In a valedictory tribute to the first International in 1874, Engels considered that it had belonged to the period of the Second Empire, ‘when the oppression throughout Europe prescribed unity and abstention from all internal controversy for the labour movement, then just awakening. It was the moment when the common, cosmopolitan interests of the proletariat could come to the fore . . . German communism did not yet exist as a worker’s party, Proudhonism was too weak to be able to insist on its particular fads, Bakunin’s new trash did not yet exist in his own head, and even the leaders of the English trade unions thought they could enter the movement on the basis of the programme laid down in the preamble to the Statutes’. In this detailed and extremely illuminating bookfootnote1 Collins and Abramsky reveal the relationship between Marx’s strategy and the situation of the British working class in the 1860’s and 70’s.

In a confidential circular to members of the International in 1866, Marx wrote that, ‘although the organization of the working class through the trade unions had acquired a certain degree of maturity and universality’, the Labour movement was totally lacking in the spirit of ‘generalization and revolutionary ardour.’ It was the task of the General Council, he continued, to ‘supply this deficiency’. Marx was not responsible for the inauguration of the International in 1864, nor did it seem at first that the International would prove a likely vehicle for Marxism. Engels remained frankly sceptical and advised Marx not to be drawn away from his theoretical work. The initial inspiration of the movement was Mazzinian rather than Socialist. The first General Council comprised 27 Englishmen and 7 foreigners, and the Englishmen nearly all came from trades based on London. The great catalyst of working class political involvement in the 1860’s had been the building strike of 1859—11 of the 27 Englishmen came from the building trade unions—and the building strike had been almost exclusively a London affair. Moreover, as the authors point out, it was the builders, and representatives of handicraft industries that had most to gain from international organization. The engineers and unionists representing the technologically advanced industries of the North felt no threat from the competition of European labour—it was simply not possible for Northern manufacturers to break strikes by importing continental labourers of equivalent skill, nor was it yet possible for European manufacturers to undercut Britain’s markets in manufactures.