BUILDING THE INTERNATIONAL – YouTube
A Workers’ International Network meeting Sunday 19th June
As part of our weekly programme of discussion meetings, over the next few months WIN will be running an occasional series on the history of the workers’ internationals. These meetings are not intended to be dry academic seminars but dynamic collective inquiries into the lessons of our common political heritage. We urge you to participate actively in helping us all to relate the past to the vital tasks ahead of us. What is WIN trying to do? At what stage is the revolutionary movement now in 2022? Why are the last fragments of the various “Fourth Internationals” rotting and splitting while the objective conditions for revolution ripen all around them? These are among the questions which will underpin all our discussions. The first meeting in this series will be held this Sunday, when we will look at the work of Marx and Engels in helping to bring together workers’ organisations in the mid-19th century. Why was the First International so diverse in its composition? At its outset it encompassed Robert Owen’s co-operative movement; Proudhon’s mutualism, which opposed the idea of class struggle; Blanqui’s conspiratorial putschist approach to revolution; and Bakunin’s revolutionary anarchism, which opposed Marx’s perspective for the creation of a workers’ state. The variety and diversity of these ideas contrast sharply with the Second International’s later broad adherence to Marxist ideas, and to the strict principles on which Lenin and the Bolsheviks founded the Communist International fifty years later, in consonance with the radically different context of the time. They contrast too with the paranoid insistence on rigid unanimity dictated today by numerous sectarian splinter groups. The International lived through just seven years of wars, civil wars and revolution. Today too, we are living today through a period in which there has never been a more universal worldwide surge of protest and desperation… and yet these struggles are isolated and dislocated. How are they to be streamlined, harnessed into a united force to change society? What can we learn from the work of Marx and Engels in helping to found the first workers’ International? To what extent can it help guide the work of Marxists today seeking to play a role in the development of a new movement.