Fourth Basle Congress of the First International in 1869

Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association, held September 6–11, 1869, in Basle, Switzerland, attended by 77 delegates from 9 countries. Marx did not attend the congress, but he directly participated in the preparations of the Basle Congress, gave his opinion on the agenda and the guidelines to be implemented at the congress, and drafted two documents, The Fourth Annual Report of the General Council and the Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance. The Congress mainly discussed three major questions: the property in the land, the right of inheritance and the expansion of the powers of the General Council of the International.

On the question of property in the land discussed at the congress, most delegates supported the resolutions of the previous (Brussels) Congress and formed a resolution on the question of property in the land, stating that the future “society has a right to abolish private property in land, and convert it into common property”. The adoption of this resolution indicated the complete bankruptcy of Proudhonism in the International.

On the question of inheritance discussed at the congress, Bakunin and his followers held that “the abolition of the right of inheritance” was a necessary condition for the emancipation of labor and the “starting point of the social revolution”, and demanded the congress to adopt a resolution for the “complete and radical abolition of the right of inheritance”. In the Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance, read out in the conference, it was stated that the laws of inheritance were not the cause, but the effect, the juridical consequence of the existing economical organization of society, based upon private property in the means of production. The goal of the proletarian revolution was the elimination of the social system of private property in the means of production, not the abolition of the right of inheritance itself. “The disappearance of the right of inheritance will be the natural result of a social change superseding private property in the means of production; but the abolition of the right of inheritance can never be the starting point of such a social transformation.” At the congress vote, neither of the two proposals on the question of inheritance (the proposal of the commission on the question of inheritance, manipulated by the Bakuninists, and the proposal drafted by Marx for the General Council) received more than half the votes, so that Bakunin’s attempt to change the aim and direction of the International through the question of inheritance failed.

The Congress discussed the issue of expanding the powers of the General Council and adopted the Resolution on Extending the Powers of the General Council, which stipulated that the General Council has the right to accept or reject workers’ organizations to participate in the International and to suspend any branch till the meeting of the next Congress, which was of great importance for the subsequent struggle against Bakuninism.