Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

part in the International: I had read the ‘Inaugural Address’ he
had written. . . an important, serious and profound manifesto,
like everything that comes from his pen when he is not
engaged in a personal polemic.¹⁴³

Bakunin, back in Italy, seems to have busied himself concocting nebu-
lous libertarian associations - mainly, it seems, ‘in the clouds of his
tobacco smoke’ (as his disciple Guillaume once put it). Bakunin’s
insistence on attacking the state made little sense in an atmosphere of
unfulfilled nationalist aspirations, but he was never noted for his sense
of occasion. Until he moved from Florence to Naples in 1865, Bakunin
seems to have achieved little either for the International or for anybody
else - Marx’s letters (attempts, apparently, to direct Bakunin from
London) went unanswered - and little more in Naples itself, except
among disgruntled intellectuals.¹⁴⁴ The smallness of his following
caused him little grief; the Christian religion, he reminded his readers
in II Popolo d’ltalia, had needed only twelve apostles to conquer the
world

and they conquered it. . .because of their heroic madness, the
absolute, indomitable, intractable character of their faith in the
omnipotence of their principle and because, disdaining deception
and cleverness, they waged open war, without transactions or
concessions. . .

These words are no mere bluster; as Hostetter indicates, they anticipate




‘the guiding principle of Bakunin’s later revolutionary activity. . . that
an heroic elite with a single-minded faith in the libertarian ideal, can
carry the day by the very intransigence of their credo and by a spon-
taneous mass intuition of its validity’.¹⁴⁵ Not that Bakunin had become
incapable of bluster; by July 1866 we find him boasting to Herzen and
Ogarev that for the previous three years his sole occupation (whatever
Marx might think) had been ‘to organize a secret international socialist
society’ and that despite the ‘detestable theory of bourgeois patriotism
spread by Mazzini and Garibaldi’ he had ‘adherents in Sweden, Norway,
Denmark, England, Belgium, France, Spain and Italy. We also have
some Polish friends and we even count some Russians among us’.¹⁴⁶
Most of this was the sheerest fantasy, although Bakunin, we know, had
produced a formal blueprint for a vast, intricate ‘International Brother-
hood’; we also know that Mazzini, as though to justify Marx’s concern,¹⁴⁷
in September 1866 founded a Universal Republican Alliance to counter-
act the influence of the International and reaffirm the priority of
republicanism over socialism. Yet Marx, who still perhaps believed in
the effectiveness of his counter-mines, seemed more confident than
perturbed. In 1867 he crowed to Engels:

At the next Congress, in Brussels, I shall personally deal with
these jack-asses of Proudhonists. I have managed the whole
thing diplomatically and did not want to come out personally
until my book was published [Capital, vol. i, had just appeared]
and our Association had struck root. . . Meanwhile [the
International] has made great progress. . . The swine among
the English Trade Unionists, who thought we had gone ‘too
far,’ now come running to us.. . Les choses marchent. In the
imminent revolution, which is perhaps closer than it seems,
we (that is, you and I) have this powerful engine in our hands.
Compare this with the results of Mazzini etc. for the last thirty
years! Furthermore, without financial means! With the intrigues
of the Proudhonists in Paris, of Mazzini in Italy, of the jealous
Odger, Cremer and Potter in London, with the Schulze-Delitsch
group and the Lassalleans in Germany, we can be well content!¹⁴⁸

Things were indeed moving, but not in a direction to make Marx and
Engels content. The intrigues of Bakunin, once they took corporeal
form, were to prove more significant than those Marx lists in his over-
confident letter, which estimates the success of the International not
according to its own growing strength but according to the disunion
and ‘intrigues’ among Marx’s enemies - an unbalanced judgment if
ever there was one.

September 1867 was the date of the Geneva Peace Congress which
Bakunin attended, along with Victor Hugo, John Stuart Mill etal.\the




Congress set up the League for Peace and Freedom, into whose Central
Committee Bakunin insinuated himself. In this capacity he did work
for the International, seeking what he called a ‘working entente’ between
it and the League, in the belief that if he could guide the latter, which
had no mass following of its own, towards socialism - an unlikely
prospect - rapprochement with the increasingly well-manned Inter-
national might follow. Marx was contemptuous of ‘the Peace Windbags’
and spoke against the International’s affiliation with them. ‘The peace-
at-any-price party’, in the words of the relevant General Council minutes,
‘would fain leave Russia alone in the possession of the means to make
war upon the rest of Europe, while the very existence of such a power
as Russia was enough for all the other countries to keep their armies
intact.’¹⁴⁹ Marx wrote to Engels in October 1867 that ‘the Russians,
naturally, have set up the [Peace] Congress. . . and for this purpose they
have sent their well-worn agent, Bakunin’.¹⁵⁰ In the event, contact
between the International and the League was scotched, as we have
seen, since the latter refused to go on record as favouring ‘a new order
. . . that will no longer know in society two classes, the one of which
is exploited by the other’. Some Internationalists attended the League’s
Geneva Congress (1867) in a private capacity, however; and Bakunin,
undaunted, tried again, this time persuading the League to invite the
International to participate in its next Congress (which was to be held
at Bern in 1868). The invitation went so far in identifying the aims of
the League with those of the International, however, that it provided
hostile Internationalists with all the ammunition they would need;
the International’s 1868 Congress in Brussels, accordingly, declared
in response that it saw no good reason for the League’s continued
existence, and high-handedly suggested that members of this now
superfluous body should, if they wished, enrol in their local sections
of the International. This declaration from without that the League
had no further raison d’etre was regarded as an ignominious slight
which its Council reproached Bakunin for having engineered.

Bakunin was further reproached at the League’s Bern Congress for
his political opinions; impervious to atmosphere, as ever, Bakunin
had attempted to initiate a debate on the ‘equalization of classes’,
thereby scandalizing the other delegates, who promptly accused him
of communism. Bakunin defended himself eloquently.

Because I press for the economic and social equalization of
classes and individuals, because, along with the workers’

Congress at Brussels, I have advocated collective property, I
am now accused of being a communist. I am asked what
distinction I would make between communism and
collectivism. . . I hate communism because it is the negation
of liberty and because humanity is for me unthinkable




without liberty. I am not a communist because communism
concentrates and causes all the powers of society to be
absorbed by the state, because it leads necessarily to the
concentration of property in the hands of the state, while
I want the abolition of the state - the radical extirpation of
authority and control by the state which, under the pretext
of moralizing and civilizing men, has, up to the present,
enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and depraved them. I want the
organization of society and collective or social property from
the bottom up, by way of free association, and not from the
top down by means of any authority whatsoever. Since I want
the abolition of the state, I want the abolition of individually
inherited property, which is only an institution of the state, a
consequence of the principle of the state. There you have the
sense in which I am a collectivist and not a communist.

Finding little support for these views among the bourgeois of the
League, Bakunin (who had already joined the Geneva section of the
International) withdrew, along with his entourage, from the League

considering that the majority of the members. .. have
passionately and explicitly declared themselves against the
economic and social equalization of classes and individuals,
and that any programme and any political action that does
not have as a goal the realization of this principle could
not be accepted by socialist democrats, that is, by
conscientious and logical friends of peace and liberty,
the undersigned believe it is their duty to withdraw from
the League.¹⁵¹

Bakunin and his followers - Russian, Swiss, Polish, French, Italian
and German - at this point founded the International Alliance of Social
Democracy, the ‘social’ in whose title was soon changed to ‘socialist’
because the term ‘social democracy’ reeked of German authoritarian-
ism. Its main difference from all the other alliances, brotherhoods and
directorates Bakunin was so adept at instituting, or inventing, was that
the Alliance from the outset considered itself a branch of the Inter-
national, accepted its statutes, and, in short order, applied in December
1868 for formal membership. This means that dual membership in the
Alliance and the International was, presumably, countenanced from
the very beginning; but what this dual membership actually implied -
or was supposed to imply - has been disputed ever since. Some accounts
insist on the existence of an International Brotherhood whose ‘only
country was universal revolution and whose only enemy [was] reaction’;
this form of organization, which we know attracted Bakunin, at least in


the abstract, would have made the Alliance

a secret society in the heart of the International, to give it
a revolutionary organization, to transform it and all the
popular masses which exist outside it into a power sufficiently
organized to destroy the politico-clerico-bourgeois reaction,
and the economic, juridical, religious, and political institutions
of the state.¹⁵²

Whether Bakunin’s Alliance was an open ‘front’ for a clandestine
brotherhood - as Marx and others in time came to believe - is impossible
to establish definitively; what we do know is that the Alliance pro-
gramme that was sent to the General Council of the International was
considerably more radical than the International’s own. It called for
the collectivization of all instruments of production, for the abolition
of the right of inheritance, and of all ‘national states’ in favour of
‘a universal union of free associations, industrial and agricultural’, for
the equalization of individuals and classes, and for a militant atheism.

These views constituted no technical obstacle to the Alliance’s
admission to the International, whose rules defined as eligible for
admission ‘all workers’ societies aspiring to... mutual assistance [and] the
complete emancipation of the working class’; that the Alliance’s mem-
bers were not workers was no obstacle either. Marx, however, was
formidably suspicious, despite, or because of, the fact that Bakunin
attempted personal blandishment on him.

I am [your friend] more than ever, dear Marx, for better
than ever I have come to understand how right you were in
following and in inviting all of us to follow the great road of
economic revolution, and in denigrating those of us who
would have got lost in the byways either of purely national
or of exclusively political undertakings. I am now doing what
you began to do more than twenty years ago. Since the
solemn and public adieux I bade the bourgeois of the Bern
Congress, I have known no other society, no other milieu than
the world of the workers. My fatherland now is the International,
of which you are one of the principal founders. You see, dear
friend, that I am your disciple, and proud of being so. . .

Marx, not too surprisingly, remained unconvinced by such protestations
of fidelity - an entree sentimentale, as he called it. He sent the Alliance’s
rules to Engels; ‘Mr. Bakunin’, he wrote in his accompanying letter, ‘is
kind enough to want to take the workers’ movement under Russian
control’.¹⁵³ Marx’s own marginal comments on the copy of the Pro-
gramme and Rules of the Alliance he was sent¹⁵⁴ (and sent Engels) have




survived. They ridicule the notion of ‘equality of classes’, and dismiss
‘abolition of the right of inheritance’as ‘the old Saint-Simonist panacea’;
the Alliance’s rejection of ‘rivalry between nations’ occasions Marx’s
marginal comment: ‘There is rivalry and rivalry, my dear Russian!’;
and against the claim that the Alliance was ‘established entirely within
the International’ Marx wrote, ‘established within and established
against!’. Marx was doing more than venting his private opinions (and
Russophobe obsessions), however, in adding to his marginalia the
observation that ‘the International . . . does not admit any “Inter-
national” branches’; for the General Council, evidently following
Marx’s lead, rejected the Alliance’s application on these very grounds.
Its resolution¹⁵⁵ (which was written by Marx) expresses the fear that
if bodies like the Alliance were admitted the International would
‘soon become a plaything [unjouet] for intriguers of all race and inter-
nationality' (my emphases). One wonders how international the Inter-
national was supposed to be. Marx had a point in insisting that ‘the
presence of a second international body working within and outside the
International... [would] be the most infallible means of its disorganiz-
ation’ - one could argue, indeed, that subsequent events were to bear out
this interpretation - but the text he used in expressing this point had its
limits. Marx was quick to add that a precedent for the rejection of the
Alliance’s application had been set by the treatment already ineted
out to the League, a measure for which several signatories of the
Alliance’s application had themselves voted (in their capacity as del-
egates to the Brussels Congress of the International).¹⁵⁶ Such a twisting
of the knife was surely gratuitous; it certainly makes accusations about
Marx’s ‘authoritarianism’ more credible.

In February 1869 the Alliance put in a second bid for membership,
agreeing to dissolve itself as an ‘international’ body if its sections in
Switzerland, Italy and Spain were allowed to enrol as regularly con-
stituted sections of the International - which was all that the General
Council had had any right to ask of it. The General Council, despite
Marx’s continued misgivings, this time was obliged to agree, provided
that the phrase ‘equalization of classes’ be stricken from the Alliance’s
programme. (‘It is not the logically impossible “equalization of classes”

. . . but the historically necessary “abolition of classes,” the true aim of
the proletarian movement, which forms the great aim of the [Inter-
national] ... however... that phrase, “dgalisation des classes”, seems to
be a mere slip of the pen. ..’ It was, in fact, to prove otherwise.)¹⁵⁷ The
General Council, which was not in the business of vetting the phras-
eology of member associations’ programmes on points of logic, once
again had no right to insist on this; to have done so was foolish and
shortsighted, since it needlessly created resentment and raised the
stakes of a conflict which Marx knew was on its way. The General
Council had given Bakunin the kind of foothold he needed to develop




a real influence in the International; he was free to advance the cause of
‘anti-authoritarian socialism’ under the mantle of legitimacy that only
the resolutely anti-anarchist General Council could confer. As Marx
was uncomfortably aware, the General Council was powerless not to
confer this legitimacy; he drafted the General Council’s reply to the
Alliance, as he put it in a letter to Engels,¹⁵⁸ with the following tactical
considerations in mind:

Bakunin thinks: if we approve his ‘radical programme,’ he can
make a big noise about this and compromise us tant si peu.

If we declare ourselves against it we shall be designated as
counter-revolutionaries. Moreover: if we admit then he will
see to it that he is supported by some of the riff-raff at the
Congress in Basel. ..

More fundamentally, however, Marx failed to take the Bakuninists’
programme seriously. ‘Their “revolutionary programme” ’, he wrote
scornfully to Engels,¹⁵⁹

is supposed to have a greater effect in Italy, Spain etc. in a few
weeks than that of the International in years. If we reject their
‘revolutionary programme’ we bring about a separation between
the countries of ‘revolutionary’ workers’ movements (these
are.. .France, where they have two whole correspondants,
Switzerland (!), Italy -where the workers, with the exception
of those belonging to us, are a mere tail to Mazzini-and Spain,
where there are more priests than workers) and [on the other
hand] the countries of slower development of the working
class (viz. England, Germany, United States, Belgium). Hence
separation between the volcanic, Plutonic workers’ movement
on the one side, and the aqueous on the other. . . That the Swiss
represent the revolutionary type is really amusing.

Marx’s scorn, as we shall see, was to rebound on him soon enough.

Whether Bakunin actually did dissolve his Alliance - a question that
was to become important - we may never finally know. E.H. Carr’s
biography of Bakunin claims not only that he did not dissolve it, but
also that our conspirator plotted a set of Chinese boxes (Bakunin’s
directorate inside a secret International Brotherhood inside the Alliance
inside the International), his aim being to dominate each in turn. This
is the kind of claim that cannot really be supported; and so, for that
matter, is Carr’s assertion that Bakunin, earlier, had

conceived the bold plan of concluding an alliance between the
League and the International which would make him, the prime




mover in the League, co-equal with Marx, the directing spirit
of the International. The League would thus serve him as a
stepping-stone to that position in the International to which his
personality and record entitled him.¹⁶⁰

The trouble with these claims is not only the absence of any direct
evidence; it is that the mixture of fantasy and reality in Bakunin’s
various plots and machinations - whatever the evidence of what he had
in mind - is impossible to disentangle. The historical record appears to
show that Bakunin was if anything remarkably slow to reap advantage
from a new found position of strength, strength he may not have
known.

Of all the Alliance sections, only one, the Genevan, actually took
the trouble to enrol in the International. This in itself suggests either
the marginality of the others or Bakunin’s lack of influence over what
they did (or both); but, the others to one side, Geneva itself was less
than ideal for Bakunin’s purposes. The complication was that Geneva
was already the major Swiss centre of the International, the seat of
what was (under another name) the Swiss National Federal Council,
the Geneva Federation. Almost all the Geneva Internationalists - the
Fabrika, as they were known, solid, careful craftsmen all, whose fas-
tidious ‘bourgeois’ instincts repelled Bakunin - were hostile to Bakunin’s
ultra-revolutionism; and the Geneva Federation refused to accept the
Geneva section of the Alliance as an affiliated body, even though the
London General Council had done so. Bakunin’s Alliance was thus
obliged to fight on two fronts - against the Geneva Federation, in a
running battle that proceeded alongside the larger struggle between
Bakunin and Marx. The course of these fights can be traced out in
Bakunin’s regular articles for the Geneva journal L'Egalite in 1868
and 1869.¹⁶¹ By October of 1869 Marx was writing to Engels¹⁶² that

the secretary of our French committee in Geneva has had
Bakunin up to his ears and complains that his ‘tyranny’ has
ruined everything. In fcgalite Bakunin announces that the
German and English workers have no need for individualism
and that they therefore accept our communisme authoritaire.

In contrast, Bakunin represents le collectivisme anarchique.

The anarchy is really in his head, where there’s room for only
one clear idea, that Bakunin must play first fiddle. . .

Prior to the Congress of Basel - which, as we shall see, marked the
turning-point in the history of the International - L ’Egalite had relent-
lessly published articles by Bakunin which professed to explain the
principles of the International but which in reality presented the
Alliance’s programme as the ‘real’ programme of the International and




the ‘treason’ of selected working-class politicians or leaders as the
natural, inevitable issue of political action on the part of the working
class.

Bakunin’s initial support in Switzerland - like Marx’s in England -
came from resident aliens, political refugees from Russia, Poland,
France and Italy; but he also gathered support among Gastarbeiter
for whom Geneva was already a centre, where builders, carpenters
and workers in heavy industry tended to be French or Italian. The
Geneva builders’ strike was one of many in 1868 that the International
helped, and whose success helped buoy the International. Bakunin,
helped by Guillaume, also marshalled considerable support among
French speaking domestic workers and watchmakers in the Jura, who
disliked the German Swiss almost as much as Bakunin disliked anything
German (or Marx anything Russian).