ABSTRACT
The brutal Russian suppression of the Polish Rebellion of 1863 helped bring to life a new organization, one offspring of which would, half a century later, destroy tsarism. The West European working class, awakening to a sense of its own latent power and its dignity, readily understood that a tyrant—Alexander II—who shot and hanged Poles seeking freedoms already won in the West posed a threat to all Europe. European labour therefore rose up in protest against the Tsar's brutality, and in so doing took a significant step toward unity. The International Working Men's Association, or First International, would surely have come into existence even without the Polish events of 1863, but the birth would have occurred later and the organization would have taken a different form. Its origins went deep into European history, especially, of course, to the French Revolution. And its first pronunciamento, as one historian has pointed out, ‘was not the Inaugural Address [which Karl Marx wrote in 1864] but rather the Communist Manifesto.’ 1 The Manifesto had first proclaimed on a wide and sustained basis the general idea, ‘workers of the world, unite!’ There had been some hopes that that idea, or rather a broader version embracing all democratically-inclined social groups, might become a reality in 1848–9, but the great uprisings collapsed and a period of reaction and war followed. Out of the reaction came the First International.
