Excerpts from Mehring's Karl Marx - The Story of His Life (1918) on the conflict between Bakunin and Marx in the 1st International (International Working Men's Association). Mehring gives a very evenhanded account of the famous split that was to initially define the historical relationship between the statist and anti-statist wings of the working class movement. Unlike most other Marxists up to the present - and whilst maintaining his political disagreements with Bakunin's anarchism and criticising his faults and weaknesses - Mehring without bias also points out the slanders, intrigues and trickeries of Marx and his supporters in this episode.

The full text of Mehring's book is available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/

[The International Working Men’s Association had been founded at a large meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on the 28th of September, 1864. By 1868 its membership and influence had begun to spread across Europe.]



Chapter Thirteen: The International at Its Zenith

3. Bakunin’s Agitation

The third congress of the International took place in Brussels from the 6th to the 13th of September, 1868.

It was better attended than any other congress either before or afterwards, but it was strongly local in character, more than half of those present being from Belgium. About one-fifth of the delegates came from France. Eleven delegates represented England, six of them being members of the General Council, including Eccarius, Jung, Lessner and the trade unionist Lucraft. Eight delegates were present from Switzerland but from Germany only three, including Moses Hess of the Cologne section. Schweitzer had received an official invitation but was unable to attend owing to the fact that legal business required his presence in Germany. Instead he sent a message declaring the agreement of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein with the aims of the International and explaining that formal affiliation was prevented only by the anti-combination laws of Germany. Italy and Spain sent one representative each.

The more vigorous life of the International in the fourth year of its existence made itself very definitely felt in the proceedings of the congress. The resistance which the Proudhonists had offered to trade unionism and strikes at the Geneva and Lausanne congresses had almost turned into its contrary; yet they still clung to their old ideas of “free credit” and the “exchange bank,” and succeeded in securing the adoption of an academic resolution in their favour although Eccarius demonstrated the practical impossibility of these Proudhonist remedies on the basis of English experience, whilst Hess demonstrated their theoretical untenableness on the basis of Marx’s reply to Proudhon twenty years earlier.

In the “property question” the French delegates suffered complete eclipse. At the proposal of de Paepe a long resolution on the subject was adopted demanding that a well-organized system of society should take over and administer the mines and the railways in the interests of the whole of society, i.e., a new State based on canons of justice, and that until that time they should be run by companies of workers affording the necessary guarantees to society as a whole. The land and the forests were also to be taken over by the State and entrusted to similar companies of workers offering the same guarantees. And finally, all canals, roads, telegraphs, and in short all the means of transport and communication were to become the common property of society as a whole. The French delegates protested violently against this “primitive communism,” but all they could secure 6 was an agreement that the next congress, which it was decided should take place in Basle, should discuss the question anew.

We have Marx’s word that he had no part in drawing up the resolutions of the Brussels congress, but he was not dissatisfied with the proceedings. First of all the congress followed the example of the Hamburg and Nuremberg congresses and thanked him in the name of the international proletariat for his scientific work on its behalf, a fact which afforded him both personal and political satisfaction, and secondly the attack launched by the French section in London against the General Council was repulsed. However, a resolution proposed by the Geneva section and adopted by the congress to the effect that threatening wars should be warded off by general strikes, by a general strike of the peoples, he described as “nonsense,” but he approved of a decision to break off relations with the League for Peace and Freedom, which held its second congress a little while later in Berne. The League proposed an alliance to the International, but it received the terse answer from Brussels that there seemed no obvious reason for its continued existence and that the best thing it could do would be to liquidate itself and advise its members to join the various sections of the International.

The idea of this alliance was supported chiefly by Michael Bakunin, who had been present at the first congress of the League for Peace and Freedom in Geneva and had joined the International a few months before the Brussels congress. When the International rejected his proposal for an alliance between the two organizations he did his best to persuade the Berne congress of the League for Peace and Freedom to advocate the destruction of all States and the establishment on the ruins of a federation of free productive cooperatives of all countries. However, he was in the minority at the congress of the League also, together with Johann Philipp Becker and others, and with this minority he then founded the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. This body was to join the International without reservation in order to work within it to further the study of all political and philosophic questions on the basis of the great principle of the general and moral equality of all human beings throughout the world.

The coming of the Alliance was announced by Becker in the September number of Der Vorbote and its aim was declared to be the formation of sections of the International in France, Italy and Spain and wherever it had influence, but it was three months later, on the 15th of December, 1868, that Becker formally requested the General Council to accept the Alliance into the International, and in the meantime this request had been made to and rejected by the French and Belgian Federal Councils. A week later, on the 22nd of December, Bakunin wrote to Marx from Geneva: “My dear friend, I understand more clearly than ever now how right you were to follow the great path of economic revolution, inviting us to go with you and condemning those of us who frittered away our energies in the by-paths of partly national and occasionally wholly political ventures. I am now doing what you have been doing for the last twenty years. Since my solemn and public breach with the bourgeoisie at the Berne congress I know no other society and no other environment than the world of the workers. My Fatherland is now the International, to whose prominent founders you belong. Yell see therefore, my dear friend, that I am your pupil, and I am proud of it. So much for my attitude and my personal opinions.” There is no reason to doubt the honesty of these assurances.

A rapid and fundamental grasp of the relations between the two men can be gained from a comparison between Marx and Proudhon made several years later by Bakunin at a time when he was already in violent opposition to Marx: “Marx is a serious and profound economic thinker and he has the tremendous advantage over Proudhon of really being a materialist. Despite all his efforts to free himself from the traditions of classical idealism, Proudhon remained an incorrigible idealist all his life, swayed at one moment by the Bible and the next by Roman law (as I told him two months before he died) and always a metaphysician to his fingertips. His great misfortune was that he had never studied natural science and never adopted its methods. He possessed sound instincts and they fleetingly showed him the correct path, but, misled by the bad or idealist habits of his intellect, he fell back again and again into his old errors. Thus Proudhon became a permanent contradiction, a powerful genius and a revolutionary thinker who fought ceaselessly against the illusions of idealism but never succeeded in defeating them for good.” Thus Bakunin on Proudhon.

He then proceeded to describe the character of Marx as it appeared to him: “As a thinker Marx is on the right path. He has set up the principle that all religious, political and legal developments in history are not the cause but the effects of economic developments. That is a great and fruitful idea, but not all the credit for it is due to him. Many others before him had an inkling of it and even expressed it in part, but in the last resort credit is due to him for having developed the idea scientifically and having made it the basis of his whole economic teachings. On the other hand, Proudhon understood and appreciated the idea of freedom better than Marx. When not engaged in inventing doctrines and fantasies, Proudhon possessed the authentic instinct of the revolutionary; he respected Satan and proclaimed anarchy. It is quite possible that Marx will develop an even more reasonable system of freedom than did Proudhon, but he lacks Proudhon’s instinct. As a German and a Jew, he is authoritarian from head to heels.” So much for Bakunin on Marx.

The conclusion which he drew for himself from this comparison was that he incorporated the higher unity of both these systems. He thought he had developed the anarchist system of Proudhon, freed it from all doctrinaire, idealist and metaphysical dress, and given it a basis of materialism in science and of social economics in history, but he was sadly deceiving himself. He developed far beyond Proudhon, possessing a far wider European education and understanding Marx far better, but unlike Marx he had neither gone through the school of German philosophy thoroughly, nor closely studied the class struggles of the Western European peoples. And above all, his ignorance of economics was even more damaging to him than ignorance of natural science had been to Proudhon. This deficiency in Bakunin’s education was due to the fact that his revolutionary activities had caused him to spend many of the best years of his life in Saxon, Austrian and Russian prisons and in the icy wastes of Siberia, but as honourable as this explanation is, it did not make the deficiency any the less serious.

The “Inner Satan” was at once his strength and weakness, and what he meant with this favourite expression of his has been explained aptly and in noble words by the famous Russian critic Bielinsky: “Michael is often guilty and sinful, but there is something in him which outweighs all his deficiencies – that is the eternally active principle which lives deep within his spirit.” Bakunin was a thoroughly revolutionary character and like Marx and Lassalle he possessed the gift which caused men to listen to his voice. It was no mean achievement for a penniless fugitive with nothing but his indomitable will to have laid the basis of the international working-class movement in a number of European countries, in Spain, Italy and Russia. However, it is only necessary to mention these countries in order to realize the difference between him and Marx. Both men observed the approaching revolution, but whereas Marx realized that the industrial proletariat, which he had studied in Germany, France and England, was the backbone of the revolution, Bakunin thought to snatch the victory with the masses of the declassed youth, the peasantry and even the slum proletariat. Although he recognized Marx’s superiority as a scientific thinker, in his own actions he fell back again and again into errors which were typical of “the revolutionaries of past generations.” He accepted his fate and consoled himself with the reflection that although science might be the compass of life, it was not life itself and only life could create real things and beings.

It would be folly and at the same time an injustice both to Marx and Bakunin to judge their relations solely on the basis of the irreconcilable quarrel in which these ended. It is of far more value politically, and particularly psychologically, to trace how they were drawn to each other again and again only to fall asunder throughout the course of thirty years. Both began their revolutionary careers as Young Hegelians and Bakunin was also one of the founders of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbücher. When the breach took place between Marx and Ruge, Bakunin supported Marx against his old patron, but later on when he was able to see at first hand in Brussels what Marx meant by communist propaganda he was horrified, and a few months later he enthusiastically supported Herwegh’s adventurous volunteer crusade into Germany only to realize the folly of the venture and acknowledge his error openly.

Soon afterwards, in the summer of 1848, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung accused him of being a tool of the Russian government, but its subsequent reparation for an error into which it had been led by two independent sources was magnanimous enough to satisfy Bakunin completely. Marx and Bakunin met again in Berlin and renewed their old friendship, and when Bakunin was expelled from Prussia the Neue Rheinische Zeitung championed his cause energetically. His subsequent Pan-Slav agitation came in for severe criticism, but an introductory remark declared, “Bakunin is our friend,” pointed out that he was acting from democratic motives and granted that his self-deception in the Slav question was very understandable. And for the rest, Engels, who was the author of this article, was wrong in his chief objection to Bakunin’s propaganda, for the Slav peoples then under Austrian domination have since proved that they did in fact possess the historical future which Engels denied them. Bakunin’s revolutionary participation in the Dresden insurrection was appreciated by Marx and Engels sooner and more enthusiastically than by anyone else.

Bakunin was taken prisoner during the retreat from Dresden and twice sentenced to death, first by a Saxon and then by an Austrian court-martial. In both cases the sentence was commuted to lifelong hard labour and in the end he was extradited to Russia where he spent many terrible years in the fortress of St. Peter-Paul. During his incarceration an idiotic Urquhartite again brought forward the exploded accusation that Bakunin was an agent of the Russian government and declared in an article in The Morning Advertiser that he was in fact not in prison at all. The same paper was then compelled to publish letters of protest from Herzen, Mazzini, Ruge and Marx. An unfortunate coincidence was the fact that Bakunin’s slanderer was also called Marx and this became known to a few people although he obstinately refused to abandon his public anonymity. This coincidence was later exploited by the sham revolutionary Herzen to launch a shameful intrigue. In 1857 Bakunin was sent from the St. Peter-Paul fortress to Siberia and in 1861 he succeeded in making his escape over Japan and the United States to London where Herzen persuaded him that Marx had denounced him in the English press as a Russian spy during his imprisonment. This was the beginning of that infamous scandal-mongering which caused much of the trouble between the two men.

Bakunin had been completely isolated from European life for over a decade and it is therefore understandable that on his arrival in London he first sought contact with Russian fugitives of the Herzen type, though fundamentally he had little in common with them. Even in his Pan-Slavism, as far as it is possible to give his aims such a name, Bakunin always remained a revolutionary, whereas Herzen was in reality playing the game of Tsarism under a mildly liberalist mask with his attacks on the “degenerate West” and his mystic cult of the Russian village community. it is nothing against Bakunin that he maintained friendly personal relations with Herzen up to the latter’s death, for Herzen had been of assistance to him in his youthful troubles. The political breach between the two was brought about by Bakunin in 1866 in a letter to~Herzen reproaching him for wanting a social transformation without a political one and for being prepared to forgive the State everything provided it left the Russian village community intact, because this was the basis of Herzen’s hopes for the regeneration not only of Russia and the Slav countries, but of the whole world. Bakunin subjected this fantasy to annihilating criticism.

However, after his successful flight from Siberia he stayed in Herzen’s house and was thus kept from any contact with Marx. Despite this fact he translated The Communist Manifesto into Russian and secured its publication in Herzen’s Kolokol. This was typical of him.

During Bakunin’s second stay in London, at the time when the International was founded, Marx broke the ice and visited him. He was able to assure Bakunin truthfully that far from having been the originator of the slander, he had expressly opposed it. After this explanation the two parted as friends. Bakunin was enthusiastically in favour of the plan for an international working-class organization, and on the 4th of November Marx wrote to Engels: “Bakunin sends you his greetings. He left for Italy to-day, where he is now living (Florence). I must say that he impressed me favourably, more so than formerly ... On the whole he is one of the few people I have met during the past sixteen years who have progressed and not retrogressed.”

The enthusiasm which Bakunin felt for the cause of the International did not last very long and his stay in Italy soon awakened “the revolutionary of a past generation” in him. He had chosen Italy to live in on account of its agreeable climate and its cheapness, but also for political reasons and because both France and Germany were closed to him. He regarded the Italians as the natural allies of the Slavs in the struggle against Austrian oppression, and whilst he was still in Siberia the exploits of Garibaldi had stirred his imagination. His first conclusion from these exploits was that the revolutionary movement was once again resurgent. In Italy he found numerous political secret societies, a declassed intelligentsia prepared to plunge at a moment’s notice into all sorts of conspiratorial adventures, a mass of peasants always on the verge of starvation, and finally an eternally seething slum proletariat. This latter was particularly strongly represented by the Lazzaroni of Naples, where Bakunin went to live after a short stay in Florence. These classes appeared to him as the real driving forces of the revolution and he regarded Italy as the country in which the social revolution was probably nearest, though he was soon compelled to recognize his error. Mazzini’s propaganda was still the dominant factor in Italy and Mazzini was an opponent of socialism. The sole aim of his vague religious battle-cries and of his strictly centralized movement was to secure a united bourgeois republic.

During the years he spent in Italy Bakunin’s revolutionary agitation took on a more definite form. Owing to his lack of theoretical knowledge, his surplus of intellectual agility and his impetuous desire for action, he was always very strongly under the influence of his environment. The politico-religious dogmatism of Mazzini drove Bakunin to stress his own atheism and anarchism and his denial of all State authority. And on the other hand, the revolutionary traditions of those classes which he regarded as the pioneers of the general transformation of society greatly influenced his own inclination to indulge in secret conspiracies and local insurrections. Bakunin therefore founded a revolutionary socialist secret society which was composed chiefly of Italians in the beginning and aimed at combating “the disgusting bourgeois rhetoric of Mazzini and Garibaldi,” but which soon extended its influence internationally.

In the autumn of 1867 he moved to Geneva, where he first tried to influence the League for Peace and Freedom in favour of his secret society, and when he failed to do so he did his best to secure the acceptance of its affiliation to the International, an organization about which he had not bothered his head for four years.





4. The Alliance of Socialist Democracy

Marx continued to harbour feelings of friendship for the old revolutionary Bakunin and he opposed various attacks which were made or planned against Bakunin amongst his, Marx’s, immediate circle.

The originator of these attacks was Sigismund Borkheim, an honest democrat to whom Marx was indebted in connection with the Vogt affair and other matters. Borkheim had two weaknesses: first of all he thought himself a brilliant writer, which he was not, and secondly he suffered from an eccentric hatred of the Russians, a hatred which was no less intense than Herzen’s equally eccentric hatred of the Germans.

Herzen was Borkheim’s pet aversion whom he belaboured thoroughly in a series of articles which appeared at the beginning of 1868 in the Demokratisches Wochenblatt shortly after its appearance. Although at that time Bakunin had already broken with Herzen politically, he was attacked by Borkheim as one of Herzen’s “cossacks” and pilloried with him as an “indestructible negation.” Borkheim had read in one of Herzen’s articles that years before Bakunin had made “the peculiar observation” that “active negation is a creative power,” and in his moral indignation Borkheim asked rhetorically whether such an idea had ever occurred to anyone on the European side of the Russian frontier, adding that it would be laughed out of court by thousands of German schoolboys. The worthy Borkheim was unaware that Bakunin’s often quoted declaration, “the lust for destruction is a creative lust” came from an article in the Deutsche Jahrbücher published at a time when Bakunin moved in Young Hegelian circles and co-operated with Marx and Ruge in founding the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

It is easy to realize that Marx regarded this and similar efforts with secret horror, and that he opposed Borkheim tooth and nail when the latter proposed to use Engels’ articles against Bakunin in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the basis for his own gibberish because he felt that they “suited his own book so splendidly.” Marx insisted that if the articles were used at all they must not be used insultingly, because Engels was an old personal friend of Bakunin, and when Engels supported Marx, Borkheim abandoned his plan. Johann Philipp Becker also wrote to Borkheim asking him not to attack Bakunin, but he received a petulant reply in which Borkheim declared, “with his usual delicacy,” as Marx wrote to Engels, that he was prepared to continue his friendship for Becker and also his financial support (not very considerable, by the way) but that in the future politics must be avoided in their correspondence. With all his friendship for Borkheim Marx found that the former’s “Russophobia” had taken on dangerous dimensions.

Marx’s feelings of friendship for Bakunin were not affected by the fact that the latter took part in the congresses of the League for Peace and Freedom. The first congress of the League had already taken place in Geneva when Marx sent a copy of the first volume of his Capital to Bakunin with a personal dedication. Receiving no word of thanks, he made inquiries of a Russian emigrant in Geneva, to whom he had written on another matter, concerning his “old friend Bakunin,” although he already harboured a faint doubt as to whether Bakunin was still his friend or not. The answer to this indirect inquiry was Bakunin’s letter of the 22nd of December in which he promised to follow along the path which Marx had been pursuing for twenty years.

On the day Bakunin wrote this letter the General Council had already decided to reject the request of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, forwarded through Becker, for permission to affiliate to the International. Marx was the prime mover in this rejection. He had known of the existence of the Alliance, which had been announced in Der Vorbote, but he had regarded it up to then as a still-born local growth and not of any importance. He knew Becker as an otherwise reliable comrade, but inclined to indulge in organizational dabblings. Becker forwarded the program and the statutes of the Alliance and declared in an accompanying letter to the General Council that the Alliance was anxious to make good the lack of “idealism” in the International.

This unfortunate observation caused “great wrath” amongst the members of the General Council “and particularly amongst the French,” as Marx wrote to Engels, and the rejection of the application of the Alliance was decided on immediately. Marx was instructed by the General Council to write the letter conveying its decision in the matter. The letter which he wrote to Engels “after midnight” on the 18th of December to obtain the latter’s advice indicates that he himself was somewhat indignant about the affair. “Borkheim was right this time,” he added. He was exercised not so much by the program of the Alliance as by its statutes. The program declared above all that the Alliance was atheist. It demanded the abolition of all religions, the replacement of belief by science, and of divine justice by human justice. It then demanded political, economic and social equality for all classes and all individuals of both sexes, and a beginning was to be made with the abolition of the right of inheritance. It further demanded that all children of both sexes should receive equal opportunities for development from birth on, that is to say, material care and education on all fields of science, industry and the arts. And finally the program condemned all forms of political activity which did not aim directly at securing the victory of labour over capital.

Marx’s verdict on this program was not a flattering one. A little while afterwards he referred to it as “an olla podrida of worn-out platitudes, an empty rigmarole, a rosary of pretentious notions to make the flesh creep, a banal improvisation aiming at nothing more than a temporary effect.” In theoretical matters the International was prepared to tolerate much, for its historical task was to develop a joint program for the international proletariat out of its practical activity. For this very reason its organization was of paramount importance as the preliminary condition for all successful practical activity, and the statutes of the Alliance made dangerous encroachments precisely on this field.

The Alliance declared itself a branch of the International and accepted all its general statutes, but it wanted to remain a separate organization. Its founders set themselves up in Geneva as a provisional central committee. National offices were to be opened in each country and to form groups everywhere, which should then be affiliated to the International. At the annual congresses of the International the representatives of the Alliance, as a branch of the International, proposed to hold their own public sessions in a special room.

Engels decided immediately. Acceptance was impossible. The result would be two General Councils and two congresses. At the first opportunity the practical General Council in London would find itself at loggerheads with the “idealist” General Council in Geneva. For the rest, he advised coolness in dealing with the matter. Any violent rejection would excite the very numerous Philistines amongst the workers (particularly in Switzerland) and do the International harm. One should reject the application of the Alliance calmly and firmly, and point out that it had chosen a special field for its activities and that the International would wait and see what success it had. In the meantime there was no reason why the members of the one association should not also be members of the other if they wanted to. His verdict on the program of the Alliance was very much like Marx’s. He had never read anything so miserable in his life. Bakunin must have become a “perfect donkey,” an observation which indicated no particular resentment against Bakunin, or at least no more than when Marx referred to his old and loyal friend Becker as “an old confusionist.” In their private correspondence the two friends made generous use of such hearty invective.

In the meantime Marx had calmed down and he drew up the decision of the General Council refusing permission for the Alliance to affiliate to the International in a form to which no objection could be taken. An indirect sally at Becker was contained in the statement that actually a number of the founders of the Alliance had already settled the question by their co-operation as members of the International in the adoption of the decision of the Brussels congress not to amalgamate with the League for Peace and Freedom. The main reason given for the negative decision of the General Council was that to accept the affiliation of a second international body existing both inside and outside the International would be the best means of destroying the organization.

It is very unlikely that Becker fell into a great rage when he received the decision of the General Council. More credible is the statement of Bakunin that he was opposed from the beginning to the formation of the Alliance, but was out-voted by the members of his secret society. He had wished to maintain this secret society, whose members were to work within the International for the aims of the society, and he had wished for the immediate affiliation of the organization to the International in order to prevent all rivalries. In any case the central committee of the Alliance in Geneva answered the refusal of the General Council with an offer to turn the sections of the Alliance into sections of the International, if the General Council would recognize the theoretical program of the Alliance.

In the meantime Marx had received Bakunin’s friendly letter of the 22nd of December, but by this time his suspicions had been so aroused that he disregarded this “sentimental entree.” The new proposal of the Alliance also aroused his mistrust; nevertheless he did not permit himself to answer it in any but a thoroughly objective fashion. At his proposal the General Council decided on the 9th of March, 1869, that it was not within its province to examine the theoretical programs of the various workers’ organizations affiliated to the International. The working class in various countries was at various stages of development and in consequence their practical activity found theoretical expression in varying forms. Joint action, which was the aim of the international, the exchange of ideas between the various sections of the International and finally the direct discussions at the annual congresses, would gradually result in the development of a joint theoretical program for the whole of the working-class movement, but for the moment the task of the General Council was to determine only whether the general tendency of the various programs was in accordance with the general tendency of the International, that is to say, the struggle for the complete emancipation of the working class.

In this connection, the decision pointed out, the program of the Alliance contained a phrase which was open to dangerous misunderstanding: political, economic and social equality for all classes when taken literally meant nothing but harmony between capital and labour such as was preached by bourgeois socialists. The real secret of the proletarian movement and the great aim of the International was rather the destruction of all classes. However, as the context indicated, the phrase concerning “the equality of the classes” was probably due to a slip of the pen, and the General Council had no doubt that the Alliance would be prepared to abandon this dangerous phrase and then there would be no obstacle to the transformation of its sections into sections of the International. When this was finally done the General Council, according to the Statutes of the International, should be informed of the place and the membership figures of all new sections.

The Alliance then altered the phrase objected to by the General Council and announced on the 22nd of June that it had dissolved itself and called upon its sections to transform themselves into sections of the International. The Geneva section of the Alliance, which was led by Bakunin, was accepted into the International by a unanimous vote of the General Council. Allegedly Bakunin’s secret society had also dissolved itself, but it continued to exist in a more or less loose form and Bakunin himself continued to work for the program which the Alliance had set itself. From the autumn of 1867 to the autumn of 1869 he lived on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, sometimes in Geneva and at others in Vevey or Clarens, and won considerable influence amongst the Franco-Italian Swiss workers.

He was supported in his activity by the peculiar circumstances in which these workers lived. In order to understand the situation it is necessary to remember that the International was not an organization with a definite theoretical program, but one which tolerated all sorts of tendencies within its fold, as the General Council had pointed out in its letter to the Alliance. A glance through the columns of Der Vorbote will show that even such a zealous and meritorious pioneer of the International as Becker never bothered himself unduly about theoretical questions. And in fact there were two very different tendencies in the Geneva sections of the International. On the one hand there was the fabrique, as the highly-skilled and well-paid workers of the jewelry and watchmaking industries were called in the Geneva dialect. These workers were almost exclusively of local origin. And on the other hand there was the gros metiers, which consisted chiefly of building workers, almost exclusively foreign-born, mostly German, which were forced to fight one strike after another to maintain tolerably decent working conditions. The former possessed the franchise and the latter did not, but the numbers of the fabrique were not sufficient for them to hope for electoral successes on their own and in consequence they were very much inclined to make electoral compromises with the bourgeois radicals. The workers of the gros metiers were subjected to no such temptation and they were much more in favour of direct revolutionary action of the kind propagated by Bakunin.

Bakunin found an even more favourable recruiting field amongst the watchmakers of the Jura. These workers were not highly-skilled men engaged in the luxury trades, but chiefly domestic workers whose already miserable conditions of life were being threatened by American mass production. They were scattered in little villages all over the mountains and little suited to a mass movement with political aims. In addition they had been made shy of politics by a number of unfavourable experiences. The first man to agitate amongst them for the cause of the International was a doctor named Coullery, an honest man of humanitarian instincts, but politically hopelessly confused. He had led these workers into electoral alliances not only with the bourgeois radicals, but even with the monarchist liberals in Neuchâtel, in which the workers had invariably got the worst of the bargain. After Coullery had been completely discredited in their eyes, the workers of the Jura found a new leader in James Guillaume, a young teacher in the industrial centre of Locle, who had thoroughly assimilated their ideas, issued a little paper entitled Le Progres and preached an ideal anarchist society in which all men would be free and equal. When Bakunin went into the Jura for the first time he found the ground thoroughly prepared for his seed, but the poor devils there probably had a greater effect on him than he had on them, for from that time onward his condemnation of all forms of political activity became stronger than ever.

For the moment, however, peace reigned in the Franco-Italian Swiss sections of the International and in January. 1869, chiefly at Bakunin’s instance, they formed a joint federal council and issued a fairly influential weekly newspaper entitled l’Egalite, to which Bakunin, Becker, Eccarius, Varlin and other prominent members of the International contributed. It was Bakunin who persuaded the federal council to put forward the question of the right of inheritance for discussion at the next congress of the International in Basle. He was perfectly within his rights in doing so, for it was one of the chief tasks of the congress to discuss such questions and the General Council immediately agreed.

Marx, however, regarded the action as a challenge from Bakunin and as such he welcomed it.





5. The Basle Congress

The fourth congress of the International took place on the 5th and 6th of September in Basle and the International reviewed the fifth year of its existence.

It had proved the most lively year of all and had been shaken by “the guerrilla fights between capital and labour,” strikes which the ruling classes of Europe began to explain more and more not as the result of the misery of the proletariat or the despotism of capital, but as the result of the secret machinations of the International.

In consequence the brutal lust to smash the International by force of arms grew rapidly. Even in England bloody collisions took place between striking miners and the military. In the mining district of the Loire drunken soldiery staged a blood-bath near Ricamarie and twenty people were shot down, including two women and a child. Once again Belgium distinguished itself most horribly, “the model State of continental constitutionalism, the comfortable, carefully-fenced paradise of landowners, capitalists and priests,” as it was called in a powerful appeal drawn up by Marx and issued by the General Council to the workers of Europe and the United States on behalf of the victims shot down in Seraing and in the Borinage by the ruthless fury of the profit-hunters. “The earth completes its annual revolution no more certainly than the Belgian government its annual slaughter of the workers,” declared Marx.

The bloody seed ripened into the harvest of the International. In the autumn of 1868 the first elections took place in England on the basis of the reformed franchise, but the results confirmed the warnings which Marx had given the workers against the one-sided policy of the Reform League. Not a single workers’ representative was elected. The “big money-bags” were victorious and Gladstone again came to the helm, but he had no intention of bringing about a thorough settlement of the Irish question or redressing the just complaints of the trade unions, and as a result the New Unionism caught fresh wind in its sails.

At the annual congress of the trade unions which took place in Birmingham in 1869 an urgent appeal was issued to all working-class organizations in the United Kingdom to affiliate to the International, not only because the interests of the working class were everywhere the same, but because the principles of the International were calculated to secure permanent peace amongst the peoples of the world. In the summer of 1869 war had threatened between England and the United States, and an address was drawn up by Marx to the National Labour Union in the United States declaring: “It is now your turn to prevent a war whose inevitable result would be to throw back the advancing working-class movements on both sides of the Atlantic.” The address met with a lively echo in the United States.

In France also the cause of the working class was making good progress and the police persecutions had the usual result of recruiting new supporters for the International. The helpful intervention of the General Council in numerous strikes led to the formation of trade unions which could not be suppressed, no matter how obviously the spirit of the International lived in them. The workers took no part in the elections of 1869 by putting forward candidates of their own, but they supported the candidates of the extreme bourgeois left, which came forward with a very radical election program. In this way the workers contributed at least indirectly to the heavy defeat which Bonaparte suffered, particularly in the big towns, although the fruits of their efforts fell for the moment into the lap of bourgeois democracy. The Second Empire began to creak ominously and from outside it received a heavy blow as the result of the revolution which took place in Spain in the autumn of 1868 and drove Queen Isabella from the country.

The course of development in Germany was somewhat different, for there Bonapartism was still advancing and not yet on the decline. The national question split the German working class and this split represented a great obstacle to the progress of the developing trade union movement. Thanks to his wrong policy in the trade union agitation Schweitzer had slithered into a situation which he could no longer control. The baseless attacks which were continuously directed against his personal honesty caused even some of his own followers to doubt him and he was ill-advised enough to endanger his reputation, which had not been seriously damaged, by a little coup d’etat.

A minority in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein therefore turned its back on the organization and amalgamated with the Nuremberg associations into a new Social Democratic Party, whose members became known as the Eisenachers, owing to the fact that their inaugural congress took place in Eisenach. In the beginning both factions fought each other violently, but they took up more or less the same attitude towards the International. They were in agreement in principle, but disagreed in form as long as the German combination laws existed. Marx and Engels were very much annoyed when Liebknecht played off the General Council of the International against Schweitzer, a thing he had no right to do. Although they welcomed “the dissolution of the Lassallean Church,” they could not do much with the other group until it had separated itself definitely from the German People’s Party, or, at least, maintained only a loose cartel arrangement with the latter. For the rest, they were still of the opinion that as a debater Schweitzer was superior to all his opponents.

The progress of the Austro-Hungarian working-class movement, which had begun to develop only since the defeats of 1866, was more harmonious. Lassallean tendencies found no foothold and the masses of the workers began to rally to the standard of the International, as the General Council pointed out in its report to the Basle congress.

The congress thus met under favourable circumstances. Only 78 delegates were present, but the congress was much more “international” than the previous congresses had been. Nine countries were represented. The General Council was represented as usual by Eccarius and Jung, and apart from them by two of the most prominent English trade union leaders, Applegarth and Lucraft. France sent 26 delegates, Belgium 5, Germany 12, Austria 2, Switzerland 23, Italy 3, Spain 4 and the United States, one delegate. Liebknecht represented the Eisenach faction and Moses Hess the Berlin section. Bakunin had both a French and an Italian mandate and Guillaume had been delegated from Locle. The chair at the congress was again taken by Jung.

In the beginning the congress dealt with organizational questions. At the proposal of the General Council, it unanimously decided to recommend all its sections and affiliated bodies to abolish the office of President, an action which the General Council had taken on its own account several years previously, on the ground that it was not in accordance with the dignity of a working-class organization to maintain a monarchical and authoritarian principle within its ranks, for even where the presidency was only an honorary office it represented a violation of the democratic principle. On the other hand, the General Council proposed that its own executive powers should be extended and that it should have the right to suspend from membership any section acting against the spirit of the International, pending the decision of the next congress. The proposal was adopted with the amendment that where federal councils existed, they should be consulted before the General Council took any such action. Both Bakunin and Liebknecht vigorously supported the proposal. Liebknecht’s support was natural, but not that of Bakunin, who thereby violated his own anarchist principle, whatever his opportunist motives for so doing may have been. It is probable that he sought to drive out the devil with Beelzebub and counted on the assistance of the General Council against all parliamentary-political activity, which he considered purely opportunist. Perhaps he was supported in this idea by Liebknecht’s well-known attack on the participation of Schweitzer and Bebel in the work of the North German Reichstag. However, Marx disapproved of Liebknecht’s speech and Bakunin, who had reckoned without his host, was soon to learn that violations of principle always revenge themselves.

The most important theoretical problems on the agenda of the congress were the question of common ownership of the land and the question of the right of inheritance. The former question had actually already been settled at the Brussels congress, and this time it was disposed of summarily. With 54 votes the congress decided that society had the right to establish common ownership of the land, and with 53 votes that such an action was necessary in the interests of society as a whole. For the most part the minority abstained from voting. Eight delegates voted against the second decision, and four against the first. A variety of opinions resulted as to the practical measures for putting the decisions into effect and it was left to the next congress in Paris to discuss the question thoroughly.

In the question of the right of inheritance the General Council had drawn up a report which summed up the most important points in a few words in the masterly fashion typical of Marx. Like all other bourgeois legislation, the inheritance laws were not the cause, but the effect, the legal consequence of the economic organization of a society based on private property in the means of production. The right to inherit slaves had not been the cause of slavery. On the contrary, slavery had been the cause of the right to inherit slaves. If the means of production were turned into common property, then the right of inheritance would disappear as far as it was of social importance, because a man could leave to his heirs only that which he had possessed during his life. The great aim of the working class was, therefore, to abolish those institutions which gave a few people the economic power to appropriate the fruits of the labour of the many. To proclaim the abolition of the laws of inheritance as the starting point of a social revolution would, therefore, be just as absurd as to proclaim the abolition of the laws of contract between buyers and sellers so long as the present system of commodity exchange prevailed. It would prove false in theory and reactionary in practice. The right of inheritance could be altered only in a period of transition when on the one hand the existing economic basis of society had not yet been altered whilst on the other hand the working class already possessed sufficient power to carry through measures preparatory to a thorough transformation of society. As such transitional measures the General Council recommended the extension of death duties and the limitation of testamentary inheritance rights, which, as distinct from the right of family inheritance, exaggerated the principles of private property in a superstitious and arbitrary fashion.

However, the commission to which the question had been delegated for discussion proposed that the abolition of the right of inheritance should be proclaimed as one of the fundamental demands of the working class, although it could produce nothing in support of its proposal apart from a few ideological phrases about “privileges,” political and economic justice” and “social order.” In the comparatively brief discussion which followed, Eccarius, the Belgian delegate de Paepe and the French delegate Varlin spoke in favour of the report of the General Council, whilst Bakunin spoke on behalf of the commission’s proposal, whose spiritual father he was. He recommended the adoption of the proposal for reasons which were allegedly practical, but which were in reality quite illusory. It would be quite impossible to establish common property without first abolishing the right of inheritance. If one tried to take the land away from the peasants they would resist, but they would not feel themselves directly affected by the abolition of the right of inheritance, and thus private property would gradually die out. When a vote was taken, it was then that there were 32 in favour of the proposal of the commission, 23 against, 13 abstentions and 7 delegates absent. The report of the General Council received 19 votes, 37 against, 6 abstentions and 13 delegates absent. Thus neither the report of the General Council nor the proposal of the commission received a clear majority so that the discussion remained without any tangible result.

The Basle congress produced a louder echo than any of its predecessors both in the bourgeois and in the proletarian world. The most learned representatives of the bourgeoisie observed, half with horror and half with malicious satisfaction, that at last the communist character of the International had been revealed, whilst in the proletarian world the decisions in favour of the common ownership of the land were welcomed with joy. In Geneva the German-language section published a manifesto to the agricultural population which was translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Russian and widely distributed. In Barcelona and in Naples the first sections of agricultural workers arose. In London the Land and Labour League was formed at a big public meeting with the slogan, “The Land for the People!” Ten members of the General Council of the International were also members of its committee.

In Germany the worthy gentlemen of the German People’s Party were furious at the decisions of the Basle congress and at first Liebknecht permitted himself to be intimidated by their fury, even issuing a declaration to the effect that the Eisenach faction was not bound by the decisions of the congress. Fortunately, however, the indignant and highly respectable leaders of the German People’s Party were not content with this and demanded that the decisions of the congress should be expressly disavowed, whereupon Liebknecht finally broke off relations with them, a step to which Marx and Engels had urged him long before. However, his initial hesitation had brought grist to Schweitzer’s mill, for Schweitzer had “preached” the common ownership of the land in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein for years and had not just adopted it in order to ridicule his opponents, as was assumed by Marx, who found this “a piece of insolence.” Engels controlled his anger over the “blackguard” sufficiently to recognize that it was “very clever” of Schweitzer always to maintain a correct theoretical attitude, well knowing that his opponents were hopelessly lost immediately any question of theory arose.

For the moment, therefore, the Lassalleans remained not only the most firmly organized, but theoretically the most advanced of all the German working-class parties.





6. Confusion in Geneva

In so far as the discussion at the Basle congress on the right of inheritance had been a sort of intellectual duel between Bakunin and Marx, it had brought no final decision, but had been unfavourable rather than favourable for the latter. However, the contention that Marx was heavily hit and now prepared for a powerful counterblast against Bakunin would not be in accordance with the facts.

Marx was quite satisfied with the result of the Basle congress. At the time he was with his daughter Jenny on a journey through Germany for the benefit of his health and on the 25th of September he wrote to his daughter Laura from Hanover: “I am glad that the Basle congress is now over and that its results were comparatively good. Such open displays of the party with all its sores always worry me. None of the actors was up to the level of his principles, but the idiocy of the upper class repairs the errors of the working class. Even the obscurest sheets in the smallest German towns through which we have passed were full of the deeds of this ‘terrible congress.’” Bakunin was no more disappointed with the results of the Basle congress than was Marx. It has been said that Bakunin, with his proposal concerning the right of inheritance, wished to defeat Marx and obtain the removal of the General Council from London to Geneva as the fruit of his theoretical victory, and that when he did not succeed in this he attacked the General Council with increased violence in l’Egalité. These statements have been made so often that they have crystallized into a sort of legend, but nevertheless there is not a word of truth in them. After the Basle congress Bakunin did not write a line for l’Egalité; before the Basle congress he was its chief editor, but one will look in vain through the long series of articles he published in it for any trace of hostility towards the General Council or towards Marx. Four articles in particular, written on The Principles of the International, were completely in the spirit in which the International was founded. It is true that in these articles he expresses misgivings concerning the disastrous influences of what Marx termed “parliamentary cretinism” on the parliamentary representatives of the workers, but first of all such misgivings have been justified again and again since, and secondly his remarks were quite harmless compared with the violent attacks which Liebknecht was then making on the participation of the working class in bourgeois parliamentarism.

Further, Bakunin’s ideas on the inheritance question may have been eccentric, but it was nevertheless his right to put them forward for discussion at the congress and in fact the congresses of the International have discussed much more eccentric ideas without those who put them forward being credited with any ulterior motives. The accusation that he had planned to secure the removal of the General Council from London to Geneva was answered briefly and strikingly by Bakunin immediately it was uttered publicly: “If such a proposal had been put forward, I should have been the first to oppose it and with all possible energy, because it would have seemed to me to be fatal for the future of the International. It is true that the Geneva sections have made tremendous progress in a very short space of time, but the atmosphere of Geneva is still too specifically local for it to be a good spot for the General Council. Apart from that, it is clear that so long as the present political organization of Europe exists, London will remain the only place suitable for the seat of the General Council and one would be a fool or an enemy of the International to propose to move it anywhere else.”

There are people who consider that Bakunin was a liar from the very beginning and that his reply to the accusation against him was a subsequent excuse, but this theory collapses immediately in face of the fact that prior to the Basle congress Bakunin had arranged to move after the congress from Geneva to Locarno. His decision was taken for reasons over which he had no control. He was in urgent financial straits and his wife was expecting a child. He wished to settle down in Locarno and translate the first volume of Marx’s Capital into Russian. A young admirer named Liubavin had persuaded a Russian publisher to pay 1,200 roubles for the translation and of this sum Bakunin received an advance of 300 roubles.

Although in the light of these facts all the intrigues which Bakunin is alleged to have set on foot before and after the Basle congress are seen to be non-existent, nevertheless the congress left a bitter taste in his mouth because, under the influence of Borkheim’s incitement, Liebknecht had declared in the presence of third parties that he held proofs showing that Bakunin was an agent of the Russian government. Bakunin demanded that Liebknecht should support his accusations before a party court of honour and this he was unable to do, with the result that the court sternly reprimanded him. After the Cologne communist trial and his experiences in exile, Liebknecht was rather inclined to suspect spies everywhere, but he accepted the verdict of the court and offered Bakunin his hand as a sign of reconciliation, and the latter accepted it.

Bakunin was all the more embittered when a few weeks later, on the 2nd of October, Moses Hess revived the old slanders in the Paris Reveil. Hess, who was present at the Basle congress as a German delegate, was giving the secret history of the congress, and in this connection he dealt with Bakunin’s “intrigues” with a view to undermining the fundamental basis of the International and securing the removal of the General Council from London to Geneva. He declared that Bakunin’s plans had come to nothing at the congress and concluded with the baseless insinuation that he, Hess, did not want to impugn Bakunin’s revolutionary honesty, but that the Russian was closely related to Schweitzer, who had been accused by the German delegates at the Basle congress of being an agent of the German government. The malicious intent of this denunciation was made all the clearer by the fact that it was quite impossible to establish any “close relation” between the agitation of Schweitzer and the agitation of Bakunin, and that personally the two men had never had anything whatever to do with each other.

It would certainly have been wiser for Bakunin to have ignored this article which was ignoble enough in all conscience, but it is easy to understand that he was provoked to anger by the repeated attacks on his political honesty, particularly when the attacks were underhanded and malicious. He therefore wrote a reply, but in his initial anger the reply grew so long that he realized himself that the Reveil could not possibly publish it. He attacked the “German Jews” with particular violence, but expressly excepted “giants” like Lassalle and Marx from the race of pygmies à la Borkheim and Hess. He then decided to use this long reply as an introduction to a book on his revolutionary beliefs and sent it to Herzen in Paris with the request that the latter should try to find a publisher, adding a shorter reply for the Reveil. However, Herzen feared that even this would not be published and he himself wrote a defence of Bakunin against Hess, and this defence was published by the Reveil together with an editorial comment which completely pacified Bakunin.

Herzen was not at all satisfied with the longer reply. He disapproved of the attacks on the “German Jews,” and was surprised that Bakunin attacked little known people like Borkheim and Hess instead of challenging Marx. Bakunin answered on the 28th of October, declaring that although he considered Marx responsible for the attacks made on him he had refrained from attacking Marx for two reasons and had even called him a “giant.” The first reason was one of justice. “Apart from all the nasty tricks he has played us, we, or at least I, cannot ignore his tremendous services to the cause of socialism, which he has served for almost twenty-five years with insight, energy and disinterestedness, and in which he has undoubtedly excelled us all. He was one of the founders, the chief founder in fact, of the International and in my eyes that is a tremendous service and one which I shall always recognize no matter what he may have done against us.”

And then he was guided by political and tactical considerations towards Marx, “who cannot stand me and loves no one but himself and perhaps those who are nearest to him. Marx’s influence in the International is undoubtedly very useful. He has exercised a wise influence on his party down to the present day and he is the strongest support of socialism and the firmest bulwark against the invasion of bourgeois ideas and intentions. I should never forgive myself if I had ever tried to destroy or even weaken his beneficial influence merely in order to revenge myself on him. However, a situation may arise, and shortly at that, in which I shall take up the struggle against him, though certainly not in order to attack him personally, but on a question of principle, on account of the State communism which he, and the English and Germans he leads, support so enthusiastically. That would be a life and death struggle, but everything comes in its own good time and the hour of conflict has not yet arrived.”

And finally Bakunin mentions a tactical reason which prevented him from attacking Marx. If he attacked Marx openly, then three-quarters of the International would be against him, but on the other hand, if he attacked the ragtag and bobtail that crowded around Marx, the majority of the International would be on his side and Marx himself would find a certain amount of malicious pleasure in it. Schadenfreude is the German word which Bakunin uses in his letter to Herzen, otherwise written in French.

Immediately after writing this letter Bakunin moved to Locarno. He was so occupied with his personal affairs that during the last few weeks he spent in Geneva after the Basle congress he took no part at all in the working-class movement and did not write a line for l’Egalité. His successor on the editorial board was Robin, a Belgian teacher who had moved to Geneva about a year previously, and together with him Perron, the enameller who had edited the paper before Bakunin. Both were supporters of Bakunin, but they did not act on his instructions. Bakunin’s aim was to enlighten the workers of the gros metiers, in whom the revolutionary proletarian spirit was much more alive than in the workers of the fabrique, and to encourage them to undertake independent action. In this he found himself in opposition to their own committees – and what he has to say about the objective dangers of such a “departmental policy,” as we should call it nowadays, is well worth reading even now – not to speak of the fabrique, which had supported the workers of the gros métiers in their strikes and drew from this undeniable service the false conclusion that the workers of the gros métiers should follow faithfully every step of their colleagues of the fabrique. Bakunin had fought against these tendencies, particularly in view of the incurable leanings of the fabrique towards alliances with bourgeois radicalism. However, Robin and Perron thought that they could whitewash and patch up the differences between the gros métiers and the fabrique, differences which had not been created by Bakunin, but which had their basis in a social antagonism. As a result they slithered into a see-saw system which satisfied neither the gros métiers nor the fabrique and opened the door to all sorts of intrigues.

A master of such intrigues was a Russian fugitive named Nikolas Utin, who lived in Geneva at the time. He had taken part in the Russian student disturbances at the beginning of the sixties, and when the country grew too hot for him he fled abroad where he lived comfortably on a considerable income – from twelve to fifteen thousand francs have been mentioned – which he derived from the trade of his father in spirits. This fact won him a position which the intellectual capacities of the vain and garrulous fellow could never have obtained for him. His successes were exclusively on the field of tittle-tattle where, as Engels once said, “the man with something serious to do can never compete with those who have all day to gossip in.” In the beginning Utin had made up to Bakunin, only to be thoroughly snubbed by him, and when Bakunin left Geneva, Utin seized the opportunity to revenge himself for his wounded vanity by pursuing him with underhand slander. His efforts to this edifying end were not without result and afterwards he cast himself humbly at the feet of the Tsar and begged for mercy. The Tsar proved he was not adamant and during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, Utin became a contractor to the Tsarist army, in which capacity he no doubt worshipped Mammon even more successfully than he had done through the paternal spirits business.

People like Robin and Perron were easy game for Utin, for although their personal honesty was above reproach they were almost incredibly clumsy, and to make matters worse they began a squabble with the General Council on questions which were certainly not of any urgent interest to the France-Swiss workers. L’Egalité complained bitterly that the General Council paid far too much attention to the Irish question, that it failed to set up a Federal Council for the English sections, that it did not arbitrate in the conflict between Liebknecht and Schweitzer, etc. Bakunin had nothing to do with all this, and the wrong impression that he approved of these attacks on the General Council or even instigated them was caused exclusively by the fact that Robin and Perron were his supporters and that Guillaume’s paper took up the same attitude.

The General Council replied to Robin’s attacks in a private circular dated the 1st of January, 1870, and addressed, apart from Geneva, only to the French-speaking Federal Councils. Although this circular was sharp in its tone it remained well within the limits of objective argument. The reasons which the General Council gave for not forming a Federal Council in England are interesting still. It declared that although the revolutionary initiative would probably come from France, nevertheless only England could serve as the lever for any serious economic revolution. It was the only country where there were no longer any peasants and where the ownership of the land was concentrated in the hands of a few landowners. It was the only country where the capitalist mode of production had established itself in almost the whole of production and where the great mass of the population consisted of wage-workers. It was the only country where the class struggle and the organization of the workers had reached a certain degree of universality and maturity. And finally, thanks to the dominant position of England on the world market, any revolution in its economic conditions would immediately react on the whole world.

Although, therefore, all the necessary material conditions for a social revolution existed in England, nevertheless the English workers did not possess either a capacity for generalization or revolutionary ardour. The task of the General Council was to give the English workers this spirit and this ardour, and the fact that it was performing its task successfully could be seen from the complaints of the big bourgeois newspapers in London that the General Council was poisoning the English spirit of the workers and driving them towards revolutionary socialism. An English Federal Council would come between the General Council of the International and the General Council of the trade unions. It would enjoy no prestige, and the General Council of the International would lose its influence on the great lever of the proletarian revolution. It therefore refused to commit the folly of placing this lever in English hands and contenting itself with bombastic mouthings in the place of serious and unseen work.

Before this circular arrived at its destination the trouble came to a head in Geneva itself. Seven members of the editorial board of l’Egalité were supporters of Bakunin and only two were his opponents. Arising out of a subordinate and politically unimportant incident, the majority raised the question of confidence, and it was then seen that with their vacillating policy Robin and Perron had sat down between two stools. The minority was supported by the Federal Council and the seven members of the majority had to resign, including Becker who had been very friendly with Bakunin whilst the latter lived in Geneva, but who had found many things to object to in the policy of Robin and Perron. The control of l’Egalité then went over into the hands of Utin.





7. “The Confidential Communication”

In the meantime Borkheim continued his incitement against Bakunin. On the 18th of February he complained to Marx that Die Zukunft, the organ of Johann Jacoby, had refused to publish what Marx described in a letter to Engels as, “a monster epistle on Russian affairs, an indescribable hodge-podge of minute details all tumbling one over the other.” At the same time Borkheim cast suspicion on Bakunin “in connection with certain financial transactions,” on the authority of Katkov, who in his youth had been a follower of Bakunin but later went over to the reaction. Marx paid little attention to this accusation and Engels remarked philosophically: “Borrowing money is too typical a Russian means of existence for one Russian to be able to reproach another about it.”

After informing Engels about Borkheim’s continued incitement against Bakunin, Marx declared that the General Council had been called upon to decide whether a certain Richard (who later really turned out to be a bad lot) had been expelled from the International in Lyons with justification, and added that as far as he could see the man could be accused of nothing more than a slavish support of Bakunin and an accompanying self-conceit. “It appears that our last circular made a sensation and that in France and Switzerland a regular hunt against the Bakuninists has begun. However, there must be moderation in all things and I shall see to it that no injustice is done.”

A confidential communication which Marx directed a few weeks later, on the 28th of March, through the mediation of Kugelmann to the Brunswick committee of the Eisenachers was in strong contrast with the good intentions with which he had concluded his letter to Engels. The basis of this confidential communication was the circular of the General Council, intended only for Geneva and for the French-speaking Federal Councils. This had long since served its purpose and had in fact let loose the “regular hunt” against the Bakuninists of which Marx had expressed his disapproval. It is difficult to see why Marx communicated the contents of this circular to Germany in face of the unpleasant result it had already had elsewhere, particularly as Bakunin had no supporters in Germany at all.

It is still more difficult to understand why he provided the circular with an introduction and a close which were even more calculated to let loose a “regular hunt,” particularly against Bakunin. The introduction began with bitter reproaches against Bakunin who had first of all attempted to smuggle himself into the League for Peace and Freedom, only to be closely observed in its executive committee as a “suspected Russian.” After having failed to secure the adoption of his programmatic absurdities in the League, he had then turned his attention to the International in order to make it into his private instrument. To this end he had founded the Alliance of Socialist Democracy. After the General Council had refused to recognize the Alliance the latter had nominally been dissolved, but in fact it had continued to exist under Bakunin’s leadership, who had then sought to attain his ends with other means. He had put forward the question of the right of inheritance at the Basle congress in the hope of defeating the General Council on the theoretical field and causing its removal from London to Geneva. He had organized “a downright conspiracy” in order to secure a majority of the Basle congress. However, he had not been successful and the General Council had remained in London. “Bakunin’s anger at the failure of his plan – perhaps he had attached all sorts of private speculations to its success – “ had then expressed itself in the attacks of l’Egalité on the General Council, attacks which had been answered in the circular of the 1st of January.

Marx then inserted the full text of the circular in his confidential communication and continued: Even before the arrival of the circular the crisis had come to a head in Geneva. The Franco-Italian Swiss Federal Council had disapproved of the attacks made by l’Egalité on the General Council and decided to keep a close control over the paper for the future. Bakunin had then retired the canton of Ticino.” Soon afterwards Herzen died. Bakunin, who had disavowed his old friend and patron from the moment he wished to put himself forward as the leader of the European working-class movement, then immediately began to sound a fanfare in Herzen’s praise. Why? Despite his own wealth, Herzen had been in receipt of an annual sum of 25,000 francs for propaganda from the pseudo-socialist Pan-Slavist party in Russia, with which he was friendly. Thanks to his lavish praise, Bakunin succeeded in obtaining this money himself and then accepted ‘Herzen’s heritage’ gladly much as he hated inheritance. In the meantime a colony of young Russian fugitives had established itself in Geneva, students who were really honest in their endeavours and who had made the struggle against Pan-Slavism the chief point in their program. They had asked to be admitted as a section of the International, proposing that Marx should be their provisional representative on the General Council, and both these requests had been granted. They had also declared that they were about to tear the mask from Bakunin’s face publicly. In this way, the confidential communication concluded, the game of this highly dangerous intriguer would be up, at least as far as the International was concerned.

It is hardly necessary to enumerate the many errors the communication contains. Generally speaking, the more incriminating the accusations it makes against Bakunin appear to be, the more baseless they are in reality. This is true in particular of the accusation of legacy-hunting. No pseudo-socialist Pan-Slavist party in Russia ever paid Herzen 25,000 francs annually for propaganda. The unsubstantial basis of this fairy tale was that in the revolutionary years a young Russian named Batmetiev had given 25,000 francs to start a revolutionary fund and that Herzen had administered this fund. There is no reason whatever to believe that Bakunin ever showed any inclination to pocket this fund on his own behalf and certainly the warm obituary he wrote for Rochefort’s Marseillaise on a political opponent who had been a friend of his youth cannot be quoted in support of such a statement. At the utmost the obituary might offer an opportunity for an accusation of sentimentality, just as all the errors and weaknesses of Bakunin, no matter how numerous they may have been, were due to characteristics which were, generally speaking, the opposite of those going into the make-up of a “highly dangerous intriguer.

The concluding passages of the confidential communication show how Marx came to fall into these errors concerning Bakunin. His information was obtained from the Russian fugitives’ committee in Geneva, in other words, from Utin, or through him from Becker. At least, a letter from Marx to Engels seems to indicate that he obtained the most serious of the accusations, that of legacy-hunting, from Becker. However, this does not rhyme with a contemporary letter from the latter to Jung, which is still extant, in which Becker complains about the confusion prevailing in Geneva, about the antagonism between the fabrique and the gros metiers, about weak-nerved illusionists like Robin and obstinate cranks like Bakunin,” but ends up by praising Bakunin and declaring that he was much better and more useful than he had been. The letters of Becker and the Russian fugitives’ committee in Geneva to Marx are no longer extant, and in both his official and private answers to this new section of the International, Marx apparently thought it better to say nothing about Bakunin at all. He advised the Russian section to work chiefly for Poland, that is to say, to free Europe from its own proximity, and he did not fail to see the humour of being the representative of young Russia, declaring that a man could never know in what strange company he might fall.

Although he treated the matter with a certain amount of humour, it was obviously a great satisfaction to him to observe that the International was beginning to find a foothold amongst the Russian revolutionaries, and otherwise it would be impossible to understand why he was prepared to believe accusations against Bakunin made by Utin, who was completely unknown to him, when he had refused to credit them from his old friend Borkheim. By a peculiar coincidence Bakunin fell victim just at that time to an error of judgment with regard to a Russian fugitive, whom he regarded as the first swallow of the coming Russian revolutionary summer, and even let himself be drawn into an adventure which was to do his reputation more harm than any other incident in his whole adventurous life.

A few days after the confidential communication had been written, on the 4th of April, the second annual congress of the Franco-Italian Swiss Federation took place in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and an open breach occurred. The Geneva section of the Alliance, which had already been accepted into the International by the General Council, demanded that it should also be accepted into the Federation and that its two delegates should be given representation at the congress. Utin opposed this and made violent attacks on Bakunin, denouncing the Geneva section as his instrument of intrigue, but he was vigorously opposed by Guillaume, a narrow-minded fanatic who in later years treated Marx as badly as Utin treated Bakunin, but a man whose education and capacity put him in a different class altogether from that of his pitiful opponent. Guillaume was victorious with a majority of 21 against 18 votes. However, the minority refused to recognize the decision of the majority and split the congress. Two congresses then met simultaneously. The majority congress decided to move the seat of the Federal Council from Geneva to La Chaux-de-Fonds and to make Solidarité, which Guillaume issued in Neuchatel, the organ of the Federal Council.

The minority justified its attitude by declaring that the majority was a purely accidental one, because only 15 sections had been represented at La Chaux-de-Fonds whilst Geneva alone had thirty sections which all or almost all opposed the acceptance of the Alliance into the Franco-Italian Swiss action. The majority, on the other hand, insisted that a section which had been admitted by the General Council could not be rejected by a Federal Council. Becker declared in Der Vorbote that the whole affair was much objectionable ado about nothing and had been possible only by a lack of fraternal feelings on both sides. The section of the Alliance was chiefly interested in the propaganda of theoretical principles and could therefore not attach much importance to being accepted into a national organization, all the more so as it was regarded in Geneva as the plotting tool of Bakunin, who had long been unpopular there. On the other hand, if the Alliance really wanted to be accepted, it was narrow-minded and childish to refuse or to make its acceptance the reason for a split.

However, the situation was not quite so simple as Becker described it. The decisions which the two separate congresses adopted were similar in many respects, but they differed just in the cardinal question – the antagonism out of which the whole confusion in Geneva had developed. The majority congress completely adopted the standpoint of the gros métiers. It condemned all forms of politics which aimed merely at social changes through national reforms, declaring that every politically organized State was nothing but a means of capitalist exploitation on the basis of bourgeois law, and therefore any participation of the proletariat in bourgeois politics consolidated the existing system and paralyzed revolutionary proletarian action. The minority congress, on the other hand, adopted the standpoint of the fabrique. It condemned political abstinence as damaging to the cause of the working class, and recommended participation in the elections, not because it would be possible to secure the emancipation of the workers in this way, but because the parliamentary representation of the workers was a means of agitation and propaganda which it would not be tactical to ignore.

The newly-formed Federal Council in La Chaux-de-Fonds demanded recognition from the General Council as the leader of the Federation. However, the General Council refused to give this recognition and on the 28th of June it declared that the Federal Council in Geneva, which was supported by the majority of the Geneva sections, should continue to exercise its old functions, whilst the new Federal Council should adopt a local name. Although this decision was fair enough and had been provoked by the new Federal Council, the latter refused to submit to it and protested vigorously against the dictatorial tendencies, against the “authoritarianism” of the General Council, thus giving the opposition within the International the second plank in its platform – the first being political abstinence. The General Council then severed all relations with La Chaux-de-Fonds.



Chapter Fourteen: The Decline of the International

[...]

4. The International and the Paris Commune

By taking over the heritage of the Commune without previously sorting over the remains, the International faced a world of enemies.

Least important were the slanderous attacks with which it was overwhelmed by the bourgeois press of all countries. On the contrary, as a result of these attacks it won, in a certain sense and to a certain degree, a propaganda weapon because the General Council was able to reply to such attacks openly and thus at least secured a hearing in the English press.

A much greater problem for the International was that presented by the necessity of assisting the numerous fugitive communards who fled to Belgium and to Switzerland, but chiefly to London. The state of its finances grew more and more unfavourable and the collection of the necessary funds to assist the fugitives met with great difficulties and necessitated great efforts. For many months the General Council was compelled to devote its chief energies and the greater part of its time to this problem, to the detriment of its normal tasks, although the latter became more and more urgent as almost all governments now began to mobilize their forces against the International.

However, even this war of the governments against the International was not its chief trouble. The campaign against the International was carried on with more or less energy in the various continental countries, but the attempts to unite all governments in a joint campaign of repression against the class-conscious proletariat failed for the moment. The first attempt of this nature was made by the French government on the 6th of June, 1871, in a circular issued by Jules Favre. But the document was so stupid and mendacious that it made little impression on the other governments, even on Bismarck, who was invariably willing to listen to any reactionary suggestion, particularly when it was directed against the working class, and who had been startled out of his megalomania by the support accorded to the Commune by the German Social Democracy, including both the Lassallean and the Eisenach fractions.

A little later the Spanish government made a second attempt to unite the governments of Europe against the International, this time also by means of a circular, issued to all governments by its Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was not sufficient, this circular declared, that individual governments should take the most severe measures against the International and its sections in their own territories. All governments should unite to exterminate the evil. This challenge might have met with greater success but for the fact that the English government immediately scotched it. Lord Granville replied that “in this country” the International had limited its operations chiefly to giving advice in strikes, and had only very limited funds with which to support such actions, whilst the revolutionary plans which formed a part of its program represented rather the opinions of its foreign members than those of the British workers, whose attention was directed chiefly to wage questions. However, foreigners in England enjoyed the protection of the laws of the country in the same way as British subjects. If they violated these laws by conducting warlike operations against any country with which Great Britain maintained friendly relations they would be punished, but for the present there was no reason for taking any special measures against foreigners on British soil. This reasonable rejection of an unreasonable demand caused Bismarck’s semi-official mouthpiece to snarl that any measures taken against the International would for the most part remain ineffective so long as British territory represented as asylum from which all the other States of Europe could be disturbed with impunity and under the protection of the British law.

Thus, although its enemies did not succeed in organizing a joint crusade on the part of the various governments against the International, the International itself did not succeed in organizing a solid phalanx of resistance to the persecutions suffered by its sections in the various continental countries. This was its chief cause of anxiety and it was made still more serious by the fact that the International felt the ground trembling under its feet in just those countries whose working classes it had regarded as its firmest bulwarks: England, France and Germany, where large-scale industrial development was farthest progressed and whose workers possessed a more or less limited franchise. The importance of these countries for the International was reflected in the fact that there were twenty Englishmen, fifteen Frenchmen and seven Germans on its General Council as against only two representatives each from Switzerland and Hungary and one representative each from Poland, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark and Italy.

From the very beginning Lassalle had organized his agitation amongst the German workers as a national affair and this had brought him bitter reproaches from Marx, but it was soon seen that this fact helped the German workers’ movement over a crisis which severely shook the socialist movement in all other continental countries. For the moment, the war against France had resulted in the temporary standstill of the German working-class movement. The two factions had enough to occupy them in their own affairs to prevent them bothering much about the International. Although both factions had declared themselves against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and in favour of the Paris Commune, the Eisenach faction, which alone was recognized by the General Council as a section of the International, had come so much into the foreground that it had been harassed by the authorities with indictments for high treason and similar disagreeable matters far more than the Lassallean faction. It was Bebel who, according to Bismarck’s own evidence, first awakened the suspicion of the latter by his fiery speech in the Reichstag in which he declared the German Social Democracy in solidarity with the Paris communards, and who caused Bismarck to deliver increasingly violent blows against the German working-class movement. However, much more decisive for the attitude of the Eisenach faction towards the International was the fact that since it had constituted itself as an independent party on a national basis it had become more and more estranged from the International.

In France Thiers and Favre had caused the monarchist-reactionary National Assembly to pass a draconic law aimed specially against the International; this law completely paralyzed the French working class, which had already been weakened to the point of utter exhaustion by the fearful blood-letting of the Versailles massacres. In their fierce desire for revenge these upholders of law and order even went so far as to demand from Switzerland, and even from England, the extradition of the fugitive communards as common criminals, and as far as Switzerland was concerned they came within an ace of being successful. Under these circumstances the connections of the General Council in France were completely broken off. In order to secure the representation of the French workers on its General Council, the International co-opted a number of fugitive communards (partly men who had already been members of the International and partly men who had distinguished themselves by their revolutionary energy in the cause of the Commune), its aim being to honour the Commune. This was a good idea as far as it went, but it weakened the General Council rather than strengthened it, for the fugitive communards suffered the inevitable fate of all emigrants and exhausted their energies in internal struggles. Marx now had to go through the same troubles and difficulties with the French emigrants as he had had with the German emigrants twenty years previously. He was certainly the last man to demand any recognition for doing what he, in any case, considered it his duty to do, but in November, 1871, the constant bickerings of the French fugitives caused him to sigh regretfully: “And that’s my reward for having wasted almost five months of my time on their behalf and for having vindicated their honour in the Address!”

And finally, the International lost the support which it had previously enjoyed from the English workers. Externally the breach first appeared when two reputable leaders of the trade union movement, Lucraft and Odger, who had been members of the General Council since its inception, Odger even as President so long as that office had existed, resigned from the council on account of the Address on The Civil War in France. This action gave rise to the legend that the trade unions parted company with the International owing to their moral abhorrence of the latter’s defence of the Commune. The grain of truth which this legend contains by no means represents the real issue. The breach was due to much more important and deep-lying reasons.

From the beginning, the alliance between the International and the trade unions was a mariage de convenance. Both parties needed each other, but neither ever intended to bind itself up with the other for better or for worse and till death did them part. With masterly dexterity Marx had drawn up a joint program in the Inaugural Address and the Statutes of the International, but although the trade unions were thus able to accept the program, in practice they never used any more of it than suited their purpose. In his answering despatch to the Spanish government Lord Granville correctly describes the relation between the English trade unions and the International. The aim of the trade unions was to improve working conditions on the basis of capitalist society, and in order to further this aim they did not scorn the political struggle, but in the choice of their allies and their weapons they were guided by no fundamental considerations, so far as such considerations did not apply immediately to their actual aim.

Marx was soon compelled to recognize that this egoistic peculiarity of the trade unions, which was deeply rooted in the history and the character of the English proletariat, could not be broken so easily. The trade unions needed the International in order to carry the Reform Bill, but once this was achieved they began to flirt with the Liberals, for without the assistance of the latter they could not hope to win seats in Parliament. Even in 1868 Marx had complained of these “intriguers” and had mentioned Odger, who put up for Parliament on several occasions, as one of them. On another occasion Marx justified the presence of a number of the supporters of the Irish sectarian Bronterre O’Brien in the General Council with the following significant words: “Despite their follies these O’Brienites represent a (very often necessary) counter-weight to the trade unionists in the General Council. They are more revolutionary, more definite in their attitude to the land question, less national, not open to corruption in any shape or form, and but for that they would have been turned out long ago.” He also opposed the repeated proposal that a special Federal Council should be formed for England, chiefly on the ground, given for instance in the circular of the General Council issued on the 1st of January, 1870, that the English lacked revolutionary ardour and the capacity to generalize, so that any such Federal Council would become a tool in the hands of radical members of Parliament.

After the secession of the English working-class leaders Marx accused them bluntly of having sold themselves to the Liberal Ministry. This may have been true of some of them, but it was not true of all, even if one assumes “corruption” to include other forms than that of cash payment. As a trade union leader, Applegarth enjoyed at least as big a reputation as Odger and Lucraft, and was in fact considered by both Houses of Parliament as the official representative of trade unionism. Immediately after the Basle congress of the International he had been questioned by his parliamentary patrons as to his attitude towards the decision of the congress in the question of the common ownership of the land, etc., but he had refused to let himself be intimidated by their scarcely veiled threat. In 1870 he was appointed a member of the Royal Commission upon the Contagious Diseases Acts, thus becoming the first worker entitled to be styled by his Sovereign “Our Trusty and Well-beloved,” nevertheless he signed the Address of the General Council on The Civil War in France and remained a member of the Council to the end.

The attitude of Applegarth, whose personal character is above reproach and who later refused an appointment on the Board of Trade, indicates clearly the real reasons for the secession of the trade union leaders. The immediate aim of the trade unions was to secure legal protection for themselves and their funds. This aim appeared to have been achieved when in the spring of 1871 the government brought in a bill giving every trade union the right to register itself as an approved society, thereby receiving legal protection for its funds providing that its statutes did not conflict with the law. However, what the government gave with one hand it immediately took away with the other, for the bill contained a lengthy clause which practically abolished the right of combination by confirming all the old elastic terms aimed at preventing strikes by prohibiting “violence,” “threats,” “intimidation,” “molesting,” “obstruction,” etc. It was in fact nothing but a law aimed specially against the trade unions, and every action taken by them, or by anyone else, with a view to furthering their cause was declared punishable, whilst the same actions when committed by other bodies remained legal. With politeness and restraint the historians of British trade unionism declare: “It seemed of little use to declare the existence of trade societies to be legal if the criminal law was so stretched as to include the ordinary peaceful methods by which these societies attained their ends.” For the first time, therefore, the trade unions were legally recognized and afforded protection, but at the same time all the provisions of the laws against trade union action were expressly confirmed and even intensified.

Naturally, the trade unions and their leaders rejected this Greek gift, but their protests succeeded only in persuading the government to divide its bill into two separate parts: a Bill legalizing the existence of the trade unions and a Criminal Law Amendment Bill embracing all the clauses against trade union activity. That was of course no real success, but merely a trap into which the trade-union leaders were invited to fall, and into which, in fact, they did fall because their anxiety for their funds was greater than their loyalty to trade-union principles. All of them, and Applegarth was even in the van, registered their organizations under the new law, and in September, 1871, the Conference of Amalgamated Trades, the representative body of the “New Unionism,” which had once been the link between the International and the unions, formally dissolved itself, “having discharged the duties for which it was organized.” Owing to the.fact that in their gradual approach towards middleclass respectability the leaders of the trade unions had come to regard strikes as one of the more primitive methods of trade union activity, it was not difficult for them to salve their consciences. As early as 1867 one of them had declared, in giving evidence before a Royal Commission, that strikes were a sheer waste of money and energies both for the workers and their employers. Therefore, in 1871, when a powerful movement in favour of the nine hour day swept over the country, the trade-union leaders did their utmost to hold back the workers, who had not participated in the “statesmanlike” development of their leaders and who were fiercely indignant at the new Criminal Law Amendment Bill against trade union activities. This movement began on the 1st of April with a strike of the engineering workers in Sunderland, spread rapidly throughout the engineering centres and culminated in the Newcastle strike which lasted five months and ended in a complete victory for the workers. The great engineering union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, was definitely opposed to this mass movement on the part of the workers, and only after the strike had been proceeding for fourteen weeks did those strikers who were members of the union receive strike support, which was fixed at five shillings a week. With this and the usual unemployment support they had to carry on their struggle. The movement, which quickly spread to a number of other trades and industries, was led exclusively by the “Nine Hours League,” which had been formed for this purpose and had a very capable leader in John Burnett.

On the other hand, the Nine Hours League received vigorous support from the General Council of the International, which sent its members Cohn and Eccarius to Belgium and Denmark to prevent the agents of the employers recruiting strike-breakers there, a task which they both performed with a considerable degree of success. Whilst negotiating with Burnett, Marx was unable to suppress the bitter remark that it was a peculiar misfortune that the organized bodies of workers remained aloof from the International until they were in trouble, whereas if they came in good time it would be easier to take effective precautionary measures. For the momen