International Socialist Workers’ Congress

Congress of International Socialist Workers held in Paris on July 14, 1889 (the centenary of the storming of the Bastille in the 1789 French Revolution). The Congress was attended by 393 delegates from 22 countries, many of whom were activists and leaders of workers’ movements in their respective countries. Engels was unable to attend because he was busy with the organization of Volume 3 of Capital.

The central questions discussed at this congress were labor legislation and the political and economic tasks of the working class; it adopted a draft resolution on international labor legislation proposed by Bebel, calling on workers' organizations and socialist parties in all countries to “use all means to counter the enslavement of the working class by the capitalist system”; and “demanded that governments of all countries enact reasonable labor legislation that guarantees an eight-hour working day, establishes a system of labor protection, protects the interests of child and women workers, eliminating the sweating system and the payment of wages in kind, etc.”.

The Congress adopted a resolution on the political and economic tasks of the working class, pointing out that labor legislation and economic struggle are the “preliminary” for the self-emancipation of the working class; a means to develop class consciousness among working people, and that “for the emancipation of the working class it is insufficient to rely only on the economic organization of laborers (the association and the trade unions)”, that it is necessary to strengthen the “socialist party that should tolerate no compromise with any other party” and to wage political struggle against capitalist rule. “The emancipation of labor and humanity cannot occur without the international action of the proletariat—organized in class-based parties—which seizes political power through the expropriation of the capitalist class and the social appropriation of the means of production.”

The Congress adopted a resolution on the First of May, International Labor Day, on the proposal of the French and American delegates. The Congress discussed the question of the abolition of the standing army and the realization of general armament. The Congress heard the reports of the delegates of various countries in order to exchange experience and information on the workers' movement in each country. On the last day of the Congress, the delegates made a special trip to pay tribute to the martyrs of the Paris Commune by laying a wreath.

This (Paris) International Socialist Workers’ Congress excluded the remaining vestiges of anarchism, formulated a number of Marxist tactics on the strategy of the international workers' movement, and gained the upper hand in the struggle for leadership against the simultaneous congress under the auspices of the Possibilists, and in effect proclaimed the emergence of the Second International.

See Second International on p. 461.