Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

From Basel to The Hague

In view of his advance preparations, which (for Bakunin) were assiduous,
it is perhaps surprising that Bakunin was as slow as he was to press
home his new found advantage. Yet at the first (and only) Congress
of the International he attended, at Basel in 1869, only twelve out of
seventy-five delegates could be called Bakuninists; and Bakunin himself
actually voted and spoke in favour of extending (not diminishing) the
powers of the London General Council¹⁶³ - which, if he was plotting
as systematically as Carr and others suggest, would have to be counted
as a grave tactical error. One of the reasons Bakunin did so is indicated
by Cole: ‘the General Council had accepted the affiliation of the
Alliance . . .whereas the Geneva [Federation] had rejected it’.¹⁶⁴ What-
ever other reasons he may have had for doing so, Bakunin pronounced
in favour of giving the General Council wide powers - power to admit
or refuse admission to the International (subject to ratification by the
annual Congress) and power to suspend between Congresses any section
suspected or accused of acting against the interests of the International
(again subject to the offended section’s appeal to the next Congress).
The importance of these resolutions will become apparent.

The Basel Congress was the most representative yet (only The Hague
in 1872 was to be more so); it even included a small German delegation.
It was convened as the International was reaching a peak - indeed the
peak - of its influence. Trade union membership and strike activity had
increased throughout Western Europe in 1869, and almost every strike
was attributed to the International’s machinations; the Internationalists,
in Cole’s words, ‘joyfully tried to live up to the role which their op-
ponents assigned to them’.¹⁶⁵ Even so, the Basel Congress - two inci-
dents, each of them connected with Bakunin, apart -had a retrospective,




almost complacent air to it; its delegates concerned themselves with
past business, and tying up the loose ends left by previous Congresses.
Apart from the debate about the powers of the General Council, which
was instigated by the Council itself, unsure as it was of its own com-
petence, the Basel Congress occupied itself most prominently with a
question that had already been voted on at the previous Congress at
Brussels (1868) - that of landed property. Tolain and others insisted
that the 1868 vote had been taken without adequate preparation;
Congress agreed to reopen the matter, even though Tolain all too
manifestly had an ulterior motive for his request: the Brussels Congress
had decided that the land - as well as mines, quarries, canals, railways,
telegraphs and other means of communication - should come under
collective ownership, and passage of this measure - and another, in
favour of strikes-was considered a defeat for the Proudhonists.

When the issue of landed property was raised again in 1869 at Basel,
Bakunin distinguished himself (as was his wont) in debate, advocating
- against the Proudhonists - not only the collectivization of land but
also of all ‘social wealth’, and throwing in for good measure the abolition
of the state, ‘the only guarantee of existing property’. (He had already
offended his hosts by vehemently opposing a German-Swiss proposal
to place on the Congress agenda the question of ‘direct legislation’, or
what we would call the referendum, which he regarded as a matter of
bourgeois politics having nothing to do with the working class.) The
most hotly disputed issue, however, was that of inheritance; this,
above all, enabled Bakunin to steal the show. His Alliance, ever since
its foundation, had considered the abolition of the right of inheritance
to be a cornerstone of its strategy. Bakunin argued that the right of
inheritance underlay private property and the state, and that its abol-
ition would lead to the downfall of each. Eccarius, presenting the
General Council’s report, which had been written, somewhat tersely,
by Marx,¹⁶⁶ argued that ‘like all other civil legislation, the laws of
inheritance are not the cause but the effect, the juridical consequence
of the existing economical organization of society, based upon private
property in the means of prduction’; the right to inherit slaves, after
all, had not been the cause of slavery. He went on,

The disappearance of the right of inheritance will be the
natural result of a social change superseding private property
in the means of production; but the abolition of the right of
inheritance can never be the starting point of such a social
transformation... To proclaim the abolition of the right of
inheritance as the starting point of the social revolution
would only tend to lead the working class away from the
true point of attack against present society. It would be as
absurd a thing as to abolish the laws of contract between


buyer and seller, while continuing the present state of exchange
of commodities.

Marx’s impatience with the notion of abolishing the right of inheritance
is manifest. It carried over into Eccarius’s inept defence of the General
Council report - he had not been well briefed - which, although, it had
the edge logically (Marx had pointed out that to abolish inheritance
alone would be to imply the legitimacy of non-inherited property), was
lackluster in comparison with Bakunin’s spirited defence of the Congress
commission’s proposal for ‘complete and radical abolition’. In Carr’s
words, Bakunin’s ‘tempestuous eloquence, and the straightforward
simplicity of his case made a powerful appeal’. In view of Eccarius’
ineptitude and Marx’s complacency, it is not too surprising that first
the Commission, then Congress at large (once the closure was applied)
took Bakunin’s part, and that the General Council’s report - which
Wilhelm Liebknecht defended at his first appearance - went down to
defeat. Technically, the issue was undecided; symbolically it was a
clear victory for Bakunin, who claimed to have overheard Eccarius
mutter, ‘Marx will be terribly annoyed’ (‘Marx wird sehr unzufrieden
sein’), as indeed he was.¹⁶⁷

Two incidents at this point reinforced Bakunin’s Teutophobia, and
Bakunin believed Marx was behind them both. Wilhelm Liebknecht
(whom Bakunin regarded as Marx’s mouthpiece) had apparently de-
nounced Bakunin as a Slavophile and a dangerous enemy of the Inter-
national; even though he withdrew these charges at a Court of Honour
held at Bakunin’s request during the Basel Congress - Bakunin melo-
dramatically lit a cigar with the verdict to demonstrate that he had no
hard feelings, thereby destroying the evidence - they were immediately
repeated, this time by Moses Hess.¹⁶⁸ Hess’s post-mortem of the Basel
Congress declared that

between the collectivists of the International [the General
Council and its allies] and the Russian communists [the
Bakuninists] there was all the difference that exists between
civilization and barbarism, between liberty and despotism,
between citizens condemning every form of violence and
slaves dedicated to the use of brutal force.¹⁶⁹

What lurked in the background of Liebknecht’s and Hess’s accusations
alike was Marx’s old belief, brought out and dusted off for the occasion,
that Bakunin was in reality a Tsarist agent. E.H. Carr believes, with
Liebknecht, that ‘only Bakunin’s abnormal sensitiveness. .. distorted a
criticism of his political activity into a slander involving his personal
honour’, but this is too simple; Carr’s formulation, which issues in the
belief that Bakunin’s sensitiveness ‘began . . .to assume the proportions


of a persecution mania’,¹⁷⁰ begs too many questions - among them
whether we should be surprised that any revolutionist of Russian
nationality should take personal offence at even the suspicion of
Tsarist sympathies; and whether, indeed, Bakunin’s post-Siberian
revolutionary activities were in any real sense ‘Russian’ or Russophile
at all. (The Nechaev episode could be regarded as a desperate attempt
to re-establish contact with Russia.)

These considerations do not justify the form taken by Bakunin’s
response to Hess - which was not only a letter defending his own
revolutionary credentials against an ignominious slight, the long Con-
fession of Faith of a Russian Social Democrat,¹¹¹ but also, by way of
a preface, ‘A Study on the German Jews’, the anti-Semitism of which
was virulent even by Bakunin’s standards. Herzen, to whom Bakunin
sent this production, was appalled (‘Why all this talk of race and Jews?’
he is reported to have said to Ogarev), but he interceded with the
editor of Le Reveil (which had published Hess’s piece), Delescluze,
who had had no intention of publishing Bakunin’s ‘elucubrations’, and
prevailed upon him to print a letter from Herzen himself in defence of
Bakunin. Bakunin, for his part, remained convinced that Marx ‘was
the originator and instigator of all the filth that has been heaped upon
[him] ’, a belief which Herzen encouraged, probably because it was true.
In October 1869 Bakunin wrote to Herzen:

I know as well as you that Marx is quite as much to blame as
the rest. . . Why then have I spared him and even praised him as
a great man? For two reasons, Herzen. The first is justice.

Leaving on one side all his iniquities against us, one cannot
help admitting. . . his enormous services to the cause of socialism,
which he has served ably, energetically and faithfully throughout
the twenty-five years I have known him, and in which he has
undoubtedly outstripped us all. He was one of the first founders,
almost the chief founder, of the International. That is in my eyes
an immense service which I shall always recognize whatever he
does against me.

The other reason is political calculation, and in my opinion,
perfectly sound tactics. . . Marx is unquestionably a useful man
in the International. He has been hitherto one of the strongest,
ablest and most influential supporters of socialism in it, one of
the most powerful obstacles to the infiltration into it of any
kind of bourgeois tendencies or ideas. I should never forgive myself
if, from motives of personal revenge, I destroyed or diminished
his undoubtedly beneficial influence. It may happen, and probably
will happen, that I shall have to enter a conflict with him, not for
a personal offence, but on a matter of principle, state communism,
of which he and the party led by him, English and German, are


fervent supporters. Then it will be a life and death struggle.

But all in good time: the moment has not yet come.

I spared and praised him for tactical reasons, out of
personal calculation. How can you fail to see that all these
gentlemen together are our enemies, and form a phalanx which
must be disunited and split up, the more easily to destroy it.

You are more learned than I and therefore know better who
first said: Divide et impera. If I now declared war on Marx,
three-quarters of the International would turn against me,
and I should.. .lose the only ground on which I can stand. But
if I begin the war by attacking his rabble, I shall have the
majority on my side; and even Marx himself, who has in him,
as you know, a big dose of malicious satisfaction at other
people’s troubles, will be very pleased that I have abused
and told off his friends.¹⁷²

Herzen found this exculpation unconvincing. ‘You will never make a
Machiavelli with your dicide,' he told Bakunin, who had indeed appar-
ently forgotton by its third paragraph who was attacking whom. Yet it
is evident from this letter that Bakunin foresaw a ‘life and death struggle’
with Marx; and it is evident from his letters of the period that Marx,
too, was convinced by the General Council’s defeat on the inheritance
issue that the International was being undermined by a deliberate
campaign on Bakunin’s part.

It is for this reason that developments in Switzerland began to
attract his attention. Marx believed that a series of articles critical of
the General Council that appeared late in 1869 in L’Egalite and in Le
Progres were the work of Bakunin. Sending a copy of the former to
Engels, Marx adds that

you will see how insolent Signor Bakunin is becoming. This
lad now has at his disposal four organs of the International.. .

He believes the moment has come to begin an open conflict
[offentlichen Krakeel] with us. He poses as the guardian of
true Proletarianism [als Wachter des wahren Proletarianismus].

Still, he will wonder. . ,¹⁷³

Marx was seeing the movement, Bakuninism - he called Bakunin’s
followers Kosaken\ - through the man, Bakunin, who had in fact
unaccountably left Geneva for Italy the previous autumn, and had
not written the articles in question (though he certainly inspired them).
Marx was provoked to draft (in the name and with the sanction of the
General Council) a remarkably testy letter to the Federal Council of
Romance Switzerland about the articles - ‘in accordance with decisions
of the last Congress, we can suspend them if necessary, [so] they will




think twice. . . As soon as a Russian creeps in, there is the devil to pay’,
as Marx put it to Engels.¹⁷⁴ Marx’s letter foreshadows many subsequent
missives by virtue of its arrogance and pulling of rank. ‘The General
Council’, wrote Marx,

does not know of any article, either in the rules or in the
regulations, which obliges it to enter into correspondence or
into polemic with L ’Egalite or to provide ‘answers’ to ‘questions’
from newspapers. Only the Federal Council of Romance
Switzerland represents the branches of Romance Switzerland
vis-a-vis the General Council.. . L ’Egalite joins Le Progres in
invitingLe Travail.. .to demand an explanation from the
General Council. This is almost a Ligue du bien publique.¹⁷⁵

Since even the notes to the Moscow edition of the Documents of the
International tell us that the Ligue du Bien Publique was an association
directed against Louis XI’s policy of uniting France into a single,
centralized state, we are entitled to wonder whether Marx quite knew
what he was doing in using so ill-judged a comparison; that Marx was
running the General Council in the manner of an autocratic, centralizing
‘state’ was a Leitmotiv of the articles in question, and was to be a theme
sounded in many more. Marx’s archness and hectoring were to rebound
upon him; his enemies were not slow to note his tendency, under
threat, to treat the General Council as a kind of private patrimony, to
fulfil, in other words, the Bakuninists’ worst suspicions of what he was
like. Whether these suspicions could have been allayed, instead of
reinforced, by the winter of 1869-70 we shall never know; it is safe to
assume, however, that each move like this one on Marx’s part lessened
whatever chance he may have had of laying such suspicions to rest in
the future.

While it could be argued that Marx’s each and every move was
specifically designed to bring matters to a head and to provoke the
‘open conflict’ he thought Bakunin wanted, this is unlikely, since it
would have split the International. A much more likely hypothesis -
one that takes into account the easily forgotten fact that no one
could have known how protracted the dispute would become - is
that Marx and Bakunin were both playing for time, Marx because he
thought (or hoped) that Bakunin would succeed in out-manoeuvring
himself, and Bakunin because only with more time at his disposal
could he gain support. Each protagonist was engaged, of course, in
anticipating the moves and cast of mind of the other, and interpreting
these in the light of explanations of the other’s behaviour that grew
more and more rigid and inflexible; each protagonist was in this sense
painting himself into a corner. Bakunin became Marx’s Bakunin, Marx
Bakunin’s Marx; and each clutched at any available straw, the better




to reinforce his view of the other. An example of how dangerously
near-sighted such presumptions could become is that Marx, learning
at last of Bakunin’s quite unexpected Italienreise and abandonment of
his Alliance in Switzerland (management of which was left in the less
than capable hands of others), seems immediately to have believed that
Bakunin’s days as a trouble maker were over. In March 1870 he sent a
confidential circular to the German sections summarizing Bakunin’s
activities¹⁷⁶ and, taking heart from his absence from Switzerland,
claiming that ‘the game of this most dangerous intriguer will soon be
brought to an end’. Events almost immediately proved him wrong.

The events in question were initiated - in Bakunin’s absence - in
Switzerland. The Geneva section of Bakunin’s Alliance, whose affairs
Bakunin himself had lately neglected, and which had lost control of
L ’Egalite (a foolish move), applied for admission once again to its local
Federal Council, the Federation romande, which held its Annual
Congress at Chaux-les-Fonds at the beginning of April 1870. The
Congress voted to admit the Geneva Section of the Alliance to the
Federation romande in accordance with the rules of the International,
which should have been the end of the matter; but it did so by a margin
of three. The anti-Bakuninist minority immediately seceded from the
Federation and held its own Congress, separately from the pro-Bakuninist
majority. Each claimed to be the true Federation romande, and their
claims had to be adjudicated by the General Council in London. This
was too good an opportunity to miss. The General Council, acting on
Marx’s advice, ruled that the majority in question was only ‘nominal’
since the ‘minority’ represented more members than the majority did.¹⁷⁷
The General Council also opined that the original Federation romande,
now the minority, which had always acted justly in the past, should not
be deprived of its title and that the organization of the majority should
therefore adopt some other name.¹⁷⁸

This reasoning was specious, at least in the sense that the represen-
tativeness criterion was never applied to other delegates or other
sections of the International - to have done so would have turned up
surprises galore. There is perhaps an element of poetic justice in the
fact that very shortly the International was to prove capable of expand-
ing its membership only at the behest of the Bakuninists; but this is to
anticipate. There are two main reasons, prolepsis aside, why the General
Council’s ruling was badly judged. First, it had conspicuously exceeded
its brief and taken an action that might legitimately seem to be not in
accordance with its own rules - rules which were applied literally when-
ever the Bakuninists might suffer. The point here is not a purely legal-
istic one. The pedantic niceties of whether or not the General Council’s
decision was, or could be interpreted as being, legal, stricto sensu, is
less important than what it seemed to people in Switzerland and else-
where to have done, people who by now were on the lookout for




(real or imagined) slights of this kind. The second reason why the
General Council acted unwisely can be seen from the context in which
this decision was made; its date was June 1870, and three months
earlier the General Council had admitted to the International a Russian
section, which had been organized among Russian emigres in Geneva as
a counterweight to Bakunin’s Alliance. The instigator of this section
was Nicholas Utin, who was sufficiently suspicious of Bakunin to
spread the old rumour that he was a Tsarist agent,¹⁷⁹ and sufficiently
in awe of Marx to ask him to represent his section on the General
Council - to become, in other words, Corresponding Secretary for
Russia (a country having no other representation). Marx, incredibly,
agreed; as he wrote to Engels (this is best given in the trilingual original):

Drole de position fur mich, als Reprasentant der jeune Russie
zu funktionieren! Der Mensch weiss nie, wozu er es bringen kann
und welche strange fellowship er zu untergehen hat. [A strange
position for me to be functioning as the representative of
young Russia! One never knows what one may come to or what
strange fellowship one may have to submit to!]¹⁸⁰

For all these reasons, by the summer of 1870 it was beginning to look
as though the General Council would keep playing with loaded dice.
Its decisions about Switzerland simply reinforced the split that had
already taken place. The Geneva Section, the official Federation
romande, supported the General Council and Utin, and, wasting no op-
portunity to discredit Bakunin, went through the motions of solemnly
expelling Bakunin and the other Alliancists from it; the Bakuninists
became the Jura Federation.¹⁸¹ The battle-lines were set; the Bakunin-
ists had succeeded in tapping a potent source of discontent. What was
already certain by the summer of 1870 was that the Jura Federation
and the General Council in London would continue to watch, and
eagerly interpret, each other’s every move from now on.

Bakuninism had by 1870 proved itself much less ‘Russian’ than
Marx thought (or wished). It spread, chiefly in those countries-Spain,
southern Italy, parts of France and Switzerland - where large numbers
of newly restive peasants, domestic workers and artisans, all of them
threatened in various ways by what seemed to them to be the ‘leap in
the dark’¹⁸² of capitalism (which held out the certain prospect only of
proletarianization) were gaining a new political voice. Carr considers
that only the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War prevented Bakunin’s
Alliance from taking root in France; Bakuninism was certainly powerful
in Lyons, where a Congress of the French sections of the International
was held in March 1870. Only Germany, over whose labour movement
Marx himself had very little influence, and Britain, where some labour
leaders still maintained their curious, but by now beleaguered, alliance




with Marx on the General Council, were to remain unaffected by the
blandishments of Bakuninism. Countries with established labour
movements, that is to say, tended to be unreceptive to Bakuninism;
this was true even of France, where Bakuninism spread in areas distant
from Paris, a city Bakunin himself never visited after 1864. The neatness
of any over-schematic separation between pre-industrial anarchism and
capitalist socialism was broken most notably in Belgium, a country
which, though poorer, was sufficiently industrialized by the 1860s to
stand comparison with England. The highly developed Belgian labour
movement was led by the extraordinary Cesar de Paepe, who was
conciliatory towards Bakuninism (and, earlier, Proudhonism) but who
retained the respect of Marx. The identification of anarchism, in its
Bakuninist form, with pre-capitalist elements in Southern Europe
should not be overdrawn in any case; its appeal was to those on the
brink of capitalism, to those faced with capitalism as a prospect, to
those on the margins, to those to whom a capitalist mode of pro-
duction was the writing on the wall, real enough to pose a threat and
to call for a new kind of response. Franz Borkenau observed that ‘the
Spanish labour movement is based on a mentality directed against
the introduction, not against the indefinite continuance, of capitalism’,
but also that ‘were there no capitalist intrusion whatsoever, there
would be no anarchism’.¹⁸³ To men on the margins the elan of Baku-
ninism and its exemplars,* their headlong assault on church and state,
landlord and capitalist, parliament and bourse, seemed more immediately
relevant and forceful than the less spectacular approach of Marx would
have been.¹⁸⁵ Marx’s approach, with its emphasis on gradualism and
organization, on order and parliamentary procedure, on the need to
build up, patiently if need be, the political as well as the industrial
power of organized labour, seemed (to those who knew about it)
plodding and irrelevant when compared with the verve and immediacy
of Bakuninism. More to the point, perhaps, the Marxist alternative -
which, we should remember, was not always presented - seemed (and

‘Anselmo Lorenzo’s description of Bakunin’s lieutenant, Giuseppe Fanelli, who
- this is no exaggeration - introduced anarchism into Spain, gives some idea of
this. ‘Fanelli’, he writes,

was a tall man with a kind and grave expression, a thick black beard and
large black expressive eyes which flashed like lightning or took on the
appearance of kindly compassion according to the sentiments which
dominated him. His voice had a metallic tone and was susceptible to all
the inflexions appropriate to what he was saying, passing rapidly from
accents of anger and menace against tyrants and exploiters to take on those
of suffering, regret and consolation when he spoke of the pains of the
exploited, either as one who without suffering them himself understands
them, or as one who through his altruistic feelings delights in presenting
the ultra-revolutionary ideas of peace and fraternity. He spoke in French
and Italian, but we could understand his expressive mimicry and follow
his speech.

Twenty years later, Lorenzo could recall the very accent with which Fanelli had
said, rolling his black eyes above his black beard, ‘Cosa orribile! Spaventosa!’"⁴




was) remote, geographically and economically as well as spiritually. It
meant, for the most part, only opposition in principle to the kind of
immediate or indiscriminate violence that to so many anarchist converts
held out the only possibility for any hope. We should not be too
surprised at the rapid spread of Bakuninism in view of what Gabriel
Kolko (in another connection) has termed the ‘original sin’ of Marx-
ism¹⁸⁶ - its insistence, that is, that nothing should stand in the way of
the attainment of long-term goals, or of the maturation of objective
conditions, if necessary over a span of generations. This, to men at the
end of their tether, seemed irrelevant, a mockery, at a time when their
livelihoods were already on the line. Bakuninism’s appeal was direct
and immediate; by 1869 alone there were journals in Geneva, Le
Locle, Lyons, Naples and Barcelona, all of them busily disseminating
Bakunin’s ideas to a ready public, and to the evident, and increasing,
dismay of Marx.

Marx, indeed, decided in the face of these ‘counter-revolutionary
intrigues’, as he called them (a description which can serve as a reminder
of the value he placed on the right kind of revolution, or as an indication
of how out of touch he had become) - Marx decided to stage the fifth
Congress of the International in Mainz, where the Germans could see to
it that Bakunin would not dominate the proceedings. (Wilhelm Lieb-
knecht duly suggested that ‘the connection between political action and
the social movement of the working class’ be included on the agenda;
the General Council complied.)¹⁸⁷ The Mainz Congress, however, thanks
to the Franco-Prussian War, was never held; what Marx wanted to
guard against there is best illustrated by the country where Bakuninism
spread most quickly and struck deepest roots. Before Fanelli’s mission
to Spain in 1868, as Bakunin’s legate, not only was the International
not represented there, but to European socialists the country was terra
incognita.¹⁸⁸ Fanelli, in Gerald Brenan’s words,

left behind him [in Madrid] copies of the statutes of the Alliance
for Socialist Democracy, the rules of a Geneva working class
society, a few numbers of Herzen’s Bell, and various Swiss and
Belgian newspapers containing reports of speeches by Bakunin.

These were the sacred texts on which a new movement was to be
constructed.... a movement that was to endure, with wave-like
advances and reces ions, for the next seventy years, and to affect
profoundly the destinies of Spain.¹⁸⁹

Fanelli, strictly speaking, made a mistake in setting up the whole
International in Spain with the programme of the Alliance; but it was
a mistake that endured, helping to give Spanish anarchism its distinctive,
and extraordinarily resilient, form. In 1870 at a General Congress at
Barcelona 150 societies from thirty-six regions constituted the Spanish




Regional Federation of the International and adopted as their statutes
those of the Jura Federation, which had been drawn up by Bakunin.
The combination of these with Fanelli’s mistake could have been
tailor-made for Spanish conditions. The disemination of anarchism in
Spain, with such a programme, was, as Brenan puts it, ‘an easy matter’.
It was precisely ‘this combination of federations of working men,
forming. . .free pacts with one another with a small, secret revolutionary
body that permeated and controlled them’ that, again according to
Gerald Brenan in 1942, ‘has been the typical organization of Spanish
anarchism down to the present day’.¹⁹⁰ This organization was well
fitted to survive successive waves of repression, and able to recoup its
losses and bounce back after each one.

This is not the place to enter into the chequered history of Spanish
anarchism; the circumstances of its growth, however, do help us under-
stand why ‘the development of Marx’s programme was impossible at
that time in Russia, Italy and Spain, as was that of Bakunin in England,
Germany and France’.¹⁹¹ At root, this observation of Brenan’s, which
puts the matter in a nutshell, helps explain why Marx’s obsessive fears
about Bakuninism, and the Bakuninists’ about Marx, turned so quickly
into realistic predictions of how the other group (or individual) would
act; but it does not tell how this pattern of cross-perception worked
to the detriment of the International. It is to this question we now
return, but not before insisting upon one crucially important point.
Immediately before the Paris Commune of 1871, the International was
experiencing a marked decline in membership and considerable apathy
in the industrial countries.¹⁹² Wherever the International was spreading,
it was doing so under the mantle of Bakuninism. Marx’s Address on the
Commune, The Civil War in France, can be seen, at one level, as a cal-
culated move aimed at re-unifying a disparate movement which could
unite around the symbolism of the Commune; Marx’s insistence on
publishing it with the imprimatur of the General Council (it was an
official address to the International) alienated several English reformist
Internationalists, as Marx knew it would. But it was not their support
that had become crucial, as the spread of Bakuninism was indicating.
Whether or not Marx was, or could have been, aware of this, it remains
true that wherever Bakuninism, and with it the International itself,
was spreading by 1871 there was little awareness among converts of the
doctrinal issues separating Bakunin from Marx. The doctrinal con-
troversy that loomed so large in London and Geneva was of little
concern wherever Bakuninism was making headway. Bakunin, who
was now sustaining his literary output, knew this perfectly well and
used it shrewdly to his own advantage. In Italy, for example, Bakunin
was able to use his well-publicized dispute with Mazzini (who had
condemned the Commune) to prosecute his feud with the General
Council. Mazzini, says Bakunin in To My Italian Friends, ‘wants the




dictatorship of Rome, not of London; but we, who have no religion,
who detest despotism in general, reject that of Rome, as we would
reject that of London’. Mazzini’s responses - which were always forth-
coming - to accusations like this would have the desired effect of
identifying Bakunin with the International. The General Council
seemed not to have been au courant: Engels (who, when he moved
from Manchester to London, actually became Corresponding Secretary
for Italy) blithely assumed that Bakunin’s gains were London’s losses,
but the General Council in reality had had no influence to lose in the
first place.

By the time that the Conference of Delegates was convened in
London - in September 1871, three months after the publication of
Marx’s philippic, The Civil War in France - it had become clear that
Marx and the General Council could defeat Bakunin only by up-staging
him, and that to up-stage him would involve acting in such a way as
to confirm Bakunin’s recurrent accusations of authoritarianism. Some
sort of point of no return had been reached. The composition of the
London Conference - held in lieu of a regular Congress and thus em-
powered to pass only administrative resolutions - alone was enough
to incur suspicion. Only two delegates were invited from Switzerland,
one of them Utin (who had assiduously investigated Bakunin’s Russian
activities and writings, the better to discredit him); the Jura Federation
was not invited, on the grounds - a pretext - that it had never relinquished
the title of Federation romande. The Conference, in short, looked like
a stage-managed affair, and indeed was little else; it consisted of the
General Council and its selected (and voting) guests. It adopted resol-
utions - which were ‘administrative’ in name only, each one having
ideologically charged implications - of an unprecedented rigidity,
particularly since now they were made binding on all sections of the
International. Resolution IX specified that political action, heretofore
a subordinate instrument for social emancipation (it had been stressed
in the Rules ‘as a means’ of social emancipation), was now linked
‘indissolubly’ to it. Resolution XV authorized the General Council to
set the time and place of the next Congress, in view of the post-Commune
Terror on the continent - which opened the possibility of the indefinite
postponement of a proper Congress in favour of further cabals. Resol-
ution XVI purported to accept in good faith the self-dissolution of
Bakunin’s Alliance in Switzerland - Bakunin’s followers in his absence
had reconstituted it under a new name - but refused to let it re-affiliate
with the International. The General Council used the resolution that
had been passed at the Basel Congress, which Bakunin had supported,
specifying that ‘the General Council has the right to admit or refuse
admission to any new society or group, saving an appeal to the Congress’.
But the General Council had now arrogated to itself the right to decide
when (and where) the next Congress was to be, the better to pack it




with favourably disposed delegates; and, worse still, Resolution XVI
coupled a General Council opinion with a Congress decision in the
interests of the Council. This was chicanery, and was rightly regarded
as such. Hostetter sums up the outcome of the London Conference
succinctly:

Bakuninism is a heresy until Congress decides otherwise; the
Council decides when a Congress convenes; therefore, Bakuninism
is heresy until the Council decides otherwise. . . The anarchists
naturally drew the conclusion that, failing all other measures,

Marx had finally decided to play the game for ideological and
political supremacy. . .with a stacked deck.¹⁹³

In the immediate wake of the London Conference, a Congress of
the Jura Federation, now dissident, was convened, in November 1871;
it issued the Sonvilliers Circular (also known as the ‘Circulaire des
Seize’),¹⁹⁴ which was sent to all federations of the International and
which claimed that the London Conference’s decisions were invalid
because of its unrepresentative character. The circular also claimed
that the Conference had arrogated to itself unconstitutional powers;
that the outcome of its deliberations was consequently invalid; and
that a new Congress should be convened immediately to consider
the divisions in the International the Conference had created. In the
words of the Sonvilliers Circular:

The functions of the General Council have come to be regarded
as the private property of a few individuals. . . they have become
in their own eyes a kind of government; and it was natural that
their own ideas should seem to them to be the official and only
authorized doctrine of the [International] while divergent ideas
expressed by other groups seem no longer a legitimate expression
of opinion equal in value to their own, but a veritable heresy. . .

Yet, in fact, the Rules of the International did not allow for this kind
of ‘secret conference’ called at London, particularly when this con-
ference proceeded to turn what had been ‘a free federation of auton-
omous sections into ‘a hierarchical and authoritarian organization of
disciplined sections’ under the control of the General Council; and
while this was no more than should be expected from those whose
ideal was ‘the conquest of political power by the working class’, this
ideal was itself no longer shared by those other members in whose
name they had acted, ultra vires. The International must return to the
principle of autonomy for its various sections; the General Council
must revert to the status it was always intended to have, that of ‘a
simple correspondence and statistical bureau’. Last but not least, the




circular sought to bring out into the open why all this mattered so
much; lest it be thought that these were abstract proposals made
simply to prove a point, with no practical import, the signatories
insisted that

future society should be none other than the universalization
of the organization which the International has given itself. . .

How can a free and equal society arise from an authoritarian
organization? It is impossible. The International embodies
future human society. . .

Marx replied to these charges, in what had by now become a kind of
propaganda war, in a pamphlet issued by the General Council bearing
its official seal, Les Pretendues scissions dans llntemationale (The
Fictitious Splits in the International)}⁹⁵ The very title of this docu-
ment was designed to suggest that the rifts existed only in the fertile
imagination of certain dissidents in the Jura; that it was printed in
Geneva but sent to all federations of the International¹⁹⁶ indicates,
on the other hand, that the rifts were more real than apparent. The
document is the first of several attempts on the part of the General
Council to trace the history of ‘persistent efforts of certain meddlers
to deliberately maintain confusion between the International and a
society [the Alliance] which has been hostile to it since its [this must
mean the Alliance’s] inception’. At a time when ‘the International is
undergoing the most serious trial since its foundation’,¹⁹⁷ Marx insists
that

denunciations in the bourgeois press, like the lamentations of
the international police, found a sympathetic echo. . .in our
Association. Some intrigues, directed ostensibly against the
General Council but in reality against the Association, were
hatched in its midst. At the bottom of these intrigues was
the inevitable International Alliance of Socialist Democracy,
fathered by the Russian, Mikhail Bakunin.¹⁹⁸

Marx endeavours to establish that Bakunin’s each and every move had
been intended ‘to replace the General Council with his personal dictator-
ship’; that ‘to this end he created a special instrument [the Alliance]. . .
[which was] intended to become an International within the Inter-
national’;¹⁹⁹ and that the effect of all these manoeuvres was to divide
the International from within at the very time when it was most threat-
ened from without.

The General Council, Marx argued, ‘ever since its origin’ had been
‘the executive delegation’ of the International, charged by the Geneva
Congress with publishing ‘the official and obligatory text of the rules’




without displacing the right of local sections ‘to adapt the General
Rules and Regulations “to local conditions and to the laws of their
country” But

who is to establish whether or not the particular rules [of a
local section] conform to the General Rules? Evidently,
if there would be no ‘authority’ charged with this function,
the resolution [at Geneva] would be null and void. Not
only could police or hostile sections be formed, but also
the intrusion of declassed sectarians and bourgeois
philanthropists into the Association could warp [denaturer]
its character and, by force of numbers at Congresses, crush
the workers.²⁰⁰

Infiltration, at least by the police, was a real danger, as events were
to show; yet the rest of Marx’s argument presents equally real diffi-
culties. The General Council had never acted in any earlier dispute as
though its function were to see to it that particular conformed to
general Rules; it had simply seen to it that nothing incompatible with
the latter had appeared on a local level - or had tried to do so, since it
lacked the means to enforce its rulings anyway. Moreover, the crucial
point raised in the Sonvilliers Circular - that the General Council had
in 1871 arrogated to itself certain powers not covered by its own
original ‘Rules’ - is the one Marx blithely ignores altogether, although
in what had become a crisis in the legitimacy of the General Council
it is the one point that should have been met most immediately.

It is for this reason that Marx’s more general arguments about
freedom, authority, sectarianism and political action - arguments that
are of considerable interest and importance, in and of themselves - sit
oddly and awkwardly in a document whose tone and evasions vitiate
their force. Marx argues against the Alliance that its members,

these proponents of absolute clamour and publicity organized
within the International, in contempt of our Rules, a real
secret society directed against the International itself with
the aim of bringing its sections, unbeknownst to them, under
the sacerdotal direction of Bakunin.²⁰¹

He argues that ‘to them, the working class is so much raw material, a
chaos into which they must breathe their Holy Spirit before it acquires
a shape’; ‘they seem to think that the mere fact of belonging to the
General Council is sufficient to destroy not only a person’s morality
but also his common sense’.²⁰² Most importantly of all,

The Alliance .. . proclaims anarchy in proletarian ranks as the
most infallible way of breaking the powerful concentration


of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters.

Under this pretext, it asks the International, at a time when
the old world is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its
organization with anarchy. The international police want
nothing better.. .²⁰³

There is something in each and every one of these points, as we shall
see; yet the fact remains that all of them are raised not in order to
meet the charges levied in the Sonvilliers Circular, but to deflect atten-
tion away from them. One of the few arguments in the circular that
Les Pretendues scissions does address directly was the argument that
the International should in its organization prefigure future society.
The Jura Federation had written that ‘future society should be a uni-
versalization of the organization [of] the International’; Marx writes:

In other words, just as the medieval convents presented an
image of celestial life, so the International must be the image
of the New Jerusalem, whose embryo the Alliance bears in its
womb. The Paris Communards would not have failed if they
had understood that the Commune was ‘the embryo of the
future human society’ and had cast away all discipline and all
arms, that is, the things that will disappear when there are

1204

no more wars!

Yet even this rejoinder is in a significant sense disingenuous, since if
there is one belief that both sides shared in this dispute it is the belief
that the International was, indeed, the organization of future society
in embryo, and also that the Paris Commune gives an important clue to
the character of future society. This argument about prefiguration had
been implicit in the Marx-Bakunin dispute from the very beginning; but
proper discussion of this point, too, must await its proper place, since
the dispute itself developed further.

Bakunin’s ‘Response’²⁰⁵ to Les Pretendues scissions (which opens
with the words ‘Dear companions in disgrace: the sword of Damocles
that has threatened us for so long has, at last, just fallen on our heads.
Yet it is not a sword, but the habitual weapon of Mr. Marx, a heap of
filth [un tas d’ordures]’) seems to recognize the unsatisfactory charac-
ter of Marx’s pamphlet, considered as a response to the issues the
Sonvilliers Circular had raised. Carlo Cafiero, too, dismissed the General
Council’s pamphlet as merely ‘washing dirty linen in public’ (a reference
to its publicizing several hitherto secret or private documents) instead
of directly defending its position. Yet Bakunin’s ‘Response’ buries the
issues still further by treating Les Pretendues scissions as nothing more
than a personal attack on him (which it was not). In their eagerness to
bury the issues separating them and to engage instead in personal




polemic, Marx and Bakunin were beginning to resemble each other.
For what Marx thought, we must turn yet again to his correspondence
of the period. In November 1871 we find him writing to Bolte a resume
of the whole contretemps.

At the end of 1868 the Russian, Bakunin, joined the
International with the aim of forming inside it a second
international under the name of Alliance of Socialist
Democracy, with himself as leader. A man devoid of
theoretical knowledge, he claimed that this separate body
was to represent the scientific propaganda of the International,
and that this propaganda was to become the special function
of the second international within the International.

His programme was a mish-mash [ein Mischmasch]
superficially scraped together from right and left - EQUALITY
OF CLASSES (!), abolition of the right of inheritance as the
starting point of the social movement (Saint-Simonist nonsense),
atheism dictated as a dogma to the members etc., and as the
main dogma (Proudhonist) abstention from the political
movement.

This children’s story found favour (and still has a certain
hold) in Italy and Spain, where the real conditions of the
workers’ movement are as yet little developed, and among a
few, vain, ambitious, empty doctrinaires in French Switzerland
and Belgium. . .

For Mr. Bakunin the doctrine (the rubbish he has scraped
together from Proudhon, St. Simon etc.) was and is a
secondary matter - merely a means to his personal self-
assertion. Though a nonentity theoretically, he is in his
element as an intriguer.²⁰⁶

Marx goes on to indicate on the one hand that he was the victim of a
conspiracy to paint the General Council ‘pan-German’ and on the other
hand that publicity of the Nechaev trial ‘will expose [Bakunin’s] infa-
mous . . . activities’ in Russia, ‘a country where they know how to
estimate Bakunin, and where my book on Capital is just now being
published’.²⁰⁷ This kind of juxtaposition - and this kind of reasoning -
is an instance (one of many) of how a theoretical dispute was being
reduced to the level of a personal polemic. Yet Marx, prior to The
Hague Congress, at another level estimated the balance of forces in the
International accurately enough (if somewhat optimistically):

England, the United States, Germany, Denmark, Holland, Austria,
the majority of the French groups, the Italians of the North,

Sicilians and Romans, the overwhelming majority of the Swiss




Romande, all of German Switzerland, and the Russians in Russia
(whom one has to distinguish from some Russians abroad who
are tied to Bakunin) go along with the General Council.

On the other side, the Jura Federation in Switzerland (that
is the men of the Alliance who hide behind this name), Naples,
perhaps Spain, a part of Belgium, and some groups of French
refugees. . .all constitute the opposition camp. Such a split, not
too dangerous in itself, could become awkward at a certain
point, as we must march against the common enemy with
closed ranks. . .²⁰⁸

The ranks, however, were never to close. Instead, the General Council
and the Jura Federation entered the lists against each other. Each
accused the other of betraying the International; each campaigned
actively for delegates at the forthcoming Congress. On the eve of The
Hague Congress, Marx wrote to Kugelmann that he knew it would be
‘a matter of life and death to the International; and before I die I want
at least to preserve it from disintegrating elements’.²⁰⁹ Since picking the
site of a Congress, a task which could make all the difference to its
outcome and proceedings, was now the prerogative of the General
Council, Marx was able to benefit from the advantage this gave him;
Geneva was carefully avoided and The Hague selected as the venue of
the next Congress.²¹⁰ Yet it was in the selection of suitably disposed
delegates to The Hague, particularly Italian delegates, that Bakunin
jettisoned his own strength. The Bologna Congress of the Romagna
sections, held in March 1872, carried Bakunin’s anti-authoritarianism
just one step too far; it resolved to recognize both the London General
Council and the Jura Federation as mere ‘offices of correspondence
and statistics’, thereby achieving the dubious distinction of horrifying
both Marx and Bakunin - Marx because this move fragmented the
International still further, Bakunin because the Italians had implied
that the Jura Federation and the General Council were rivals, the very
point Marx had been trying to establish in order to marshal support
for Bakunin’s expulsion from the International.²¹¹

But this was a mere foretaste. The first National Congress of Italian
Socialism, which was held at Rimini in August 1872, resolved unani-
mously that the London Conference of 1871 ’s ‘special authoritarian
doctrine’, the General Council’s ‘slander and mystification’, the ‘indig-
nity’ of its circular, Les Pretendues scissions, all revealed its ‘lust for
authority’; it resolved that the General Council’s decision to convene
at The Hague was a deliberate move to exclude the delegates of the
‘revolutionary’ countries (as indeed it was); and it resolved that for
these reasons

the Italian federation of the International . . . breaks all solidarity
with the General Council of London .. . and proposes to all those




sections who do not share the authoritarian principles of the
General Council to send their representatives on September
2nd 1872 not to The Hague but to Neuchatel in Switzerland,
for the purpose of opening. . . [an] anti-authoritarian
Congress.²¹²

This, of course, was a disaster for Bakunin, who needed every vote at
The Hague he could get; it is possible that by this resolution - which
they proceeded to put into effect - the Italians, carried away by their
own (or Bakunin’s) logic, cost him his majority there.

Yet even apart from this malentendu the advantage lay throughout
with the General Council. The choice of venue, the composition of the
delegates, and indeed the absence at The Hague of much of the usual
conflict and haggling over the credentials of those who appeared there -
all these assured Marx of support. The General Council had won the
battle for delegates sans mot dire, before the Fifth (and in a way final)
Congress so much as convened. Marx even took the unprecedented step
of attending The Hague Congress himself, though Bakunin, unaccount-
ably, did not. Bakunin, perhaps, sensed what would happen there; all
the resolutions the General Council sponsored carried comfortably,
even though one, at least, was dubious and another completely un-
expected. The Congress handsomely defeated a Bakuninist proposal to
convert the General Council into a central office for correspondence
and statistics; instead, the Council won a motion incorporating Resol-
ution IX of the London Conference into the Rules of the International.
Next, a committee of enquiry headed by Engels’s former operative in
Italy, Theodor Cuno, reported that Bakunin had headed a secret
organization, the Alliance for Socialist Democracy, an imperium in
imperio, which had since its inception violated the spirit and the letter
of the International;²¹³ and, as the logical capstone to this report that
Marx had desired, Bakunin and Guillaume were expelled from the
International. (Their ally Schwitzguebel escaped condemnation narrowly
and left of his own accord.) It was resolved, on rather slender evidence,
that Bakunin’s Alliance had aimed by its secret organization to impose
a sectarian programme on the International; and that this worked
against the very principles for which the International stood by virtue
of its division of Alliance sympathizers ‘into two castes: the initiated
and the uninitiated ... the latter designed to be led by the [former] by
means of an organization whose very existence is unknown to them’.
The report itself²¹⁴ finds ‘insufficient evidence’ for the existence of the
Alliance after 1869, yet manages to condemn Bakunin et al. for belong-
ing to it. It seems that Marx swayed the committee by producing -
behind closed doors - a copy of a letter from Nechaev to a Russian
publisher who had advanced Bakunin money to translate Marx’s Capital
(vol. i) into Russian, which threatened reprisals if he should ask Bakunin




to return the money. Marx, counting on foreknowledge of what Nech-
aev’s idea of reprisals meant, had deliberately procured this letter
(which Bakunin may not even have known about) and deliberately had
held it back until it could be produced as the last straw in a campaign
to discredit Bakunin once and for all.²¹⁵ Marx’s underhanded action has
been defended by Nicholaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen:

The International must not be a screen for activities a la
Nechaev. Even if Bakunin himself were incapable of drawing
the practical consequences of his own teaching, as Nechaev
had done, the Nechaev affair had demonstrated that people
might always be found who would take his theories seriously.

One crime like Nechaev’s carried out in Europe in the name of
the International would suffice to deal the workers’ cause a
reeling blow. The struggle against Bakunin had become a
matter of life and death for the International.²¹⁶

This seems accurate as a paraphrase of Marx’s thinking; yet even though
Marx for these reasons presumably considered any means justified in
order to rid the International of Bakunin, the accusation he used to
sway the committee was not shown to have had anything to do with
the Alliance, and the committee, without doubt, exceeded its com-
petence in including consideration of it.

It was at this point - the vendetta against Bakunin having been
concluded - that Engels, backed by Marx, Longuet and (some) other
members of the General Council, produced the bombshell of The Hague
Congress, moving that the seat of the General Council be moved to New
York. This motion, which was completely unexpected by the assembled
delegates, was carried amid considerable (and understandable) confusion.
Marx had destroyed the International in order to save it; why he did so
has remained a matter of considerable controversy ever since.

Marx’s motives to some extent can be reconstructed, but only on the
assumption that his almost melodramatic move actually was what it
appeared to be, a way of effectively killing off the International. The
new American General Council, which in its earlier guise as the North
American National Federal Council had already weathered a serious
and divisive split, was valiantly to go through Congresses of the Inter-
national in the USA, but these were fewer in number, and indeed less
in importance, than those of the anti-authoritarian (anarchist) Inter-
national in Europe, which functioned much more successfully. If Marx
suspected that the transplanted International would atrophy in the
USA, what caused him to produce his coup de grace? The answer has
several levels. To begin with, dissension within the General Council,
which by 1872 was not at all the solid Marxist bloc the anarchists
imagined it to be, played a part. One member, Hales, had long flirted




with the Bakuninists; others, outraged at Marx’s defence of the Paris
Commune, had resigned en bloc; and Marx had felt obliged to make
up the balance by co-opting Blanquist refugees from the Commune to
sit on the General Council. Yet a choice between Blanquists and Baku-
ninists as bellwethers for the International was in Marx’s eyes no choice
at all, since both groups were conspiratorialists with a taste for ‘bar-
ricadology’ which Marx considered irresponsible. In any tug of war
between London and Switzerland about the site of the General Council,
the International itself would become discredited as a conspiratorial
clique. Yet other locations were no more promising. Brussels and Paris
could be ruled out because of the dangers of reaction in the wake of
the suppression of the Commune, as indeed could Berlin. Madrid or
Geneva would have meant Bakuninism regnant. New York at least
would be safe from European governments and Bakuninists alike; so,
at this level, Marx’s dealing of his controversial death-blow can be
seen to have been carefully calculated. There are other reasons, other
levels, too. Marx, whose health was worsening, saw more point in
completing Capital than in continuing to wear himself out in pursuit
of what had become a lost cause. He described The Hague Congress
in advance as ‘the end of my slavery. Then I shall become a free man;
I shall accept no further administrative function’.²¹⁷

We are led, then, to consideration of the reasons why the Inter-
national was by 1872 a lost cause. The reasons must be sought further
back. The Hague Congress was preceded (and, in truth, succeeded) by
a confused pattern of decline, not all of it reducible to the Marx-
Bakunin dispute but much of it exacerbated by the conflict with the
Bakuninists. Two points, in particular, need to be borne in mind. First,
the Marx-Bakunin dispute was superimposed upon a pattern of repres-
sion following the Paris Commune. As Morgan has reminded us, ‘the
International’s rival “Marxist” and “Bakuninist” factions might have
left to fight out their struggle in complete obscurity if the International
had not been suddenly and firmly associated with the Commune’²¹⁸ of
1871. This association - which both Marx and Bakunin encouraged -
dealt the International a blow from which it never really recovered.
Second, in considering the Marx-Bakunin dispute, we must in Raymond
Postgate’s words ‘imagine this violent polemic accompanied by a
continuous dwindling of the sections, [by] decay, and [by] the erection
of false sections for election purposes. We are present at the death of