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274 THE CLASS STRUGGLE MARX AND THE INTERNATIONAL 275 This organization came into existence in the beginning of. 1845, and called itself the Democratic Friends of all Nations. It was not particularly successful.
In the summer and the fall of the same year a number of international celebrations were held in London, that were visited by Democrats from all nations. The best known of these celebrations is that of September 22, at which Julian Harney was the chief speaker. This celebration was the first meeting of more than a thousand representatives of international democracy. In their decisions they demanded not only Internationalism, but Communism as the aim of the proletarian movement.
This idea of an international association for democracy was taken up by Harney who proceeded, at the beginning of 1846, to organize the Fraternal Democrats, an organization that shortly afterward united the radical wing of the English Chartists with the revolutionary refug from the continent. This organization kept up relations with the democrats and reformers, not only of Europe, but of America as well.
In Paris in 1843, German refugees had organized a democratic secret organization, Bund der Geächteten. Out of this the famous Bund der Gerechten evolved, after a split in 1836.
Members of this Bund der Gerechten organized the public Deutscher Arbeiter Bildungs Verein, which later, as Kommunistischer Arbeiter Bildungs Verein was destined to play a momentous role in the labor movement. Here, on English soil, the Bund der Gerechten that had hitherto remained entirely German, rapidly developed into an international secret society.
Here speakers from all nations were heard. In February 1846, Harney delivered a speech in which he said: The cause of the people is alike in all nations the cause of labor, of exploited, enslaved labor. In every country those who produce wheat, live on potatoes; those who raise cattle, never taste meat; those who raise grapes taste only the dregs of their noble juice; those who make clothes go in rags; they who build houses, live in wretched hovels; they who produce the necessities, the comforts, the luxuries of life, are drowned in misery. Are not the sorrows and the destitution of the workers alike in all countries? Is not their cause identical. The leading spirits in the Bund der Gerechten, and in the Kommunistischer Arbeiter Bildungs Verein tried earnestly to induce Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to join their ranks.
How the influence of these two theoreticians gave a new foundation to the Socialists of the Bund der Gerechten, how they turned it into the Communistic League is too well known to require repetition. It is generally known that this metamorphosis was partly accomplished, partly furthered, by the Communist Manifesto whose publication gave to the modern labor movement its first theoretical foundation. The Communistic League thus was the first concrete expression of an international labor movement. Many of those who were active in this secret organization, later assumed a leading role in the International Workingmen Association. The theoretical principles that were written upon the standards of the Communistic League are the same principles that are today the connecting link between the units of the entire world proletarian movement. Here, in the Manifesto of this Communistic League, the great word of Marx and Engels, Proletarians of the World, Unite! began its victorious journey over the face of the earth.
II.
The overthrow of the revolutionary movement of 1848 killed the labor movement on the European continent. The 10th of April, 1848, gave the death blow to the Chartist movement in England. The Communist trial in Cologne and the general reaction all over Germany choked the first germ of independence in the working class; in France the coup etat of Napoleon crushed down the last vestiges of a labor movement that might have escaped the overthrow of the June insurrection.
But the overthrow of the 1848 revolution brought in its wake unheard of industrial prosperity. Capitalism, which had reached a modern state of development only in England, took root upon the continent. In Germany, in France, new forces were awak