Course on
Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 1b
Revolution in Paris, France: February 1848
The First
International
The Communist Manifesto
is a deliberately internationalist document. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
were deployed to write it by the international Communist League, of
which they were members. The League was strongly based among continental
workers in London, where the first edition was printed (in German) while Marx
was running a part of it in Brussels, Belgium. Engels was in Germany, and
Communist League members were in action in many other countries
including France.
The Manifesto’s publication coincided almost exactly with
the outbreak of revolution in France, in February of 1848, which quickly spread
to other countries. The final Chapter IV
of the Manifesto says among other things that: “… the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things,” and it finishes
with the famous slogan “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
The Communist Manifesto is one of the first two books of
Marxism to come into the public realm. Both were written and published in 1847/early
1848 (the other book is “The Poverty of Philosophy”).
Marxism was internationalist from the start and it has never
ceased to be so.
Most of the revolutions of 1848 were aimed at overthrowing
feudal monarchies, or in other words turning
kingdoms into republics, if necessary by supporting the bourgeoisie in
the anti-monarchy revolution. The content of Marxist internationalism to this
day includes relentless opposition to monarchy.
Marx’s 1864 Address to the International Working Men’s
Association (The First International)
was the consequence of his being invited and elected to the leadership of that
organisation formed in London in a hall next to where the South African High
Commission now stands. Please download and read the Address in the downloadable
document linked below. Marx had been in exile in London since 26 August 1849
after being banished in quick succession from Belgium, Germany and France. In
1864, Marx’s reputation was that of being the foremost internationalist of his
time.
The First International survived until the fall of the Paris
Commune in 1871. The Second International was
established at a gathering in Chur, Switzerland ten years later in 1881, two
years before Marx’s death in 1883 and fourteen years before Engels’ death in
1895. The Second International fostered Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg among many
others. Its collapse in 1914 marked the great division between the opportunists
(such as the “renegade” Kautsky) who in the face of imperialist war folded
their internationalism and became cowardly national chauvinists, and on the
other hand the true internationalists like Luxemburg and Lenin who opposed the
imperialist war. These latter ones, the true internationalists, were also the
communists, who established the communist parties of today.
The Third International, also called the Communist International (or
Comintern) was launched in Soviet Russia less than two years after the October
Revolution, in 1919, and in 1921 it admitted the Communist Party of South
Africa into membership, thus founding the party that is today known as the
South African Communist Party, the SACP.
The history of the communists is an unbroken line of
internationalism of which the SACP is an indissoluble part. The SACP is still
internationalist and it continues to promote the same relentless
anti-monarchical, anti-feudal, anti-colonial, anti-neo-colonial, anti-imperialist
cause as before and will do so until the day of continental permanent
proletarian revolution dawns in Africa.
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
Further
reading:
On War, Chapter 1, What is War?, 1827,
Clausewitz (7916 words)
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