Written by Karl Marx, adopted by the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on May 11, 1869, and published as a leaflet, London, 1869. Attributed to Karl Marx by MEW (vol. 16). Text from The General Council of the First International, 1868-1870. Minutes, Moscow, Progress Publishers, n.d. [1963-68], pp. 319-321, which prints the leaflet. Traducción al español.

Fellow-workmen,

In the initiatory programme of our Association we stated: “It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England that saved the West of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” Your turn has now come to stop a war, the clearest result of which would be, for an indefinite period, to hurl back the ascendant movement of the working class on both sides of the Atlantic.

We need hardly tell you that there exist European powers anxiously bent upon hurrying the United States into a war with England. A glance at commercial statistics will show that the Russian export of raw produce, and Russia has nothing else to export, was rapidly giving way before American competition, when the civil war suddenly turned the scales. To convert the American ploughshares into swords would just now rescue from impending bankruptcy that despotic power which your republican statesmen have, in their wisdom, chosen for their confidential adviser. But quite apart from the particular interests of this or that government, is it not the general interest of our common oppressors to turn our fast-growing international co-operation into an internecine war?

In a congratulatory address to Mr. Lincoln on his re-election as president, we expressed our conviction that the American civil war would prove of as great import to the advancement of the working class as the American war of independence had proved to that of the middle class. And, in point of fact, the victorious termination of the anti-slavery war has opened a new epoch in the annals of the working class. In the States themselves, an independent working-class movement, looked upon with an evil eye by your old parties and their professional politicians, has since that date sprung into life. To fructify it wants years of peace. To crush it, a war between the United States and England is wanted.

The next palpable effect of the civil war was, of course, to deteriorate the position of the American workman. In the United States, as in Europe, the monster incubus of a national debt was shifted from hand to hand, to settle down on the shoulders of the working class. The prices of necessaries, says one of your statesmen, have since 1860 risen 78 per cent, while the wages of unskilled labour rose 50 per cent, those of skilled labour 60 per cent only. “Pauperism,” he complains, “grows now in America faster than population.” Moreover, the sufferings of the working classes set off as a foil the new-fangled luxury of financial aristocrats, shoddy aristocrats, and similar vermin bred by wars. Yet for all this the civil war did compensate by freeing the slave and the consequent moral impetus it gave to your own class movement. A second war, not hallowed by a sublime purpose and a great social necessity, but of the Old World’s type, would forge chains for the free labourer instead of tearing asunder those of the slave. The accumulated misery left in its track would afford your capitalists at once the motive and the means to divorce the working class from its bold and just aspirations by the soulless sword of a standing army.

On you, then, depends the glorious task to prove to the world that now at last the working classes are bestriding the scene of history no longer as servile retainers, but as independent actors, conscious of their own responsibility, and able to command peace where their would-be masters shout war.

In the name of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, British nationality:
R. APPLEGARTH, carpenter; M. J. BOON, engineer; J. BUCKLEY, painter; J. HALES, elastic web-weaver; HARRIET LAW; B. LUCRAFT, chair-maker; J. MILNER, tailor; G. ODGER, shoemaker; J. ROSS, bootcloser; B. SHAW, painter; COWELL STEPNEY; J. WARREN, trunk-maker; J. WESTON, handrail-maker. French nationality: E. DUPONT, instrument-maker; JULES JOHANNARD, lithographer; PAUL LAFARGUE. German nationality: G. ECCARIUS, tailor; F. LESSNER, tailor; W. LIMBURG, shoemaker; MARX, KARL. Swiss nationality: H. JUNG, watchmaker; A. MÜLLER, watchmaker. Belgian nationality: M. BERNARD, painter. Danish nationality: J. COHN, cigar-maker. Polish nationality: ZABICKI, compositor.

B. LUCRAFT, Chairman
COWELL STEPNEY, Treasurer
J. GEORGE ECCARIUS, General Secretary

London, May 12th, 1869