The Conspiracy Book by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Sterling

1864

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

By the 1850s the Philadelphes, the last of the great conspiracies to come out of the French Revolution, was a shadow of its former self. Exiled from France after the coup d’état that put Napoleon III in power, the Philadelphes regrouped in London. Their efforts to make common cause with other radical groups in Europe convinced them that a front group oriented toward the rights of working people might be an effective vehicle for their plans. In 1864, accordingly, Philadelphe members founded the International Workingmen’s Organization—the International, for short—and began recruiting political radicals and trade-union members across Europe.

Among the many radicals who joined the new organization was a German economist named Karl Marx (1818–1883), also living in exile in London. Marx and his friend and patron Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) had become major figures in European radical circles with the 1848 publication of The Communist Manifesto, and the Philadelphes hoped that they could capitalize on Marx’s fame for their own purposes. Marx proved to be better at political scheming than they were, though, and within a year of the organization’s founding he was in charge of the International, and the Philadelphes had been expelled.

Marx had a major rival, though, in the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), whose International Brothers quickly set out to infiltrate the International. A series of bruising political struggles left Marx still in control, but the struggle left the International fatally weakened. It went out of existence in 1876, and a new organization of the same kind—the Second International—did not take shape until 1889.

An illustration of Mikhail Bakunin addressing members of the IWA (International Workingmen’s Association), often called the First International, at the congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1869. The rivalry between Bakunin and Karl Marx, a fellow radical and member of the “International,” resulted in a weakened organization, but with Marx in control.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.