London, 13 February 1871
Citizens,
The General Council was very pleased to receive your letter of December 14. Your previous letter dated 30 July also reached us; it was passed to Citizen Serraillier,(2) the Secretary for Spain, with the instruction to forward our answer to you. But soon Citizen Serraillier went to France to fight for the Republic, and then he was confined in Paris. If, therefore, you have not received any answer to your letter of 30 July, which is still in his hands, it is due to these circumstances. Now, the General Council, at its meeting of the 7th inst. has charged the undersigned F. E. to handle correspondence with Spain in the interim and has passed on your last letter to him.(3)
In the meantime, we have been regularly receiving the Spanish workers' newspapers La Federacion from Barcelona, La Solidaridad from Madrid (until December 1870), El Obrero from Palma (until its suspension) and recently La Revolucion social from Palma (first issue only). These newspapers have kept us up-to-date with what is happening in Spain with regard to the labour movement; we have seen with much satisfaction that the ideas of social revolution are increasingly becoming the common property of the working class of your country.
Without doubt the empty rantings of the old political parties have, as you say, attracted too much popular attention, thus constituting a major obstacle to our propaganda. This happened everywhere in the first years of the proletarian movement. In France, in England, in Germany the socialists had to, and still have to, combat the influence and the action of the old political parties, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, monarchist or even republican. Everywhere experience has shown that the best means of freeing the workers from this domination by the old parties is to found in each country a proletarian party with a political programme of its own, a political programme that is very clearly distinguished from those of the other parties since it must express the conditions for the emancipation of the working class. The details of this political programme might vary according to the special circumstances in each country; but the fundamental relations between labour and capital being everywhere the same, and the fact of political domination by the propertied classes over the exploited classes existing everywhere, the principles and the goal of the proletarian political programme will be identical, at least in all the western countries. The propertied classes, landed aristocracy and bourgeoisie, hold the working people in thraldom, not only by virtue of their wealth, by the simple exploitation of labour by capital, but also through the coercive power of the state, the army, the bureaucracy, the courts. To refrain from fighting our enemies in the political arena would be to abandon one of the most powerful means of action, and particularly of organisation and propaganda. Universal suffrage gives us an excellent means of action. In Germany the workers, strongly organised as a political party, have succeeded in sending six deputies to the self-styled national assembly; and the opposition which our friends Bebel and Liebknecht have been also able to put up against the war of conquest has had a more powerful effect on behalf of our international propaganda than years of propaganda by the press and by meetings would have had. In France, too, at this moment workers' representatives have just been elected and will proclaim out loud our principles to the national assembly. At the next elections the same thing will happen in England.
We are pleased to hear that you wish to send us the contributions from the branches in your country; we shall receive them with thanks. Please send them in the form of a banker's draft drawn on a bank here in London, payable to John Weston, our treasurer, by registered letter to the undersigned either at 256 High Holborn, London (seat of our Council) or to his home address 122 R.P.R.(4) We wait with great interest the statistics of your federation which you promise to send us.
As for the Congress of the International, it is pointless to think about it as long as the present war continues. But if, as seems likely, peace is soon restored, the Council will take up this important matter straightaway and will consider your kind invitation to hold it in Barcelona.
We have no sections yet in Portugal; perhaps it would be easier for you than for us to open relations with the workers of that country. If this is so, would you please write to us again on this matter. Likewise, we believe that it would be best, to begin with at any rate, if you yourselves will make contact with the typesetters of Buenos Aires, provided you let us know later on what results have been achieved. Meanwhile, you would render us a kind service and further the cause by sending us a copy of Anales de la Sociedad tipografica de Buenos Aires for our information.
For the rest, the international movement continues to make progress despite all obstacles. In England the central Trades' Councils(5) of Birmingham and Manchester, and through them the workers of the two most important manufacturing cities in the country, have just affiliated direct to our Association. In Germany we are currently suffering the same persecution at the hands of the governments there as Louis Bonaparte subjected us to in France a year ago. Our German friends, more than fifty of whom are in prison, are literally suffering for the international cause; they have been arrested and persecuted because they opposed the policy of conquest with all their strength and because they demanded that the German people should fraternise with the French people. In Austria many of our friends have been imprisoned but the movement is making progress nevertheless. Everywhere in France our sections have been the life and soul of the resistance against the invasion. They have seized local power in the big cities of the South, and if Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux and Toulouse have evinced an energy unknown elsewhere, it was thanks to the efforts of the Internationals. In Belgium we are well organised; our Belgian sections have just celebrated their sixth regional Congress. In Switzerland the differences which had arisen between our sections some time ago seem to be sorting themselves out. From America we have received the membership of new French, German and Czech (Bohemian) sections, and, as regards the others, we continue to maintain fraternal relations with the great organisation of American workers, the Labor League.(6)
Hoping to receive more news from you soon, we send you our fraternal greetings.
For the General Council of the International Working Men's Association
F.E.
1871 First published in: Marx and Engels,
Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVI, 1935