Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

, T1Q

a movement .

The International: a post-mortem

‘We always knew the bubble would burst,’ said Engels in 1873, in a cel-
ebrated a posteriori judgment;²²⁰ and, knowing that this would happen,




it was not a matter of delaying the catastrophe but taking care
that the International emerged from it pure and unadulterated.. .
if we had come out in a conciliatory way at The Hague, if we
had hushed up. . .the split - what would have been the result?

The sectarians, especially the Bakuninists, would have had another
year in which to perpetuate, in the name of the International, still
greater stupidities and inanities; the workers of the most developed
countries would have turned away in disgust; the bubble would
not have burst, but, pierced by pinpricks, would have slowly
collapsed, and the next Congress. . .would have turned into the
most sordid personal row, because principles would have been
already abandoned at The Hague. Then the International would
have gone to pieces...

Engels (putting to one side the exculpatory confusion of foreknowledge
and hindsight that runs through this letter) was probably right; by
1872 a point of no return had been reached, and the character of the
International had changed irreversibly. In the industrialized countries
it had lost its muscle; in the areas where it could spread (and was
spreading) it could do so only under the aegis of Bakuninism - only at
the cost, that is, of decentralization and of Bakunin’s obsession with
conspiratorialism.

Marx’s worst fears, in other words, had been realized; the fight
against what he thought of as revolutionary sectarianism had proved
unsuccessful; the battle-lines, always beleaguered, had finally given
way. Yet Marx, who at first had had no choice but to keep the Inter-
national open-ended, and to avoid brow-beating delegates, had himself
given way; he finally had converted the International into a dogmatic
forum in response to Bakunin, and had done so, indeed, in such a way
as to realize many of Bakunin’s worst fears. By employing unsavoury
strategems worthy of Bakunin himself, Marx had by 1872 reinforced
the anarchists’ belief that he had ‘authoritarian’ leanings, and - much
more importantly, in the long run - he had done much to guarantee in
advance that future Internationals would have to be either ludicrously
ineffective or more ideologically monolithic than the first. We may be
present at the death of a movement, as Postgate thought; yet, to use
an image of which Marx was perhaps inordinately fond, the death-throes
of one kind of movement may affect the birth-pangs of another.

Could all this have been avoided? The question can only be answered
with reference to the history of the International, and of the Marx-
Bakunin dispute within it, and this is so for two main reasons. First, the
idea that the International from its very inception somehow bore the
seeds of its final crisis is supportable only to a very limited extent, and
makes sense, as we shall see, only if applied to the fissiparous tendencies
that were apparent from the outset.²²¹ What concerns us here is the




way in which Marx endeavoured - vainly, as it turned out - to manage
and control these tendencies; and this leads to our second point, that
whatever doctrinaire tendencies Marx exhibited in the course of his
donnybrook with Bakunin were themselves not pre-ordained. Marx’s
prior experiences in and credentials from the Communist League had
in no way marked him as doctrinaire in any obvious sense (although he
was not of an amiable or tolerant disposition and his personal intoler-
ance was notorious). He had resigned from the Central Council of the
League for irreproachably gradualist reasons, and it is worth reminding
ourselves of them since they were to be raised in another form in the
course of his dispute with Bakunin.

The minority [Marx had written] have substituted the dogmatic
spirit for the critical, the idealist interpretation of events for the
materialist. Simple will-power, instead of the true relations of
things, has become the motive force of the revolution. While we
say to the working people, ‘You will have to go through fifteen,
twenty, twenty-five years of civil wars, and wars between nations
not only to change existing conditions but to change yourselves
and make yourselves worthy of political power,’ you on the
other hand, say ‘We ought to get power at once, or else give up
the fight.’ While we draw the attention of the German workman
to the undeveloped state of the proletariat in Germany, you
flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German
artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without
doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats make
a fetish of the word ‘people’ you make one of the word ‘proletariat.’
Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for revolutionary
action.²²²

It might have been expected from such a farewell to extremism that
Marx would be if anything a moderating influence on the diverse sects
that originated and animated the International; a voice of moderation
was in 1864 certainly needed. Marx considered that the purpose of the
International would be that of combating the kind of conspiratorialism
and sectarianism that (in Marx’s view) had rent apart and stymied the
Communist League. Marx always thought of the International as a
centrifugal force that existed in order to counteract the centripetal
tendencies that in fact eventually helped break it apart; he had hoped
- vainly, as it turned out by 1872 - that open workers’ associations,
working together and in tandem in the International, would eventually
displace conspirators and sectarians (as Marx thought of them) once
and for all. But by 1872 Bakuninists could be out-manoeuvred only
with Blanquists: one set of conspirators and sectarians only by using
another. The International had defeated its own purpose; having




begun life in 1864 as an attempt at merging together labour movements
(which were not necessarily socialist) and socialist political associations
(which were not necessarily rooted in the working class), the Inter-
national by 1872 had ceased to be the kind of forum where these (and
other) divergent tendencies might be consolidated. To look at the
International in this light is to see that all attempts at consolidation
were thwarted, not just by the Bakuninists and ‘Alliancists’ (who were,
after all, comparative latecomers) but also by the Proudhonists (who
were not) and other groups - reformist trade unionists, Chartists,
Owenites, positivists, freemasons, Lassalleans, co-operators of the
Schulze-Delitsch type, Mazzinian democratic nationalists, Blanquist
conspirators and all the rest. Freymond and Molnar’s excellent sum-
ming up reminds us of

how great a distance separated the Jura watch-maker.. . from
the Parisian. . .disciple of Proudhon, the London trade-unionist
from the Geneva bricklayer, and the Barcelona weaver from the
Milanese follower of Mazzini. And an abyss separated all these
workers from revolutionary communists such as Marx and
Engels.²²³

The heterogeneity of these groups would have been the strength and the
weakness of the International, Bakunin or no Bakunin; and it is raised
here not as a way of minimizing the Marx-Bakunin conflict but simply
as a way of recalling its context. One point is clear and fundamental. If,
to Marx, the International was necessary, defensible and vindicated to
the extent that it transcended working-class sectarianism and particu-
larism, to Bakunin the Internationa] was ‘authoritarian’, therefore
unconscionable to the same extent. Unity at the price of dictatorship
was to Bakunin not worth striving for; it would either not hasten the
revolution or bring about a revolution run on authoritarian lines. In
either event it would run counter to the only goals - those of freedom
and decentralization - that had ever justified revolution (or the Inter-
national) in the first place.

Marx’s point of view was not a new one; but it was very different.
He believed, in the words of his letter to Bolte, that

the development of socialist sectarianism and that of the real
labour movement always stand in inverse relationship to each
other. So long as the sects are justified (historically) the working
class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement. As
soon as it has obtained this maturity, all sects are essentially
reactionary.²²⁴

To point to the history of the International as something that vindicates




this idea would be to accept too much on faith. One of the precipitating
causes of the demise of the International, after all, was the Paris Com-
mune; and it is the Paris Commune that reveals, dramatically, what is
wrong with Marx’s much too formulaic view of working-class organ-
ization. If the ‘real movement’ of the working class was embodied in
or expressed by the International vis-a-vis what Marx called the ‘sects’,
how could the most celebrated working-class uprising of the nineteenth
century take place without much more than a sidelong glance at the
International? The Commune put Marx in a difficult position, as he
himself was aware; he was to admit in The Critique of the Gotha
Programme that ‘the International was no longer practicable in its
first historic form after the fall of the Paris Commune’.²²⁵ In truth
the International was no longer practicable in this form after its rise.
The further irony is that the International - every mention of which
by the bourgeois press was followed by Marx, avidly-as a result of the
Commune was regarded by the same press as the kind of underground
terrorist organization Bakunin would have liked it to be. That this
view could not have been less accurate is beside the point; and that
Marx in fact had his private reservations about the Commune - he
regarded it as foolhardy and incapable of surviving - is beside the
point too, since its very arrival put Marx in a difficult position. He
could not have avoided coming out, publicly and brazenly, in its
defence (not least because of the de-institutionalization of political
power the Commune represented); but he knew what defending the
Commune would mean. The Civil War in France needed the imprimatur
of the General Council, the very General Council that by now was
restive and chafing at the bit; to obtain this imprimatur meant splitting
the General Council and tearing apart even further the tattered remnants
of unity in an International that was already beginning to split at the
seams. Nor was this all. Marx’s defence and sanction of the Commune
earned him the very reputation as ‘red terrorist Doctor’ he feared
would damage the International irreparably; and here, too, his fears
turned out to be justified. Once the International, as a result of the
Commune and Marx’s defence of the Commune, had become tarred
with the brush of conspiratorialism and terrorism, the wheel in a real
sense had turned full circle, since Marx not only considered that con-
spiratorialism and terrorism should be eschewed in principle and in
practice by the International, but also that to combat them was the
very raison d’etre of the International. The association between Inter-
nationalism, conspiracy and terrorism was made, moreover, just as
Bakuninism looked most threatening, and at the very time when the
sinister escapades of Nechaev were coming to light.

It is the convergence or coalescence of all these developments that
helps explain what happened subsequently. The balance of forces in
the Marx-Bakunin dispute shifted irreversibly, as indeed did the meaning




of the terms used in the arguments, as a result of the Commune - an
uprising which, ironically enough, had been instigated in the name of
neither Marx nor Bakunin, and which owed very little to anything
either of them had said or done. Its effect on both Marx and Bakunin
was, however, enormous, in an unsettling kind of way. It was in the
immediate wake of the Commune that the London Conference of the
General Council imposed organizational (and ideological) measures of
unprecedented rigidity on all sections of the International and arrogated
to itself unprecedented powers. These measures, from Marx’s point
of view, were in the nature of a last-ditch attempt to create, or re-
create, unity at a time when the International looked weak enough to
succumb to external pressure; Marx’s worst fear-that a once promising
political movement of the working class would, after everything,
buckle inwards and collapse - was on the point of being realized, and
only emergency measures might save it. From Bakunin’s point of view
the measures Marx thought were called for amounted to proof positive
of what he had suspected all along: the General Council’s (and Marx’s)
‘authoritarian’, ‘dictatorial’ tendencies. Marx’s attempt to forestall the
realization of his worst fears provoked and became the occasion of
Bakunin’s worst fears. Bakunin had had his suspicions confirmed; he
could now feel that he had been right all along. When he acted on his
perception, the measures taken had the by now unavoidable effect of
confirming and reconfirming Marx’s worst suspicions about him. From
this point onwards, the controversy could only feed on itself.

To see that we are by now in the presence of what might be termed,
in Hegelian language, a ‘bad infinite’ is to appreciate how a crucially
important feature of the Marx-Bakunin dispute is to be interpreted.
That each party caricatured the features of the other has often been
noticed; that the mutual caricaturing had a certain pattern to it (as
does all caricature), however, has but rarely been addressed. The
pattern is not just one of wilful exaggeration, although this certainly
played a part and has often been remarked; Bakunin’s obsessive views
of the General Council as a monolithic phalanx of authoritarian com-
munists with an unshakeable, unreasoning belief in state centralization,
or as a pedantocracy that concealed behind endless layers of theorizing
its own manque de volonte is a case in point; Marx’s portrayal of the
Jura Federation as the unwitting tool of Bakunin’s ubiquitous, sectar-
ian, dictatorial and Jesuitical Alliance, which in turn because of its
disruptive tendencies was an unwitting tool of the forces of reaction,
is another. That both views are exaggerated is easily pointed out. (On
hearing of his expulsion at The Hague, Bakunin characterized the
General Council as ‘a state, a government, a universal dictatorship! The
dream of Gregory VII, of Boniface VIII, of Charles V and Napoleon is
reproduced in new forms but ever with the same pretensions, in the
camp of social democracy!’)²²⁶ In reality the General Council was no




pan-German agency guided by a brain like Bismarck’s; nor was it under
Marx’s thumb as much as Bakunin (or, at times, Marx himself) liked to
imagine. Marx pointed out in the debate on the General Council at The
Hague Congress that the Council had no army, no budget ‘but only
moral force’ and that it would be impotent without ‘the consent of the
entire Association’²²⁷ -consent the dispute had made impossible to get.
The more monolithic Bakunin thought the General Council was, the
more divided it was in reality; but this no longer mattered. Much the
same is true of Marx’s accusations of Bakunin, who in fact was a
singularly inept conspirator, easily taken in, easily swayed and easily
distracted. What Marx characterized as his campaign of disruption was
in fact marked by numerous mistakes and blunders; Bakunin made
himself an easy target.

In essence, each party in the dispute attributed to the other a group
of followers who had a clear understanding of what was at stake in the
confrontation (the Alliancists and General Council members respect-
ively), yet neither group has any counterpart in reality. The point here,
however, is not just that Marx and Bakunin, in making similarly exag-
gerated charges, came to resemble each other; it is that the beliefs of
each about the other came to displace the realities. In politics, as in
psychoanalysis, beliefs and feelings in a sense become facts, and ‘object-
ivity’ is breached. Bakunin’s belief in the General Council as a disci-
plined ‘pan-German’ phalanx of authoritarians guided by a Bismarckian
brain came to matter in this debate more than the reality did, just as
Marx’s belief in the existence of a ubiquitous conspiratorial Alliance
masterminded by Bakunin and bent upon destroying the International
from within mattered more in the debate than the reality did - although
the reality in this case would be impossible to trace. Each party assumed
the worst and acted on this perception; each party’s view of the other
sought (and found) its own confirmation. It is this, indeed, that lends a
certain symmetry to the debate; sometimes the very arguments used in
it feed on each other. (Bakunin would commonly refer to the Tsar of
all the Russians as a German, or a Prussian import; Marx claimed that
‘Prussianism as such has never existed and cannot exist other than in
alliance and in subservience to Russia.’)²²⁸

An approach to the Marx-Bakunin conflict that stresses each pro-
tagonist’s changing perception of the other is more satisfactory, it
seems, than the kind of approach that rests content with pointing out
that each protagonist was making a calculated ‘bid’ for ‘power’, or
that each wished to impress the International into his own mould, or
that each made exaggerated - or similarly exaggerated - claims. The
latter kind of approach begs too many awkward questions and finally
explains very little; yet even the former approach, whatever its intrinsic
superiority, is insufficient to explain the outcome of the conflict,
however much light it may shed on its form. What needs to be explained




is why the Marx-Bakunin dispute led to the break-up of the Inter-
national, and why this happened when it happened. What translated
a background cause of disunity into a precipitating cause of decline
was the Paris Commune - not simply because of the repressive measures
from various governments that were aimed, in the aftermath of the
Commune, at the International, but also because the aftermath of the
Commune refocused the debate between Marx and Bakunin. After the
Commune, and after the 1871 London Conference, Marx and Bakunin’s
worst fears and horrible imaginings of each other, exaggerated as they
were, appeared to have the ring of truth - not for the first time, admit-
tedly, but nevertheless now more than ever they seemed to have been
borne out. The General Council looked more ‘authoritarian’ and
‘dictatorial’ (and indeed was so); Bakunin’s Alliance looked more
threatening (and was so too). The Commune - albeit for all the wrong
reasons - made the International famous, or notorious; but it also
sounded the International’s death knell.

Marx and Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy

Late in 1874 Marx read Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy to help teach
himself Russian, and in doing so could not resist the temptation -
fortunately for us - to copy into a notebook extracts (in Russian) from
Bakunin’s book, interspersing them with comments (in German) of his
own. Marx’s conspectus has survived, and is of considerable interest; it
serves to sum up some of the issues dividing him from Bakunin, two
years before Bakunin’s death, and to distil, as in a concentrate, some of
Marx’s objections to Bakuninism.

Statism and Anarchy, one of Bakunin’s longer works, is also one of
his most important; it was published among the Russian colony in
Geneva in 1873 with the subtitle ‘The Struggle of the Two Parties in
the International Working Men’s Association’,²²⁹ although this subtitle
does not adequately summarize its contents. Statism and Anarchy also
expresses Bakunin’s thoughts - with the numerous digressions to which
the reader of Bakunin becomes accustomed - on contemporary Russian
developments, particularly the growth of Russian populism, on which it
was intended to have some influence. In this, Bakunin’s book was
largely successful; Statism and Anarchy was from all accounts very
influential among the Russian narodniki of the 1870s, and Axelrod was
to admit having been profoundly affected by its arguments.²³⁰

These arguments take the form of attempting to link Bakunin’s
struggle with Marx in the International with the struggle of the Slav
peoples against German domination; each struggle symbolizes the
movement of revolution against the obduracy of reaction. Germany
had become the centre of reaction, not least in its authoritarian socialism;




pan-Germanism and statism are one and the same thing, since the
Germans are impregnated with the spirit of obedience and Obrigkeit,
of slavishness and docility; of all peoples, they are the least receptive
to the spirit of liberty. Romance and Slavic peoples form the opposite
end of the spectrum; they are the keepers of the flame, the guardians
of the sacred spirit of revolt, and they alone can form the vanguard of
those forces unalterably opposed to the forces of centralization which
otherwise will ‘pan-Germanize’ Europe by means of conquest. The
struggle between Bakunin and Marx in the International is to be inter-
preted in the light of this larger, polar contrast; Marx and his pan-
German allies, who could not see beyond the need to centralize the
forces of the proletariat in order to seize state power, are in effect the
unwitting dupes of the larger historical tendency of centralization, to
which the Slav genius stands opposed by its very nature. Its instincts
need only to be galvanized by anti-authoritarian socialism if the process
of centralization, authoritarianism, and Germanic systemization, which
Marx had carried into the revolutionary camp, was not to inaugurate a
period of official dictation and of despair and resignation. Statism and
Anarchy is not one of Bakunin’s more rousing works, however; on the
contrary, the Slav genius is invoked as a kind of last-ditch line of de-
fence against those forces Bakunin, by now, had come to believe were
triumphant.

Yet several familiar themes are sounded in Statism and Anarchy,
among them opposition to organization from top to bottom as a means
of telling people - particularly those who stood in least need of such
arrogant regimentation - how they ought to conduct themselves; and
the idea that revolution will proceed not from those who were more
‘advanced’ on Marx’s dehumanizing scale, the pan-German proletariat,
but will proceed from the lower depths, from the downtrodden, the
oppressed, the exemplary. Political action, Bakunin insists all over again,
reeks of dictatorship; and political action on the part of revolutionaries
reeks of revolutionary dictatorship, which, being a contradiction in
terms, amounts in effect to no revolution at all. Marx’s concept of the
dictatorship of the proletariat (which Bakunin does not distinguish
from that of Blanqui, or indeed from that of Lassalle) is singled out for
scornful treatment. Bakunin believed that

former workers.. .as soon as they have become rulers and

representatives, cease to be workers ... and look down on the

whole common workers’ world from the height of the state.

They will no longer represent the common people but only their

own claims to rule them.

Bakunin’s argument can, of course, be traced back to Proudhon’s
‘homme elu, homme foutu’; and Proudhonist and Bakuninist alike




would have been scandalized by Marx’s response. Workers, said Marx,
as representatives or governors, cease to be workers

as little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he
becomes a municipal councillor... If our Bakunin were au
courant, if only with the position of a manager in a workers’
co-operative factory, all his nightmares about domination would
go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the
administrative function can assume in a workers’ state, if he wants
to call it thus.. ,²³¹

Bakunin had posed the rhetorical question, ‘What does it mean, the
proletariat raised to the position of the ruling class?’ and whether ‘the
proletariat as a whole’ would be at the head of the government. Marx
responds by asking whether

in a trade union, for example, does the whole union form its
executive committee? Will all division of labour cease in the
factory, and will the various functions which correspond to
this division of labour, cease? And, in Bakunin’s constitution,
de bas en haut, will all go to the top? In which case there will
be no bottom.²³²

Bakunin accused Marx of wanting the domination of the people by a
small number of elected representatives; Marx replies that such a view is
‘asinine’:

This is democratic verbiage, political drivel! An election is a
political form, which is present even in the smallest Russian
commune and in the artel. The character of the election does
not depend on this name, but on the economic basis, the
economic relations of the electors, and as soon as the functions
[in question] have ceased to be political ones, then there exists
1.) no governmental function, 2.) the distribution of general
functions has become a business matter which does not result
in anyone’s domination, and 3.) election has nothing of its
present political character.²³³

Bakunin had protested that

the so-called people’s state will be nothing but the despotic
guidance of the mass of the people by a new and numerically
very small aristocracy of genuine or sham scientists. Since the
people are not learned or scientific they will be freed from the
cares of government and entirely regimented into a common
herd. A fine liberation!,




Marx points out in reply that ‘the class rule of the workers over the
strata of the old world with whom they have been fighting can only
exist as long as the economic basis of class existence is not destroyed’.
Bakunin asks, ‘What does it mean, the proletariat raised to the position
of the ruling class?’; Marx answers:

it means that the proletariat, instead of struggling in isolation
against the economically privileged classes, has acquired
sufficient strength and organization to employ general means
of coercion in the struggle against them. But it can only use the
kind of means that destroy its own character as a wage-earner
[Marx uses the word salariat] and thus its own character as a
class. Thus its domination ends with its complete victory, since
its class character has disappeared.²³⁴

We shall return to this formulation, which is of a piece with those of
‘On the Jewish Question’ and the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, presently; for the time being we need note only that Marx, who
had ridiculed the idea expressed in the Sonvilliers Circular that the
International in and by its free federal organization could foreshadow
the organization of future society, nevertheless believed that class-
based action on the part of the revolutionary proletariat outlined in
advance the proletariat’s exercise of political power, for the sake of
suppressing its enemies.

Since the proletariat, during the period of the struggle for the
destruction of the old society still acts on the basis of the old
society, and hence still gives to the movement political forms
which more or less correspond to it, it has not yet reached its
definite organization during its period of struggle. From this,

Bakunin concludes that it would be better for the proletariat to
do nothing at all, that it should await the day of general
liquidation, the last judgment.²³⁵

The ‘conspectus’ is an important, if overlooked, source on what a
Marxist politics involves, not least because of what it says about the
relationship between proletarian dictatorship and the peasantry. If the
peasant is to be won over for the revolution, Marx argues against
Bakunin, the proletariat in power

must not hit the peasant over the head, as it would e.g. by
proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or the
abolition of his property. .. Still less should small-holding
property be strengthened, by the enlargement of the peasant
allotment simply through peasant annexation of the larger




estates, as in Bakunin’s revolutionary campaign. .. .if [a radical
social revolution] is to have any chance of victory, it must be
able to do as much immediately for the peasants as the French
bourgeoisie, mutatis mutandis did in its revolution for the
peasants in France of that time. A fine idea, that the rule of
labour involves the subjugation of land labour!²³⁶