvez and the existentialists treated the whole of Marxist thought as an atemporal whole, some using texts from 1845, others from 1867, as if Marx’s thought did not develop, as if the rough copy of 1844 (not even finished, still less published) contained the best of Marxism’ (D’une Sainte Famille à l’autre, p. 223).
125. Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, p. 28.
126. This bibliographical note takes account of the list of editions of the [Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844] up to 1982 published in Bert Andréas (ed.), Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels. Das elende der klassischen deutschen Philosophie. Bibliographie, Trier: Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus, 1983, pp. 64-72.

Opening steps
On 28 September 1864, St. Martin’s Hall in the very heart of London was packed to overflowing with some two thousand workmen. [1] They had come to attend a meeting called by English trade union leaders and a small group of workers from the Continent.The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen stated:

A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages; and we are sorry to say that this has been done, though not from any desire on the part of our continental brethren to injure us, but through a want of regular and systematic communication between the industrial classes of all countries. Our aim is to bring up the wages of the ill-paid to as near a level as possible with that of those who are better remunerated, and not to allow our employers to play us off one against the other, and so drag us down to the lowest possible condition, suitable to their avaricious bargaining.[2]

The organizers of this initiative did not imagine – nor could they have foreseen – what it would lead to shortly afterwards. Their idea was to build an international forum where the main problems affecting workers could be examined and discussed, but this did not include the actual founding of an organization to coordinate the trade union and political action of the working class. In reality, it gave birth to the prototype of all organizations of the workers’ movement, which both reformists and revolutionaries would subsequently take as their point of reference: the International Working Men’s Association.[3]

It was soon arousing passions all over Europe. It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of men and women to struggle for the most radical of goals: changing the world. Thus, on the occasion of the Third Congress of the International, held in Brussels in 1868, the leader writer of The Times accurately identified the scope of the project:

It is not … a mere improvement that is contemplated, but nothing less than a regeneration, and that not of one nation only, but of mankind. This is certainly the most extensive aim ever contemplated by any institution, with the exception, perhaps, of the Christian Church. To be brief, this is the programme of the International Workingmen’s Association.[4]

Thanks to the International, the workers’ movement was able to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of its own strength, and to develop new and more advanced forms of struggle. The organization resonated far beyond the frontiers of Europe, among the artisans of Buenos Aires, the early workers’ associations in Calcutta, and even the labour groups in Australia and New Zealand that applied to join it.

The right man in the right place
The workers’ organizations that founded the International were a motley assemblage. The central driving force was British trade unionism, whose leaders were mainly interested in economic questions; they fought to improve the workers’ conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence they conceived of the International as an instrument that might prevent the import of manpower from abroad in the event of strikes.

Then there were the mutualists, long dominant in France but strong also in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they were opposed to any working-class involvement in politics and to the strike as a weapon of struggle, as well as holding conservative positions on women’s emancipation. Advocating a cooperative system along federalist lines, they maintained that it was possible to change capitalism by means of equal access to credit. In the end, therefore, they may be said to have constituted the right wing of the International.

Alongside these two components, which comprised the majority, there were still others. Third in importance were the communists. Grouped around Karl Marx and active in small groupings with limited influence, they were anticapitalist: opposing the existing system of production and espousing the necessity of political action to overthrow it.

At the time of its founding, the ranks of the International also included vaguely democratic elements that had nothing to do with the socialist tradition. The picture is further complicated by the fact that some workers who joined the International brought with them a variety of confused theories, some of a utopian inspiration; while the party led by followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, which never affiliated to the International but orbited around it – was hostile to trade unionism and conceived of political action in rigidly national terms.

To secure cohabitation of all these currents in the same organization, around a program so distant from the approaches with which each had started out, was Marx’s great accomplishment. His political talents enabled him to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, ensuring that the International did not swiftly follow the many previous workers’ associations down the path to oblivion.[5] It was Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International, and Marx too who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly class-based, political program that won it a mass character beyond all sectarianism. The political soul of its General Council was always Marx: he drafted all its main resolutions and prepared most of its congress reports. He was “the right man in the right place,” as the German workers’ leader Johann Georg Eccarius once put it. [6]

Contrary to later fantasies that pictured Marx as the founder of the International, he was not even among the organizers of the meeting at St. Martin’s Hall, and was a non-speaking participant.[7] Yet he immediately grasped the potential in the event and worked hard to ensure that the new organization successfully carried out its mission. Thanks to the prestige attaching to his name, at least in restricted circles, he was appointed to the standing committee,[8] where he soon gained sufficient trust to be given the task of writing the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Statutes of the International. In these fundamental texts, as in many others that followed, Marx drew on the best ideas of the various components of the International. He firmly linked economic and political struggle to each other, and made international thinking and international action an irreversible choice.

It was mainly thanks to Marx’s capacities that the International developed its function of political synthesis, unifying the various national contexts in a project of common struggle. The maintenance of unity was gruelling at times, especially as Marx’s anticapitalism was never the dominant political position within the organization. Over time, however, partly through his own tenacity, partly through occasional splits, Marx’s thought became the hegemonic doctrine. The character of workers’ mobilizations, the antisystemic challenge of the Paris Commune, the unprecedented task of holding together such a large and complex organization, the successive polemics with other tendencies in the workers’ movement on various theoretical and political issues: all this impelled Marx beyond the limits of political economy alone, which had absorbed so much of his attention since the defeat of the 1848 revolution and the ebbing of the most progressive forces. He was also stimulated to develop and sometimes revise his ideas, to put old certainties up for discussion and ask himself new questions, and in particular to sharpen his critique of capitalism by drawing the broad outlines of a communist society. The orthodox Soviet view of Marx’s role in the International, according to which he mechanically applied to the stage of history a political theory already forged in the confines of his study, is thus totally divorced from reality.

Membership and structure
During its lifetime, the International was depicted as a vast, powerful organization. The size of its membership was always overestimated. The public prosecutor who arraigned some of its French leaders in June 1870 stated that the organization had more than 800,000 members in Europe; [9] a year later, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, The Times put the total at two and a half million.[10] In reality, the membership figures were much lower. It has always been difficult to arrive at even approximate estimates, and that was true for its own leaders and those who studied it most closely. But the present state of research allows the hypothesis that, at its peak in 1871-72, the membership may been over 150,000, but not much higher.

In those times, when there was a dearth of effective working-class organizations apart from the English trade unions and the General Association of German Workers, that figure was still sizeable. It should also be borne in mind that, throughout its existence, the International was recognized as a legal organization only in Britain, Switzerland, Belgium and the United States. In other countries it was at best on the margins of legality, and its members were subject to persecution. On the other hand, the Association had a remarkable capacity to weld its components into a cohesive whole. Within a couple of years from its birth, it had succeeded in federating hundreds of workers’ societies; after 1868 societies were added in Spain, and following the Paris Commune sections sprang up also in Italy, Holland, Denmark and Portugal. The development of the International was doubtless uneven, yet a strong sense of belonging prevailed among those who joined it. They retained the bonds of class solidarity and responded as best they could to the call for a rally, the words of a poster or the unfurling of the red flag of struggle, in the name of an organization that had sustained them in their hour of need. [11]

Members of the International, however, comprised only a small part of the total workforce. In Britain, with the sole exception of steelworkers, the International always had a sparse presence among the industrial proletariat.[12] The great majority of members there came from tailoring, clothing, shoemaking and cabinet-making – that is, from sectors of the working class that were then the best organized and the most class-conscious. Nowhere did factory workers ever form a majority, at least after the expansion of the organization in Southern Europe. The other great limitation was the failure to draw in unskilled labour,[13] despite efforts in that direction beginning with the run-up to the first congress. The Instructions for Delegates of the Provisional General Council are clear on this: “Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, [the unions] cannot fail to enlist the non-society men into their ranks.”[14]

In one of the key political-organizational documents of the International, Marx summarized its functions as follows: “It is the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever.”[15] Still, despite the considerable autonomy granted to federations and local sections, the International always retained a locus of political leadership. Its General Council was the body that worked out a unifying synthesis of the various tendencies and issued guidelines for the organization as a whole.

From October 1864 until August 1872 it met with great regularity, as many as 385 times, and debated a wide range of issues: working conditions, the effects of new machinery, support for strikes, the role and importance of trade unions, the Irish question, various foreign policy matters, and, of course, how to build the society of the future, and drafted the documents of the International. [16]

The formation of the International
Britain was the first country where applications were made to join the International; the 4,000-member Operative Society of Bricklayers affiliated in February 1865, soon to be followed by associations of construction workers and shoemakers. In the first year of its existence, the General Council (GC) began serious activity to publicize the principles of the Association. This helped to broaden its horizon beyond purely economic questions, as we can see from the fact that it was among the organizations belonging to the (electoral) Reform League founded in February 1865.

In France, the International began to take shape in January 1865, when its first section was founded in Paris. But it remained very limited in strength, had little ideological influence, and was unable even to establish a national federation. Nevertheless, the French supporters of the International, who were mostly followers of Proudhon’s mutualist theories, established themselves as the second largest group at the first conference of the organization.

In the following year, the International continued to expand in Europe and established its first important nuclei in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. The Prussian Combination Laws, however, meant that the International was unable to open sections in what was then the German Confederation. The 5,000-member General Association of German Workers – the first workers’ party in history – followed a line of ambivalent dialogue with Otto von Bismarck and showed little or no interest in the International during the early years of its existence. It was an indifference shared by Wilhelm Liebknecht, despite his political proximity to Marx.

The activity of the GC in London was decisive for the further strengthening of the International. In Spring 1866, with its support for the strikers of the London Amalgamated Tailors, it played an active role for the first time in a workers’ struggle, and following the success of the strike five societies of tailors, each numbering some 500 workers, decided to affiliate to the International. The International was the first association to succeed in the far from simple task of enlisting trade union organizations into its ranks.[17]

In September 1866, the city of Geneva hosted the first congress of the International, with 60 delegates from Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland. By then the Association could point to a very favourable balance-sheet of the two years since its foundation, having rallied to its banner more than one hundred trade unions and political organizations. Those taking part in the congress essentially divided into two blocs. The first, consisting of the British delegates, the few Germans and a majority of the Swiss, followed the GC directives drawn up by Marx (who was not present in Geneva). The second, comprising the French delegates and some of the French-speaking Swiss, was made up of the mutualists. At that time, in fact, moderate positions were prevalent in the International.

Basing themselves on resolutions prepared by Marx, the GC leaders succeeded in marginalizing the mutualists at the congress, and obtained votes in favour of state intervention. On the latter issue, Marx had spelled things out clearly:

In enforcing such laws [of social reform], the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency.[18]

Thus, far from strengthening bourgeois society (as Proudhon believed), these reformist demands were an indispensable starting point for the emancipation of the working class. Furthermore, the “instructions” that Marx wrote for the Geneva congress underline the basic function of trade unions against which not only the mutualists but others had taken a stand:

This activity of the Trades’ Unions is not only legitimate, it is necessary. It cannot be dispensed with so long as the present system of production lasts…. On the other hand, unconsciously to themselves, the Trades’ Unions were forming centres of organization of the working class, as the mediaeval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the Trades’ Unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule.

In the same document, Marx did not spare the existing unions his criticism. For they were too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital [and had] not yet fully understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general social and political movements.[19]

Growing strength
From late 1866 on, strikes intensified in many European countries. Organized by broad masses of workers, they helped to generate an awareness of their condition and formed the core of a new and important wave of struggles.

Although some governments of the time blamed the International for the unrest, most of the workers in question did not even know of its existence; the root cause of their protests was the dire working and living conditions they were forced to endure. The mobilizations did, however, usher in a period of contact and coordination with the International, which supported them with declarations and calls for solidarity, raised funds for strikers, and helped fight attempts by the bosses to weaken the workers’ resistance.

It was because of its practical role in this period that workers began to recognize the International as an organization that defended their interests and, in some cases, asked to be affiliated to it.[20] Workers in other countries raised funds in support of the strikers and agreed not to accept work that would have turned them into industrial mercenaries, so that the bosses were forced to compromise on many of the strikers’ demands. In the towns at the centre of the action, hundreds of new members were recruited to the International. As was later observed in a GC report: “It is not the International Working Men’s Association that pushes people into strikes, but strikes that push workers into the arms of the International Working Men’s Association.”[21] Thus, for all the difficulties bound up with the diversity of nationalities, languages and political cultures, the International managed to demonstrate the absolute need for class solidarity and international cooperation, moving decisively beyond the partial character of the initial objectives and strategies.

From 1867 on, strengthened by success in achieving these goals, by increased membership and by a more efficient organization, the International made advances all over Continental Europe. It was its breakthrough year in France in particular, where the bronze workers’ strike had the same knock-on effect that the London tailors’ strike had produced in England. The International now had 25 sections in Geneva alone.

But Britain was still the country where the International had its greatest presence. In the course of 1867, the affiliation of another dozen organizations took the membership to a good 50,000.[22] Nowhere else did the membership of the International ever reach that level. In contrast to 1864-67 period, however, the subsequent years in Britain were marked by a kind of stagnation. There were several reasons for this, but the main one was that the International did not manage to break through into factory industry or unskilled labour.

The growing institutionalization of the labour movement further contributed to this slowdown in the life of the International. The Reform Act, resulting from the battle first joined by the Reform League, expanded the franchise to more than a million British workers. The subsequent legalization of trade unions, which ended the risk of persecution and repression, allowed the fourth estate to become a real presence in society, with the result that the pragmatic rulers of the country continued along the path of reform, and the labouring classes, so unlike their French counterparts, felt a growing sense of belonging as they pinned more of their hopes for the future on peaceful change.[23]

The situation on the Continent was very different indeed. In the German Confederation, collective wage-bargaining was still virtually non-existent. In Belgium, strikes were repressed by the government almost as if they were acts of war, while in Switzerland they were still an anomaly that the established order found it difficult to tolerate. In France, striking was legalized in 1864, but the first labour unions still operated under severe restrictions.

This was the backdrop to the congress of 1867, where the International assembled with a new strength based on expanded membership. Marx was busy working on the proofs of Capital and was absent from the General Council when preparatory documents were drafted as well as from the congress itself. [24] The effects were certainly felt, as is evident in the congress’s focus on bare reports of organizational growth in various countries and on Proudhonian themes dear to the strongly represented mutualists.

Also discussed there was the question of war and militarism, in which the delegate from Brussels, César De Paepe, formulated what later became the classical position of the workers’ movement: “so long as there exists what we call the principle of nationalities… so long as there are distinct classes, there will be war… the true cause of war is the interests of some capitalists.”[25] In addition there was a discussion of women’s emancipation,[26] and finally the congress voted in favour of a report stating that “the efforts of nations should tend toward state ownership of the means of transport and circulation.”[27] This was the first collectivist declaration approved at a congress of the International.

Defeat of the mutualists
From the earliest days of the International, Proudhon’s ideas were hegemonic in much of French-speaking Europe. For four years the mutualists were the most moderate wing of the International. The British trade unions, which constituted the majority, did not share Marx’s anticapitalism, but nor did they have the same pull on the policies of the organization that the followers of Proudhon were able to exercise.

Marx undoubtedly played a key role in the long struggle to reduce Proudhon’s influence in the International. His ideas were fundamental to the theoretical development of its leaders, and he showed a remarkable capacity to assert them by winning every major conflict inside the organization. The workers themselves, however, were already sidelining Proudhonian doctrines; it was above all the proliferation of strikes that convinced the mutualists of the error of their conceptions. And it was the workers’ movement itself that demonstrated, in opposition to Proudhon, that it was impossible to separate the social-economic question from the political question.[28]

The Brussels Congress of 1868 finally clipped the wings of the mutualists. The high point came when the assembly approved De Paepe’s proposal on the socialization of the means of production – a decisive step forward in defining the economic basis of socialism, no longer simply in the writings of particular intellectuals but in the program of a great transnational organization. As regards agriculture, mines and transport, the congress declared the necessity of converting land into “the common property of society,” even observing the destructive environmental effect of private ownership of forests. [29] This marked an important victory for the GC and the first appearance of socialist principles in the political program of a major workers’ organization.

If the collectivist turn of the International began at the Brussels Congress, it was the Basel Congress held the next year that consolidated it and eradicated Proudhonism even in its French homeland. Eleven of the French delegates even approved a new text which declared “that society has the right to abolish individual ownership of the land and to make it part of the community.”[30] The 78 delegates were drawn not only from France, Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Belgium, but also from Spain, Italy and Austria, plus the National Labor Union of the United States. The constituency of the association was visibly enlarged, and the record of the proceedings as well as general reports on the activity of the congress transmitted the enthusiasm of the workers gathered there.

The Basel Congress was also of interest because Mikhail Bakunin took part in the proceedings as a delegate. When his International Alliance for Socialist Democracy had applied to join the International, the GC initially turned down the request, on the grounds that it continued to be affiliated to another, parallel transnational structure, and that one of its objectives – “the equalization of classes”[31] – was radically different from a central pillar of the International, the abolition of classes. Shortly afterwards, however, the Alliance modified its program and agreed to wind up its network of sections; its 104-member Geneva section was accordingly admitted to the International.

Marx knew Bakunin well enough, but underestimated the consequences of this step. The influence of the famous Russian revolutionary rapidly increased in a number of Swiss, Spanish and French sections (as it did in Italian ones after the Paris Commune), and already at the Basel Congress he managed to affect the outcome of deliberations. The vote on the right of inheritance, for example, was the first occasion on which the delegates rejected a proposal of the General Council. Having finally defeated the mutualists and laid the spectre of Proudhon to rest, Marx now had to confront a much tougher rival, who formed a new tendency – collectivist anarchism – and sought to win control of the organization.

Before the Paris Commune
The late Sixties and early Seventies were a period rich in social conflicts. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International. When 8,000 silk dyers and ribbon weavers in Basel asked for its support, the GC could not send them more than four pounds from its own funds, but it issued a circular that resulted in the collection of another £300 from workers’ groups in various countries. Even more significant was the struggle of Newcastle engineering workers to reduce the working day to nine hours, when two emissaries of the GC played a key role in stymying the bosses’ attempt to introduce strikebreakers from the Continent. The success of this strike, a nationwide cause célèbre, served as a warning for the English capitalists, who from that time on gave up recruiting workers from across the Channel.[32]

The year 1869 witnessed significant expansion of the International all over Europe. Britain was an exception in this respect, however. While the union leaders fully backed Marx against the mutualists, they had little time for theoretical issues[33] and did not exactly glow with revolutionary ardour. This was the reason why Marx for a long time opposed the founding of a British federation of the International independent of the GC.

In every European country where the International was reasonably strong, its members gave birth to new organizations completely autonomous from those already in existence. In Britain, however, the unions that made up the main force of the International naturally did not disband their own structures. The London-based GC therefore fulfilled two functions at once: as world headquarters and as the leadership for Britain, where trade union affiliations kept some 50,000 workers in its orbit of influence.

In France, the repressive policies of the Second Empire made 1868 a year of serious crisis for the International. The following year, however, saw a revival of the organization, and new leaders who had abandoned mutualist positions came to the fore. The peak of expansion for the International came in 1870, but despite its considerable growth, the organization never took root in 38 of the 90 départements. The national total has been put somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000.[34] Thus, although the International did not become a true mass organization in France, it certainly grew to a respectable size and aroused widespread interest.

In Belgium, membership peaked in the early 1870s at several tens of thousands, probably exceeding the number in the whole of France. It was here that the International achieved both its highest numerical density in the general population and its greatest influence in society. The positive evolution during this period was also apparent in Switzerland. In 1870, however, Bakunin’s activity divided the organization into two groups of equal size, which confronted each other at the congress of the Romande Federation precisely on the question of whether his International Alliance for Socialist Democracy should be admitted to the Federation.[35] When it proved impossible to reconcile their positions, the proceedings continued in two parallel congresses, and a truce was agreed only after an intervention by the GC. The group aligned with London was slightly smaller, yet retained the name Romande Federation, whereas the one linked to Bakunin had to adopt the name Jura Federation, even though its affiliation to the International was again recognized.

During this period, Bakunin’s ideas began to spread, but the country where they took hold most rapidly was Spain. In fact, the International first developed in the Iberian peninsula through the activity of the Neapolitan anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli, who, at Bakunin’s request, travelled to Barcelona and Madrid to help found both sections of the International and groups of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy. His trip achieved its purpose. But his distribution of documents of both international organizations, often to the same people, was a prime example of the Bakuninite confusion and theoretical eclecticism of the time; the Spanish workers founded the International with the principles of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy.

In the North German Confederation, despite the existence of two political organizations of the workers’ movement – the Lassallean General Association of German Workers and the Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany – there was little enthusiasm for the International and few requests to affiliate to it. During its first three years, German militants virtually ignored its existence, fearing persecution at the hands of the authorities. The picture changed somewhat after 1868, as the fame and successes of the International multiplied across Europe, and both rival parties aspired to represent its German wing. The weak internationalism of the Germans ultimately weighed more heavily than any legal aspects, however, and declined still further when the movement became more preoccupied with internal matters.[36]

Against this general background, marked by evident contradictions and uneven development between countries, the International made provisions for its fifth congress. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, however, left no choice but to call off the congress. The conflict at the heart of Europe meant that the top priority now was to help the workers’ movement express an independent position, far from the nationalist rhetoric of the time. In his First Address on the Franco-Prussian War, Marx called upon the French workers to drive out Louis Bonaparte and to obliterate the empire he had established eighteen years earlier. The German workers, for their part, were supposed to prevent the defeat of Bonaparte from turning into an attack on the French people:

in contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose international rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be everywhere the same – Labour. The pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men’s Association.[37]

The leaders of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, were the only two members of parliament in the North German Confederation who refused to vote for the special war budget, and sections of the International in France also sent messages of friendship and solidarity to the German workers. Yet the French defeat sealed the birth of a new and more potent age of nation-states in Europe, with all its accompanying chauvinism.

The International and the Paris Commune
After the German victory at Sedan and the capture of Bonaparte, the Third Republic was proclaimed in France on 4 September 1870. In January of the following year, a four-month siege of Paris ended in the French acceptance of Bismarck’s conditions; an ensuing armistice allowed the holding of elections and the appointment of Adolphe Thiers as President of the Republic. In the capital, however, Progressive-Republican forces swept the board and there was widespread popular discontent. Faced with the prospect of a government that wanted to disarm the city and withhold any social reform, the Parisians turned against Thiers and on 18 March initiated the first great political event in the life of the workers’ movement: the Paris Commune.

Although Bakunin had urged the workers to turn patriotic war into revolutionary war,[38] the General Council in London initially opted for silence. It assigned Marx the task of writing a text in the name of the International, but he delayed its publication for complicated, deeply held reasons. Well aware of the real relationship of forces on the ground as well as the weaknesses of the Commune, he knew that it was doomed to defeat. He had even tried to warn the French working class in his Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War: “Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workmen … must not allow themselves to be swayed by national memories of 1792.”[39] A fervid declaration hailing the Commune would have risked creating false expectations among workers throughout Europe, eventually becoming a source of demoralization and distrust. His grim forebodings soon proved all too well founded, and on 28 May the Paris Commune was drowned in blood. Two days later, he reappeared at the GC with a manuscript entitled The Civil War in France; it was read and unanimously approved, then published over the names of all the Council members. The document had a huge impact over the next few weeks, greater than any other document of the workers’ movement in the nineteenth century.

Despite Marx’s passionate defence, and despite the claims both of reactionary opponents and of dogmatic Marxists eager to glorify the International, [40] the GC played no part in pushing for the Parisian insurrection. Prominent figures in the organization did play a role, but the leadership of the Commune was in the hands of its radical-republican Jacobin wing. Marx himself pointed out that “the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it have been.”[41]

Marx had to spend whole days answering press slanders about the International and himself: “at this moment,” he wrote, [he was] “the best calumniated and the most menaced man of London.”[42] Meanwhile, governments all over Europe sharpened their instruments of repression, fearing that other uprisings might follow the one in Paris. Criticism of the Commune even spread to sections of the workers’ movement. Following the publication of The Civil War in France, both the trade union leader George Odger and the old Chartist Benjamin Lucraft resigned from the International, bending under the pressure of the hostile press campaign. However, no trade union withdrew its support for the organization – which suggests once again that the failure of the International to grow in Britain was due mainly to political apathy in the working class. [43]

Despite the bloody denouement in Paris and the wave of calumny and government repression elsewhere in Europe, the International grew stronger and more widely known in the wake of the Commune. For the capitalists and the middle classes it represented a threat to the established order, but for the workers it fuelled hopes in a world without exploitation and injustice.[44] Insurrectionary Paris fortified the workers’ movement, impelling it to adopt more radical positions. The experience showed that revolution was possible, that the goal could and should be to build a society utterly different from the capitalist order, but also that, in order to achieve this, the workers would have to create durable and well-organized forms of political association.[45]

This enormous vitality was apparent everywhere. Attendance at GC meetings doubled, while newspapers linked to the International increased in both number and overall sales. Finally, and most significantly, the International continued to expand in Belgium and Spain – where the level of workers’ involvement had already been considerable before the Paris Commune – and experienced a real breakthrough in Italy. Although Giuseppe Garibaldi had only a vague idea of the Association,[46] the “hero of the two worlds” decided to throw his weight behind it and wrote a membership application that contained the famous sentence: “The International is the sun of the future.” [47] Printed in dozens of workers’ newssheets and papers, the letter was instrumental in persuading many waverers to join the organization.

The International opened a new section in Portugal in October 1871. In Denmark, in the same month, it began to link up most of the newly born trade unions in Copenhagen and Jutland. Another important development was the founding of Irish workers’ sections in Britain; their leader John MacDonnell was appointed the GC’s corresponding secretary for Ireland. Unexpected requests for affiliation came from various other parts of the world: some English workers in Calcutta, labour groups in Victoria, Australia and Christchurch, New Zealand, and a number of artisans in Buenos Aires.

The London Conference of 1871
Two years had passed since the last congress of the International, but a new one could not be held under the prevailing circumstances. The General Council therefore decided to organize a conference in London. Despite efforts to make the event as representative as possible, it was in fact more like an enlarged GC meeting. Marx had announced beforehand that the conference would be devoted “exclusively to questions of organization and policy,” [48] with theoretical discussions left to one side. He spelled this out at its first session:

The General Council has convened a conference to agree with delegates from various countries [on] measures that need to be taken against the dangers facing the Association in a large number of countries, and to move towards a new organization corresponding to the needs of the situation. In the second place, to work out a response to the governments that are ceaselessly working to destroy the Association with every means at their disposal. And lastly to settle the Swiss dispute once and for all.[49]

Marx summoned all his energies for these priorities: to reorganize the International, to defend it from hostile forces, and to check Bakunin’s growing influence. By far the most active delegate at the conference, Marx took the floor as many as 102 times, blocked proposals that did not fit in with his plans, and won over those not yet convinced.[50] The gathering in London confirmed his stature within the organization, not only as the brains shaping its political line, but also as one of its most combative and capable militants.

The most important decision taken at the conference, for which it would be remembered later, was the approval of Édouard Vaillant’s Resolution IX. The leader of the Blanquists – whose residual forces had joined the International after the end of the Commune – proposed that the organization should be transformed into a centralized, disciplined party, under the leadership of the General Council. Despite some differences, particularly over the Blanquist position that a tightly organized nucleus of militants was sufficient for the revolution, Marx did not hesitate to form an alliance with Vaillant’s group: not only to strengthen the opposition to Bakuninite anarchism within the International, but above all to create a broader consensus for the changes deemed necessary in the new phase of the class struggle. The resolution passed in London therefore stated:

that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes; that this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes; and that the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economic struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists. The conclusion was clear: “the economic movement [of the working class] and its political action are indissolubly united.” [51]

Whereas the Geneva Congress of 1866 established the importance of trade unions, the London Conference of 1871 shifted the focus to the other key instrument of the modern workers’ movement: the political party. It should be stressed, however, that the understanding of this was much broader than that which developed in the twentieth century.[52] Marx’s conception should therefore be differentiated both from the Blanquists’ – the two would openly clash later on – and from Lenin’s, as adopted by Communist organizations after the October Revolution.

Only four delegates opposed Resolution IX at the London Conference, but Marx’s victory soon proved to be ephemeral. For the call to establish what amounted to political parties in every country and to confer broader powers on the General Council had grave repercussions in the internal life of the International; it was not ready to move so rapidly from a flexible to a politically uniform model of organization. [53]

Marx was convinced that virtually all the main federations and local sections would back the resolutions of the Conference, but he soon had to think again. On 12 November, the Jura Federation called a congress of its own in the small commune of Sonvilier, and, although Bakunin was unable to attend, it officially launched the opposition within the International. Bakunin’s close ally James Guillaume and the other participants accused the General Council of having introduced the “authority principle” into the International and transformed its original structure into “a hierarchical organization directed and governed by a committee.” The Swiss declared themselves “against all directing authority, even should that authority be elected and endorsed by the workers,” and insisted on “retention of the principle of autonomy of the Sections,” so that the General Council would become “a simple correspondence and statistical bureau.”[54]

Although the position of the Jura Federation was not unexpected, Marx was probably surprised when signs of restlessness and even rebellion against the GC’s political line began to appear elsewhere. In a number of countries, the decisions taken in London were judged an unacceptable encroachment on local political autonomy. Even the Belgian Federation, which at the conference had aimed at mediation between the different sides, began to adopt a much more critical stance towards London, and the Dutch too later took their distance. In Southern Europe, where the reaction was even stronger, the opposition soon won considerable support. Indeed, the great majority of Iberian Internationalists came out against the GC and endorsed Bakunin’s ideas. In Italy too, the results of the London Conference were seen in a negative light. In fact, the founding congress of the Italian Federation of the International took the most radical position against the GC: they would not participate in the forthcoming congress of the International but proposed to hold an “anti-authoritarian general congress”[55] in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. This would prove to be the first act of the impending split.

Feuding across the Atlantic also harmed relations among members in London. The relations of two allies with Marx took a turn for the worse, and in Britain too the first internal conflicts began to emerge. Support for the General Council also came from the majority of the Swiss, from the French (now mostly Blanquists), the weak German forces, the recently constituted sections in Denmark, Ireland and Portugal, and the East European groups in Hungary and Bohemia. But they added up to much less than Marx had expected at the end of the London Conference.

The opposition to the GC was varied in character and sometimes had mainly personal motives. Still, beyond the fascination with Bakunin’s theories in certain countries and Guillaume’s capacity to unify the various oppositionists, the main factor militating against the resolution on “Working-Class Political Action” was an environment unwilling to accept the qualitative step forward proposed by Marx. Not only the group linked to Bakunin but most of the federations and local sections regarded the principle of autonomy and respect for the diverse realities as a cornerstone of the International. Marx’s miscalculation on this score accelerated the crisis of the organization.[56]

The end of the International
The final battle came towards the end of Summer 1872. After the terrible events of the previous three years – the Franco-Prussian war, the wave of repression following the Paris Commune, the numerous internal skirmishes – the International could at last meet again in congress. In the countries where it had recently taken root, it was expanding through the enthusiastic efforts of union leaders and worker-activists suddenly fired by its slogans. Yet most of the membership remained unaware of the gravity of the conflicts that raged on within its leading group. [57]

The Fifth Congress of the International took place in The Hague in September, attended by 65 delegates from a total of 14 countries. The crucial importance of the event impelled Marx to attend in person,[58] accompanied by Engels. In fact, it was the only congress of the organization in which he took part. Neither De Paepe nor Bakunin made it to the Dutch capital, but the “autonomist” contingent, a total of 25 in all, was present in strength.

By an irony of fate, the congress unfolded in Concordia Hall, though all the sessions were marked by irreducible antagonism between the two camps, resulting in debates that were far poorer than at the two previous congresses. This hostility was exacerbated by three days of wrangling over credentials. The representation of delegates was indeed skewed, not reflecting the true relationship of forces within the organization. French sections had been driven underground, and their mandates were highly debatable, yet the largest group of delegates was French; Germany had no sections of the International, yet nearly one-quarter of the delegates. Other representatives had been delegated as members of the General Council and did not express the will of any section.

Approval of the Hague Congress resolutions was possible only because of its distorted composition. The most important decision taken at The Hague was to incorporate Resolution IX of the 1871 London Conference into the statutes of the Association, as a new article 7a. Political struggle was now the necessary instrument for the transformation of society since: “the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies, and for the enslavement of labour. The conquest of political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class.”[59]

The International was now very different from how it had been at the time of its foundation: the radical-democratic components had walked out after being increasingly marginalized; the mutualists had been defeated and many converted; reformists no longer constituted the bulk of the organization (except in Britain); and anticapitalism had become the political line of the whole Association, as well as of recently formed tendencies such as the anarcho-collectivists. Moreover, although the years of the International had witnessed a degree of economic prosperity that in some cases made conditions less parlous, the workers understood that real change would come not through such palliatives but only through the end of human exploitation. They were also basing their struggles more and more on their own material needs, rather than the initiatives of particular groups to which they belonged.

The wider picture, too, was radically different. The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age in which the nation-state would be the central form of political, legal and territorial identity; this placed a question mark over any supranational body that financed itself from membership dues in each individual country and required its members to surrender a sizeable share of their political leadership. At the same time, the growing differences between national movements and organizations made it extremely difficult for the General Council to produce a political synthesis capable of satisfying the demands of all.

It is true that, right from the beginning, the International had been an agglomeration of trade unions and political associations far from easy to reconcile with one another, and that these had represented sensibilities and political tendencies more than organizations properly so called. By 1872, however, the various components of the Association – and workers’ struggles, more generally – had become much more clearly defined and structured. The legalization of the British trade unions had officially made them part of national political life; the Belgian Federation of the International was a ramified organization, with a central leadership capable of making significant, and autonomous, contributions to theory; Germany had two workers’ parties, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and the General Association of German Workers, each with representation in parliament; the French workers, from Lyon to Paris, had already tried “storming the heavens”; and the Spanish Federation had expanded to the point where it was on the verge of becoming a mass organization. Similar changes had occurred in other countries.

The initial configuration of the International had thus become outmoded, just as its original mission had come to an end. The task was no longer to prepare for and organize Europe-wide support for strikes, nor to call congresses on the usefulness of trade unions or the need to socialize the land and the means of production. Such themes were now part of the collective heritage of the organization as a whole. After the Paris Commune, the real challenge for the workers’ movement was a revolutionary one: how to organize in such a way as to end the capitalist mode of production and to overthrow the institutions of the bourgeois world.

It was no longer a question of how to reform the existing society, but how to build a new one. [60] For this new advance in the class struggle, Marx thought it indispensable to build working-class political parties in each country. The document To the Federal Council of the Spanish Region of the International Working Men’s Association, written by Engels in February 1871, was the most explicit statement of the General Council on this matter:

Experience has shown everywhere that the best way to emancipate the workers from this domination of the old parties is to form in each country a proletarian party with a policy of its own, a policy which is manifestly different from that of the other parties, because it must express the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the working class. This policy may vary in details according to the specific circumstances of each country; but as the fundamental relations between labour and capital are the same everywhere and the political domination of the possessing classes over the exploited classes is an existing fact everywhere, the principles and aims of proletarian policy will be identical, at least in all western countries…. To give up fighting our adversaries in the political field would mean to abandon one of the most powerful weapons, particularly in the sphere of organization and propaganda. [61]

From this point on, therefore, the party was considered essential for the struggle of the proletariat: it had to be independent of all existing political forces and to be built, both programmatically and organizationally, in accordance with the national context. At the GC session of 23 July 1872, Marx criticized not only the abstentionists (opposed to any political engagement by the working class) but the equally dangerous position of “the working classes of England and America,” “who let the middle classes use them for political purposes.”[62] On the second point, he had already declared at the London Conference that “politics must be adapted to the conditions of all countries,” [63] and the following year, in a speech in Amsterdam immediately after the Hague Congress, he stressed:

Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labour; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics. But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same.… We do not deny that there are countries … where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labour.[64]

Thus, although the workers’ parties emerged in different forms in different countries, they should not subordinate themselves to national interests. [65] The struggle for socialism could not be confined in that way, and especially in the new historical context internationalism must continue to be the guiding beacon for the proletariat, as well as its vaccine against the deadly embrace of the state and the capitalist system.

During the Hague Congress, harsh polemics preceded a series of votes. Following the adoption of article 7a, the goal of winning political power was inscribed in the statutes, and there was also an indication that a workers’ party was the essential instrument for this. The subsequent decision to confer broader powers on the General Council – with 32 votes in favour, 6 against and 12 abstentions – made the situation even more intolerable for the minority, since the Council now had the task of ensuring “rigid observation of the principles and statutes and general rules of the International,” and “the right to suspend branches, sections, councils or federal committees and federations of the International until the next congress” [66].

For the first time in the history of the International, a congress approved the GC’s decision to expel an organization: namely, the New York Section 12. Its motivation was that “The International Working Men’s Association is based on the principle of the abolition of classes and cannot admit any bourgeois section.”[67] The expulsions of Bakunin and Guillaume also caused quite a stir, having been proposed by a commission of enquiry that described the Alliance for Socialist Democracy as “a secret organization with statutes completely opposite to those of the International.”[68] The call to expel Adhemar Schitzguébel, on the other hand, one of the founders and most active members of the Jura Federation, was rejected.[69] Finally, the congress authorized publication of a long report, The Alliance for Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association, which traced the history of the organization led by Bakunin and analysed its public and secret activity country by country. Written by Engels, Lafargue and Marx, the document was published in French in July 1873.

The opposition at the congress was not uniform in its response to these attacks. On the final day, however, a joint declaration read out by the worker Victor Dave (1845-1922) from the Hague section stated:

1. We … supporters of the autonomy and federation of groups of working men shall continue our administrative relations with the General Council….
2. The federations which we represent will establish direct and permanent relations between themselves and all regular branches of the Association. […]
3. We call on all the federations and sections to prepare between now and the next general congress for the triumph within the International of the principles of federative autonomy as the basis of the organization of labour[70].

This statement was more a tactical ploy – designed to avoid responsibility for a split that by then seemed inevitable – than a serious political undertaking to relaunch the organization. In this sense, it was similar to the proposals of the “centralists” to augment the powers of the General Council, at a time when they were already planning a far more drastic alternative.

For what took place in the morning session on 6 September – the most dramatic of the congress – was the final act of the International as it had been conceived and constructed over the years. Engels stood up to speak and, to the astonishment of those present, proposed that “the seat of the General Council [should] be transferred to New York for the year 1872-1873, and that it should be formed by members of the American federal council.” [71] Thus, Marx and other “founders” of the International would no longer be part of its central body, which would consist of people whose very names were unknown. The delegate Maltman Barry, a GC member who supported Marx’s positions, described better than anyone the reaction from the floor:

Consternation and discomfiture stood plainly written on the faces of the party of dissension as [Engels] uttered the last words…. It was some time before anyone rose to speak. It was a coup d’état, and each looked to his neighbour to break the spell. [72]

Engels argued that “inter-group conflicts in London had reached such a pitch that [the GC] had to be transferred elsewhere,” [73] and that New York was the best choice in times of repression. But the Blanquists were violently opposed to the move, on the grounds that “the International should first of all be the permanent insurrectionary organization of the proletariat” [74] and that “when a party unites for struggle … its action is all the greater, the more its leadership committee is active, well armed and powerful.” Vaillant and other followers of Blanqui present at The Hague thus felt betrayed when they saw “the head” being shipped “to the other side of the Atlantic [while] the armed body was fighting in [Europe].”[75] Based on the assumption that “the International had had an initiating role of economic struggle,” they wanted it to play “a similar role with respect to political struggle” and its transformation into an “international workers’ revolutionary party.”[76] Realizing that it would no longer be possible to exercise control over the GC, they left the congress and shortly afterwards the International.

Many even in the ranks of the majority voted against the move to New York as tantamount to the end of the International as an operational structure. The decision, approved by a margin of only three votes (26 for, 23 against), eventually depended on 9 abstentions and the fact that some members of the minority were happy to see the General Council relocated far from their own centres of activity. Another factor in the move was certainly Marx’s view that it was better to give up the International than to see it end up as a sectarian organization in the hands of his opponents. The demise of the International, which would certainly follow the transfer of the GC to New York, was infinitely preferable to a long and wasteful succession of fratricidal struggles.

Still, it is not convincing to argue – as many have done[77] – that the key reason for the decline of the International was the conflict between its two currents, or even between two men, Marx and Bakunin, however great their stature. Rather, it was the changes taking place in the world around it that rendered the International obsolete. The growth and transformation of the organizations of the workers’ movement, the strengthening of the nation-state as a result of Italian and German unification, the expansion of the International in countries like Spain and Italy (where the economic and social conditions were very different from those in Britain or France), the drift towards even greater moderation in the British trade union movement, the repression following the Paris Commune: all these factors together made the original configuration of the International inappropriate to the new times.

Against this backdrop, with its prevalence of centrifugal trends, developments in the life of the International and its main protagonists naturally also played a role. The London Conference, for instance, was far from the saving event that Marx had hoped it would be; indeed, its rigid conduct significantly aggravated the internal crisis, by failing to take account of the prevailing moods or to display the foresight needed to avoid the strengthening of Bakunin and his group.[78] It proved a Pyrrhic victory for Marx – one which, in attempting to resolve internal conflicts, ended up accentuating them. It remains the case, however, that the decisions taken in London only speeded up a process that was already under way and impossible to reverse.

In addition to all these historical and organizational considerations, there were others of no lesser weight regarding the chief protagonist. As Marx had reminded delegates at a session of the London Conference in 1871, “the work of the Council had become immense, obliged as it was to tackle both general questions and national questions.”[79] It was no longer the tiny organization of 1864 walking on an English and a French leg; it was now present in all European countries, each with its particular problems and characteristics. Not only was the organization everywhere wracked by internal conflicts, but the arrival of the Communard exiles in London, with new preoccupations and a variegated baggage of ideas, made it still more arduous for the General Council to perform its task of political synthesis.

Marx was sorely tried after eight years of intense activity for the International. Aware that the workers’ forces were on the retreat following the defeat of the Paris Commune – the most important fact of the moment for him – he therefore resolved to devote the years ahead to the attempt to complete Capital. When he crossed the North Sea to the Netherlands, he must have felt that the battle awaiting him would be his last major one as a direct protagonist.

From the mute figure he had cut at that first meeting in St. Martin’s Hall in 1864, he had become recognized as the leader of the International not only by congress delegates and the GC but also by the wider public. Thus, although the International certainly owed a very great deal to Marx, it had also done much to change his life.

Before its foundation, he had been known only in small circles of political activists. Later, and above all after the Paris Commune – as well as the publication of his magnum opus in 1867, of course – his fame spread among revolutionaries in many European countries, to the point where the press referred to him as the “red terror doctor.” The responsibility deriving from his role in the International – which allowed him to experience up close so many economic and political struggles – was a further stimulus for his reflections on communism and profoundly enriched the whole of his anticapitalist theory.

Marx versus Bakunin
The battle between the two camps raged in the months following the Hague Congress, but only in a few cases did it centre on their existing theoretical and ideological differences. Marx often chose to caricature Bakunin’s positions, painting him as an advocate of “class equalization” (based on the principles of the 1869 programme of the Alliance for Socialist Democracy) or of political abstentionism tout court. The Russian anarchist, for his part, who lacked the theoretical capacities of his adversary, preferred the terrain of personal accusations and insults. The only exception that set forth his positive ideas was the incomplete Letter to La Liberté (a Brussels paper) of early October 1872 – a text which, never sent, lay forgotten and was of no use to Bakunin’s supporters in the constant round of skirmishes. The political position of the “autonomists” emerges from it clearly enough:

There is only one law binding all the members … sections and federations of the International…. It is the international solidarity of workers in all jobs and all countries in their economic struggle against the exploiters of labour. It is the real organisation of that solidarity through the spontaneous action of the working classes, and the absolutely free federation … which constitutes the real, living unity of the International. Who can doubt that it is out of this increasingly widespread organisation of the militant solidarity of the proletariat against bourgeois exploitation that the political struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie must rise and grow? The Marxists and ourselves are unanimous on this point. But now comes the question that divides us so deeply from the Marxists. We think that the policy of the proletariat must necessarily be a revolutionary one, aimed directly and solely at the destruction of States. We do not see how it is possible to talk about international solidarity and yet to intend preserving States … because by its very nature the State is a breach of that solidarity and therefore a permanent cause of war. Nor can we conceive how it is possible to talk about the liberty of the proletariat or the real deliverance of the masses within and by means of the State. State means dominion, and all dominion involves the subjugation of the masses and consequently their exploitation for the sake of some ruling minority. We do not accept, even in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent assemblies, provincial government or so called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere, honest and real in the hand of the masses, and that when it is concentrated into those of a few ruling individuals it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction.[80]

Thus, although Bakunin had in common with Proudhon an intransigent opposition to any form of political authority, especially in the direct form of the state, it would be quite wrong to tar him with the same brush as the mutualists. Whereas the latter had in effect abstained from all political activity, the autonomists – as Guillaume stressed in one of his last interventions at the Hague Congress – fought for “a politics of social revolution, the destruction of bourgeois politics and the state.”[81] It should be recognized that they were among the revolutionary components of the International, and that they offered an interesting critical contribution on the questions of political power, the State and bureaucracy.
How, then, did the “negative politics” that the autonomists saw as the only possible form of action differ from the “positive politics” advocated by the centralists? In the resolutions of the International Congress of Saint-Imier, held 15-16 September 1872 on the proposal of the Italian Federation and attended by other delegates returning from The Hague, it is stated that “all political organization can be nothing other than the organization of domination, to the benefit of one class and the detriment of the masses, and that if the proletariat aimed to seize power, it would itself become a dominant and exploiting class.” Consequently, “the destruction of all political power is the first task of the proletariat,” and “any organization of so-called provisional and revolutionary political power to bring about such destruction can only be a further deception, and would be as dangerous to the proletariat as all governments existing today.”[82]

As Bakunin stressed in “The International and Karl Marx” (another incomplete text), the task of the International was to lead the proletariat “outside the politics of the State and of the bourgeois world”; the true basis of its program should be “quite simple and moderate: the organization of solidarity in the economic struggle of labour against capitalism.” [83]In fact, while taking various changes into account, this declaration of principles was close to the original aims of the organization and pointed in a direction very different from the one taken by Marx and the GC after the London Conference of 1871.[84]

This profound opposition of principles and objectives shaped the climate in The Hague. Whereas the majority looked to the “positive” conquest of political power,[85] the autonomists painted the political party as an instrument necessarily subordinate to bourgeois institutions and grotesquely likened Marx’s conception of communism to the Lassallean Volksstaat that he had always tirelessly combated. However, in the few moments when the antagonism left some space for reason, Bakunin and Guillaume recognized that the two sides shared the same aspirations. In The Alleged Splits in the International, which he wrote together with Engels, Marx had explained that one of the preconditions of socialist society was the elimination of the power of the state:

All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement — i.e., abolition of classes — is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions.

The irreconcilable difference stemmed from the autonomist insistence that the aim must be realized immediately. Indeed, since they considered the International not as an instrument of political struggle but as an ideal model for the society of the future in which no kind of authority would exist, Bakunin and his supporters proclaim (in Marx’s description)

anarchy in proletarian ranks as the most infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext, [they ask] the International, at a time when the Old World is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its organization with anarchy.[86]

Thus, despite their agreement about the need to abolish classes and the political power of the state in socialist society, the two sides differed radically over the fundamental issues of the path to follow and the social forces required to bring about the change. Whereas for Marx the revolutionary subject par excellence was a particular class, the factory proletariat, Bakunin turned to the “great rabble of the people,” the so-called “lumpenproletariat,” which, being “almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future.”[87] Marx the communist had learnedthat social transformation required specific historical conditions, an effective organization and a long process of the formation of class consciousness among the masses; Bakunin the anarchist was convinced that the instincts of the common people, the so-called “rabble,” were both “invincible as well as just,” sufficient by themselves “to inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution.” [88]

Another disagreement concerned the instruments for the achievement of socialism. Much of Bakunin’s militant activity involved building (or fantasizing about building) small “secret societies,” mostly of intellectuals: a “revolutionary general staff composed of dedicated, energetic, intelligent individuals, sincere friends of the people above all,”[89] who will prepare the insurrection and carry out the revolution.Marx, on the other hand, believed in the self-emancipation of the working class and was convinced that secret societies conflicted with “the development of the proletarian movement because, instead of instructing the workers, these societies subject them to authoritarian, mystical laws which cramp their independence and distort their powers of reason.”[90] The Russian exile opposed all political action by the working class that did not directly promote the revolution, whereas the stateless person with a fixed residence in London did not disdain mobilizations for social reforms and partial objectives, while remaining absolutely convinced that these should strengthen the working-class struggle to overcome the capitalist mode of production rather than integrate it into the system.

The differences would not have diminished even after the revolution. For Bakunin, “abolition of the state [was] the precondition or necessary accompaniment of the economic emancipation of the proletariat”;[91] for Marx, the state neither could nor should disappear from one day to the next. In his Political Indifferentism, which first appeared in Almanacco Repubblicano in December 1873, he challenged the hegemony of the anarchists in Italy’s workers’ movement by asserting that

if the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then [according to Bakunin] they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form.[92]

It should be recognized, however, that despite Bakunin’s sometimes exasperating refusal to distinguish between bourgeois and proletarian power, he foresaw some of the dangers of the so-called “transitional period” between capitalism and socialism – particularly the danger of bureaucratic degeneration after the revolution. In his unfinished The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, on which he worked between 1870 and 1871, he wrote:

But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all. All will be equal, not only from the juridical and political point of view, but from the economic point of view.… There will therefore be no longer any privileged class, but there will be a government, and, note this well, an extremely complex government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State.… It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority.… All states, even the most republican and most democratic states … are in their essence only machines governing the masses from above, through an intelligent and therefore privileged minority, allegedly knowing the genuine interests of the people better than the people themselves.[93]

Partly because of his scant knowledge of economics, the federalist path indicated by Bakunin offered no really useful guidance on how the question of the future socialist society should be approached. But his critical insights already point ahead to some of the dramas of the twentieth century.

Conclusion
The International would never be the same again. The great organization born in 1864, which had successfully supported strikes and struggles for eight years, and had adopted an anticapitalist program and established a presence in all European countries, finally imploded at the Hague Congress. In later decades, however, the workers’ movement adopted a socialist program, expanded throughout Europe and then the rest of the world, and built new structures of supranational coordination. Beyond the continuity of names (the Second International from 1889-1916, the Third International from 1919 to 1943), each of these structures constantly referred to the values and doctrines of the First International. Thus, its revolutionary message proved extraordinarily fertile, producing results over time still greater than those achieved during its existence.

The International helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. It also spread an awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force; and that – here Marx’s theoretical contribution was fundamental – it was essential to overcome the capitalist mode of production and wage labour, since improvements within the existing system, though necessary to pursue, would not eliminate dependence on employers’ oligarchies.

An abyss separates the hopes of those times from the mistrust so characteristic of our own, the antisystemic spirit and solidarity of the age of the International from the ideological subordination and individualism of a world reshaped by neoliberal competition and privatization. The passion for politics among the workers who gathered in London in 1864 contrasts sharply with the apathy and resignation prevalent today.

And yet, as the world of labour reverts now to conditions of exploitation similar to those of the nineteenth century, the project of the International has once again acquired an extraordinary topicality. Today’s barbarism of the “world order,” ecological disasters produced by the present mode of production, the growing gulf between the wealthy exploitative few and the huge impoverished majority, the oppression of women, and the blustery winds of war, racism and chauvinism, impose upon the contemporary workers’ movement the urgent need to reorganize itself on the basis of two key characteristics of the International: the multiplicity of its structure and radicalism in objectives. The aims of the organization founded in London 150 years ago are today more vital than ever. To rise to the challenges of the present, however, the new International cannot evade that twin requirement: it must be plural and it must be anticapitalist.

Translated by Patrick Camiller

References
1. This article is based upon the “Introduction” to Marcello Musto (ed.), Workers Unite!: The International 150 Years Later (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2014), an anthology of key documents of the International. Citations given here as GC and PI refer to multi-volume official Minutes published under the respective titles General Council of the First International and Première Internationale. See notes 1 and 4 to the Documents section in this issue.
2. David Ryazanov, “Zur Geschichte der Ersten Internationale,” in Marx-Engels Archiv, vol. 1 (1925), 100.
3. Near the end of the life of the International when considering for approval the revised statutes of the organization, members of the General Council (GC) raised the question of whether “persons” should be substituted for “men.” Friedrich Engels responded that “it was generally understood that men was a generic term including both sexes,” making the point that the association was and had been open to women and men, GC, V, 256.
4. Quoted in G. M. Stekloff, History of the First International, New York: Russell & Russell, 1968 [1928], ii.
5. Cf. Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, London: MacMillan, 1965, 34.
6. Johann George Eccarius to Karl Marx, 12 October 1864, in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, vol. III/13, Berlin: Akademie, 2002, 10.
7. Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864, in Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 50 vol., 1975-2005, Moscow: Progress Publishers [henceforth MECW], vol. 42, 1987, 16.
8. At the founding meeting of the International, a Standing Committee was struck to organize the association. This became its Central Council, which subsequently became known as the General Council. Henceforth, these committees are referred to here simply as the General Council.
9. See Oscar Testut, L’Association internationale des travailleurs, Lyon: Aimé Vingtrinier, 1870, 310.
10. The Times , 5 June 1871.
11. See Julius Braunthal, History of the International, New York: Nelson, 1966 [1961], 116.
12. Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, 70; Jacques D’Hondt, “Rapport de synthèse,” in Colloque International sur la première Internationale, La Première Internationale: l’institution, l’implantation, le rayonnement, Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968, 475.
13. Ibid., 289.
14. GC, I, 340-351.
15. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 2; also, Karl Marx to Paul Lafargue, 19 April 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, 491: “The General Council was not the Pope, that we allowed every section to have its own theoretical views of the real movement, always supposed that nothing directly opposite to our Rules was put forward.”
16. See Georges Haupt, L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, Turin: Einaudi, 1978, 78.
17. Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, 65.
18. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 2.
19. Ibid.
20. Jacques Freymond, “Introduction,” in PI, I, xi.
21. Various Authors, “Report of the [French] General Council,” 1 September 1869, in PI, II, 24.
22. Henri Collins, “The International and the British Labour Movement: Origin of the International in England” in Colloque International, La Première Internationale, 34.
23. Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, 290-91.
24. Marx in fact continued not to attend congresses, with the exception of the crucial Hague Congress (1872).
25. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 49.
26. Ibid., Document 6.
27. Ibid., Document 32.
28. Freymond, “Introduction,” in PI, I, xiv.
29. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 3.
30. PI, II, 74.
31. Mikhail Bakunin, “Programme of the Alliance [International Alliance of Socialist Democracy],” in Arthur Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, 174. The translation provided in this book is inaccurate and misleading. In Fictitious Splits in the International (GC, V, 356-409),Engels and Marx quoted directly from Bakunin’s original document (“l’égalisation politique, économique et sociale des classes”).
32. Braunthal, History of the International, 173.
33. Freymond, “Introduction,” in PI, I, xix.
34. Jacques Rougerie, in “Les sections françaises de l’Association Internationale des Travailleurs,” in Colloque International sur la premieère Internationale, 111, spoke of “some tens of thousands.”
35. Jacques Freymond (ed.), Études et documents sur la Première Internationale en Suisse, Geneva: Droz, 1964, 295.
36. Ibid., x.
37. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 54.
38. Arthur Lehning, ‘‘Introduction,” in Idem. (ed.), Bakunin – Archiv, vol. VI: Michel Bakounine sur la Guerre Franco-Allemande et la Révolution Sociale en France (1870-1871), Leiden: Brill, 1977, xvi.
39. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 57.
40. Georges Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism 1871-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 25, warns against “the reshaping of the reality of the Commune in order to make it conform to an image transfigured by ideology.”
41. Karl Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, MECW, vol. 46, 66.
42. Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 18 June 1871, in MECW, vol. 44, 157.
43. Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, 222.
44. See Haupt, L’internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, 28.
45. Ibid., 93-95.
46. Nello Rosselli, Mazzini e Bakunin, Turin: Einaudi, 1927, 323-24.
47. Giuseppe Garibaldi to Giorgio Pallavicino, 14 November 1871, in Enrico Emilio Ximenes, Epistolario di Giuseppe Garibaldi, vol. I, Milan: Brigola 1885, 350.
48. Karl Marx, 15 August 1871, in GC, IV, 259.
49. Karl Marx, 17 September 1871, in PI, II, 152.
50. Miklós Molnár, Le déclin de la première internationale, Geneva: Droz, 1963, 127.
51. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 74.
52. In the early 1870s the working-class movement was organized as a political party only in Germany. Usage of the word party, whether by followers of Marx or of Bakunin, was therefore very confused. Even Marx used the term more as synonymous with class. Debate in the International between 1871 and 1872 did not focus on the construction of a political party (an expression uttered only twice at the London Conference and five times at the Congress of The Hague), but rather on the “use … of the adjective ‘political’” (Haupt, L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, 84).
53. Jacques Freymond and Miklós Molnár, “The Rise and Fall of the First International,” in Milorad M. Drachkovitch, The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864-1943, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966, 27.
54. Various Authors, “Circulaire du Congrès de Sonvilier,” in PI, II, 264-65.
55. Various Authors, Risoluzione, programma e regolamento della federazione italiana dell’Associazione Internazionale dei Lavoratori, in Gian Mario Bravo, La Prima Internazionale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978,787.
56. See Freymond and Molnár, “Rise and Fall of the First International” (note 53), 27-28.
57. Haupt, L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, 88.
58. See Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 29 July 1872, in MECW, vol. 44, 413, where he noted that this congress would be “a matter of life and death for the International; and before I resign I want at least to protect it from disintegrating elements.”
59. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 65.
60. Freymond, “Introduction,” in PI, I, x.
61. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 69.
62. Karl Marx, 23 July 1872, in GC, V, 263.
63. Karl Marx, 20 September 1871, in PI, II, 195.
64. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 56.
65. See Haupt, L’Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, 100.
66. PI, II, 374.
67. Ibid., 376.
68. Ibid., 377.
69. Ibid., 378.
70. Various Authors, [“Statement of the Minority”], in Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC, C.P.S.U. (ed.) The Hague Congress of the First International, vol. 1: Minutes and Documents, Moscow: Progress, 1976, 199-200.
71. Friedrich Engels, 5 September 1872, in PI, II, 355.
72. Maltman Barry, “Report of the Fifth Annual General Congress of the International Working Men’s Association, Held at The Hague, Holland, September 2-9, 1872,” in Hans Gerth, The First International: Minutes of The Hague Congress of 1872, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, 279-80. This report does not appear in The Hague Congress, vol. 1.
73. Friedrich Engels, 5 September 1872, in PI, II, 356.
74. Édouard Vaillant, Internationale et Révolution. A propos du Congrès de La Haye, in PI, III, 140.
75. Ibid., 142.
76. Ibid., 144.
77. Miklós Molnár, “Quelques remarques à propos de la crise de l’Internationale en 1872,” in Colloque International, La Première Internationale, 439.
78. Molnár, Le Déclin de la Première Internationale, 144.
79. Karl Marx, 22 September 1872, in PI, II, 217.
80. Mikhail Bakunin, “A Letter to the Editorial Board of La Liberté,” in Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, 236-37.
81. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 76.
82. Ibid., Document 78.
83. Mikhail Bakunin, “The International and Karl Marx,” in Sam Dolgoff (ed.), Bakunin on Anarchy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, 303.
84. On Bakunin’s rejection of the conquest of the State by the working class organized in a political party, see Lehning, ‘‘Introduction” (note 38), cvii.
85. See James Guillaume, L’Internationale, Documents et Souvenirs (1864-1878), vol. II, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969 [1907], 342.
86. Musto, Workers Unite!, Document 75.
87. Bakunin, “The International and Karl Marx” (note 83), 294.
88. Ibid., 294-95.
89. Mikhail Bakunin, “Programme and Purpose of the Revolutionary Organization of International Brothers,” in Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, 155.
90. Karl Marx, “Record of Marx’s speech on Secret Societies,” in MECW, vol. 22, 621.
91. Mikhail Bakunin, “Aux compagnons de la Fédération des sections internationales du Jura,” in Arthur Lehning et al. (eds.), Bakunin – Archiv , vol. II: Michel Bakounine et les Conflits dans l’Internationale, Leiden: Brill, 1965, 75.
92. Karl Marx, “Political Indifferentism,” MECW, vol. 23, p. 393.
93. Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, London: Freedom Press, 1950, 21 [translation edited].