The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict

[chlamor]

The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict

First Published: What's Next, December 2003;

“Again, I’m not enough of a Marx scholar to pretend to an authoritative judgement. My impression, for what it is worth, is that the early Marx was very much a figure of the late Enlightenment, and the later Marx was a highly authoritarian activist, and a critical analyst of capitalism, who had little to say about socialist alternatives. But those are impressions.” Noam Chomsky.

THE TEMPESTUOUS relation between Marx and Bakunin is a well known legacy of the history of western socialism. As co-members of the International Working Men’s Association, they seem to have devoted as much energy battling one another as their common enemy, the capitalist system, culminating in Marx’s successful campaign to expel Bakunin from the organization. While at times engaging in cordial relations, they nevertheless harbored uncomplimentary mutual assessments. According to Marx, Bakunin was “a man devoid of all theoretical knowledge” and was “in his element as an intriguer”,1 while Bakunin believed that “... the instinct of liberty is lacking in him [Marx]; he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian”.2

For some, the intensity of the conflict has been puzzling, given that the two authors seem to be struggling for identical goals. Convinced that capitalism is predicated on the exploitation of workers by capitalists, they were equally dedicated to fighting for a socialist society where economic classes would be abolished and all individuals would have the opportunity to develop all of their creative capacities. Hence, both envisioned socialism as eliminating the division of labor, especially between mental and manual work, and between men and women. In other words, the work process was to be transformed so that all workers would take an active role in the organization, design and implementation of it. Moreover, both argued that the oppressed must liberate themselves – one should not expect any benevolent impulses from members of the ruling, capitalist class; and to insure success, the revolution must assume an international scope. Finally, they agreed that the State was an instrument of class oppression, not some neutral organ that equitably represented everyone’s interests, and in the final analysis must be abolished. The 1871 Paris Commune offered, in their opinion, a model to be emulated.

However, their most profound point of disagreement centered on their conflicting analyses of the State. Most importantly, while Marx envisioned a transitional stage between capitalism and a fully mature communist society, which included a state in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a workers’ state), Bakunin adamantly rejected the establishment of any kind of state, including a workers’ state. In fact, this rejection is the defining principle of the school of anarchism, a term that literally translates as “no government”. For Bakunin, the only consistent, revolutionary option was to move immediately to a fully mature communist society which, both authors agreed, would be distinguished by the absence of a state. As a corollary to this disagreement, Marx supported attempts by independently organized workers to pursue their class interests by pressing for reforms within the bourgeois state – for example, for a reduction in the length of the working day – arguing that such victories would promote class consciousness, whereas Bakunin contested this proposal on the grounds that any political engagement whatsoever would constitute a perversion of the revolutionary movement and instead advocated complete abstention from the bourgeois political arena. The proper form of a revolutionary organization was also a point of dispute. Bakunin enthusiastically created secret societies as catalysts for a revolutionary upsurge while Marx flatly rejected them. Finally, the two contested the proper role of the peasants in a revolutionary movement. Bakunin argued that they might play a leading role while Marx designated the proletariat as the exclusive, leading revolutionary agent.

Because of the preponderance of the points of agreement, some commentators have resorted to personality flaws to account for the interminable disharmony that plagued their relation. For example, Bakunin has been accused of being both anti-Semitic and anti-Germanic while Marx has been considered to suffer from an incurable strain of rigid authoritarianism. A more promising line of explanation of their intractable differences, however, lies in an investigation into the profoundly divergent philosophical frameworks that served as the points of departure for their respective political analyses. As will be shown below, their foundational concepts are so incompatible that even their points of agreement are rendered more illusory than substantive.

Bakunin’s Philosophic Positions

Some of the important philosophical assumptions Bakunin employed in his approach to human reality were borrowed from the European Enlightenment, particularly the empiricist branch of this tradition, so a proper appreciation for his framework requires a brief excursion into its principles.

Having witnessed the phenomenal success of the natural sciences with such practitioners as Galileo and Newton, among others, many Enlightenment philosophers were inspired to transpose both the method and guiding assumptions of the natural sciences onto the domain of human behavior. These borrowed assumptions included the conviction that different kinds of natural objects contain their unique and defining fixed essence; objects interact with one another according to immutable mechanical laws of cause and effect; and after careful observation of individual interactions, the appropriate laws can be conclusively identified and codified. Consequently, the assumption was commonly adopted by members of the Enlightenment that humans are entirely natural creatures along the lines of other natural species and accordingly embody a unique and permanent essence and exhibit behavior that is entirely determined by natural causes. This approach was highlighted by the popular recourse to the concept of “the state of nature”. As a state that either literally or figuratively preceded the formation of organized societies, it purported to offer a glimpse into human nature in its purely “natural” state, prior to alterations resulting from the impact of society. Philosophers during this period, which coincided with the rise of capitalism, almost universally described humans as individualistic, autonomous and independent and to one degree or another strongly inclined to pursue their own self interest, in conformity with the prevailing bourgeois norms.

Bakunin deviated somewhat from this philosophic tradition by rejecting the description of humans as essentially individualistic. For example, he mocked the conception of society as originating by means of isolated, independent individuals contracting with one another, labeling this version a philosophic “fiction”, and argued instead that humans were naturally social and always lived in communities. But he profoundly subscribed to the view that humans should be regarded on the same theoretical plane as other natural objects and that consequently human behavior was governed entirely by mechanical, natural laws. The following quotations offer a sample of this outlook:

“There are a good many laws which govern it [society] without its being aware of them, but these are natural laws, inherent in the body social.... [T]hey have governed human society ever since its birth; independent of the thinking and the will of the men composing the society.”3

“[Natural laws] ... constitute our being, our whole being, physically, intellectually, and morally: we live, we breathe, we act, we think, we wish only through these laws.”4

“History and statistics prove to us that the social body, like any other natural body, obeys in its evolutions and transformations general laws which appear to be just as necessary as the laws of the physical world.”5

“Man himself is nothing but Nature.... Nature envelopes, permeates, constitutes his whole existence.”6

Bakunin’s ethics at first glance seem to be a logical corollary to his general naturalistic framework in so far as he identifies what is morally good with what is natural:

“The moral law ... is indeed an actual law ... because it emanates from the very nature of human society, the root basis of which is to be sought not in God but in animality.”7

“I speak of that justice which is based solely upon human conscience, the justice which you will rediscover deep in the conscience of everyman, even the conscience of the child and which translates itself into simple equality.”8

In other words, justice is a natural human sentiment which permanently resides in the human constitution.

Bakunin’s definition of evil, however, was not altogether consistent. On the one hand, he seems to have followed the empiricist tradition by identifying it with what is also natural: “We know very well, in any case, that what we call good and bad are always, one and the other, the natural results of natural causes, and that consequently one is as inevitable as the other.”9 On the other hand, perhaps because he found it politically advantageous, Bakunin also identified evil, not with a natural impulse or sentiment, but with what is “unnatural”, thereby creating a dualistic universe that was not entirely captured by natural laws. What lay outside these laws was the unnatural, the artificial, a domain which consequently could persevere only by constant recourse to force and coercion: “We must distinguish well between natural laws and authoritarian, arbitrary, political, religious, criminal, and civil laws which the privileged classes have established....”10

One final important component of Bakunin’s philosophic arsenal is his notion of freedom. We shall see that when Marx and Bakunin mention this term, they have in mind two entirely different concepts. Bakunin’s understanding of this term contains several important facets. For example, for Bakunin, acting freely means, above all, acting “naturally” or according to one’s natural impulses: “The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.”11 In other words, this definition rests on the conception of humans as natural creatures governed by natural laws. To act naturally is simply to be spontaneous, to be “oneself”: “Once more, Life, not science, creates life; the spontaneous action of the people themselves alone can create liberty.”12

The identification of freedom with spontaneity or impulsive behavior then leads to a second feature of Bakunin’s definition. He is embracing a conception of freedom that can be exercised by an single individual, isolated from a human community. One can act spontaneously entirely alone; it does not, for example, require a special, acquired mental capacity. Consequently, for Bakunin, freedom was an attribute of individuals, not of humans constituting a collectivity:

“Liberty ... consists in my being entitled, as a man, to obey no other man and to act only on my own judgment.”13

“Liberty is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek no sanction for their actions except their own conscience and their own reason, to determine them only of their own free will, and consequently to be responsible for them to themselves first of all, and then to society of which they are a part, but only in so far as they freely consent to be a part of it.”14

However, because he viewed humans as naturally social, at times he tried to take this understanding of freedom and demonstrate that it could operate consistently in a human community:

“I am a fanatical lover of liberty.... I do not mean that formal liberty which is dispensed, measured out, and regulated by the State.... Nor do I mean that individualist, egoist, base, and fraudulent liberty extolled by the school of Jean Jacques Rousseau and every other school of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the rights of all, represented by the State, as a limit for the rights of each.... No, I mean the only liberty worthy of the name, the liberty which implies the full development of all the material, intellectual, and moral capacities latent in everyone of us; the liberty which knows no other restrictions but those set by the laws of our own nature. Consequently there are, properly speaking, no restrictions, since these laws are not imposed upon us by any legislator from outside, alongside, or above ourselves. These laws are subjective, inherent in ourselves; they constitute the very basis of our being.... [T]hat liberty of each man which does not find another man’s freedom a boundary but confirmation and vast extension of his own; liberty through solidarity, in equality.”15

Leaving aside the question whether this formulation is consistent with his earlier versions, Bakunin is basically arguing that it is our nature to live together in equality, cooperating with one another, where no one exploits or is exploited. Hence, if I am acting naturally and consequently freely, then I am not exploiting my neighbor, thereby allowing my neighbor to live naturally and freely. In this way one individual’s freedom serves as a confirmation and extension of another. But still, this conception of freedom is grounded on the individual: “... collective liberty and prosperity exist only so far as they represent the sum of individual liberties and prosperities.”16

To summarize Bakunin’s philosophy, he is operating, by and large, within the naturalistic framework established by the empiricist current of the Enlightenment. Humans are conceived as embodying a permanently fixed nature with behavior basically determined by natural laws. This state of affairs is then identified with what is good. However, when coercion enters into the relations among people, we enter the realm of the unnatural. We are alienated from our natural condition and we lose our freedom.

The Philosophy of Marx

While Bakunin’s major theoretical assumptions were firmly rooted in materialist Enlightenment philosophy, Marx was impacted by this tradition for the most part only after it underwent a significant transformation in the hands of Hegel. Most importantly, Hegel rejected the Enlightenment conviction that humans are a natural species, conforming to the same kind of permanently fixed laws as the rest of the natural world. Instead, he postulated a vision of humanity engaged in a developmental process, constantly transforming and recreating itself in its struggle to become increasingly rational. Moreover, this undertaking was conceived as a collective endeavor since rationality, in the final analysis, is an attribute that requires, both for its original emergence and its continual exercise, the contribution of the entire species. For example, each new generation builds on the rational accomplishments of its predecessors, and in this way humans gradually succeed in creating a scientific grasp of reality. Finally, in Hegel’s opinion, this historical process culminates in a state of consummate rationality when humanity acquires self-knowledge. Here humans achieve the capacity to regulate their interactions according to conscious, rational canons and have come to understand themselves as a rational species in a collective sense.

Marx adopted Hegel’s vision of humans engaged in a collective undertaking but argued in favor of a different logic governing the process. For Hegel, the logic of history reflected the logic of human consciousness while Marx anchored the logic to a materialist substructure. In particular, for Marx, the manner in which humans go about satisfying their basic needs stamps a certain structure on the kind of society they create, the relations people have with one another, and the ideas they formulate about themselves and the surrounding world:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”17

Moreover, this economic foundation contains a certain logic that unleashes a historical movement:

“... [W]e must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely that man must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need ... leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act.”18

Like Hegel, Marx viewed this historical process as a collective endeavor since humans depend on one another both for the satisfaction of their basic physical needs and for the acquisition of higher needs:

“The object before us, to begin with, material production. Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production, is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism.”19

While Bakunin posited a fixed, natural human essence, Marx, again following Hegel’s lead, believed that human nature itself unfolded in a developmental process whereby the specific nature of one historical epoch was shed and a new nature was donned in a perpetual process of re-creation. As humans invent ever more sophisticated instruments to employ in the production process, they simultaneously transform themselves into more rational, universal individuals. At the beginning of history, the human species was hardly distinguishable from the rest of the animal kingdom; people were impulsive and lacked a conscious understanding of themselves and their environment. In other words, Bakunin’s picture of humanity as a fixed, natural species only enjoys a fleeting validity at the earliest stage of history in Marx’s perspective:

“This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from the sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population.”20

But in the course of a communist revolution, a remarkable transformation takes place: the working class seizes control of the instruments of production and, for the first time, begins to direct them according to a conscious, rational plan:

“All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.”21

Here humans have abandoned their animal-like, impulsive existence in favor of a deliberate, rational regulation of their affairs. But conscious mastery of the productive forces can only be achieved when humans work in cooperation and harmony with one another, for as long as economic classes exist with their accompanying exploitation, relations of domination will substitute for rational discussion, thereby precluding the possibility of consciously controlling the productive forces:

“First, the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals: the reason for this that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and association of these individuals.”22

For this reason, the involvement of all individuals in the conscious control of the economy is an absolute prerequisite:

“In all appropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all.”23

In stark contradiction to Bakunin, Marx believed that a successful revolution does not signal the recapturing of an original, natural essence that was stifled by the advent of the State and the creation of classes, but rather the creation of a new human being:

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”24

Thus, in the revolutionary process, the proletariat transforms itself from a passive class, following the dictates of the bourgeoisie, into a self-determining agent capable of taking the reins of history into its own hands and directing events according to a conscious plan. This represents the dawn of a new age in which individuals act collectively and consciously in determining social policy: “Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting off of all natural limitations.”25

We see, therefore, that Marx and Bakunin have developed two dramatically divergent visions of humanity. Bakunin adopted a static version of human nature, identifying it with what is physically natural while Marx posited a humanity that was undergoing maturation, leaving behind a more animal-like existence as it achieved ever higher levels of rationality and self-consciousness.

Their ethical doctrines correspondingly reflected these different conceptual frameworks. While Bakunin defined the good in terms of what is “natural,” Marx relativized ethical terms historically so that each new mode of production was seen to spawn new ethical assumptions:

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental productions as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.”26

In the context of criticizing Gilbart, a 19th century British historian of economics who claimed that deriving profit from money through interest was “naturally” just, Marx argued that there is no natural justice, i.e., no justice that is permanently valid:

“To speak here of natural justice, as Gilbart does ... is nonsense. The justice of the transactions between agents of production rests on the fact that these arise as natural consequences out of the production relationships. The juristic forms in which these economic transactions appear as willful acts of the parties concerned, as expressions of their common will and as contracts that may be enforced by law against some individual party, cannot, being mere forms, determine this content. They merely express it. This content is just whenever it corresponds, is appropriate, to the mode of production. It is unjust whenever it contradicts that mode.”27

Marx’s notion of freedom also involves a paradigm shift in relation to Bakunin and the empiricist school of the Enlightenment. There are two pivotal turns that Marx executed in departing from this tradition and in both cases he was following Hegel’s analysis.

First, for Marx, freedom does not amount to following one’s impulses or engaging in spontaneity. Impulses are a part of one’s natural constitution – they are not the product of choice. When we act impulsively, we act “naturally” and without conscious reflection. However, when we rationally and consciously direct our behavior, we ourselves, through thoughtful deliberation, determine our course of action. Marx accordingly allied himself with that sector of the Enlightenment that was represented, for example, by Kant and Rousseau, where both endorsed the autonomy of the subject:

“Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion. The work of material production can achieve this character only (1) when its social character is posited, (2) when it is of a scientific and at the same time general character, not merely human exertion as a specifically harnessed natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity regulating all the forces of nature.”28

Second, and connected with the first point, freedom is not a capacity that is exercised fundamentally by an individual; rather it is for Marx undertaken primarily by a community of people and in this respect his analysis deviates from Kant and Rousseau. Science, for example, is not a discipline that can be created or employed by an isolated individual. Humans existed for thousands of years before they were in a position to begin to engage in scientific thought, and many more thousands of years passed before they were able to create formal, scientific theories. And no progress could be made at all in this direction until humans developed the ability to build on the contributions of previous generations.

Moreover, because humans are dependent upon one another for the satisfaction of their needs, both physical and psychological, they are compelled to work with one another. Within capitalist society, rather than working with one another directly, cooperation is enforced indirectly by people competing against one another, each consulting only his or her private interest in determining which option to pursue. But such behavior entails that the structure people operate within does not become an object of critical reflection precisely because, from the vantage point of an isolated individual, it is impossible to alter. Hence, from this perspective society appears to be as inflexible as the law of gravity. But the goal of a socialist society is to invert this relation. Instead of individuals feeling powerless in the face of their own social institutions, by directly coming together through organized discourse, they place themselves in a position to alter these institutions according to their own needs and values. But this can only be accomplished when individuals are operating as a coordinated force, where they are discussing, debating and voting on which options to pursue, and where everyone has the opportunity to participate. Consequently a socialist society brings into play a new definition of freedom, and, in Marx’s opinion, a superior conception: the collective, rational determination of social policy. “Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by blind forces of Nature.”29

Consequently, Bakunin’s individualistic definition of freedom, in Marx’s opinion, remains mired in the conceptual framework of bourgeois philosophy and simply sows confusion when transplanted onto a socialist foundation:

“Liberty [i.e. the bourgeois conception], therefore is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.... But the [bourgeois] right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself.”30

In fact, this bourgeois conception of freedom, when compared to a more advanced socialist conception, is simply another form of slavery:

“Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity.”31

The differences between Marx’s and Bakunin’s definitions of freedom, in the final analysis, stem directly from their opposed philosophical presuppositions. For Bakunin, since humans are a natural species, it only makes sense to define freedom as acting naturally. But for Marx, since he regards humanity as in the process of lifting itself above nature, freedom is identified with collective, rational action.

One final cornerstone of Marx’s philosophic foundation concerns his analysis of the laws of history. As we have seen, his historical, materialist approach committed him to emphasizing the role of economic conditions in determining the course of history. But while Bakunin argued that historical laws could be reduced to natural laws, thereby implying that humans have no more control over their destiny than natural objects, Marx postulated a dynamic relation between human intentions and the surrounding economic environment:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”32

“It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.”33

Here, the material environment and human intentions conjoin to nudge, or hurl, as the case may be, history in a particular direction.

This dynamic relationship for Marx is rooted in the basic production process through which humans relate both to one another and to nature:

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both men and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal.... We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”34

In other words, the economic foundation itself upon which history rests in Marx’s system, includes the role of human consciousness as an irreducible moment.

Consequently, Marx’s materialism does not commit him to a mechanical explanation where each historical event is conclusively determined by a preceding set of conditions, as in the natural sciences. Rather, the surrounding economic conditions establish certain parameters within which human intentions operate, thereby stamping a general logic on these intentions without entirely determining them. It is impossible, for example, to create a computer when one has only stone implements at one’s disposal, but one is not compelled to create a computer even if all the necessary technology is available.

For this reason Marx insisted upon drawing a sharp boundary between nature, on the one hand, and history on the other:

“Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.”35

And for this reason he was also critical of attempts to depict history as one more branch of the natural sciences:

“Does not the history of the productive organs of man [i.e. technology], of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention [as the history of the organs of plants and animals]? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? ... The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.”36

The Dispute Over the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

With their divergent philosophical frameworks at least partially clarified, it becomes clearer why their political differences could not be resolved. Their respective political programs were tied to conflicting philosophical principles so that they were at times being pulled in diametrically opposed directions.

From Bakunin’s perspective, the most important revolutionary act aimed at the destruction of the institution of the State: “We think that the necessarily revolutionary policy of the proletariat must have for its immediate and only object the destruction of States.”37 The State, by establishing the right of inheritance, creates economic classes and thereby introduces an “unnatural” dimension in human relations, a perversity, as it were, that can only be maintained through force which, by means of the military and the police, the State monopolizes. When the State is abolished and coercion is removed, people can immediately revert back to their “natural” condition and recapture their “natural” freedom. No transitional period is required. The dictatorship of the proletariat, as another State, would only serve to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Operating within his historical, materialist framework and placing economics first, Marx countered this analysis by arguing that the State, far from creating economic classes, was itself created by them, by the clash of opposing class interests. The ruling class, in order to consolidate its economic privileges, uses the State to create laws which enshrine its monopoly on wealth in a cloak of legal legitimacy, and it establishes a military apparatus that is prepared to implement these laws by brute force.

Consequently, from Marx’s perspective, classes could persist beyond the destruction of the bourgeois state, although with some difficulty, and the bourgeoisie could survive even after its property has been expropriated. People who have enjoyed privileges are molded by them, they tend to view their elevated position as “natural,” and accordingly seldom relinquish their assets voluntarily. As history as proven, they will often fight tenaciously to reinstate them. Hence, according to Marx, if the proletariat is truly determined to succeed, it must be prepared to use decisive force, if the situation demands. Therefore the working class must establish its own coercive apparatus, i.e. state, so that it can defend its interests and enforce a genuine form of majority rule. Otherwise it will find itself at the mercy of a counterrevolution.

In criticizing Marx’s program of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bakunin raises this challenge: “If the proletariat is to be the ruling class, one may ask whom will it govern? There must be yet another proletariat that will be subjected to this new domination, this new state.”38 Here Bakunin’s reaction stems from his belief that the State itself is the creator of classes so that whoever controls the state is identified with the ruling, capitalist class while those being victimized by it are the equivalent of the proletariat. But for Marx, as we just saw, the proletarian dictatorship is not aimed at any section of the working class but at the former bourgeoisie, which simply does not disappear overnight.

Bakunin, however, proceeds: “There are about forty million Germans. Are all forty million going to be members of the government?”39 And Marx responds: “Certainly, because the thing starts with the self-government of the commune.”40

This last criticism of Bakunin is connected with a fundamental misunderstanding of Marx’s program. Operating within an a-historical framework, Bakunin was quick to assume all states are basically the same. Hence, he concluded that Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat was not essentially different from the bourgeois state: “... according to Mr. Marx’s theory the people not only must not destroy it [the State] but on the contrary must reinforce it and make it stronger....”41

But this was not Marx’s intention. In 1852, for example, in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx argued:

“This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.... Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”42

Almost twenty years later he reiterated this position: “... If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare: the next French Revolution will no longer attempt to transfer the bureaucratic-military apparatus from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution on the Continent.”43

The determination to smash the bourgeois state was a cornerstone of Marx’s political program. Its destruction opens the door to the political participation of the entire working class where everyone can have a voice in shaping public policy. If the bourgeois state were to survive, the proletariat would remain hopelessly paralyzed in a bureaucratic quagmire.

Aside from the need of the dictatorship of the proletariat to guard against the bourgeoisie, Marx envisioned the establishment of a socialist society as an arduous task, requiring a transitional period in which the groundwork could be laid for a radically new society. Not subscribing to any concept of a natural, pristine condition that could serve as a point of return, Marx conceived of the revolutionary process as one that actually involved the creation of a new human being, one that was capable of acting both socially and rationally. But such an achievement could not be secured instantaneously; considerable time and effort was required for it to mature.

“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”44

But in order for a moral and intellectual transformation in humans to take place, or, as mentioned above, “an alteration of man on a mass scale,” the proper economic conditions must exist because, as Marx persistently argued, humans are molded by their economic environment:

“He [Bakunin] understands nothing whatever about social revolution; all he knows about it is political phrases; its economic prerequisites do not exist for him. Since all the economic forms, developed or undeveloped, that have existed till now included the enslavement of the worker (whether in the shape of the wage-worker or the peasant, etc.) he presumes that a radical revolution is equally possible in all of them.”45

These economic improvements would include the abolition of the division of labor, especially between mental and manual labor, and the development of the productive forces:

“And ... this development of productive forces ... is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which ... finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.”46

Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat was also required since it could not be assumed that relations among people will immediately proceed smoothly. Time would be needed for humanity to recreate itself along more humanitarian principles. Then:

“... after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want, after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’”47

Organisational Differences

Another major point of dispute centers on the form of organization needed to wage a revolution.

Although Bakunin was a member of the International Working Men’s Association, most of his organizing efforts were concentrated on the creation of secret societies which were governed by a top-down structure. The following quote gives a sense of the role Bakunin assigned to them and why they appeared to be a sensible alternative for him:

“This organization rules out any idea of dictatorship and custodial control. But for the very establishment of the revolutionary alliance and the triumph of revolution over reaction, the unity of revolutionary thought and action must find an agent in the thick of the popular anarchy which will constitute the very life and all the energy of the revolution. That agent must be the secret universal association of international brothers.

“This association stems from the conviction that revolutions are never made by individuals or even by secret societies. They come about of themselves, produced by the force of things, the tide of events and facts.... All that a well-organized secret society can do is first to assist the birth of the revolution by sowing ideas corresponding to the instincts of the masses, then to organize, not the army of the revolution – the army must always be the people – but a kind of revolutionary general staff made up of devoted, hardworking and intelligent men, and above all of sincere friends of the people, without ambition or vanity, and capable of acting as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the popular instinct.

“Therefore there should be no vast number of these individuals.... Two or three hundred revolutionaries are enough for the largest country’s organization.”48

There are several important points contained in the above passage. First, the emphasis is placed on the instincts of the masses for the fuel that will erupt in a revolutionary upheaval. Second, there is no emphasis on organizing the masses themselves. Third, the secret societies act somewhat as midwives, assisting in the birth of the revolution but are certainly not considered the main engine of it. They engage in translating the instincts of the masses into revolutionary concepts. Fourth, precisely because these societies are in fact secret, they are not elected by the masses, but are self-appointed representatives of the masses. They themselves determine whether they are genuinely hardworking and intelligent. Using these principles as his point of departure, Bakunin then criticized Marx for failing to appreciate the crucial role of instinct or temperament:

“Likewise, Marx completely ignores a most important element in the historic development of humanity, that is, the temperament and particular character of each race and each people, a temperament and a character which are themselves the natural product of a multitude of ethnological, climatological, economic and historic causes.... Among these elements ... there is one whose action is completely decisive in the particular history of each people; it is the intensity of the spirit of revolt.... This instinct is a fact which is completely primordial and animalistic.... t is a matter of temperament rather than intellectual and moral character....”49

And for this reason there is no need to educate the masses. In order to mount a revolution, Bakunin’s self-appointed leaders must simply mix with the oppressed so that this instinct to revolt might be ignited. Then, because instincts are true and just, one can depend on them entirely to push the revolution to a successful conclusion. Consequently, Bakunin complained that Marx was actually contaminating this natural flow of events in that Marx was “ruining the workers by making theorists out of them”.50

For Marx, the revolutionary process was far more complicated, requiring ongoing education of the proletariat. For example, it was crucial for him that the proletariat acquire class consciousness because, without this consciousness, it would not come to the realization that the entire capitalist system must be abolished and replaced by a system that operates in the interests of working people, as opposed to a small, extremely wealthy minority. In other words, without class consciousness, members of the proletariat assume that their miserable condition is a function of their own individual initiative, or lack thereof, or simply bad luck, as opposed to resulting from naked class exploitation. But class consciousness is not simply gained instinctively since the bourgeoisie, for example, is relentlessly on a campaign to assert ideological hegemony by arguing that capitalism represents the highest achievement in individual freedom, fairness in the distribution of wealth, etc. For these reasons, Marx was always insistent on the importance of propaganda or education:

“To assure the success of the revolution one must have ‘unity of thought and action’. [Marx is quoting Bakunin.] The members of the International are trying to create this unity by propaganda, by discussion and the public organization of the proletariat. But all Bakunin needs is a secret organization of one hundred people, the privileged representatives of the revolutionary idea, the general staff in the background, self-appointed and commanded by the permanent ‘Citizen B’ [i.e., Bakunin].”51

But in order for education to take place, the working class must be organized, and one such venue is the trade union movement: “It is in trade unions that workers educate themselves and become socialists, because under their very eyes and every day the struggle with capital is taking place.”52

Moreover, for Marx, beyond their trade union experience, workers must be organized on a political level so that they can challenge the bourgeoisie for state power. A political party is the organ through which the working class develops and expresses its class consciousness. It is the instrument with which it articulates and promotes its own class interests in opposition to the bourgeoisie:

“Here, in order to be able to offer energetic opposition to the democratic petty bourgeois, it is above all necessary for the workers to be independently organised and centralised in clubs... The speedy organisation of at least a provincial association of the workers’ clubs is one of the most important points for the strengthening and developing of the workers’ party; the immediate consequence of the overthrow of the existing governments will be the election of a national representative assembly. Here the proletariat must see to it:

“I. that no groups of workers are barred on any pretext or by any kind of trickery on the part of local authorities or government commissioners.

“II. that everywhere workers’ candidates are put up alongside the bourgeois-democratic candidates, that they are as far as possible members of the League, and that their election is promoted by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to lay before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be bribed by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and giving the reactionaries the possibility of victory.”52a

Furthermore, from Marx’s perspective, these working class organizations must encompass the entire proletariat. The working class as a whole must become actively engaged so that the discussions and debates truly amount to “universal intercourse”. If only some are engaged in the decision-making process, then the decisions will reflect only these special interests so that the decisions will not be universally valid.

“Thus things have now come to such a pass, that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence... In all appropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, only when controlled by all.”53

Therefore, while Bakunin was intent on organizing secret societies and relying on the instincts of the masses to push the revolution to a successful conclusion, Marx was urging that the workers themselves become organized. These working class organizations not only serve as vehicles for education, but they have the potential to become powerful weapons aimed at challenging the bourgeoisie for state power. In the process of this struggle, workers not only deepen their self-consciousness as an oppressed class, but gradually acquire the realization that they are capable of seizing control of society and running it in their own interests.

Political Reforms

Bakunin consistently condemned all efforts on the part of the proletariat to improve its lot by pressing for specific legislation that seemed in its interest. The State, after all, was an unnatural excrescence, implying that any participation in it would only contaminate the revolutionary movement. Marx, on the other hand, not only regarded this political engagement as permissible but even, at times, as indispensable, provided that the conquest of state power was not on the immediate agenda, either because the objective conditions were lacking or because the proletariat had not already achieved the appropriate level of class consciousness and organization. Struggling for reforms involves a certain level of organized, self-determination and hence contributes to the transformation of the working class into active agents. Also, when these campaigns are successful, they can endow the working class with a sense of its own power, enhance its self-confidence, and consequently lead to even bolder initiatives in a revolutionary direction. Moreover, the legislation can in turn open up greater opportunities for working class self-activity, for example, by shortening the working day. Finally, as mentioned earlier, this kind of political engagement is an expression of, and contributes to, the development of class consciousness:

“On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class as a class confronts the ruling classes and tries to constrain them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt by strikes, etc., in a particular factory or even in a particular trade to compel individual capitalists to reduce the working day, is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force through an eight-hour, etc. law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say, a class movement, with the object of enforcing its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially coercive force.”54

For Marx, the development of class consciousness is a slow process that traverses a number of stages. On the lowest level, a worker who is suffering from the relations of exploitation approaches the employer as an individual, pleading for ameliorated working conditions. After meeting with failure, workers eventually come to recognize that a more promising avenue lies in collective action, for example, in organizing a union and launching a strike. Here the individual’s consciousness rises one level as he or she realizes that co-workers are also suffering and collective action can be far more effective than the pleas of an isolated individual. But these struggles can in turn lead to action on a more universal plane where one realizes that one’s plight is not simply the function of a particular workplace but emanates from the capitalist system itself. Here, individuals recognize that all workers are suffering and that by organizing the entire working class, a powerful agent is created that has the capacity to change such laws as the length of the working day; and so on. The political arena offers an important opportunity for the proletariat to embark on this path of growth.

More here:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... on-ann.htm

[chlamor]

Bakunin vs. Marx
Bakunin vs. Marx
Ulli Diemer on some of the points of departure between anarchism and Marxist-Leninism.

By Ulli Diemer

I propose in this article to examine some of the most common anarchist objections to "Marxism". The issues I shall single out are all raised in the recent works cited in the preceding article (Anarchism vs. Marxism).

All of them were raised, often for the first time, by Bakunin at the time when anarchism first emerged as a self-conscious movement defining itself in opposition to all other currents on the left. Therefore I will concentrate primarily on Bakunin in the following discussion, and on some of his differences with Marx. While I realize that Bakunin is not the only interpreter of anarchism, I think this is a valid approach for a number of reasons: (a) it is not possible to cover everything and everybody in a short essay; (b) the Bakunin/Marx split was the formative event in the history of anarchism; (c) Bakunin is still the most widely read, quoted, and admired anarchist in the anarchist movement itself; (d) many of the key anarchist objections to Marxism originate with Bakunin, and these objections continue to be used today; to the extent that it is possible to call them into question, it is possible to call into question current anarchist pre-conceptions about Marxism and to inaugurate a genuine dialogue.

How do anarchists see the Marxist/anarchist split? What are their claims?

The following beliefs seem to be generally accepted by anarchists:

1. Marxists believe in the creation of a "peoples' state" or a "workers' state"; anarchists believe in the abolition of the state.
2. "Anarchists look to a society in which real decision making involves everyone who lives in it"; Marxism instead would set up "a few discipline freaks pulling the strings on a so-called 'proletarian' dictatorship."
3. Marx was an "economic determinist"; Bakunin "emphasized the psychological subjective factors in revolution." Marxism is the ego trip of intellectuals who try to fit everything into their "theory of byzantine complexity" - dialectical materialism - which is of "doubtful usefulness" at best and which mainly serves to make it possible for Marxist leaders to establish "control over the movement".
4. Anarchists believe that revolutionary organizations should be open, egalitarian, and completely democratic; Marxists on the other hand advocate "hierarchical, power-tripping leadership", as exemplified by the vanguard party and democratic centralism.
5. The original split in the First International between the factions headed by Bakunin and Marx came over the issue of authoritarianism; Marx and Bakunin expelled from the International on trumped-up charges because Bakunin opposed Marx's dictatorial, centralized regime over the International.
6. Marxism is "authoritarian"; anarchism is "libertarian".

What of these objections?

1. The peoples' state

Perhaps it is not surprising that it is widely believed that Marx originated this concept, given the number of "Peoples' Republics", "Workers' States", etc. in the world today that call themselves "Marxist". Both the Leninists who use the concept, and the anarchists who oppose it, seem quite unaware that it is nowhere to be found in Marx's writings. Marx, on the contrary, specifically rejected it. (See for example Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.)

It is indicative of Bakunin's methods that he repeatedly accused Marx of advocating a "Peoples' State" (see for example Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchy, Vintage, 1972), an accusation that in view of his failure to cite any evidence to support it (check the sources and see if Bakunin ever offers a single quote to back up his claims) and in view of Marx's and Engels' repeated and explicit repudiation of the concept, can only be interpreted as a deliberate fabrication on Bakunin's part. And it is hardly to the credit of several generations of anarchists that they have continued to swallow Bakunin's fictions on this matter without ever bothering to look for evidence to back them up.

Marx and Engels' position on the state, while not free of ambiguities and not above criticism, was quite different from what Bakunin claimed. It is spelled out most extensively in Marx's The Civil War in France, but is developed in numerous other works as well. What Marx foresaw was that during the revolutionary period of struggle against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat would use the state apparatus to crush the bourgeoisie: "to achieve its liberation it employs means which will be discarded after the liberation". (Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin's State and Anarchy, 1874-75). After the vanquishing of the bourgeoisie, the state has outlived its usefulness.

Marx pointed to the Paris Commune as being very close to what he had in mind; Bakunin too was enthusiastic about the commune, yet continued to accuse Marx of secretly holding very different views. This Bakuninist nonsense has been repeated by other anarchists as well. For example, the anarchist writer Arthur Mueller Lehning writes that "It is an irony of history that at the very moment when the battle between the authoritarians and the anti-authoritarians in the International reached its apogee, Marx should in effect endorse the program of the anti-authoritarian tendency.... The Commune of Paris had nothing in common with the state socialism of Marx and was more in accord with the ideas of Proudhon and the federalist theories of Bakunin. Civil War in France is in full contradiction with all Marx's writings on the question of the State." (quoted in Bakunin on Anarchy, P. 260).

This is a remarkable piece of doublethink. Marx's major work on the state is said to be "in full contradiction" with "all" his writings on the state!

What writings on the state is Lehning referring to then? We don't know, because he doesn't say. As always in anarchist polemics, we have to take him in faith. Certainly Lehning cannot be referring to the Poverty of Philosophy, written in 1847, or the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, or the Critique of the Gotha Program, written in 1875, or to the private letters Marx was writing at the same time as the publication of The Civil War in France in 1871. All of these consistently maintain that the state is incompatible with socialism. Together they comprise most, if not "all" of Marx's writings on the state. But Lehning (and Bakunin, and Dolgoff, and Avrich, and Brothers, and Murtaugh, and...) know better. Somewhere, in some mythical world known only to anarchists, there are to be found Marx's real views on the state, the "People's State of Marx" (Bakunin on Anarchy, P. 318), which is "completely identical" with "the aristocratic-monarchic state of Bismarck". (Bakunin on Anarchy, P.319).

How does one refute an "argument" which, without a single shred of evidence, except racial predisposition ("as a German and a Jew, he (Marx) is from head to toe an authoritarian" - Bakunin in 1872) without a single quotation, attributes ideas and concepts to Marx that Marx repeatedly attacked?

There are two alternatives: either one swallows everything Bakunin, Dolgoff, and Co. say, on faith, because they are anarchists, or one takes the path of intellectual integrity, and tries to discover Marx and Engels' views on the state by reading what Marx and Engels said about the state.

If one takes the latter course, one might start by reading Engels' March 1875 letter to Bebel, in which he says "it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people's state: so long as the proletariat still uses the state, it does not use it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore propose to replace state everywhere by Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word 'commune.'"

It is possible, of course, to argue that the use of the state by the proletariat in the brief transitional period is dangerous, and could lead to the establishment of a permanent state. It must be noted, however, that Bakunin himself envisioned a form of post-revolutionary state, complete with elections, delegates, a parliament, an executive committee, and an army. (Bakunin on Anarchy, P. 153) Anarchists are curiously quiet about this however.

Nevertheless, it remains a fact that in balance, the concern Bakunin expressed about the possible degeneration of the revolution proved to be a valid one, and that Marx for his part failed to give sufficient consideration to the dangers posed by this threat to a future revolution. This criticism, however, must itself be qualified in a number of ways; and it is certainly a far cry from the claims of Bakunin and the anarchists that Marxism was a theory that aimed at the subjection of society to state.

2. Dictatorship of the Proletariat .

A closely related question is that of the dictatorship of the proletariat, one of the most abused and misunderstood terms of all of Marxism. The question of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and Marx's view of it, is an extremely complicated one that cannot be covered in a few paragraphs. But the point here is simply to dispose of the grossest misunderstandings of the term, fostered by its appropriation by the Bolsheviks, and by the related fact that dictatorship has come to have a quite different meaning today than it had in Marx's time. As Dolgoff puts it, there was then a "loose sense in which the term 'dictatorship' was used by nineteenth-century socialists to mean simply the preponderant influence of a class, as in Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat'" (Bakunin on Anarchy, P. 12).

Or to put it more precisely, the dictatorship of the proletariat means the rule by the proletariat as a class, and the suppression of the bourgeoisie as a class. It is perfectly compatible with, and indeed presupposes, the most thorough-going democracy within the working class. The best brief exposition of the Marxian concept, and how it differs from the Leninist concepts of dictatorship, comes from Rosa Luxemburg's 1918 polemic against the Bolsheviks:

"We have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom - not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy - not to eliminate democracy altogether.

"But social democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people, who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

"Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class - that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses." (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, Ann Arbor paperback, P. 77-8).

3. "Economic Determinism"

The question of Marxian materialism and Marx's emphasis on the relations of productions is again an extremely difficult one which simply cannot be dealt with intelligently in a brief article. At this point it is possible only to say that it raises difficult problems which have to be seriously analyzed. However, while a re-examination of Marx's theory and the admitted contradictions in it are on the agenda, it must be said that the typical anarchist portrayals of it and objections to it are ill-informed misconceptions that contribute less than nothing to the discussion. For example, Marx was not an economic determinist; he rejected economic determinism and what he called "crude materialism" out of hand. He did not attempt to reduce all phenomena to economic ones; it is necessary only to read any of his political works to know this.

As Engels says, "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract senseless phrase." (letter to Joseph Block, Sept. 21-22, 1890, in Lewis Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, P. 397-398.)

Anarchists like Paul Avrich, however, have their own view of 'what Marx really meant'. See how Avrich crudely contrasts Marx's and Bakunin's views: (Bakunin) "rejected the view that social change depends on the gradual unfolding of 'objective' historical conditions. He believed, on the contrary, that men shape their own destinies..."

It is unfortunate that Avrich has never read, for example, Marx's third thesis on Feuerbach: "The materialist doctrine (of Feuerbach) that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are the products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating." Or The Holy Family: "History does nothing, it 'does not possess immense riches', it does not fight battles'. It is men, real, living men, who do all this, who possess things and fight battles. It is not 'history' which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends." (Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Pelican P. 78.)

4.5.6. The nature of the revolutionary organization; authoritarianism and libertarianism

These too are very complicated questions: it is impossible to do justice to either Marx's or Bakunin's views in a short and rather polemical articles that aims at challenging certain gross misconceptions rather than at evaluating and criticizing their ideas and practice in a rigorous and comprehensive way. It is necessary to understand, first of all, that the ideas of both Marx and Bakunin, as expressed in their writings, are in certain respects contradictory; neither Marx, nor certainly Bakunin, was totally consistent throughout his life. Secondly, the practice of both men was sometimes at variance with what they advocated. Neither was able always to live up to the standards set down. Both men displayed streaks of arrogance and authoritarianism in their own personalities.

Nevertheless, there remains a body of writing and practice that makes it possible to evaluate what Marx and Bakunin stood for.

I shall argue that a serious examination of the question yields the following points:

1. Bakunin deliberately distorted and falsified Marx's views on the issues under dispute.

2. The accusation that led to Bakunin's expulsion from the International, that of heading a secret society which aimed to infiltrate and take over the International, was true. (Since this seems to be accepted by most historians, this point will not be pursued. See for example Woodcock's Anarchism, P. 168, or Aileen Kelly's article in the January 22, 1976 issues of the New York Review of Books.) The only point worth noting here is that the "authoritarian" federal structures of the International that Bakunin protested against so vehemently in 1871 and 1872 were introduced to the International shortly before, not on the initiative of the General council of which Marx was a member, but on the motion of Bakunin's supporters, with Bakunin's active participation and support. It was only after he failed to gain control over the structures of the International that Bakunin suddenly discovered their "authoritarianism".

3. The charge of authoritarianism and dictatorial views can be directed against Bakunin with a great deal more justification than they can against Marx.

Bakunin's deliberate misrepresentations of Marx's views on the state were noted earlier. Bakunin was obsessed with the idea that all Germans held identically authoritarian views, and consistently attributed the views of some of Marx's bitterest enemies, such as Bismarck and Lasalle, to Marx. Marx's fury at this tactic is a matter of record. Bakunin, in many of his polemics against Marx, argues from the premise that Marx must obviously be authoritarian because he is a German and a Jew, who are by definition authoritarians and statists. (Because of selective editing, this is not evident in Dolgoff's Bakunin anthology.) Bakunin went even further, claiming that Marx was part of an international conspiracy with Bismarck and Rothschild. Such accusations are of course not worthy of reply, but surely they make it clear that it is necessary to treat the "facts" and arguments of the man making them with the greatest caution.

A similar disregard for the most elementary rules of evidence, not to mention decency, permeated most of Bakunin's polemics against Marx. He charged, again and again, that Marx advocated a universal dictatorship, that he believed in a socialism "decreed from the top down." He ignored Marx's lifelong insistence that "the emancipation of the working classes can only be the work of the working classes themselves," and Marx's intransigent opposition to the state. Nor did he attempt to support his accusations with facts or quotations. In reading Bakunin's caricature of Marx's views - the only "version" of Marxism most anarchists have bothered to familiarize themselves with! - readers will search in vain for one single quotation amidst the hysterical confusion of wild, unsubstantiated charges. There simply are none.

Almost as bad are those anarchists who lambaste Marx for his "advocacy" of "democratic centralism" and the "vanguard party." Is it really necessary to point out that these concepts were developed long after Marx's death, that Marx never belonged to an organization practising either; that he consistently opposed the tiny conspiratorial sects of his day; that he made it a condition of his joining the Communist League that they scrap their closed, undemocratic organizational forms; that he always, and angrily, refused attempts by socialists of his day to single him out for special honours or titles in the movement?

And has it been completely forgotten that one of Marx's chief themes in his criticism of Bakunin was the latter's eternal fascination with conspiratorial, manipulative, sectarian politics?

For there is, unfortunately for those who believe in anarchist fairy tales, a substantial body of evidence for the contention that Bakunin held precisely those "authoritarian" views which he brazenly attributed to Marx. Those who seek evidence of a penchant for dictatorial, Machiavellian politics will find a good deal of material in the writings not of Marx, but of Bakunin. (This is not to say that Bakunin consistently held such views; there are serious contradictions in his thought amounting to a basic polarity.)

Bakunin's advocacy of a post-revolutionary state, which continued most of the forms of the pre-revolutionary state, such as elections, parliament, army, etc., was noted earlier, and can be found, for example, in Bakunin on Anarchy, P. 153. Similarly, despite his much-vaunted opposition to any form of independent political action by the working class, one can find him advocating, in his letters, not simply political action, but working-class support and action on behalf of bourgeois political parties. (See for example Bakunin on Anarchy, P. 219.) And elsewhere, one finds him advocating that anarchists should run for Parliament (Bakunin on Anarchy, P. 218).

Nor are these merely products of his naive, youthful days, which are so often used to excuse some of his grossest aberrations, as for example when we find the 'young' Bakunin (at age 35) writing appeals to the Czar, while Marx, four years younger, is advocating the revolutionary overthrow of the state. No, these pronouncements, and many others like them, are issued privately at precisely the time that Bakunin is publicly proclaiming his opposition to Marxism because it advocates political action by the working class, and a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat in the immediate post-revolutionary period.

It is also worth contrasting Bakunin's proclamation of the principle, for the future anarchist society, of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work" (my emphasis) with Marx, who held to the much more radical principle, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Or consider Bakunin's Rules for his International Alliance, not a passing whim, but the organization to which he gave his primary allegiance while participating in the First International. Here is a sample, written in 1869: "it is necessary that in the midst of popular anarchy, which will make up the very life and all the energy of the revolution, the unity of revolutionary thought and action should be embodied in a certain organ. That organ must be the secret and world-wide association of the international brothers..."
"...the only thing a well-organized secret society can do it to assist the birth of revolution by spreading among the masses ideas that accord with the instinct of the masses, and to organise, not the army of the revolution - that army must always be the people, but a revolutionary General Staff composed of devoted, energetic and intelligent individuals who are above all sincere - not vain or ambitious - friends of the people, capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary ideas and the popular instincts."
"The number of these individuals should not, therefore, be too large. For the international organisation throughout Europe one hundred serious and firmly united revolutionaries would be sufficient. Two or three hundred revolutionaries would be enough for the organisation of the largest country."

As the authoritarian Marx said of this libertarian idea: "To say that the hundred international brothers must 'serve as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the popular instincts,' is to create an unbridgeable gulf between the Alliance's revolutionary idea and the proletarian masses; it means proclaiming that these hundred guardsmen cannot be recruited anywhere but from among the privileged classes."

When one sees the views of Bakunin and Marx side by side, it is difficult to remember that it is Marx, not Bakunin, who is supposed to be the father of "Marxism-Leninism" and Bakunin, not Marx, who is supposed to be the father of "anarchism".

Bakunin's authoritarian tendencies were at their most extreme at precisely the time that he was splitting the International. This was the time of his association with the notorious Nechaev. Most anarchists sources treat this as a passing aberration on Bakunin's part, and indeed he did repudiate Nechaev when he found out the true nature of his activities.

But the fact remains that Bakunin did enter into partnership with Nechaev, and under his influence wrote a number of tracts that displayed a despotic, Machiavellian approach to revolution that far surpassed anything he ever accused Marx of. The authorship of some of the pieces in question has been disputed, but the relevant point is that Bakunin allowed these pamphlets to be published bearing his name and actively worked to distribute them knowing they bore his name.

In these pamphlets, Nechaev and Bakunin advocate a new social order, to be erected "by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of Our Committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone," compulsory residence in communal dormitories, rules for hours of work, feeding of children, and other minutae. As the "authoritarian" Marx put it: "What a beautiful model of barrack-room communism! Here you have it all: communal eating, communal sleeping, assessors and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and to crown all, Our Committee, anonymous and unknown to anyone, as the supreme dictator. This indeed is the purest anti-authoritarianism..."

When one looks at Bakunin's views on authority and revolution in detail, it is hard to disagree with Marx's and Engels' assertion that Bakunin and his followers simply used the word "authoritarian" to mean something they didn't like. The label "authoritarian" was then, and remains today for many libertarians, a way of avoiding serious political questions.

The fact is that not all authority is bad; that in certain situations authority is necessary and unavoidable. As Engels says, "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon - authoritarian means, if such there be at all."

And some form of authority, i.e. decision-making structure, is necessary in any form of interaction, co-operation, or organization that is social rather than individual. In a socialist society, it will still be necessary to makes decisions about things; these decisions will necessarily reflect the will, i.e. the authority, of the majority. This is not a violation of collectivity, but an absolutely indispensable component of it. To say, as many anarchists do, that they reject all forms of authority, even that which is willingly accepted; even that which is the result of democratic decision-making, is simply to advocate either rule by a minority, or a return to the purest form of free-market capitalism, as is advocated by the "libertarian" right. No amount of talk about "consensus" or local autonomy or individual initiative will alter this fact. Consensus is not always attainable, because sometimes people do not agree. Then a decision-making process is necessary, and if it is democratic, the minority will have to accede to the majority. Autonomy and individual initiative can still have the fullest possible play, but this does not alter the fact that the authority of the majority has prevailed in the question at hand.

There is another aspect of Bakunin that must be confronted because, like his ill-defined views on authority, it has remained a part of the anarchist movement. Running through all of Bakunin's thought and subsequent anarchist thought and practice is a dark thread, an infatuation with violence, with destruction for the sake of destruction, action for the sake of action, distrust of logic, intellect, and knowledge, and a love for conspiratorial, tightly controlled organizations. For the most part, these things remained subsidiary to his - and his successors' - genuinely libertarian and humanistic instincts.

During the period of Bakunin's association with Nechaev, who was attracted solely by Bakunin's dark side, this aspect took over. Then, confronted with the realization of this dark side in practice, in the person of Nechaev, Bakunin shrank back in genuine horror. However, as Aileen Kelly notes, "even then he managed to integrate Nechaev's villainy into his own fantasies, writing to his astonished friends that Nechaev's methods were those of a "pure" and "saintly" nature who, faced with the apathy of the masses and intellectuals in Russia, saw no other way but coercion to mold the latter into a force determined to move the masses to revolution. Such reasoning, Bakunin concluded, 'contains, alas! much truth.'"

Kelly continues: "This grotesque assessment of Nechaev is very revealing. At a time when the gap between man's empirical and ideal nature seemed enormous, Bakunin, albeit reluctantly, concluded that if men do not wish to liberate themselves, it might be necessary for those with their highest interests at heart to liberate them against their will."

To Bakunin's credit, he continually struggled against the implications of this aspect of his thought. Always fascinated by all 'revolutionary' shortcuts, he nevertheless strove to remain loyal as well to his libertarian instincts, and it is this aspect of his remarkably polarized vision that he left as his lasting heritage. The anarchist movement he fathered has also been plagued by the same polarity, by the tension between real libertarianism on the one side, and the sometimes irresistible attraction of anti-intellectualism, terrorism, and conspiracy, on the other. The anarchist movement needs to come to grips with Bakunin's ambiguous heritage. And to do so, it also needs to come to terms with Marx.

Published in The Red Menace, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1978, along with a companion article, Anarchism vs. Marxism.

https://libcom.org/library/bakunin-vs-marx

[blindpig]

a timely tweet:

Misha Panarin @HamsickAndBrush 7h7 hours ago

The idea that anarchists and leninists want "the same thing through different methods" is beyond incorrect. Leninists want to put batter in the oven so it becomes a cake. Anarchists want to eat flour and milk straight from the bowl and call recipe books authoritarian.

[chlamor]

Marx versus Bakunin - Part One
Alan Woods 17 February 2010

It is fashionable to portray Marxism as the source of authoritarianism. This accusation is raised repeatedly by anarchists, reformists and all kinds of opportunists. Bakunin was one of the more famous exponents of such accusations. But the truth is concrete and the historical facts reveal that those same elements who raise a hue and cry about authoritarianism are themselves the worst bureaucrats and authoritarians... where they manage to rule the roost.

“For the rest, old Hegel has already said: A party proves itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can stand the split.” (Engels to Bebel, 20 June, 1873)

There have been many splits in the history of the Marxist movement. The enemies of Marxism seize upon this fact as proof of an inherent weakness, an intolerant spirit, excessive centralism, bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies and so on. In fact, periodic crises and splits are an inevitable consequence of development. Crises are a fact of human existence: birth is a crisis, as is adolescence, old age and death. Weak individuals will allow a crisis to drag them under. Men and women of stronger character will overcome the crisis and emerge stronger and more confident than before.

It is the same with a revolutionary tendency. The movement must constantly strive to rid itself of sectarian and opportunist tendencies, which partly reflect the pressures of alien classes, partly the inability of a layer of the organization to advance to a higher stage of development. This was the case in the First International, or International Workingman’s Association (IWA), when Marx and Engels were obliged to wage a ferocious struggle against the followers of the anarchist Bakunin.

The document that we recently published in instalments, Fictitious Splits in the International is a useful reminder of the differences between Marxism and anarchism. We believe it deserves a careful reading for the lessons it has for Marxists today.

Bakunin
Bakunin’s intrigues against the General Council began in 1871, although he was in contact with Marx before that. In 1864 he met Marx in London, from whom he learned of the founding of the International. He promised to co-operate. However, Bakunin held the view that that Marx exaggerated the importance of the working class, while he held that the intelligentsia, the students, the lumpenproletariat and the middle classes representatives of bourgeois democracy more likely agents of revolution.

For this reason, Bakunin began his activity, not in the workers’ movement but in a bourgeois organization in Switzerland called The League for Peace and Freedom (Ligue de la Paix et de la Liberté). He was actually elected to its central committee. He thought he could take over the League and use it as a vehicle for advancing his anarchist doctrines. But at the League’s Berne Congress he failed to make any impact and split away with an insignificant minority.

It was only at this point, having fallen out with and split from, the bourgeois League that he entered the Romande Section of the IWA in Geneva. That was at the end of 1868. Bakunin hit on the idea of forming inside the IWA an anarchist faction with himself as leader. For this purpose, he established the “Alliance of Social-Democracy”. His aim was to get control of the IWA and foist his anarchist ideas upon it.

But he had a serious problem: the International was led by the General Council in London where Marx had considerable influence. In order to achieve his aim therefore, Bakunin had to undermine the General Council and blacken the name of Marx. This he did with no regards to the democratic rules of the International, by factional intrigues and personal attacks. These intrigues, directed ostensibly against the General Council were in reality directed against the International itself, the ideas, methods and programme of which Bakunin was fundamentally opposed to.

Bakunin’s ideas
Marxism and anarchism are completely opposed and mutually exclusive ideologies. The first is a scientific theory and a revolutionary policy reflecting the class interests of the proletariat. Anarchism is a confused and unscientific doctrine that finds its class base in the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. This is not the place to deal in detail with the ideas of Bakunin, although we may return to this topic in the future. His programme (insofar as it existed) was a superficial mishmash of ideas taken from Proudhon, St. Simon and other utopian socialists. Above all, he preached abstention from the political movement – an idea that he also took from Proudhon.

As far as the rejection of political action and organization is concerned, Marx wrote:

“N.B. as to political movement: The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organization of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

“On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organization, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organization.

“Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organization to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs. Gladstone & Co. are bringing off in England even up to the present time.” (Marx to Bolte, November 23, 1871, published in Marx and Engels Correspondence; Publisher: International Publishers, 1968)

The confused ideas of Bakunin got a certain echo in Italy and Spain, where capitalism was still in an embryonic state and the workers' movement still poorly developed, and to some extent in French Switzerland and Belgium. In countries like Britain and Germany it made little progress. In the ranks of the First International it was a small minority. The prevailing influence in the leadership of the International Workingmen’s Association (the General Council, based in London) was that of Marx and Engels.

Anarchism or democracy?
To this very day there are people who repeat the arguments of Bakunin as if they were good coin. In particular, the arguments that Marxism is “authoritarian” and dictatorial, and that a centralized revolutionary organization crushes the freedom of the individual, stifles all creative thought and prepares the way for totalitarian dictatorship, are frequently repeated by the critics of Marxism, although they were answered long ago by Marx and Engels.

It was Bakunin, not Marx, who engaged in dictatorial Machiavellian politics, intriguing behind the backs of the International in order to discredit its leaders in order to disorganize it to set up a rival organization. It was Bakunin, not Marx, who associated with the likes of Nechayev. Together with the latter he wrote pamphlets on a new social order, to be created “by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of Our Committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone”.

In this anti-authoritarian paradise, there would be compulsory residence in communal dormitories, rules for hours of work, feeding of children etc., on which Marx commented ironically:

“What a beautiful model of barrack-room communism! Here you have it all: communal eating, communal sleeping, assessors and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and to crown all, Our Committee, anonymous and unknown to anyone, as the supreme dictator. This indeed is the purest anti-authoritarianism...”

For Bakunin and his followers, the word "authoritarian" just meant anything they didn't like. But it is an undeniable fact that in certain situations authority is necessary and unavoidable. As Engels says,

"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon - authoritarian means, if such there be at all." (Engels, On Authority)

Should the revolutionary party mirror the future society?
Another oft-repeated argument of the anti-authoritarians is that a centralised, disciplined party cannot lead to genuine socialism and must lead to totalitarian dictatorship. How many times have we heard this? How many times have we been told that Stalinism is the inevitable product of Leninist centralism?

Some kind of decision-making structure is necessary at any level of human co-operation or organization. In any community, I must necessarily sacrifice part of my freedom to others. Even in the future classless society, people will still have to make decisions, which will be the decisions of the majority. And under capitalism, the workers must organize collectively to fight to defend their interests. How is this to be done, unless the minority submits to the will of the majority?

It is a regrettable fact that sometimes people do not agree. What are we to do in such circumstances? History has never produced any better instrument for expressing the popular will than democracy. True, even the most perfect democracy has its limitations, but to date nobody has ever proposed anything more prefect. What is the alternative? "Consensus"? But that only means the law of the lowest common denominator. Or perhaps the solution is that all decisions must be unanimous? That is the most undemocratic method of all, since the opposition of just one individual can paralyse the will of the majority: in other words it is the right of veto – the dictatorship of a single individual!

The middle classes are used to individualistic methods and have an individualistic mentality. An assembly of students can debate for hours, days and weeks without ever coming to a conclusion. They have plenty of time and are accustomed to that kind of thing. But a factory mass meeting is an entirely different affair. Before a strike, the workers discuss, debate, listen to different opinions. But at the end of the day, the issue must be decided. It is put to the vote and the majority decides. This is clear and obvious to any worker. And nine times out of ten the minority will voluntarily accept the decision of the majority.

The best example of an anti-authoritarian is a strike breaker, who declares that, no matter what his workmates decide, he or she demands the right to express his or her free individuality – by breaking the strike. We know these arguments in favour of the absolute freedom of the Individual, which are proclaimed during every strike by the bourgeois press in defence of the scabs. And we also know how the workers on strike regard the latter and how they see the “the absolute freedom of the Individual.”

In reality, anarchist organizations (surely a contradiction in terms?) always suffer from the most extreme bureaucracy, because someone has to take decisions. Who are they? In practice, decisions are taken “spontaneously” by self-appointed groups that are elected by nobody and responsible to nobody – that is to say, government by cliques. That was the method of the Bakuninists in the IWA. Behind the backs of the membership, they organized an intrigue under the slogan of combating the “authoritarian” General Council.

One might add that the same people who were allegedly waging a struggle for democracy and against authoritarianism, were elected by nobody and responsible to nobody. The General Council was the elected leadership of the International. The Bakuninist Alliance was self-appointed and functioned outside the democratic structures of the International. Its members represented only themselves, although their activities were organized and orchestrated by the man referred to as “Citizen B” (Bakunin), who in reality decided everything.

The International Social-Democratic Alliance
Bakunin was an unprincipled adventurer who was constantly scheming and intriguing to boost his own position and prestige. For him theory was always a secondary consideration: merely a means of his personal self-assertion. There have been many such people in the movement both before and since.

Marx wrote to Friedrich Bolte about Bakunin:

“He – a man devoid of theoretical knowledge – put forward the pretension that this separate body was to represent the scientific propaganda of the International, which was to be made the special function of this second International within the International.

“[…] If he is a nonentity as a theoretician, he is in his element as an intriguer.” (Letter to Friedrich Bolte, 3 November 1871).

The Alliance was characterized by radical-sounding verbiage. It declared war upon God and the State and demanded that all its members be atheists. Its economic programme was confused and ambiguous. Instead of fighting for the abolition of class society, it demanded the equality of all classes. Instead of the expropriation of the means of production, it limited itself to a demand for the abolition of the right of inheritance. And in order not to frighten away the middle class and liberal bourgeois, it was careful not to define clearly its class character.

The new society approached the General Council with the request that it be taken into the International as a separate organization, with its own constitution and programme. Bakunin wrote an ingratiating letter to Marx, full of false flattery. He wrote:

“Since taking leave solemnly and publicly from the bourgeoisie at the Berne Congress, I no longer know any other society, any other environment, than the world of the workers. My country is now the International, of which you are one of the most important founders. So you see, my dear friend, that I am your disciple, and proud of my title.”

Marx was not impressed. Up to the end of 1868 his attitude toward Bakunin was that of extreme tolerance. He had welcomed Bakunin as a collaborator in 1862. Now he was suspicious of the latter’s motives – and he was not wrong. Let us remember that only four years earlier Bakunin had written from Italy promising to work for the International. Not only did he not keep his promise, but he devoted all his energies into promoting a rival bourgeois movement, the League for Peace and Freedom. Only after his efforts to take over that organization had failed did he turn his attention to the International, which was now obviously growing in strength and influence.

The General Council refused the Alliance's request, and Bakunin resorted to a manoeuvre. He announced that the Alliance would disband and transform its sections, (which would continue to hold to their own programme) into sections of the International. After these assurances, the General Council agreed to admit the sections of the former Alliance into the IWA.

The Alliance claimed to have dissolved on the 6th of August and informed the General Council of this. But a few weeks later it reappeared in the guise of a new “Section of Revolutionary Socialist Propaganda and Action,” which declared itself in agreement with the general principles of the International, but reserved itself the right to make full use of the freedom which the Statutes and the congresses of the International afforded.

It did not take Marx long to conclude that Bakunin had deceived the General Council. Despite having officially disbanded his society, he maintained its central organization intact for the purpose of taking over the International. Subsequent events proved that the Alliance continued to exist. It conducted a continuous guerrilla war against the International under the guise of fighting the “authoritarianism” of the General Council. For this purpose Bakunin and his followers did not hesitate to resort to any means, even the basest slanders and the most dishonest intrigues.

How intriguers work
It is not difficult for professional intriguers to influence honest party activists. When dealing with this kind of individual, naive honesty is a definite disadvantage, since honest people cannot recognize an intrigue. They take things at face value and believe what is said to them, since they have no reason to suspect the other person’s motives, believing them to be honest party workers themselves.

Bakunin hatched the plan of a secret faction, the L'Alliance Internationale de la Démocratte Socialiste, which, while formally a branch of the IWA, in reality formed a parallel International Association “with the special mission to elaborate the higher philosophical etc. principles” of the proletarian movement. He “would, by a clever trick, have placed our society under the guidance and supreme initiative of the Russian Bakunin.”

Bakunin was a skilful intriguer and soon convinced the veteran German revolutionary and friend of Karl Marx and Engels, Johann Philipp Becker, who lived in Switzerland, to put his name to his programme. Marx wrote with regret: “brave old Becker, always anxious for action, for something stirring, but of no very critical cast of mind, an enthusiast like Garibaldi, easily led away”. (Marx To Paul and Laura Lafargue, 15 February 1869)

The way in which they set to business, was characteristically dishonest. They sent their new programme, placing Becker’s name at the head of the signatures, thus hiding behind the moral authority of a veteran of unquestionable honesty. Then, behind the backs of the General Council they sent emissaries to Paris, Brussels, etc. (In those days they did not possess the Internet, which would have saved them a lot of time and effort). Only in the last moment, did they communicate the documents to the London General Council.

The General Council took action to stop these factional intrigues. On 22 December 1868, a unanimous decision of the General Council declared the rules of the Alliance laying down its relations with the International Working Men’s Association null and void and refused the Alliance admittance as a branch of the International Working Men’s Association. All the branches of the IWA approved the decision.

Becker was resentful towards Marx for this, but, as Marx wrote to the Lafargues: “with all my personal friendship for Becker I could not allow this first attempt at disorganizing our society to succeed.” (Marx To Paul and Laura Lafargue, 15 February 1869). Bakunin reacted by declaring that the Alliance was “dissolved”, when in fact it remained in being as a secret organization working behind the backs of the International.

The Nechayev affair
An indication of Bakunin’s adventurism was his association with the notorious Russian terrorist Nechayev, who was tried for the murder of a young student member of his group in Russia and ended his life in a tsarist prison, having seriously compromised the revolutionary cause. It was partly to divert attention away from this scandal that Bakunin intensified his attacks on Marx and the General Council.

There were profound differences between the ideas advocated by Bakunin and those of Marx. Bakunin utterly rejected the idea of the proletariat seizing power. He denied any form of political struggle insofar as it had to be conducted within bourgeois society, which had to be destroyed. Ryazanov sums up the essence of Bakunin’s creed:

“First destroy, and then everything will take care of itself. Destroy - the sooner, the better. It would be sufficient to stir up the revolutionary intelligentsia and the workers embittered through want. The only thing needed would be a group composed of determined people with the demon of revolution in their souls.” (D. Ryazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, p. 185)

This is a completely false conception of the class struggle. The working class can only learn through struggle. Without the day-to-day struggle for advance under capitalism, the socialist revolution would be impossible. The struggle for reforms, higher wages, better conditions, a reduction of working hours, etc. creates more favourable conditions for the class organization of the proletariat. At a certain historical stage, the economic struggles of the working class necessarily become political, as in the fight for democratic rights, freedom of speech and assembly, the right to strike, the right to vote etc. It is unthinkable that the working class could remain indifferent to such questions.

The slogan of political abstentionism merely means that the working class would remain politically subordinate to the parties of the liberal bourgeoisie, as the example of England already showed clearly. In order to achieve independence from the bourgeoisie in the political sphere the proletariat must fight for its own independent political party. That was why Marx considered the political struggle and the political organization of the proletariat for the conquest of political power indispensable. But for the Bakuninists this was a book sealed by seven seals.

As we have seen, Bakunin’s adventurism was completely exposed by the Nechayev affair. Nechayev was a young fanatic, a revolutionary adventurer who turned up in Geneva in the spring of 1869, claiming to have escaped from the fortress of St. Peter-Paul. He also claimed to represent an all-powerful committee that would overthrow Tsarist Russia. This was a pure invention. He had never been in St. Peter-Paul and the committee never existed.

Nevertheless, Bakunin was impressed by “the young savage,” “the young tiger” as he used to call Nechayev. Nechayev was a devoted disciple of Bakunin. But unlike his master, Nechayev was always characterized by an iron consistency. Bakunin had preached that the lumpenproletariat were the real carriers of the social revolution. He regarded criminals as desirable elements to be recruited into the revolutionary movement. So it was logical that his loyal disciple Nechayev should conclude that it was necessary to organize a group of lumpens for the purpose of “expropriation” in Switzerland.

In the autumn of 1869 Nechayev returned to Russia with a plan to set up a Bakuninist group there. There is no doubt that he went with Bakunin's full support. He carried with him a written authorization from Bakunin which declared that he was the “accredited representative” of a so-called European Revolutionary Alliance – another invention of Bakunin. He even issued an appeal to the officers of the tsarist army calling on them to place themselves unconditionally at the disposal of the “committee”, although it did not exist.

When a member of Nechayev’s group, a student called Ivanov, began to doubt the existence of the secret committee, Nechayev murdered him. This led to numerous arrests, but Nechayev himself managed to avoid arrest. The Nechayev trial opened in St. Petersburg in July, 1871 and the whole ghastly affair was publicly exposed. There were over eighty accused, mostly students, Nechayev himself having conveniently escaped to Geneva.

The Nechayev affair did a lot of damage to the movement in Russia and internationally. It affected the IWA because Nechayev let people believe that he was acting in the name of the International, whereas in fact he was an agent of Bakunin. Later, in order to explain away this wretched affair and absolve Bakunin from his personal responsibility for it, it had been claimed that Bakunin fell under the influence of Nechayev who tricked him and used him for his own purposes.

But it was Bakunin who provided him with fake documents that purported to be from the International and were signed by him. It was Bakunin who wrote most, if not all, the proclamations and manifestos of the non-existing “committee” and it was Bakunin who defended Nechayev after he had fled from the scene of his crime, describing the murder of the unfortunate Ivanov as “a political act”. Meanwhile, the majority of the students that were put on trial were sentenced to long terms in prison or to a living death in the Siberian mines.

The Basle Congress
It was at Basle that Bakunin first made his appearance, and his faction was well represented there. But as he was still feeling his way, he was cautious about putting forward his real programme. Ironically, the same Bakunin who had always been violently opposed opportunism, confined himself to demanding the immediate abolition, not of private property, but of the right of inheritance.

As usual, Bakunin stood everything on its head. It is not the right of inheritance that is responsible for private property, but the existence of private property that gives rise to the right of inheritance. After the seizure of power, the proletariat will deal with this question, along with many other related secondary issues. But the main task is the expropriation of large-scale private property through the nationalization of the land, the banks and private monopolies. But this is a political act, and therefore anathema to the anarchists.

To propose the abolition of the right of inheritance in general, apart from its clearly utopian character, leaves out of account the fact that a large part of the middle class, peasants and even a section of the working class would be affected. A workers' state would not expropriate the small property owners, but only large scale private property. In the meantime, it would be sufficient to impose a heavily graduated tax on wealth and limit the right of inheritance.

For Bakunin, however, these concrete circumstances were irrelevant. His scheme of social revolution was a pure abstraction, outside of time and space. As usual, his empty demagogy only served to sow the maximum confusion. When the question was put to the vote neither of the resolutions won a sufficient majority, and the whole affair was left in a confused state, which was the inevitable result of the anarchists’ “theoretical” interventions. Having made a bid mess, Bakunin then forgot about the right of inheritance and passed onto something else. This was absolutely typical conduct on his part: a) beat the drum loudly on some issue or other, b) cause the maximum confusion, c) move on to some other matter. The disorganizing results of this conduct are self-evident.

It is interesting to note that the "authoritarian" structures of the International that Bakunin protested against so vehemently in 1871 and 1872 were introduced to the International on the motion of Bakunin's supporters, with Bakunin's support. That was at a time when he was aiming to gain control of the International. Only when this plan failed did Bakunin suddenly discovered the "authoritarian" character of the International’s structure and rules. Bakunin always ruled his own faction, the Alliance, with a rod of iron. Certainly, the charge of authoritarianism and dictatorial tendencies can with far greater justice be directed against Bakunin than against Marx.

About this time Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, after a sharp factional struggle with the Lassallean Schweitzer, had succeeded in establishing a separate party at the Eisenach convention (1869) based on the programme of the International. Bakunin's activity in the League for Peace and Freedom were discussed and rejected by this party congress. The next Congress was supposed to take place in Germany but it could not be convened. Immediately after the Basle Congress tensions between France and Prussia were deteriorating fast and the outbreak of war was imminent.

To the degree that the members of the International became aware of the disorganizing conduct of Bakunin and his followers, they reacted against. Marx wrote to Engels on 30 October 1869:

“Apropos. The secretary of our French Genevan committee is utterly fed up with being saddled with Bakunin, and complains that he disorganises everything with his ‘tyranny’. In the Égalite, Monsieur Bakunin indicates that the German and English workers have no desire for individuality, so accept our communisme autoritaire. In opposition to this, Bakunin represents le collectivisme anarchique. The anarchism is, however, in his head, which contains only one clear idea — that Bakunin should play first fiddle.” (MECW, Volume 43, p. 363)

https://www.marxist.com/marx-versus-bak ... rt-one.htm

[chlamor]

Marx versus Bakunin - Part Two
Alan Woods 22 February 2010

The Paris Commune put to the test the different currents inside the First International. Its subsequent defeat created an atmosphere where all kinds of demoralised elements thrived. Intrigue was on the order of the day. This led to a questioning of centralised leadership, of the very role of the leadership. Marx and Engels answered all this fully.

Bakunin and the Franco-Prussian War
In the middle of all this, stormy events were being prepared. The thunder-clouds of war that hung over Europe erupted in the Franco-Prussian War. The defeat of the French armies at Sedan led to the collapse of the Bonapartist regime and the Paris Commune. France was once more in the throes of revolution. Here the adventurist character of Bakunin was exposed in practice.

During the war Bakunin supported France, fearing that it would become a German colony “and then instead of living socialism we will have the doctrinaire socialism of the Germans.” (James Joll, The Anarchists, p. 90).

When on July 19, 1870 the war erupted it took Europe by surprise. A few days after the outbreak of hostilities the General Council published a proclamation written by Marx, which began with a quotation from the Inaugural Address of the International on war: "a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure."

Marx fiercely denounced Napoleon III, pointing out that whichever side won, the last hour of the Second Empire had struck. This was a prophetic prediction. In about six weeks the regular French army was smashed at Sedan. On September 2, Napoleon had already surrendered to the Prussians. Two days later a republic was declared in Paris. But the war continued. It passed into the second phase, in which Prussia was no longer fighting a defensive war against the Empire but a predatory war against the French people to seize Alsace-Lorraine and plunder France.

On September 9, 1870, immediately after the proclamation of a Republic in France, the General Council issued its second Manifesto on the war, also written by Marx. It contains one of the most profound analyses in all of Marx's writings. Long before the fall of Sedan, the Prussian general staff declared itself in favour of a policy of conquest. Marx opposed any annexations or indemnities, and prophetically predicted that such a predatory peace would create a state of permanent war in Europe. France would fight to regain what she had lost and would enter into an alliance with Tsarist Russia against Germany. This was exactly what happened in 1914.

The Manifesto urged the German workers to demand an honourable peace and the recognition of the French Republic and advised the French workers to keep a watchful eye on the bourgeois republicans and make use of the Republic for the purpose of strengthening their class organization to fight for their emancipation. However, Marx warned the French workers not to try to take power under present circumstances.

While Marx was trying to restrain the French workers from entering into an untimely battle against overwhelming forces, Bakunin was doing his best to stir them to revolt at all costs. As soon as he heard of a local uprising in Lyons Bakunin went to that city on the 28th of September where he installed himself in the Town Hall. He declared the “administrative and governmental machinery of the State” abolished and the “Revolutionary Federation of the Commune” proclaimed in its place.

Bakunin carried his rejection of authority to the point that he neglected to post guards on the door of the Town Hall, so that when the State finally appeared in the form of the National Guard, it was able to enter the premises without difficulty and arrest everyone inside. Marx wrote about this episode with heavy but justified irony:

“London, October 19, 1870

“As to Lyons, I have received letters not fit for publication. At first everything went well. Under the pressure of the ‘International’ section, the Republic was proclaimed before Paris had taken that step. A revolutionary government was at once established ‑ La Commune ‑ composed partly of workmen belonging to the ‘International’, partly of Radical middle class Republicans. The octrois [internal customs dues] were at once abolished, and rightly so. The Bonapartist and Clerical intriguers were intimidated. Energetic means were taken to arm the whole people. The middle class began if not really to sympathise with, at least to quietly undergo, the new order of things. The action of Lyons was at once felt at Marseilles and Toulouse, where the ‘International’ sections are strong.

“But the asses, Bakunin and Cluseret, arrived at Lyons and spoiled everything. Belonging both to the ‘International’, they had, unfortunately, influence enough to mislead our friends. The Hotel de Ville was seized for a short time ‑ a most foolish decree on the abolition de l'etat [abolition of the state] and similar nonsense were issued. You understand that the very fact of a Russian ‑ represented by the middle class papers as an agent of Bismarck ‑ pretending to impose himself as the leader of a Comite de Salut de la France [Committee for the Safety of France] was quite sufficient to turn the balance of public opinion. As to Cluseret, he behaved both as a fool and a coward. These two men have left Lyons after their failure.

“At Rouen, as in most industrial towns of France, the sections of the International, following the example of Lyons, have enforced the official admission into the ‘committees of defence’ of the working-class element.

“Still, I must tell you that according to all information I receive from France, the middle class on the whole prefers Prussian conquest to the victory of a Republic with Socialist tendencies.” (Marx and Engels Correspondence, Marx to Edward Beesly)

His attempt to proclaim anarchism having ended in farce, “Citizen B” was compelled to return to Switzerland empty-handed. Now he turned his attention once more to the IWA. Unable to overthrow the bourgeois state, he intensified his efforts to overthrow the General Council, which, on the eve of the Paris Commune, had to take up precious time with Bakunin’s constant intrigues.

The Paris Commune
Just as Marx thought, the French republicans immediately showed their cowardice and their readiness to enter into an agreement with Bismarck against the working class, who were prepared to fight against the Prussian forces. The attempt of the French bourgeois to disarm the workers of Paris was the spark that lit the flame of the Paris Commune.

A barricade in the Paris Commune, March 18, 1871.
A barricade in the Paris Commune, March 18, 1871.
The Commune lasted three months (March 18 to May 29, 1871) but finally succumbed to overwhelming force. A few days after the defeat of the Commune Marx wrote the famous Address we now know as The Civil War in France. At a time when the Communards were being systematically maligned by the bourgeois press, Marx defended them. He pointed out that the Paris Commune was the prototype of a future workers’ state, a concrete expression of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Basing himself on the experience of the Revolution of 1848, Marx had come to the conclusion that the working class, after having seized power, could not simply lay hold of the bourgeois apparatus of the state and use it for its own purposes, but that it would have to demolish this military-bureaucratic machine and erect in its place a new state, a state that would not be a replica of the old state of the oppressor class, but a workers’ state, democratically run by the working class, a transitional state dedicated to its own eventual dissolution. The Paris Commune was just such a state.

Bakunin and his followers arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions. Their opposition to politics and the state became even more insistent, advocating the creation of communes in separate towns as soon as possible; with the idea that these communes would inspire other towns to follow their example. But one of the reasons the Commune failed was precisely that it remained isolated in Paris. What was required, as Marx explained, was to march on Versailles, where the counterrevolution was based, and crush the enemy before the enemy crushed the Commune, which was unfortunately what occurred.

Some time later, Garibaldi replied to the Bakuninists that the Paris Commune was defeated because it was not centralized and disciplined enough: “You intend, in your paper, to make war upon untruth and slavery. That is a very fine programme, but I believe that the International, in fighting against the principle of authority, makes a mistake and obstructs its own progress. The Paris Commune fell because there was in Paris no authority but only anarchy. Spain and France are suffering from the same evil.” (Engels, Comment upon Giuseppe Garibaldi’s letter to Prospero Crescio, 7th July 1873, MECW, vol. 23, p. 453.)

After the Commune
The defeat of the Commune inevitably created a very difficult situation for the International. The International faced the attacks of enemies on all sides. There were the slanderous attacks by the bourgeois press of all countries. But the General Council was able to reply to such attacks openly, and for a while the attacks actually served to strengthen the International.

In France, however, the raging counterrevolution meant that for a few years the French workers’ movement was paralyzed and links with the International were broken. As a consequence of the defeat and the White Terror that followed it, an army of communard refugees flooded into London, virtually the only place in Europe that would receive them. At a time when almost all governments now began to mobilize their forces against the International, it was overwhelmed by the necessity of assisting the many refugees from the Communards, most of whom ended up in London. The collection of the necessary funds to assist them absorbed a lot of the time of Marx and other members of the General Council.

Worse was to come. As so often happens in exile circles following the defeat of a revolution, the French refugees were demoralized and disoriented by events, and bitter factional strife was continually breaking out amongst them. This affected the General Council, which had co-opted a number of refugees to make up for the loss of contacts in France itself. It was later exposed that a number of French police agents and provocateurs had penetrated the ranks of the French exiles and infiltrated the ranks of the International.

The International was besieged by enemies on all sides. Bakunin launched an attack on Marx and “State communism”: “We shall fight to the hilt against their false authoritarian theories, against their dictatorial presumption and against their methods of underground intrigues and vainglorious machinations, their introduction of mean personalities, their foul insults and infamous slanders, methods which characterize the political struggles of almost all Germans and which they have unfortunately introduced into the International.” (Quoted in Mehring, Karl Marx)

Meanwhile, Mazzini published violent attacks on the Commune and on the International in a weekly publication which he published in Lugano, but Garibaldi, who was a genuine revolutionary and a national hero, saw in the International “the rising sun of the future”. The German labour movement also suffered the attacks of the state. Bebel and Liebknecht, who had protested against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and declared their solidarity with the Paris Commune, were arrested and sentenced to confinement in a fortress. Bismarck came down hard on the German working-class movement and particularly the supporters of the International.

Ultra-leftism and opportunism
Marx was forced to fight on different fronts. On the one hand there were the ultra-left anarchists, but on the other there were all kinds of confused, reformist elements who had joined the International as a means of furthering their trade union activity, but were by no means revolutionaries. These people were frightened by the Paris Commune and the ferocity of the repression that followed. More than one of them deserted the International on one pretext or another.

A typical representative of this trend was the English trade unionist John Hales, who was at the time the General Secretary of the IWA. Hales was a reformist with nationalist prejudices. Marx said that in his dealings with the English reformist workers’ leaders he had to be very patient: “mild in manner but bold in content.” He must have had the patience of Job!

On reading the minutes of the General Council, one gets a clear impression of what Marx and Engels had to put up with from such people. The English members of the Council displayed a narrow-minded parochial attitude to most questions, indulging in petty quarrels over trivial organizational matters, which often detracted from far more important work.

Needless to say, men like Hales were deeply suspicious of genuine revolutionaries and had an ambivalent attitude to the Paris Commune. They were hostile to Republicanism and inclined to seek accommodation with Liberal elements. As Hales showed in his attitude to the Irish question. He demanded that the Irish members of the IWA should come under the control of the British Federal Council – a demand that was rejected by the General Council with only one vote in favour – that of Hales.

At first sight it may seem that there could be no common ground between English reformists like Hales and Co. and the Bakuninists. But in politics we can find all sorts of strange bedfellows. The Alliance’s demand for autonomy for the national sections found a sympathetic hearing from some of the English. To the degree that Hales felt that his position as General Secretary of the IWA was being threatened, to establish his position he manoeuvred the British Federal Council as a counterweight to the General Council.

And that was not all. Bakunin’s demand that the workers must abstain from politics also chimed well with the class collaboration politics of the trade union leaders who were stuck firmly to the apron-strings of the Liberal Party and had no desire to take the initiative of setting up an independent Labour party. All this was sufficient grounds for the English reformists to make common cause with the Spanish and Italian anarchists – and always against Marx and the General Council.

Barrage of letters
Anarchism is the communism of the petty bourgeois and the lumpenproletarian. In both cases, the central consideration is always the same: extreme individualism, a total rejection of any rules, discipline and centralization. In the course of the dispute with the Bakuninists, the latter ignored all the democratic structures of the International. They refused to recognize the General Council, although it had been elected by the World Congress and repeatedly re-elected.

The Bakuninists were small in numbers, but made a lot of noise. On 28 July 1871 Engels wrote to Carlo Cafiero:

“The Bakuninists are a tiny minority within the Association and they are the only ones who have at all times brought about dissension. I am referring mainly to the Swiss, because we had little or nothing to do with the others. We have always allowed them to have their principles and to promote them as they thought best, so long as they renounced all attempts at undermining the Association or imposing their programme on us.” (MECW, vol. 44, p. 180)

The limited resources of the General Council were put under severe strain by the problems that flowed from the defeat of the Commune. The constant attacks by the enemies of the International, the intrigues of the Bakuninists and need to assist the ever increasing numbers of starving and destitute refugees from France, took up a colossal amount of time. For weeks on end Marx was unable to dedicate any time to Capital and other important theoretical work. He wrote in desperation to Kugelmann:

“Remember, mon cher, that if the day had 48 hours, I would still not have finished my day’s work for months now.

“The work for the International is immense, and in addition London is overrun with refugees, whom we have to look after. Moreover, I am overrun by other people – newspaper men and others of every description – who want to see the ‘monster’ with their own eyes.

“Up till now it has been thought that the emergence of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing had not yet been invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads its inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths in one day (and the bourgeois cattle believe and propagate them still further), than could have previously been produced in a century.” (Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 27 July 1871, MECW, vol. 44, pp. 176-177)

One way of sabotaging the work of an organization is by overloading it with tasks that surpass its real ability to cope. The Bakuninists adopted the tactic of bombarding the sections and individual members with a barrage of letters, circulars etc., defaming Marx and the General Council. Commenting on this tactic, Engels wrote:

“As private correspondents these men are assiduous beyond belief; and if he [were] a member of the Alliance they would certainly have bombarded him with letters and blandishments.” (To Lafargue, 19 January, 1872, MECW, vol. 44, p. 301). Engels fortunately did not live in the age of emails, or he would have had a lot more to complain about.

The Sonvillier circular accused the London Conference of the deadliest of all deadly sins ‑ authoritarianism:

"This Conference has... taken resolutions... which tend to turn the International, which is a free federation of autonomous sections, into a hierarchical and authoritarian organization of disciplined sections placed entirely under the control of a General Council which may, at will, refuse their admission or suspend their activity"!

The circular claimed that the very fact that some people were members of the General Council had a "corrupting effect", for "it is absolutely impossible for a person who has power" (!) over his fellows to remain a moral person. The General Council is becoming a "hotbed of intrigue". This is just another way of expressing the common prejudice of backward workers that “all leaders are corrupt”. If that were really the case, the outlook for socialism would be very poor indeed.

Yet another complaint of the “anti-authoritarians” is that the same members of the General Council were re-elected every year. The same leadership was sitting in the same place (London). The General Council has been "composed for five years running of the same persons, continually re-elected". To this complaint Marx gave the obvious answer: “The re-election of the General Council's original membership, at successive Congresses at which England was definitely under-represented, would seem to prove that it has done its duty within the limits of the means at its disposal” ibid.).

It is clear that the Congress would only re-elect a leadership if it considered that its work was generally satisfactory. The Sixteen, on the contrary, interpreted this only as a proof of the "blind confidence of the Congresses", carried at Basel to the point of "a sort of voluntary abdication in favour of the General Council". In their opinion, the Council's "normal role" should be "that of a simple correspondence and statistical bureau".

No leadership?
The idea that the International should have no guiding centre and that its leading bodies should only co-ordinate the work of the national sections was later put into practice by the Second International, which, as Lenin remarked, was not an International but only a post office. This played a big part in bringing about the national-reformist degeneration of the Second International.

Moreover, this argument is not confined to the International. It equally applies to national and local organizations. The logic of it would be to dissolve the organization altogether – which suits the anarchist point of view admirably. Unfortunately, the workers are involved in the class struggle and cannot do without strong centralized organization to fight the bosses. The workers’ organizations are very democratic and willing to discuss different opinions as to whether to call a strike or not. But at the end of the day, the issue is put to the vote and the majority decides.

The question is: what is the real character of a revolutionary leadership? Is it to provide political leadership, or merely to act in an administrative (i.e. bureaucratic) character? Is it to organize and centralize the work or merely to pass on information and co-ordinate the work of the constituent bodies that will function with complete autonomy? Is the revolutionary organization a school without any definite ideas, which discusses endlessly the views of every comrade in order for an idea to “emerge” of its own accord? Or is it an organization that is formed on the basis of very definite ideas, theories and principles that are regularly re-discussed, concretized and voted on in democratic congresses with elected delegates?

Marx answered the anarchists as follows:

“First, the General Council should be nominally a simple correspondence and statistical bureau. Once it has been relieved of its administrative functions, its correspondence would be concerned only with reproducing the information already published in the Association's newspapers. The correspondence bureau would thus become needless.

“As for statistics, that function is possible only if a strong organization, and especially, as the original Rules expressly say, a common direction are provided. Since all that smacks very much of ‘authoritarianism’, however, there might perhaps be a bureau, but certainly no statistics. In a word, the General Council would disappear. The federal councils, the local committees, and other ‘authoritarian’ centres, would go by the same token. Only the autonomous sections would remain.

“What, one may ask, will be the purpose of these ‘autonomous sections’, freely federated and happily rid of all superior bodies, ‘even of the superior body elected and constituted by the workers’?

“Here, it becomes necessary to supplement the circular by the report of the Jura Federal Committee submitted to the Congress of the Sixteen:

"‘In order to make the working class the real representative of humanity's new interests, ‘its organization must be’ guided by the idea that will triumph. To evolve this idea from the needs of our epoch, from mankind's vital aspirations, by a consistent study of the phenomena of social life, to then carry this idea to our workers' organizations — such should be our aim,’ etc. Lastly, there must be created ‘amid our working population a real revolutionary socialist school.’

“Thus, the autonomous workers' sections are in a trice converted into schools, of which these gentlemen of the Alliance will be the masters. They ‘evolve’ the idea by ‘consistent’ studies which leave no trace behind. They then ‘carry this idea to our workers' organizations’. 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.” (Fictitious Splits in the International, MECW, vol. 23, p. 114)

As the elected leadership of the International, the General Council could not allow itself to be bullied and blackmailed by self-appointed individuals and groups. In a letter to Carmelo Palladino, dated 23 November 1871, Marx explained his attitude to all this:

“Whatever your fears in regard to the great responsibility the General Council has taken upon itself, that Council will remain ever loyal to the flag entrusted to its care seven years ago by the faith of the working men of the civilised world. It will respect individual opinions, it is prepared to transfer its powers to the hands of its mandators, but as long as it is charged with the supreme direction of the Association, it will see to it that nothing is done to vitiate the character of the movement which has made the International what it now is, and will abide by the resolutions of the Conference until such time as a congress has decided otherwise.” (MECW, vol. 44, pp. 261-2)

Marx pointed out, the only sin that the General Council was guilty of was – carrying out Congress decisions. The Congress consists of elected delegates who, after participating freely in democratic debate, decide by a majority what ideas and methods the International has to follow. The International elected a leadership composed of the most capable and experienced people to do precisely this. And democracy has always consisted of the fact that the majority decides. The minority has the right to express its views within the organization, but if you are in a minority you have to accept it, not shout about “authoritarianism”.

The problem here – and in general with the “anti-authoritarians” – is that they do not respect the rights of the majority. Their real complaint is that they are a minority, and not the majority. They believe that the tail ought to wag the dog. Marx remarked ironically: “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. How else can we suppose that a majority will transform itself into a minority by voluntary co-options?” (Fictitious Splits in the International, MECW, vol. 23, p. 114)

Factional use of private correspondence
As part of their “anti-authoritarian” campaign, the Bakuninists did not hesitate to make unscrupulous use of private correspondence for factional purposes, and even demanded that the General Council should debate with them in public. When the Bakuninist papers Egalite joined the Progres in inviting the Travail (a Paris paper) to denounce the General Council, Marx wrote:

“The General Council does not know of any article, either in the Rules, or the Regulations, which would oblige it to enter into correspondence or into polemic with the Egalite or to provide 'replies to questions' from newspapers. The Federal Committee of Geneva alone represents the branches of Romance Switzerland vis-a-vis the General Council. When the Romance Federal Committee addresses requests of reprimands to us through the only legitimate channel, that is to say through its secretary, the General Council will always be ready to reply. But the Romance Federal Committee has no right either to abdicate its functions in favour of the Egalite and Progres, or to let these newspapers usurp its functions. Generally speaking, the General Council's administrative correspondence with national and local committees cannot be published without greatly prejudicing the Association's general interests. Consequently, if the other organs of the International were to follow the example of the Progres and the Egalite, the General Council would be faced with the alternative of either discrediting itself publicly by its silence or violating its obligations by replying publicly.” (Fictitious Splits, MECW, vol. 23, p.90, my emphasis, AW)

This is quite clear: the leadership of the International is not under any obligation to enter into public polemics with anybody. On the contrary, to do so would represent a violation of its obligations. Internal correspondence cannot be published without greatly prejudicing the Association's general interests. Such correspondence must be conducted through the normal channels that exist for that purpose. To suggest anything else would be tantamount to proposing the dissolution of the International, eradicating the difference between members and non-members and abolishing any element of internal democracy, congress decisions, elections, etc. In other words, it would represent the triumph of anarchy over democratic centralism – which is precisely what Bakunin wanted.

The Sonvillier circular complained bitterly that: "the [London] Conference aimed a blow at freedom of thought and its expression... in conferring upon the General Council the right to denounce and disavow any publicity organ of the sections or federations that discussed either the principles on which the Association rests, or the respective interests of the sections and federations, or finally the general interests of the Association as a whole (see L'Egalite of October 21)."

What had L'Egalite of October 21 published? It had published a resolution in which the Conference "gives warning that henceforth the General Council will be bound to publicly denounce and disavow all newspapers calling themselves organs of the International which, following the precedents of Progres and Solidarite, discuss in their columns, before the middle-class public, questions exclusively reserved for the local or federal committees and the General Council, or for the private and administrative sittings of the Federal or General Congresses."

To which Marx replied:

“To appreciate properly the spiteful lamentations of B. Malon, we must bear in mind that this resolution puts an end, once and for all, to the attempts of some journalists who wished to substitute themselves for the main committees of the International and to play therein the role that the journalists' bohemia is playing to the bourgeois world. As a result of one such attempt, the Geneva Federal Committee had seen some members of the Alliance edit L'Egalite, the official organ of the Romanish Federation, in a manner completely hostile to the latter.” (Fictitious Splits, MECW, vol. 23. p. 104)

Marx and Engels did not regard the party press as an open forum where anyone could air their views in public. On 9 August 1871 Der Volksstaat published a statement by Amand Goegg addressed to the editors of the Schwäbischer Merkur, in which he declared himself an advocate of anarchist individualism. On 12 August Der Volksstaat published a letter by Bernhard Becker referring to the time of his expulsion from the General Association of German Workers in 1865.

When Engels found out, he was furious and wrote to the German Social Democratic leader Wilhelm Liebknecht: “Why bother to rehabilitate that good-for-nothing B. Becker? And allow that jackass Goegg to parade his own idiocies before the public?” (MECW, vol. 44, p. 199). Even the publication of a letter by an undesirable element was considered to be unacceptable. This shows how far Marx and Engels were from the idea of the party press as a free-for-all.

Another issue was the public distribution of private and internal correspondence for factional purposes. On this we can cite Marx’s numerous comments on the subject. Marx wrote a letter to Nikolai Danielson, 12 December 1872, in which he says:

“Dear Friend,

“From the enclosed you can see the results of the Hague Congress. I read out the letter to Lyubavin to the Commission d'enquête on the Alliance in the strictest confidence and without divulging the name of the addressee. Nevertheless, the secret was not kept, firstly because the Commission included Splingard, the Belgian lawyer, among its numbers, and he was in reality no more than an agent of the Alliancists; secondly, because Zhuhovsky, Guillaume et Co. had already earlier — as a preventive measure re-counted the story all over the place in their own way and with apologist interpretations. This was how it came about that, in its report to the Congress, the Commission was compelled to pass on the facts relative to Bakunin that were contained in the letter to Lyubavin (of course, I had not revealed his name, but Bakunin’s friends had already been informed on that score by Geneva). The question that presents itself now is whether the Commission appointed by the Congress to publish the minutes (of which I am a member) may make public use of that letter or not? That is for Lyubavin to decide. However, I may note that — ever since the Congress — the facts have been going the rounds of the European press, and this was none of our doing. I found the whole business all the more distasteful since I had reckoned on the strictest discretion and solemnly demanded it.” (MECW, vol. 44, pp. 455-6, Marx To Nikolai Danielson, my emphasis, AW)

We see here that Marx considered the public use of private and internal party correspondence as something absolutely unacceptable, in fact, distasteful. It amounts to a breach of trust between comrades and an unscrupulous misuse of information. It goes without saying that one does not necessarily speak in the same terms about a subject in a private conversation as one would in a public meeting. If I believe that any chance remark I make in a private communication (either spoken or written) will the next day be broadcast to the four winds, I will be very careful about what I say, and a frank and honest interchange of ideas will be impossible.

This is particularly true in the course of a factional dispute, where tempers can flare up and even the most reasonable comrades may make comments that they may later regret. If one wishes to solve a dispute in the best (i.e. political) way, it is necessary to shrug one’s shoulders at such things, which constitute the small change of politics, trivial details that represent nothing serious. But if one wishes, not to solve a dispute, but to inflame it, to poison the atmosphere, increase tension, create personal clashes and carry matters to the point of a split, then the correct tactic is to spread all kinds of gossip, reveal in public what has been said (or written) to you in private, and violate every norm of comradely behaviour.

When Engels discovered that the Italian Bakuninists had got hold of a letter he had written to a comrade in Italy, and were using it for factional purposes, he was indignant. This is what he wrote:

“Having rebelled against the whole organisation of the International, and knowing that it will have great difficulty in justifying itself at the Congress next September, the Jura Committee is now looking for letters and mandates from the General Council in order to fabricate false accusations against us. I, like all of us, willingly consent to all letters being read to the Congress, but we do not find it agreeable to learn that the same letters, written for this or that section, have been put at the disposal of these gentlemen.” (Engels to Cesare Bert, 7 June 1872, MECW, vol. 44, p. 392)

https://www.marxist.com/marx-versus-bak ... rt-two.htm

[chlamor]

Marx versus Bakunin - Part Three
Alan Woods 25 February 2010

After the defeat of the Paris Commune different ultra-left and opportunist tendencies emerged within the First International, who intrigued against the General Council and attempted to use the name of the International for their own ends. This was finally resolved with the expulsion of these elements with strict powers established for the General Council and clear rules on how the International was to be run.

Problems in England
The triumphant reaction in Europe rained blows down on the International. The correspondence of Marx and Engels reflect the increasingly desperate position: “In Spain many people have been imprisoned and others are in hiding. In Belgium the government is trying with all its might to give free rein to the law and even more against us. In Germany the followers of Bismarck are even starting to play this game too.” (Engels to Carlo Cafiero, 16 July 1871, MECW, vol. 44, p. 171)

There were internal problems everywhere, including in England. The war between France and Germany had benefited the English capitalists, who were able to give a part of their enormous profits to a section of the working class. As a sign of the confidence of the English bourgeoisie, several of the old anti-union laws were abolished. The idea of class collaboration began to take firm root among trade union leaders, including some who were members of the General Council.

As the International was becoming more radical, many of the union leaders were becoming increasingly moderate. To tell the truth, the alliance of these reformist union leaders with the revolutionary socialists was never very firm or wholehearted. Now it was put under extreme pressure by the Paris Commune. Some of the trade union leaders were alarmed by the Commune and the ferocious reaction that followed the defeat frightened them even more.

The intensity of the attacks on the International in the bourgeois press made them uneasy. It threatened their good relations with the bourgeois liberals, and they were anxious to put some distance between the General Council and themselves. Marx’s Address, The Civil War in France. was the last straw. Although it had been written by Marx at the request of the General Council, two English Council members, Lucraft and Odger, disassociated themselves from it and resigned in protest. Engels wrote to Carlo Cafiero on 28 July 1871:

“If Mazzini calls our friend Marx a ‘man of corrosive… intellect, of domineering temper’, etc., etc., I can only say that Marx’s corrosive domination and his jealous nature have kept our Association together for seven years, and that he has done more than anyone else to bring it to its present proud position. As for the break up of the Association, which is said to have begun already here in England, the fact is that two English members of the Council, who had been getting on too close terms with the bourgeoisie, found our address on the civil war too strong and they withdrew. In their place we have four new English members and one Irishman, and we reckon ourselves to be much stronger here in England than we were before the two renegades left.” (MECW, vol. 44, p. 186)

The fact is that the trade union leaders were already beginning to seek a rapprochement with the Liberals, in order to win seats in Parliament. Even in 1868 Marx had complained of these “intriguers”, naming Odger, who stood for Parliament on several occasions, as one of them. After they split, Marx accused them of having sold themselves to the Liberal Ministry.

This caused a split in the English section of the International. However, not all the English trade union leaders broke away. Applegarth signed the Address of the General Council on The Civil War in France and remained a member of the Council to the end. But now there were serious problems with John Hale. He was pushing strongly for the establishment of a special Federal Council to be formed for England. Marx opposed the proposal, fearing, rightly, that it would become a tool in the hands of radical bourgeois members of Parliament.

Conflicts in the American section
Marx placed great hopes in the prospects for the International in the USA, where a young and fresh proletariat was developing rapidly with the growth of industry. But even in the New World there were problems. They were the exact opposite of the problems the IWA faced in Europe, where after the Paris Commune the bourgeois and middle class were ferociously hostile to the International. In America on the contrary, socialism was becoming quite fashionable among the cultured middle classes.

Here the International was seen, not as a threat, but rather as an interesting novelty. It attracted the attention of all sorts of middle class “progressives”: liberals, pacifists, feminists, temperance societies and even religious preachers. In New York, Section 12 of the IWA was taken over by a wealthy bourgeois feminist by the name of Victoria Woodhull, who Marx described as “a banker's woman, free-lover, and general humbug [hypocrite]”, and Tennessee Claflin her sister.

Section 9 was founded by her sister and was of the same kind. Woodhull was the first woman along with her sister to operate a brokerage firm in Wall Street and then open a weekly newspaper called modestly Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, advocating among a hotchpotch of demands including sex education, free love, women's suffrage, short skirts, spiritualism, vegetarianism, and licensed prostitution. But its main purpose for the sisters was advertising themselves and their bourgeois-liberal ideas.

Marx referred to Section No. 12 as a group “founded by Woodhull, and almost exclusively consisting of middle-class humbugs and worn-out Yankee swindlers in the reform business”. On August 30, 1871 the journal published "An Appeal of Section No. 12" (to the English-speaking citizens of the United States) signed by W. West, secretary of Section 12. The following excerpts are from this Appeal:

"The object of the International is simply to emancipate the laborer, male and female, by the conquest of political power."(…) "It involves, first, the Political Equality and Social Freedom of men and women alike."

"Political Equality means the personal participation of each in the preparation, administration, and execution of the laws by which all are governed." (…) "Social Freedom means absolute immunity from impertinent intrusion in all affairs of exclusively personal concernment, such as religious belief, the sexual relation, habits of dress, etc."

"The proposition involves, secondly, the establishment of a Universal Government... Of course, the abolition of... even differences of language are embraced in the program."

These extracts are sufficient to give an accurate idea of the class content and ideas of these people.

Immigrant workers
The most militant, class conscious and revolutionary sections of the young American proletariat were refugees from Europe: Germans, Poles, Russians, Irish, Jews, etc. Many did not speak English. By contrast, Section 12 was dominated by middle class English-speaking Americans with political ambitions. Section No. 12 invited the formation of "English-speaking sections" in the United States on the basis of this programme. In practice, this was an attempt by bourgeois careerists to use the name of the International for place hunting and electoral purposes:

"If practicable, for the convenience of political action, there should be a section formed in every primary election district."

"There must ultimately be instituted in every town a municipal committee or council corresponding with the common councils; in every state, a state committee or council corresponding with the state legislature; and in the nation, a national committee or council corresponding with the United States National Congress."

"The work of the International includes nothing less than the institution, within existing forms, of another form of government, which shall supersede them all."

This Appeal led to the formation of “all sorts of middle-class humbug sections, free-lovers, spiritists, spiritist Shakers, etc.” It caused a split in the American section, when Section 1 (composed mainly of German-speakers) of the old Council demanded 1) that Section 12 be expelled and 2) that no section be admitted to membership unless it consisted of at least two-thirds workers.

Marx considered it imperative that the IWA should purge its ranks of these elements. He wrote to Bolte: “Obviously the General Council does not support in America what it combats in Europe. Resolutions I (2) and (3) and IX now give the New York committee legal weapons with which to put an end to all sectarian formations and amateur groups and if necessary to expel them. ” This was what was done. Five dissidents formed a separate Council on November 19, 1871, which consisted of English-speaking Americans as well as Frenchmen, and Germans.

On November 19, 1871Woodhull's journal protested against Section 1 and declared, among other things:

"The simple truth is that Political Equality and Social Freedom for all alike, of all races, both sexes, and every condition, are necessary precursors of the more radical reforms demanded by the International." (our emphasis)

And:

"The extension of equal citizenship to women, the world over, must precede any general change in the subsisting relations of capital and labor."

Moreover:

"Section 12 would also remonstrate against the vain assumption, running all through the Protest" (of Section 1) "under review, that the International Working Men's Association is an organization of the working classes...." (Marx, Notes on the American split)

In these few lines the bourgeois-liberal character of this trend stands out clearly. Here we have very similar ideas to that of the “trendy lefts” today: feminists, pacifists, ecologists and all the other petty bourgeois movements that have infiltrated the labour movement in a period when the class struggle was at a low ebb. These elements tend to be highly eloquent and assertive in pushing their particular views. They elbow the workers to one side and seize positions, which they use for their own advantage.

For these people, the struggle for socialism is always subordinate to their particular hobby, in this case, feminism. Although they were very far removed from anarchism, like Bakunin, they were very keen to assert their “autonomy” against the General Council, and their absolute right to “do their own thing”. This is very characteristic of middle class tendencies at all times – the assertion of “my” rights as an absolute and inviolable principle as against the rights of the majority. In the pages of Woodhull's Journal, October 21, 1871, Section 12 asserted:

"The independent right of each section to have, hold, and give expression to its own constructions of said proceedings of the several Congresses, and the Rules and Regulations” (!) “of said General Council, each section being alone responsible for its own action."

This is how these people understood the role of the proletariat. In Woodhull's journal, November 25, 1871, we read the following:

"It is not true that the 'common understanding or agreement' of the workingmen of all countries, of itself, standing alone, constitutes the Association... The statement that the emancipation of the working classes can only be conquered by themselves cannot be denied, yet it is true so far as it described the fact that the working classes cannot be emancipated against their will [!]."

This is the authentic voice of the bourgeois socialist, loud and clear!

On December 3, 1871, the new Federal Council for North America was formally founded. The very next day it denounced the bourgeois swindlers in a circular to all sections of the International in the United States. It states, among other things:

"In the Committee" (of the old Central Committee) "which was to be a defense against all reform swindles, the majority finally consisted of practically forgotten reformers and panacea-mongers....

"Thus it came about that the people who preached the evangels of free love sat fraternally beside those who wanted to bring to the whole world the blessing of a single common language ‑ land co-operativists, spiritualists, atheists, and deists ‑ each striving to ride his own hobbyhorse. Particularly Section 12, Woodhull... The first step that has to be taken here to further the movement is to organize and at the same time arouse the revolutionary element to be found in the opposing interests of capitalists and workers...

"The delegates of Sections 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 16, 21, 23, 24, 25, and others, having seen that all efforts to control this mischief were in vain, decided, after the adjournment of the old Central Council sine die (December 3, 1871), to establish a new one, which would consist of real workers and which would exclude all those who would only confuse the question". (New Yorker Democrat, December 9, 1871)

The break with Section 12
The two rival Councils appealed to the General Council for recognition. This obviously caused some confusion. Various sections, for example, the French Section No. 10 (New York), and several Irish sections, withdrew their delegates from both councils until the General Council made its decision.

The Woodhull journal (West, etc.) lied unashamedly when it asserted that it was sure of the support of the General Council. An article of December 2 carried the headline: Section 12 Sustained. The Decision of the General Council. This was a direct fabrication. On the contrary, the decision of the General Council, November 5, 1871, sustained the Central Committee against the claims of Section 12, which tried to replace it.

The fate of the International in the United States depended on carrying out a complete break with Woodhull and Co. As soon as the resolutions reached New York, they began to follow their old tactics. First they had discussed the original split in the most notorious New York bourgeois papers. Now they did the same against the General Council (presenting the matter as a conflict between Frenchmen and Germans, between socialism and communism), to the joy of all the enemies of the International.

The middle class elements particularly resented the proposal of the General Council that two-thirds of the members of any section should be made up of workers. Very characteristic were the marginal comments in Woodhull's journal on December 15 1871:

"No new test of membership, as that two-thirds or any part of a section shall be wage slaves, as if it were a crime to be free, was required."

The journal dated May 4, 1872 commented on the resolution of the General Council:

"... In this decree of the General Council its authors presume to recommend that in future no American section be admitted of which two-thirds at least are not wage slaves. Must they be politically slaves also? As well one thing as the other...."

To these complaints of the petty bourgeois elements, Marx replied: "The intrusion into the International Working Men's Association of bogus reformers, middle-class quacks, and trading politicians is mostly to be feared from that class of citizens who have nothing better to depend upon than the proceeds of wage slavery."

Presidential ambitions
Ignoring the clear repudiation by the General Council, Woodhull and her supporters continued to organize a ceremony of confusion, arguing, without the slightest justification, that the International had accepted her feminist views. In an article signed W. West, in Woodhull's, etc., journal, March 2, 1872, one reads:

"The issue of the 'Appeal' of Section 12 to the English-speaking citizens of the United States in August last was a new departure in the history of the International, and has resulted in the recognition by the General Council of Political Equality and Social Freedom of both sexes alike, and of the essential political character of the work before us."

Meanwhile, as the Presidential elections approached, the cloven hoof showed itself ‑ namely, that the International should serve in the election of ‑ Madame Woodhull! She decided to run as the first woman for the United States Presidency in 1872 but it turned out to be a farce. In order to get support for her campaign, she flirted with the bourgeois Liberals. On March 2, 1872, under the title, "The Coming Combination Convention", we read the statement:

"There is a proposition under consideration by the representatives of the various reformatory elements of the country looking to a grand consolidated convention to be held in this city in May next, during Anniversary week... Indeed, if this convention in May acts wisely, who can say that the fragments of the defunct Democratic party will come out from them and take part in the proposed convention... Every body of radical [mind] everywhere in the United States should, as soon as the call is made public, take immediate steps to be represented in it."

The Appeal was headed by the signature: Victoria C. Woodhull, followed by Theodore H. Banks, R. W. Hume (Banks was one of the founders of the Counter Council). In this Appeal: the convention will consider "nominations for President and Vice-President of the United States". Specially invited were:

"Labor, land, peace, and temperance reformers, and Internationals and Women Suffrages ‑ including all the various suffrage associations ‑ as well as all others who believe the time has come when the principles of eternal justice and human equality should be carried into our halls of legislation."

The whole affair was the laughing stock of New York and United States. Section 2 of the IWA stated:

"Recognizing the principle of women's right to vote, in view of the insinuations of Citizeness Woodhull, at the meeting in Apollo Hall, leading the public to believe that the International supports her candidacy.

"Declares:

"That for the present the International cannot and should not be taken in tow by any American political party; for none of them represents the workers' aspirations; none of them has for its objective the economic emancipation of the workers.

"Section 2 had thought:

"That our sole objective ought to be, for the present, the organization and the solidarity of the working class in America."

Under the title "Internationals, watch out!", the same issue of Socialiste states, among other things:

"The International is not, and cannot be, persecuted in America; the politicians, far from aiming at its destruction, think only of using it as a lever and supporting point for the triumph of their personal views. Should the International let itself be dragged into this path, it would cease to be the Association of Workers and become a ring of politicians.

"For a long time now, there have been cries of alarm; but the convention in Apollo Hall, nominating, in the name of the International, Madame Woodhull as candidate for the Presidency, should henceforth open the eyes of the less perceptive. Internationals of America, watch out!"

Ms. Woodhull tried to use her money to buy herself an International. But it proved to be too expensive. The bourgeois policies advocated by Section 12 were sufficient grounds for the expulsion of the Woodhull group and its supporters from the First International. The Hague Congress ratified the expulsion of these middle class interlopers and recognized the new, proletarian Council.

https://www.marxist.com/marx-versus-bak ... -three.htm

[chlamor]

Marx versus Bakunin - Part Four
Alan Woods 02 March 2010

In 1872 in response to the intrigues of Bakunin and his secret society, the Hague conference of the First International adopted a resolution prohibiting any organization with an independent programme to function within the body of the International and proceeded to expel Bakunin and his supporters, putting an end to the internal diatribe and intrigues and establishing the principles upon which the organisation would function.

The London Conference
The congress in Basle in 1869 had decided that the next congress should take place in Paris, and was now (1871) due, but under conditions of ferocious state repression, the General Council decided to hold a closed conference in London, similar to the one which had taken place in 1865. Under the general conditions of reaction, the Conference had to have a secret character. Marx wrote to the Russian Utin on 27 July 1871:

“Last Tuesday the General Council resolved that there would not be a Congress this year (in view of extraordinary circumstances) but that, as in 1865, there should be a private conference in London to which different sections would be invited to send their delegates. The convocation of this Conference must not be published in the press. Its meetings will not be public ones. The Conference will be required to concern itself, not with theoretical questions, but exclusively with questions of organization.” (Marx to Nikolai Utin, MECW, vol. 44, p. 178.)

The London conference took place from the 17th to the 23rd of September with only 23 delegates present, including six from Belgium, two from Switzerland and one from Spain. Thirteen members of the General Council were also present, but six of them had only a consultative vote.

It approved a resolution that the emancipation of the working class could be achieved only by constituting itself into a special political party against the bourgeois parties. The conference also declared that the German workers had fulfilled their proletarian duty during the Franco-Prussian War. And it rejected all responsibility for the so-called Nechayev affair. The resolution adopted on the question of the political struggle represented a total defeat for the Bakuninists, as we see from the concluding paragraphs:

"In presence of an unbridled reaction which violently crushes every effort at emancipation on the part of the working men, and pretends to maintain by brute force the distinction of classes and the political domination of the propertied classes resulting from it;...

"That this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to insure the triumph of the social Revolution and its ultimate end ‑ the abolition of classes;

"That the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economical struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political powers of landlords and capitalists ‑

"The Conference recalls to the members of the International:

"That in the militant state of the working class, its economical movement and its political action are indissolubly united."

The General Council was convinced that, despite Bakunin's protestations, his secret society continued to exist. The conference adopted a resolution prohibiting any organization with an independent programme to function within the body of the International.

The conference declared that the question of the Alliance was settled, now that the Geneva section had voluntarily dissolved itself. With regard to the Jura sections, the conference ratified the decision of the General Council, recognizing the Federal Council in Geneva as the only representative body for the Latin Swiss members. It advised the workers of the Jura sections to affiliate once again to the Federal Council in Geneva. Alternatively, they should call themselves the Jura Federation.

The conference further declared categorically that the International had nothing to do with the Nechayev affair, and that Nechayev had falsely appropriated and utilized the name of the International. This was directed at Bakunin who was well known to have been connected with Nechayev for a long time. Finally, the Conference left it to the discretion of the General Council to decide the time and place of the next congress or conference.

Marx regarded the results of the Conference as positive. He wrote to Jenny Marx on 23 September 1871 with a tone of palpable relief: “The conference is at last coming to an end today. It was hard work. Morning and evening sessions, commission sessions in between, hearing of witnesses, reports to be drawn up and so forth. But more was done than at all the previous Congresses put together, because there was no audience in front of which to stage rhetorical comedies.” (Marx to MECW, vol. 44, p. 220)

Attacks on the General Council
The London Conference brought the conflict with the Bakuninists to a head. For years the General Council had to fight against this conspiracy. Unable to prove what was going on behind the backs of the members of the International, Marx and Engels had to put up with the campaign of insults and attacks for almost a year. At last, by means of Conference resolutions I (2) and (3), IX, XVI, and XVII, it delivered its long prepared blow.

The Bakuninists now declared open war against the General Council. They accused it of rigging the conference and of forcing upon the International the dogma of the necessity of organizing the proletariat into a special party for the purpose of winning political power. The Bakuninists accused Marx and his followers as opportunists who were hindering the social revolution. They demanded another Congress where this question would be definitely settled.

In a barrage of circulars and letters, the Bakuninists publicly abused Marx in the most foul and disgusting language. In this furious campaign to discredit Marx and the General Council, they did not hesitate to accuse Marx of being an agent of Bismarck. They were even prepared to make use of anti-Semitism.

Bakunin felt threatened by Resolution XIV, and made strenuous efforts to get a protest started against the Conference decision. For this purpose he made use of some demoralized elements among the French political refugees in Geneva and London. Playing unscrupulously on the anti-German sentiments of the French, Bakunin compared Marx to Bismarck. He put out the slogan that the Geneva Council was dominated by Pan-Germanism.

Bakunin used national prejudice without scruples. He argued that all Germans held authoritarian views, and repeatedly compared Marx to Bismarck. He also repeatedly accused Marx of advocating a universal dictatorship, and a socialism "decreed from the top down." This accusation had not the slightest basis in fact. All his life Marx insisted that "the emancipation of the working classes can only be the work of the working classes themselves." But as the hack journalists say: why let the facts spoil a good story? Lies and slanders are the stock-in-trade of all intriguers. And if a lie is repeated with sufficient insistence, some people are sure to believe it.

In slandering Marx, Bakunin did not even stop at racist and anti-Semitic smears, which he raised on more than one occasion. For example, he wrote in 1872:

"Proudhon understood and felt liberty much better than Marx; Proudhon, when he was not dealing with doctrine and metaphysics, had the true instinct of the revolutionary – he worshipped Satan and proclaimed anarchy. It is possible that Marx might theoretically reach an even more rational system of liberty than that of Proudhon – but he lacks Proudhon’s instinct. As a German and a Jew he is authoritarian from head to foot. Hence come the two systems: the anarchist system of Proudhon broadened and developed by us and freed from all its metaphysical, idealist and doctrinaire baggage, accepting matter and social economy as the basis of all development in science and history. And the system of Marx, head of the German school of authoritarian communism.” (James Joll, The Anarchists, p. 90)

Marx refers to all this as “the intrigues of this bunch of scoundrels”, a description that, as we see, was fully justified.

Bakunin had a base in Italy and the French region of Switzerland. His main base was among the skilled watchmakers of the Jura region of Switzerland who were beginning to suffer from the competition of the developing industries.

The London Conference had given the General Council authority to disown all alleged organs of the International which, like the Progres and the Solidarité in the Jura, discussed internal questions of the International in public. The Bakuninists changed the name of Solidarité to La Révolution Sociale, which immediately began a ferocious attack on the General Council of the International, which it described as the “German Committee led by a brain à la Bismarck.”

This was a scandalous attempt to play on the anti-German prejudices of the French. Marx wrote to an American friend: “It refers to the unpardonable fact that I was born a German and that I do in fact exercise a decisive intellectual influence on the General Council. Nota bene: the German element in the General Council is numerically two-thirds weaker than the English and the French. The crime is, therefore, that the English and French elements are dominated (!) in matters of theory by the German element and find this dominance, i.e., German science, useful and even indispensable.” (Letter to Bolte)

The Bakuninists then tried the trick of changing their name. On the 20th of October the new Section for Revolutionary Socialist Propaganda and Action appeared in Geneva and approached the General Council with a request for affiliation. After the General Council had consulted the Federal Council in Geneva the request was rejected. In the end the Bakuninists set themselves up as the Jura Federation. Marx wrote to the Belgian César de Paepe on 24 November 1871:

“On the other hand, there will be the Jura Federation in Switzerland (in other words the men of the Alliance who hide behind this name), Naples, possibly Spain, part of Belgium and certain groups of French refugees (who, by the by, to judge by the correspondence we have had from France, would not appear to exert any serious influence there), and these will form the opposing camp. Such a split, in itself no great danger, would be highly inopportune at a time when we must march shoulder to shoulder against the common foe. Our adversaries harbour no illusions whatever about their weakness, but they count on acquiring much moral support from the accession of the Belgian Federal Council.” (MECW, vol. 44, p. 264)

The Jura sections organized a congress on the 12th of November in Sonvillier, although only 9 out of 22 sections were represented by only 16 delegates. However, to make up for their small numbers, they made more noise than ever. They expressed resentment at the fact that the London Conference had forced a name on them, but for tactical reasons they decided to call themselves in the future the Jura Federation.

In Switzerland many members of the International supported the London Conference. On December 21-2, Marx’s daughter Jenny wrote to Kugelmann as follows:

“In Geneva, that hotbed of intrigants, a congress representing thirty sections of the International has declared itself for the General Council, has passed a resolution to the effect that the separatist factions cannot henceforth be considered to form parts of the International, their acts having clearly shown that their object is to disorganize the Association; that these sections, who, under another name, are only a fraction of the old Alliance faction, by continuing to sow dissentions, are opposed to the interests of the Federation. This resolution was voted unanimously in an assembly of 500 members. The Bakuninists who had come all the way from Neuchatel to be present would have been seriously ill-used, had it not been for the men whom they style ‘des Bismarckians’ Outine, Perret, etc., who rescued them and begged the assembly to allow them to speak. (Outine of course was well aware that the best means of killing them altogether was to allow them to make their speeches.” (Documents of the First International, p. 530, notes)

However, in revenge, the Sonvillier congress sent out a circular to all the Federations of the International attacking the validity of the London Conference and appealing from its decisions to a general congress to be called as quickly as possible. They began to spread the rumour that the International was in a mortal crisis and on a downward path. In their view, the IWA had been formed as “a tremendous protest against any kind of authority,” and that every section had been guaranteed complete independence. They argued that the General Council was only an executive organ, but now the members had come to place a blind confidence in it. As a result, the Basle Congress had given the General Council authority to accept, reject or dissolve sections, pending the approval of the next congress.

What the author of the circular (Guillaume) did not mention was that this decision had been adopted after Bakunin had spoken enthusiastically in its favour, and that Guillaume had been in complete agreement with it. The reason was quite simple: the Bakuninists, who were strongly represented at Basle, believed that the General Council was going to be moved to Geneva, and they could control it. It is usually the case that the “anti-authoritarian” tendency is only against authority when they are in a minority. When they are in the majority, they are invariably despots and bullies.

“Anti-authoritarianism”
The Congress of Sixteen proceeded to "reorganize" the International by attacking the Conference and the General Council in a "Circular to All Federations of the International Working Men's Association". The Sonvillier circular used demagogic arguments to “prove” the dictatorial nature of the General Council, which had consisted of the same men and met in the same place for five years. This was cited as proof that the General Council now regarded itself as the (Bismarckian) “brains” of the International. Why were the ideas of the General Council regarded as the official theory of the International? Why were they considered to the only ones permissible? Why did the General Council regard the different opinions of other groups and individuals as heresy?

A stifling orthodoxy had developed in the International and in the members of the General Council, they argued, which prevented creative thinking and oppressed the free spirits of everybody else. The omnipotence of the General Council necessarily had a corrupting effect. It was impossible that a man like Marx who held such power could retain a moral character. This was a recipe for tyranny, and so on and so forth.

The decisions taken at Basle were bad enough, they said. But now the London Conference had taken further steps to transform the International from a free association of independent sections into an authoritarian and hierarchical organization in the hands of the General Council. It had decided that the General Council should have power to determine the time and place of the next congress, or of a conference to replace it. Thus the General Council had the power to replace the congresses with secret conferences.

They demanded that the powers of the General Council be reduced to those of a simple bureau for correspondence and the collection of statistics, and dictatorship and centralization be replaced by a free association of independent groups “without any directing authority, even if set up by voluntary agreement”

The General Council was to be no more than a “simple statistical and corresponding bureau”. The International must be the very image of the future communist society:

“The future society should be nothing but a universalization of the organization which the International will establish for itself. We must therefore try to bring this organization as close as possible to our ideal […] The International, embryo of the future human society, must henceforth be the faithful image of our principles of liberty and federation, and must reject any principle leading to authoritarianism, to dictatorship.”

This whole line of argument (which is still repeated today, even by people who think they are Marxists) is false from start to finish. The revolutionary party is a necessary tool for overthrowing capitalism. Must a tool resemble what it produces? In order to make a chair, a saw is required. But a saw that resembled a chair would never produce a chair or anything else.

This is not only nonsense but dangerous nonsense, and particularly so at the time we are considering, when, following the defeat of the Commune, the International was under attack from the bourgeois State, its members in many countries facing arrest and imprisonment or deportation.

As Marx remarked: “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 which must disappear when there are no more wars!” (op. cit., p. 115)

The real attitude of the “anti-authoritarians” was shown by the following incident. When the IWA representative, the Russian Utin, went to Zurich, he was attacked and beaten by eight men, who would have killed him, except that four German students happened to appear and saved him. It appears that this attack was organized by Slav supporters of Bakunin, whose activities were to be investigated by Utin. This kind of conduct was not only considered acceptable by Bakunin. He actively encouraged it, as we see in the case of Nechayev.

The Jura circular did not achieve its aim. The demand for the calling of a congress met with no support. Only in Belgium was it decided to call for a change in the Statutes of the International, to turn it into an association of independent federations and make the General Council “a Centre for Correspondence and Information.”

The Sonvillier circular provided welcome ammunition to the enemies of the International and was widely publicized by the bourgeois press, which, particularly since the fall of the Paris Commune, had been assiduously spreading lies about the sinister power of the General Council. These fairy stories were now confirmed from within the ranks of the International. The Bulletin Jurassien, which now took the place of the Révolution Sociale reprinted the articles of approval of the bourgeois newspapers.

It was the noisy campaign of slander and disinformation initiated by the Sonvillier circular that caused the General Council to issue an answer to it, also in the form of a circular, entitled Fictitious Splits in the International (Les prétendues Scissions dans l’Internationale.) In this circular the General Council answered all the lies and distortions of the Bakuninists.

The London conference’s acknowledgement that the German workers had done their proletarian duty during the Franco-Prussian War, this was used as an excuse for the accusation of “Pan-Germanism,” which was said to dominate the General Council.

These ridiculous accusations were brought forward in order to undermine the centralization of the International, which, in practice, would have meant its complete dissolution. Particularly in the prevailing conditions of counterrevolution, state repression and the systematic infiltration of workers’ organizations by police spies, centralization was the only possibility of saving the organization, as Marx explained:

“It [the Alliance] proclaims anarchy in the ranks of the proletariat as the infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of political and social forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext and at a moment when the old world is seeking to destroy the International it demands that the latter should replace its organization by anarchy.”

But such considerations made no difference to the anarchists, whose unprincipled and baseless attacks on the International leadership from within served to reinforce the attacks of the bourgeois state from without. Marx systematically exposed the machinations of the intriguers, and in particular Bakunin.

The Hague Congress
This Congress was convened in September, 1872. For the first time Marx was present in person, but Bakunin stayed away, probably because he knew he would be heavily defeated. The resolution of the London Conference on political action was ratified. There was one small addition which was copied verbatim from the Inaugural Address of the International. It reads:

"Since the owners of land and capital are always using their political privileges to protect and perpetuate their economic monopolies and to enslave labour, the great duty of the proletariat is to conquer the political power."

On the 5th of March 1872 the General Council had announced the calling of the annual congress for the beginning of September. In a letter to Kugelmann on the 29th of July Marx wrote: “The international congress (Hague, opens on the 2nd of September) will be a matter of life or death for the International and before I withdraw I want at least to protect it from the forces of dissolution.”

Part of Marx’s plan to protect the International from the destructive activities of the Bakuninists was the proposal to move the General Council from London, where it was becoming increasingly bogged down in rows and conflicts, to New York. The Bakuninists were not represented on the General Council, but they had succeeded in causing such confusion among the German, English and French members that the Council was obliged to form a special subcommittee to deal with the constant disputes.

The Hague congress met from the 2nd to the 7th of September. There were 61 delegates and Marx had a certain majority. With the exception of Lafargue, all five Spanish delegates were Bakuninists, as also were the eight Belgian and the four Dutch representatives. But the Italian Bakuninists sent no representatives to the congress, since their Rimini conference in August had broken off all relations with the General Council. The Jura Federation sent Guillaume and Schwitzguebel.

The rows began immediately, with the preliminary examination of the mandates, which lasted three days, so that the actual business of the congress began only on the fourth day with the reading of the report of the General Council, which was drawn up by Marx. The report detailed all the acts of repression against the International, the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, the terrorism of the English government against the Irish sections. It also reported on the steady progress made by the International in Holland, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland and Scotland, and its growth in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Buenos Aires. The report was adopted with acclaim.

It is interesting to note the attitude of Marx and Engels to the question of imperative mandates: that is, the practice of mandating delegates to vote in a particular way. This is an essentially undemocratic practice, which prevents delegates from arriving at their own conclusion as a result of participating in a debate and listening to the arguments of all sides. Engels wrote on the subject:

“We shall only note that if all electors gave their delegates imperative mandates concerning all points on the agenda, meetings and debates of the delegates would be superfluous. It would be sufficient to send the mandates to a central counting office which would count up the votes and announce the results. This would be much cheaper.” (Engels, Imperative mandates at the Hague Congress, 17th September 1872, MECW, vol. 23, p. 277)

Nowadays, when it has become fashionable in certain quarters to revive anarchist theories on organization, using the pretext of modern technology and particularly the Internet, these lines have a great relevance. If all that is required is the click of a mouse, congresses, conferences, debates and so on, are quite unnecessary. They can be replaced by emails. How Engels would have enjoyed that idea!

There followed the discussion on the General Council. Lafargue explained that the daily struggle of the working class against capitalism could not be conducted effectively without a central leadership. Opposing this, Guillaume denied the necessity for a General Council except as a central office for correspondence and statistics and without any authority. The International was not the property of one clever man, and so on and so forth.

The discussion ended on the fifth day of the congress in a closed session. In a long speech Marx demanded that the previous powers of the General Council should not only be maintained, but increased. It should be given the right to suspend, not only individual sections, but whole federations, under certain conditions, pending the decisions of the next congress. It had neither police nor soldiers at its disposal, but it could not permit its moral power to decay. Rather than degrade it to a letter-box it would be better to abolish the General Council altogether. Marx’s viewpoint was carried with 36 votes against 6, with 15 not voting.

Engels then moved that the General Council should be moved from London to New York for at least a year. The proposal caused consternation, particularly from the French delegates, who succeeded in getting a separate vote first on whether the seat of the General Council should be moved at all, and secondly whether it should be moved to New York. In the end, the motion that the seat of the General Council should be moved was carried with a small majority. Twelve members of the new General Council were then elected and given the right to co-opt seven other members.

In the same session the discussion on political action was opened. Vaillant brought in a resolution in the spirit of the decision of the London conference, declaring that the working class must constitute itself its own political party independent of, and in opposition to, all bourgeois political parties. He pointed to the lessons of the Paris Commune, which had collapsed for the lack of a political programme. Guillaume, on the other hand, wanted to have nothing to do with this. The anarchists wanted to destroy political power, not to conquer it.

The Blanquists Ranvier, Vaillant and the others left the congress in protest at the decision to remove the General Council to New York. Serge took the chair in place of Ranvier and Vaillant’s proposal was then adopted with 35 against 6 votes, and 8 votes not cast. Some of the delegates had already left for home, but most of them had left written declarations in favour of the resolution.

The last hours of the last day of the congress were taken up with the report on Bakunin and the Alliance. The problem had been hanging round the neck of the International like a heavy millstone. It is one thing to engage in internal discussions about political differences, something that can be highly educational, but it is another thing to be involved in the kind of constant wrangles with intriguers whose aim is not to fight for ideas but to confuse, disorient and disrupt because they cannot convince the majority.

Such a phenomenon does not educate or raise the level, but spreads demoralization. Marx already pointed to the destructive effects the Bakuninists were having in Switzerland, when he wrote Fictitious Splits in the International that “the Geneva Federal Committee […] was exhausted after its two years of struggle against the sectarian sections” (MECW, vol. 23, p. 93). It was not the only case.

A committee of five declared with four votes against one (a Belgian) that it considered that a secret Alliance had existed with statutes directly contrary to the statutes of the International, although there was not sufficient evidence to prove that the Alliance still existed.

Secondly, it was proved by a draft of the statutes and by letters of Bakunin that he had attempted to form a secret society within the International with statutes differing fundamentally from the statutes of the International. Thirdly, Bakunin had adopted fraudulent practices in order to obtain possession of the property of others, and either he or his agents had used intimidation. On these grounds the majority of the committee then demanded the expulsion of Bakunin, Guillaume and a number of their supporters from the International.

This was accepted. The Congress had ample reasons for expelling Bakunin on purely political grounds. But there is one final point to make: in addition to the above-mentioned grounds Bakunin was expelled also for a "personal reason."

This "personal reason” refers to matters related to the Nechayev affair. While in Switzerland, Nechayev had been involved in an act of blatant blackmail. In order to earn some money, Bakunin had promised to undertake the translation of Das Kapital for a Russian publisher, who paid him an advance of three hundred roubles. The translation was never done, but Bakunin agreed that Nechayev should arrange to release him from his contract. Nechayev then wrote a letter to Lyubavin, the publisher's agent in Switzerland, threatening him with “the vengeance of the People's Justice” (i.e. death) if he continued to bother Bakunin.

Marx alludes to this in a letter to Nikolai Danielson, dated 15 August, 1872):

“Bakunin has worked secretly since years to undermine the International and has now been pushed by us so far as to throw away the mask and secede openly with the foolish people led by him — the same man who was the manager in the Nechayev affair. Now this Bakunin was once charged with the Russian translation of my book [of Volume I of Capital], received the money for it in advance, and instead of giving work, sent or had sent to Lubanin (I think) who transacted for the publisher with him the affair, a most infamous and compromising letter. It would be of the highest utility for me, if this letter was sent me immediately. As this is a mere commercial affair and as in the use to be made of the letter no names will be used, I hope you will procure me that letter. But no time is to be lost. If it is sent, it ought to be sent at once as I shall leave London for the Haag Congress at the end of this month.” (MECW, vol. 44, p. 421)

The Hague Congress settled this question once and for all.

https://www.marxist.com/marx-versus-bak ... t-four.htm

[chlamor]

Marx versus Bakunin - Part Five
Alan Woods 09 March 2010

At the Hague congress of the First International Bakunin was finally expelled, provoking the wrath of the anarchists and like-minded people, some of which walked out of the organisation, like the Blanquists. At the same time, the opportunists such as the English trade union leaders lined up with the ultra-left in demanding greater autonomy for the local sections, all of course complaining about the authoritarianism of Marx and the General Council.

The expulsion of Bakunin
Bakunin and his chief lieutenant Guillaume were finally expelled at the Hague Congress. Engels wrote:

“These expulsions constitute an open declaration of war by the International to the ‘Alliance’ and the whole of Mr. Bakunin’s sect. Like every other shade of proletarian socialism Bakunin’s sect was admitted in the International on the general condition of maintaining peace and observing the Rules and the Congress resolutions. Instead of doing so, this sect led by dogmatic members of the bourgeoisie having more ambition than ability tried to impose its own narrow-minded programme on the whole of the International, violated the Rules and the Congress resolutions and finally declared them to be authoritarian trash which no true revolutionary need be bound by.

“The almost incomprehensible patience with which the General Council put up with the intrigues and calumny of the small band of mischief-makers was rewarded only with the reproach of dictatorial behaviour. Now at last the Congress has spoken out, and clearly enough at that. Just as clear will be the language of the documents concerning the Alliance and Mr. Bakunin’s doings in general which the Commission will publish in accordance with the Congress decision. Then people will see what villainies the International was to be misused for.” (Engels, On the Hague Congress of the International, 17th September 1872, MECW, vol. 23, pp. 268-9)

Guillaume had already refused to appear before the committee set up to investigate the activities of the Alliance. When he was called upon by the chairman to defend himself, but declared that he would make no attempt to defend himself as he was unwilling to take part in a “farce”. The attack, he declared, was not directed against individuals, but against the federalist (i.e., anarchist) tendency as a whole. The supporters of this tendency had already drawn up a statement, which was then read to the congress. It was signed by five Belgian, four Spanish and two Jura delegates and also by an American and a Dutch delegate.

Engels later described the scene at the Congress:

"The debate on this question was heated. The members of the ‘Alliance’ did all they could to draw out the matter, for at midnight the lease of the hall expired and the Congress had to be closed. The behaviour of the members of the Alliance could not but dispel all doubt as to the existence and the ultimate aim of their conspiracy. Finally the majority succeeded in having the two main accused who were present – Guillaume and Schwitzguébel – take the floor; immediately after their defence the voting took place. Bakunin and Guillaume were expelled from the International, Schwitzguébel escaped this fate, owing to his personal popularity, by a small majority; then it was decided to amnesty the others.” (Engels, On the Hague Congress of the International, 17th September 1872, MECW, vol. 23, pp. 268-9)

Engels, who spoke in the debate, said:

“The good faith of the General Council and of the whole International, to whom to correspondence had been submitted, was betrayed in a most disgraceful manner. Having once committed such a deception, these men were no longer held back by any scruples from their machinations to subordinate the international, or, if this were unsuccessful, to disorganize it.” (Engels, Report on the Alliance of Socialist Democracy presented in the name of the General Council to the Congress at the Hague, late August 1872, MECW, vol. 23, p. 231)

Seeing that they were in a minority, as usual the Bakuninists resorted to a manoeuvre. Allegedly in order to avoid a split in the International, they declared that they were willing to maintain “administrative relations” with the General Council, but rejected any interference on its part in the internal affairs of the Federations. The signatories of the Bakuninist resolution appealed to all federations and to all sections to prepare themselves for the next congress in order to carry the principle of free association (autonomie fédérative) to victory.

However, the congress was not prepared to be sidetracked by such tricks and sophistry. It voted to expel Bakunin immediately with 27 against 7 votes, 8 votes not being cast. Then Guillaume was expelled with 25 against 9 votes, and 9 votes not being cast. The other expulsion proposals of the committee were rejected, but it was instructed to publish its material on the Alliance.

After the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume, the Alliance, which had control of the Association in Spain and Italy, unleashed a campaign of vilification against Marx and the General Council everywhere. It joined forces with all the disreputable elements and attempting to force a split into two camps. Marx was undismayed. He wrote to Nikolai Danielson:

“However, its ultimate defeat is assured. Indeed, the Alliance is only helping us to purge the Association of the unsavoury or feeble-minded elements who have pushed their way in here and there.” (Marx To Nikolai Danielson In St Petersburg, 12 December 1872, MECW, Volume 44, p. 455)

After the Hague Congress
Crises and splits put people to the test. The result can have a demoralizing effect on the weaker elements and people who are not theoretically prepared. This was no exception. Writing on the 8th of May, 1873, to Sorge, Engels declared:

“Although the Germans have their own squabbles with the Lassalleans, they were very disappointed with the Hague congress where they expected to find perfect harmony and fraternity in contrast to their own wrangling, and they have become very disinterested.”

The split also had a demoralizing effect on the French émigrés, who were already disoriented by the defeat of the Commune. Writing again to Sorge on the 12th of September, 1874, Engels declared:

“The French emigrants are completely at sixes and sevens. They have quarreled amongst themselves and with everyone else for purely personal reasons, mostly in connection with money, and we shall soon be completely rid of them ... The irregular life during the war, the Commune and in exile has demoralized them frightfully, and only hard times can save a demoralized Frenchman.” (Engels to Frierich Adolph Sorge In Hoboken, MECW, vol. 45, p. 40)

In Italy, the Bakuninists were strong and the Marxists were a small minority. Engels wrote:

“I hope that the outcome of the Hague Congress will make our Italian ‘autonomous’ friends think. They ought to know that wherever there is an organisation, some autonomy is sacrificed for the sake of unity of action. If they do not realise that the International is a society organised for struggle, and not for fine theories, I am very sorry, but one thing is certain: the great International will leave Italy to act on its own until it agrees to accept the conditions common to all.” (Engels, Letters from London – More about the Hague Congress, 5th October 1872, MECW, vol. 23, p. 283.)

The wavering elements naturally raised the banner of unity at all costs. But the loud demands for unity were answered in advance by the Bakuninists, who in their Rimini Conference, held at the beginning of August 1872, publicly announced that they had split from the International and formed a separate organization. By so doing they had placed themselves outside the ranks of the IWA, as Engels pointed out:

“The Bakuninists have now finally placed themselves outside the International. A conference (ostensibly of the International, in reality of the Italian Bakuninists) has been held in Rimini. Of the 21 sections represented, only one, that from Naples, really belonged to the International. The other 20, in order not to endanger their ‘autonomy’, had deliberately neglected to take all the measures on which the Administrative Regulations of the International make admission conditional; they had neither written to the General Council requesting admission, nor sent their subscriptions. And these 21 ‘International’ sections decided unanimously in Rimini on August 6:

“ ‘The Conference solemnly declares to all workers of the world that the Italian Federation of the International Working Men’s Association severs all solidarity with the General Council in London, proclaiming instead, all the louder, its economic solidarity with all workers, and urges all sections that do not share the authoritarian principles of the General Council to send their representatives on September 2, 1872 not to The Hague, but to Neuchâtel in Switzerland in order to open the general anti-authoritarian Congress there on the same day’.” (Engels, On the Rimini Conference, 24th August 1872, MECW, vol. 23, p. 216.)

Engels always spoke with the greatest contempt of the unity-mongers, who went around shouting at the top of their voice that the split was a disaster, that unity must be restored at any price, and all the rest of it. In a letter to Bebel written on 20 June, 1873, he wrote:

“One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for ‘unity.’ Those who have this word most often on their lips are those who sow the most dissension, just as at present the Jura Bakuninists in Switzerland, who have provoked all the splits, scream for nothing so much as for unity. Those unity fanatics are either the people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything up together into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again in much more acute opposition because they are now all together in one pot (you have a fine example of this in Germany with the people who preach the reconciliation of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie) or else they are people who consciously or unconsciously (like Mühlberger, for instance) want to adulterate the movement. For this reason the greatest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues are at certain moments the loudest shouters for unity. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble and been more treacherous than the unity shouters.” (Engels to August Bebel, MECW, vol. 44, p. 512)

The Blanquists split
The subsequent proposal that the permanent residence of the General Council be transferred to New York was dictated in part by purely practical considerations. Given the prevailing wave of counterrevolution, the International lost its base not only in France and Germany, but also in England. But the proposal was bound to meet with vigorous resistance from the German, French and English leaders, and the resistance to it after the Hague Congress was ferocious and embittered.

The immediate effect was that the Blanquists walked out of the International. They were furious at the decision to move the Council to New York because they had hoped to get control of it. They split from the International as a result. The proposal of Marx and Engels to move the General Council to New York had been taken in order to prevent the Blanquists from using the Council to promote their adventurist tactics. But by splitting from the International they consigned themselves to oblivion.

On the two chief questions at issue, the question of political activity and the question of strict centralization, the Blanquists were in agreement with Marx, but their political adventurism and advocacy of revolutionary coups made them an even greater danger than the reformists in the prevailing conditions of European reaction. It was presumed that the transfer of the International would be a temporary move, to be reversed when conditions permitted. However, as it turned out, the Hague Congress was the last of any significance in the history of the International.

Eccarius, Jung and Hales
It frequently happens in politics, as in other aspects of life, that the most trivial personal considerations (jealousy, ambition, spite etc.) can play a disproportionate role in shaping events. Of course, in the revolutionary movement, such factors play the role of a catalyst for far more deep-seated political differences, which are not immediately obvious, but become clearer ex post facto. To use the celebrated expression of Hegel, necessity expresses itself through accident.

This was the case with Eccarius and Jung, two members of the General Council who had been Marx’s most loyal comrades for years. But in May, 1872, a definite breach occurred between Marx and Eccarius. The immediate cause was quite trivial. Eccarius announced that he was leaving his position as General Secretary of the International, as he was unable to live on his weekly salary of fifteen shillings.

Unfortunately, he was replaced by the Englishman John Hales and Eccarius unjustly blamed Marx for this. On the other hand, Marx was annoyed by the fact that Eccarius published information about the internal affairs of the International in the bourgeois press in return for payment, in particular information concerning the private conference of the International in London.

To give an indication of the problems Marx and Engels had to put up from Eccarius on the General Council, the following extract from the meeting of 11 May 1872 will suffice. When questioned about his making public the internal affairs of the General Council, Eccarius refused to show the incriminating correspondence, taking refuge behind legalistic arguments:

“Citizen Eccarius said he was in the same position as Hales; he kept no copies and should decline to answer; he should stand on the principle of English law, which was that those who prosecute should prove. […]

“Citizen Marx considered Hales had been guilty of grave indiscretion, as he had compromised the Council.

“Citizen Engels agreed with the remarks of Citizen Marx. With respect to the defence of Citizen Eccarius, the Council has nothing to do with British law. It had a right to know: had Eccarius written the letter he was charged with writing? Yes or no?

“Citizen Eccarius thought when the charge was made the proofs would be forthcoming, but instead of the proofs being produced he was asked to acknowledge his guilt. He should refuse to give any answer until the letter was in his hand. It had all along been assumed that he had been guilty of criminal correspondence, and he should let those who made the charge prove it.

“Citizen Marx said he said nothing about criminal correspondence, but he did say it was a crime if Eccarius wrote the letter which had the damaging character – of destroying the influence of the Council.

“With regard to the demand that the charge should be proved, he would point out that this was not an ordinary tribunal where there was a defendant and a prosecutor. It was a question of the conservation of the influence of the Council. […]

“Citizen Engels said that the sentimentality of the previous sitting, when it was said it was cruel to let charges hang over a man’s head etc., only made the cry for delay more comical.” (Documents of the First International, vol. 5, pp. 191-2)

It is not the last time we have heard the demand that, in dealing with disciplinary cases, the International must follow the strict procedures of bourgeois law – an argument, which, as we see from the above, was indignantly rejected by Marx and Engels, who also had no time for appeals to sentimentality, hurt feelings and so on. The overriding consideration was to defend the revolutionary organization. By releasing internal information and spreading gossip, Eccarius had damaged the influence of the General Council, and Marx considered this to be a crime.

For his part, Jung was jealous of Marx’s closeness to Engels, with whom he was in daily contact since he moved to London from Manchester. Jung and Eccarius felt offended by this and complained that “the General,” as Engels was nicknamed in the circle, had an abrupt military tone. Whenever he took the chair at the meetings of the General Council, there was usually a row, they said.

It is fairly typical of mediocre individuals to make such complaints about the “tone” of a discussion, and the alleged “arrogance” of people more able than themselves. Trotsky pointed out that it was unworthy of a revolutionary to take offense because he or she has suffered a “flip on the nose.” In revolutionary politics what is important is not form but content, not the tone with which something is said but what is said.

Sometimes, however, such secondary considerations can give rise to friction and enmities that can later be filled with a political content. That was the case with Jung and Eccarius. They were not necessarily bad people, but they had a limited political understanding and allowed their personal feelings and hurt pride to cloud their political judgment. With Hales things were very different. When he was elected General Secretary, a sharp personal conflict arose between him and Eccarius. On the part of the latter it was mainly a question of jealous resentment. But Hales was an opportunist and a reformist to the marrow of his bones and he had always distrusted the revolutionary ideas of Marx.

The London conference decided to set up an English Federation, and it held its first congress in Nottingham on the 21st and 22nd of July. This was Hales’ opportunity to build a counterweight to the General Council and cancel out the influence of Marx. He proposed to the 21 delegates who were present that the Federation should establish contact with the other Federations not through the General Council, but directly, and that at the coming congress of the International the new Federation should support a change in the Statutes of the International with a view to reducing the authority of the General Council.

This was music to the ears of the Bakuninists, fitting in well with their slogan of the “endangered autonomy of the Federations.” In fact, the English trade unionists had absolutely nothing in common with the ideas of the Bakuninists, being inclined to towards English Liberalism. But none of this mattered. They were all agreed on one thing: implacable opposition to Marx and the “authoritarian” General Council. In this way an unholy alliance was formed between Hales, Eccarius and Jung.

Although, as we have seen, the reformist Hales had nothing in common with the ideas of the anarchists, he had secretly entered into close the relations with the Jura Federation at the Hague. This unprincipled bloc was based on the well-known idea: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” For these people, any weapon or ally was useful if it gave one a stick to beat Marx and the General Council!

On the 6th of November 1874, writing in the name of the English Federal Council, Hales declared that the “hypocrisy of the old General Council” had now been exposed. Previous to this, on the 18th of September Hales moved a vote of censure against Marx in the British Federal Council, using as an excuse Marx’s comments at the Hague concerning the corrupt nature of some English working-class leaders. The vote of censure was adopted. Hales then gave notice that he intended to present a resolution for the expulsion of Marx from the International, whilst another member gave notice for a resolution rejecting the decisions of the Hague congress.

The theory of “two rival bureaucracies”
Hales developed an original and peculiar theory: Marx and Bakunin were really... the same. According to Hales, Marx had attempted to organize a secret society within the International on the pretext of destroying another secret society which it had invented to suit its aims. It was only a matter of one authoritarian bureaucracy fighting against another authoritarian bureaucracy to get control of the International!

At the same time, however, Hales pointed out that the English were not in agreement with the Jura Federation politically. They (the English) were convinced of the usefulness of political action. Here he spoke the unvarnished truth, since the English trade union leaders were trying to get into parliament, and for this purpose they needed the help of the Liberals. However, they were quite prepared to grant complete autonomy to all other federations as demanded by the different conditions in the various countries – and the different interests of the leaders.

Politics knows strange bedfellows. Although Hales and Eccarius had previously entertained a violent dislike for each other, they now became the most zealous allies, and Jung finally became one of the most violent opponents of Marx and Engels. In the cases of both Eccarius and Jung, they permitted their political judgment to be clouded by personal jealousies and resentments. As Lenin once remarked, spite in politics always plays the most destructive role.

In the past, Eccarius and Jung had become known to the whole International as the most faithful defenders of the opinions of Marx. Now they did a 180 degree somersault and appealed for support for the Jura Federation against the “intolerance” of the Hague decision and the “dictatorial tendencies” of Marx and Engels. However, the two men met with vigorous resistance in the English sections, and in particular the Irish. Even in the Federal Council they encountered opposition. So, as befits such committed advocates of democracy and toleration, they carried out a coup d’etat in the English branch of the International. They issued an appeal to all sections and all members, declaring that the British Federal Council was so divided against itself that further co-operation was impossible. They demanded the calling of a congress to reverse the decisions taken at the Hague.

The minority immediately replied to these manoeuvres with a counter-appeal, probably written by Engels, which condemned the proposed congress as illegal. Nevertheless, the congress took place on the 26th of January, 1873. Hales delivered violent attacks on the old General Council and on the Hague Congress, and was actively supported by Jung and Eccarius. The congress unanimously condemned the Hague decisions and refused to recognize the new General Council in New York, and declared itself in favour of a new international congress. Hales intrigued quite openly against the General Council and in August he was removed from his post. But the split in the British Federation was by now an accomplished fact.

The end of the International
The history of the First International really ends with the Hague congress. The leading figure of the new General Council in New York was Sorge, who was well acquainted with American conditions and a loyal supporter of Marx. But still the moving of the new General Council to New York failed to save the IWA. The movement in America lacked the experience and material means to prosper there.

The sixth congress of the International was called by the General Council in New York for the 8th of September in Geneva. But its only purpose was to sign the death certificate of the International. The Bakuninists organized their counter-congress in Geneva on the 1st of September. It was attended by two English delegates – the old arch-enemies Hales and Eccarius, five delegates each from Belgium, France and Spain, four delegates from Italy, one delegate from Holland and six delegates from the Jura.

Marx frankly admitted that the congress had been “a fiasco” and advised the General Council not to emphasize the formal organizational side of the International for the moment, but, if possible, to keep the centre point in New York going, to prevent it from falling into the hands of adventurers and others who might compromise the cause. Events would assure the recreation of the International on a higher level in the future. History was to prove Marx correct.

In 1876 the General Council in New York published the notice that the First International had ceased to exist. For ten years the International had dominated one part of European history. But now it faced an uncertain future because of objective difficulties and internal problems. In 1874, Engels wrote. “A general defeat of the working-class movement such as was suffered in the period from 1849 to 1864 will be necessary before a new international, an alliance of all proletarian parties in all countries, along the lines of the old one can come into being. At present the proletarian world is too big and too diffuse.”

Unlike its successors, the Second (Socialist) and Third (Communist) Internationals, the First International was never a mass organization. Moreover, in its beginnings it was politically confused, being made up of all kinds of different elements: English reformist trade unionists, French Proudhonists, followers of Mazzini, the Italian nationalist, Blanquists, Bakuninists and others. But thanks to the patient and tireless work of Marx and Engels, the ideas of scientific socialism eventually triumphed.

In the building of a genuine International, the importance of ideas is as fundamental as are strong foundations in the building of a house. The International Workingman’s Association was the first real attempt to establish an international organization of the working class. It was the equivalent of laying down the foundations of a house. If a house is to withstand the battering of the elements, it must have strong foundations.

The great merit of Marx’s work in the IWA was that it established a firm theoretical base for the movement, without which the future development of the International would have been impossible. The First International laid the basis for the creation of the mass social-democratic workers’ parties in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Holland and North America. It had established the theoretical foundations for the future development of socialism on a world scale.

An important role in this was the fierce ideological battle with other trends, especially Bakuninist anarchism. In the end, the combination of an extremely unfavourable objective situation following the defeat of the Paris Commune and the destructive factional intrigues of the Bakuninists undermined the International. Marx and Engels transferred the centre to New York, partly to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Bakuninists and other intriguers, but partly because they hoped that the workers’ movement in North America would come to the rescue.

In the end, these hopes did not materialize, and they were compelled to recognize that the IWA had played out its historical role. The International, as an organized force, ceased to exist. But the tradition of the International lived on. It survived as an idea and a programme, to re-emerge about a decade later on a higher level. The emergence of mass workers’ parties and trade unions towards the end of the 19th century provided the basis for the founding of a new International – the Second International.

In July 1889 the International Socialist Congress opened its doors in Paris, attended by delegates from 20 countries. They founded the new Socialist International and declared May Day an international working-class holiday. And they adopted the principles of the International Workingmen's Association founded a quarter of a century before. The International, like the phoenix of ancient legend, had risen from the ashes to spread its mighty wings.

London, 9 March, 2010

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[blindpig]

History of Anarchism in Russia
by E. Yaroslavsky
I.
Before the Bolshevik Party

Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin undoubtedly played a prominent part in developing and elaborating the theory of anarchism and in leading the anarchist movement. He left a deep imprint on the movement of the Russian "revolutionary commoners" of the 1870's. Bakunin was the theoretical leader of a large section of the Land and Freedom (Zemlya i Volya) organization, and later his theories and ideas were followed in the anarchist movement not only in Russia, but in other countries as well. Before becoming an anarchist, he was prominent in the nationalist Pan-Slav movement. These facts are enough for this figure to compel attention in the revolutionary movement.

Bakunin was born in 1814 into a rich and noble family of Russian landowners, and was brought up on money gained by the most brutal exploitation of the peasant serfs. In an autobiographical fragment Bakunin himself wrote:

I was born on May 30, 18151, on my father's estate of Premukhino, in the Novy-Torzhok county of Tver Province, between Moscow and St. Petersburg, on the banks of a little stream called the Osura. My father was of old and noble family. At the age of eight or nine, his uncle, who was Foreign Minister under Catherine II, appointed him attache of the Embassy to Florence; there his education was taken over by another relative, a minister. He was nearly thirty-five before he returned to Russia. Thus he spent all of his youth abroad and received his education in foreign countries....Between 1817 and 1825 he belonged to the secret Northern Society, which made the famous attempt at a military insurrection in St. Petersburg in December, 1825.2
After the insurrection was suppressed by Nicholas I, Bakunin's father turned his back on the revolution. Bakunin wrote: "He became a respectable property-owner like many of his neighbors, reconciling himself to the slavery of the hundreds whose labor he lived."

Bakunin was one of six brothers and five sisters.

At first-Bakunin relates-our upbringing was very liberal, but after the tragic denouement of the December conspiracy (1825), my father, scared by this defeat, changed his system. From that time on he did his best to make us loyal subjects of the tsar, and with this end in view I was sent to an artillery school at the age of fourteen.3

Thus Bakunin's childhood and youth were spent in an atmosphere which suited him for the position of an aristocrat. The military environment in which he was brought up was intellectually stifled by the regime of Nicholas I. Before he left the country in 1840, Bakunin, far from sympathizing with revolutionary or opposition sentiments, even condemned the Decembrists. Recalling these years, Bakunin wrote in 1870 in a pamphlet, Science and the Urgent Cause of Revolution:

After the time of the Decembrists, the heroic liberalism of the educated nobility degenerated into pedantic liberalism, into doctrinairism....All revolutionary ideas, all attempts at fearless protest, came to be regarded from the height of metaphysical self-satisfaction as childish boasts. I know what I am talking about, for in the thirties, under the influence of Hegelianism, I too was guilty of this sin.
Abroad Bakunin plunged into political life and associated with people of radical and democratic views. This may be seen from the very first article he wrote, printed in Germany in October, 1842, under the pseudonym of Jules Elizard. In this article he wrote:

All nations and classes are filled with foreboding; even in Russia, that infinite snow-covered empire, which we know so little and which perhaps will have so great a future-even in Russia the heavy storm clouds are gathering. The atmosphere is stifling, it is heavy with storm.
As is generally known, Bakunin took an active part in the revolutionary movement of 1848-49 in France (Paris), in Germany and in Austria. But it would be wrong to assume that Bakunin was a revolutionary from his youth. All Bakunin's biographers, including anarchist, point out that until 1866, when he was in his fifty-second year, Bakunin was a revolutionary democrat greatly infected with Pan-Slav nationalism.

Although as far back as 1842 Bakunin gave utterance to the idea which became the motto of the anarchists-"the passion to destroy is at the same time a passion to create"-in 1852 he was rather tolerant towards his landlord brother, Nikolai Bakunin, who subjected his serfs to corporal punishment. He only advised him, when doing so, to punish them "in such a way as to convince them that the punishment is just."

It will be of interest to compare this period in the life of Bakunin with the same period in the life of Karl Marx, the founder of the Communist movement. In 1847 Marx, together with Engels, drew up the Communist Manifesto, that first and most remarkable program of the revolutionary proletariat, which Bakunin later also admired, even to the extent of translating it into Russian. It was published in Russian by his disciple, Sergei Nechayev. As a fighting slogan for the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels took the motto of the French workers: "Workers of the World, unite!" It is enough to compare this constructive, organizing, rallying, fighting slogan with Bakunin's bald appeal for destruction in order to appreciate the enormous significance that the appeal of the Communist Manifesto had for the whole working class movement.

Bakunin was subjected to the most brutal persecution on the part of the tsarist government. He was arrested by the Prussian authorities in connection with the Dresden uprising, and imprisoned in a fortress. Later he was extradited to Russia and on the order of Nicholas I was confined to the fortress of Peter and Paul, which few left alive. Buried alive in this fortress, Bakunin wrote his "confession" as a repentant sinner, begging the tsar for pardon. Of course, this "confession" was deliberately written in repentant terms with a view to obtaining release from the fortress, and Bakunin hoped to be able to atone for this action by his later revolutionary conduct. But genuine revolutionaries in Russia regarded it as the depth of infamy to plead with the tsar for pardon even when sentenced to death.

The writer of these lines spent 12 years in prison and in penal servitude in the depths of Siberia, and knows that those who addressed repentant confessions and petitions for pardon to the tsar were held traitors by the Russian revolutionaries and were boycotted by them. If the Russian revolutionaries of the 1870's and of later years had known of Bakunin's confession, many of them would have repudiated him. But Bakunin's adherents and he himself took great pains to conceal this fact. Bakunin's confession to Tsar Nicholas was published only after the proletariat, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, came into power and opened the archives of the tsarist government. It is useless for Bakunin's biographer, the anarchist Nettlau, to shower contempt on those who censure this confession of Bakunin's. It is useless for Nettlau to attempt to explain away this petition by saying that Bakunin was writing to the tsar as his jailer, that there was no one else to whom he could write. This explanation is not true. The anarchists must acknowledge that Bakunin in this case did not display the endurance of a genuine revolutionary. The Russian revolutionaries did not write such petitions to their jailers as Bakunin wrote to the tsar when he had already learned from Count Orlov that he was not threatened with sentence of death.

Bakunin wrote to the tsar:

Grant me two greatest favors, Your Majesty, and I shall bless Providence for having rescued me from the Germans in order to place me in the fatherly hands of Your Imperial Majesty. Having forfeited the right to call myself a loyal subject of Your Majesty, I can only sign myself sincerely: repentant sinner, Mikhail Bakunin.
Such was Bakunin's letter to the tsar begging for two favors: to be spared solitary confinement and to be allowed visits from his relatives.

Every worker is entitled to censure such behavior on the part of Bakunin, who claimed to be a flawless revolutionary. It is worth while comparing this behavior with that of another Russian revolutionary, N.G. Chernyshevsky. For over twenty years he was confined in a fortress and put to penal servitude in Siberia, but he did not sink so low as to plead for pardon from his mortal enemy, the tsar, although his position was much worse than that of Bakunin, and although he had no rich and prominent relatives to intercede for him as was the case with Bakunin.

Bakunin was a nationalist during and after the 1848 revolution. To this must be added another very unpleasant fact, which was true even after Bakunin had become an anarchist-he had a touch of the anti-Semite about him. While Marx was urging the revolutionary movement of the workers of the world to unite into a single revolutionary league, Bakunin played with the idea of a union of Slavs irrespective of class. In the very midst of the revolutionary events in Europe in 1848 he wrote a pamphlet entitled, "The Appeal to the Slavs, by the Russian Patriot Mikhail Bakunin, Member of the Pan-Slav Congress at Prague." That was why Marx and Engels engaged in such heated controversy with Bakunin at that time-they realized the danger of substituting for the international class slogans of the struggle the liberal-bourgeois nationalist slogans advocated by Bakunin.

Let us see what Nettlau says in this connection. Nettlau points out that beginning with April, 1848,

...narrow-minded Pan-Slav nationalism carried the day with him. He personally thought that he was acting in the right way. He wanted to be active among his own people. He had to sow hatred and discord, wars and new military autocracies which would organize and centralize the forces of the various nations for mutual conflict....He forgot the West, discovered, as he said, his "Slavonic heart," and came out in April-not for the liberation of Europe and all humanity, but for the liberation of a certain group of nationalities. Three months later, as he himself relates, he was ready to throw himself into the arms of Nicholas I.
Nettlau relates that already at that time (and not later, when he was in the tsar's power in the fortress), Bakunin thought of petitioning the tsar for pardon:

It was at this time (between June and July, 1848), that he conceived the plan of writing to Nicholas I to plead for pardon, to ask him to raise the standard of Pan-Slavism, to be the "savior," the "father" and tsar of all the Slavs. ("To be their savior and father, and, proclaiming yourself Tsar of all the Slavs, at last to plant the standard of Pan-Slavism in Eastern Europe to the terror of the Germans and all other oppressors of the Slav people.")
On February 19, 1857, Bakunin was exiled to Siberia. In June, 1861, he escaped on an American ship to America, and later traveled to Europe. At this time he was still a nationalist. In a letter to Hertzen, dated August 1, 1863, he wrote:

I took an active part in the Pan-Slav movement, and even now I still think that a Slavonic federation is the only thing possible for us, for it alone can in a new and perfectly free form satisfy the feeling of grandeur which undoubtedly lives in our people, a feeling which has mistakenly taken or will take the treacherous road of empire.
A short time before, on May 28, 1863, in a speech he made at a banquet in Sweden, he said:

What then is our position, the position of those who are fighting against the St. Petersburg government? We are conservatives, we are opposed to bloodshed....We who are called revolutionaries are not republicans at any price. If Emperor Alexander II desired honestly to head the political and social regeneration of Russia, if he desired to restore liberty to Poland and to those parts of the country which do not want to belong to the empire, if instead of the land of Peter, Catherine, and Nicholas, which was founded on violence, he were to found a free, democratic, popular Russia, with local government for the provinces, and if, to crown this, he were to raise the standard of a Slavonic federation-then, instead of fighting him, we would be his most loyal and devoted servants.
Bakunin said this a year before Marx and Engels founded the International Workingmen's Association- the First International. Whereas Marx and Engels had for nearly two decades been engaged in organization, propaganda, and political work to unite the proletariat into an independent class force, Bakunin pursued nationalist strivings and expressed readiness to become the servant and loyal subject of the tsar if the latter were to raise the standard of a Slavonic federation.

Thus it is not surprising that in the confession he wrote in the fortress of Peter and Paul, Bakunin addressed the tsar as follows:

If at that time Your Majesty had chosen to raise the Slavonic standard, they-and not only they, but all those who speak the Slavonic tongue, on Austrian and Prussian territory-would without terms, without negotiations, trusting themselves implicitly to your will, joyfully, with fanatical enthusiasm, have sheltered under the broad wings of the Russian eagle and hurled themselves proudly not only on the loathed Germans, but on all Western Europe.
We are quoting these passages from Bakunin's confession not in order to degrade his memory, but in order to show that this was not merely a pretended confession, that when Bakunin was no longer in prison, when he was again at liberty abroad, he still expressed the same ideas.

One other point must be added to what we have already said about Bakunin's political views during this period. In 1862 he wrote a pamphlet, The Popular Cause - Romanov, Pugachev or Pestel?4 Bakunin at that time was convinced that a peasant rebellion throughout Russia was inevitable, and declared that it was desirable for the tsar himself to stand at the head of this popular movement. How confused Bakunin's views on the revolution were at that time may be seen from what he wrote in this pamphlet about popular self-government; "Whether with the tsar or without him is a matter of indifference; that is as the people wish; but there must be no officials in Russia." Self-government headed by the tsar but without officials! Can anyone imagine a more muddled and confused theory? Bakunin clung for a very long time to the absurd idea that the tsar could be the liberator of the people. At the age of 47 he wrote:

Our attitude towards Romanov is clear. We are neither his enemies nor his friends, we are the friends of the cause of the Russian, Slavonic people. If the tsar leads this cause, we will stand for him, but when he opposes it we shall be his enemies.
Bakunin wrote this in 1862, when Russia was still in the midst of peasant rebellions provoked by the vile deception practised on the people by Alexander II, who by his manifesto of February 19, 1861, robbed the peasants for the benefit of the landowners.5 While Chernyshevsky, Dobrolubov and other advanced revolutionaries of the time called for a popular peasant revolution, Bakunin misled the Russian revolutionaries by the very assumption that the tsar could lead the movement of the people for their liberation. But we shall see that somewhat later his followers in Russia-the members of the Zemlya i Volya Party-attempted to create a peasant organization and call forth a movement in the name of the tsar, who, they alleged, stood for the peasants and against the landlords.

We repeat, while Marx was already a fully mature political leader of the Communist working class movement, and had established the Communist League in 1847 and begun to organize the First International in 1864, Bakunin still advocated his nationalist Pan-Slav plans and ideas, which he finally abandoned only after Alexander II suppressed the revolutionary uprising in Poland.

Later Bakunin regarded himself as an internationalist, and, in fact, set up an international anarchist organization. In the First International (International Workingmen's Association) he called for the destruction of all states and the fraternal union of all nations. But at the same time, even when he was already an anarchist, he preached the union of all Slavs (without class distinction) and called for a struggle of all the Slav nations, not against the German bourgeoisie, but against the German nation, glossing over the existence of a Slav bourgeoisie, and forgetting the fact that the German workers were brothers just like the workers of Italy, Spain, France, and every other country. In his principal work on anarchism, The State and Anarchy, Bakunin not only defended totally unscientific, nationalist, chauvinist views, but defended them as the leading ideas for anarchists. In this work he contrasted the Germans to the Slavs. "The Germans," he wrote, "seek life and liberty within the state, while for the Slavs the state spells destruction." This work was written in 1873, two years after the Paris Commune, and in it Bakunin still preached the creation of a Pan-Slav federation.

Bakunin's works contain absolutely open attacks on the Jews; and he attacked, not the Jewish bourgeoisie, but the Jews in general, all Jews. He regarded all Jews as parasites and exploiters and treated them with unconcealed contempt. When Bakunin within the First International was fighting Utin, the organizer of the Russian section of the International in Geneva and a supporter of Marx, he wrote about him in his "Report on the Alliance" as follows:

Utin-need it be said?-is a Jew by birth, and, what is worse, a Russian Jew. His features, temperament, character, manners, his nervous nature, are simultaneously insolent and cowardly, vain and huckstering.
In speaking of Utin, Bakunin often refers to him as "that little Jew." We are not defending Utin as a revolutionary, for later he became a renegade and petitioned the tsar for pardon. But why did Bakunin regard a Russian Jew as being "worse" than any other? The reason was that the tsarist government in Russia, while showing tolerance towards the rich Jews, and sometimes even encouraging them and granting them privileges and honors, had created a special ghetto-the Pale of Settlement-for the poorer Jews, forbade them to engage in agriculture and to work in government employ, kept them out of the big factories, and deprived the masses of the Jewish people of all rights. For centuries it had imbued Russia with contempt for this nationality. And Bakunin, the former aristocrat, landlord and officer in the tsarist army, had imbibed this contempt for the Jews, this Great-Russian, Slavonic chauvinism and anti-Semitism with his mother's milk. When Bakunin found himself in Europe, where anti-Semitism was fostered among the petty bourgeoisie by their competition with the Jewish petty bourgeoisie-shopkeepers, artisans, etc.-Bakunin assimilated these feelings the more easily because all his education in tsarist Russia had provided a fertile soil for them.

That was why in his controversies with Marx and Lassalle, in which he denied that their views on the revolution were different simply because he did not understand the essential difference between them, Bakunin used to attribute their doctrines either to their German sentiments or to their Jewish descent. "I am convinced," he wrote, "that the Rothschilds value Marx's services, and that Marx instinctively feels attracted towards and entertains profound respect for the Rothschilds." August Bebel, the well-known leader of the German working class, used to call anti-Semitism "the socialism of fools." But Bakunin's anti-Semitism was more deep-seated. Its roots went down into that aristocratic, landowning, exploiting environment from which he had come, and with whose sentiments he never succeeded in breaking completely.

It is to be wondered at then that at the end of the 1870's certain Narodnik followers of Bakunin approved of the Jewish pogroms in the south of Russia and issued a leaflet in which they argued that Jewish pogroms were the expression of popular protest against the exploiters? Is it to be wondered at that Makhno and his followers, who called themselves anarchists, permitted and even themselves organized Jewish pogroms?

Bakunin belonged to the group of "repentant aristocrats" who believed that they must atone for the sins of their exploiting fathers. He devoted himself to the cause of the revolution. But such repentant aristocrats very often retained their aristocratic attitude to many phenomena of social life. We have already seen that Bakunin could not get rid of the nationalism of his class-anti-Semitism and Great-Russian chauvinism. On the other hand, these "repentant aristocrats" often idealized what they had despised before. Becoming anarchists, they regarded every highway robber as a mature revolutionary. Bakunin and his adherents regarded the religious sects in Russia, which had nothing in common with either Communism or anarchism, as a revolutionary force. As we shall see later, the facts of reality proved a bitter, cruel disappointment for the supporters of Bakunin.

Beginning with the second half of the 1860's, Bakunin became an anarchist. He took part in organizing the First International. But at the same time he set up an organization of his own within the First International for the purpose of fighting Marx. Bakunin proclaimed his struggle against Marx to be a struggle against dictatorship, a struggle against centralization. It is well known, however, that Bakunin, while officially opposing centralization, established an organization based on the strictest centralism. Before he formed the Alliance, Bakunin organized the International Brotherhood Society, the rules of which contained the following clause on discipline, formulated by Bakunin himself:

Within the Council it is the right and even the duty of every brother to advocate his own views; but once the majority in the council or the Directorate has by its supreme authority adopted a decision conflicting with his opinion, he has no right by any means whatsoever to influence public opinion against this supreme decision.
The powers with which Bakunin invested this anarchist directorate may be seen from the following statement he made on the rights of members of the International Brotherhood Society.

He has no right to accept any post, whether judicial, church, government, military or civil, nor to join any secret society without the formal consent of the directorate of the International Council.
Thus, while opposing the centralized form of organization of the International Workingmen's Association, Bakunin introduced this form in his own organization and demanded dictatorial powers for its leading body. In 1870 Bakunin wrote to Richard, one of his closest adherents:

There will no longer be public order or the public interest. What must take their place if revolutionary anarchy is not to lead to reaction? The collective action of an invisible organization spread throughout the country. If we do not establish such an organization we shall never emerge from our state of impotence.
While fighting against the hegemony of the Marxists in the First International, Bakunin wanted to establish the hegemony and dictatorship of the anarchists. In one of his letters to Richard, dated April, 1870, Bakunin wrote:

The revolutionary politicians, who advocate dictatorship, want passions to calm down after the first victories, they want order, the confidence of the masses, subordination to the authorities which will be set up in the course of the revolution. Thus a new state is proclaimed. We, on the contrary, shall foster, support, free the passions, call forth anarchy, invisibly guiding the popular storm, not by means of tangible, visible power, but by the collective dictatorship of our allies....That is the only dictatorship I accept. But in order that it may be effective, it must exist, and for this purpose it must be prepared for and organized beforehand....For it will not come into being of itself, out of discussion, out of difference of opinion, arguments about principles or popular assemblies. There is only one power, one dictatorship, the organization of which is possible and beneficial-the collective, invisible dictatorship of allies in the name of our common principle.
Thus within the First International Bakunin established a secret alliance which carried out his anarchist theory within the revolutionary movement. The disagreements between Bakunin and Marx were based on their totally different understanding of the aim and objects of the proletarian revolution and the forms and methods of struggle. The passionate struggle Marx and Engels waged against Bakunin was prompted primarily by the fact that Marx and Engels saw how greatly the working class movement would be endangered if it adopted the ideas and principles of anarchism. When Engels wrote his critical review of the activities of the anarchists during the Spanish revolution of 1873, entitled "The Bakuninists at Work," he had already had the opportunity to judge the results of anarchist doctrine not from Bakunin's writings, but from the actual experience of the movement. The deplorable results of the anarchist "abstention from politics" were already plain.

Nechayev
Before passing on to the Narodnik movement in Russia, which adhered to Bakunin's views, we will deal with Sergey Nechayev, a prominent figure in the revolutionary movement, a man of great will-power, of iron endurance and undoubted organizational ability, and the first advocate of Bakunin's anarchist views in Russia.

Why deal with Nechayev?

Nechayev carried on his activities in the late sixties and the early seventies, when the First International had already been established and the profound difference between the views of Marx and Bakunin had taken definite shape. Nechayev acted on behalf of Bakunin.

We shall not dwell on the struggle over Nechayev that took place between Marx and Bakunin. Abroad Nechayev behaved in such an adventurist manner that not only did Marx suspect him of being a provocateur, but Bakunin himself repudiated his plans (for example, Nechayev proposed that the anarchists raid banks and similar institutions in Switzerland).

In Russia, Nechayev established an organization called the Popular Retribution. This organization was centralistic from top to bottom. All authority was vested in its Central Committee and unquestioning discipline was enforced. It was the most authoritarian organization ever established by revolutionaries. And yet Bakunin, as every anarchist knows, was an enemy of authority. The anarchists still call themselves libertarians, as distinct from the Communist parties. The Communist parties are based on the principle of democratic centralism, i.e., the election of all the leading bodies from the bottom up and the subordination of all members of a lower Party organization (circle, group or nucleus) to the decisions of the superior elected Party organization. The anarchists have always disagreed with this feature of Communist organization. One of the questions on which Bakunin waged a bitter struggle against Marx in the First International was that of how the working class was to be organized.

How, then, could Sergey Nechayev, a disciple of Bakunin, establish a strictly centralized organization and provide it with rules which were utterly in conflict with the official pronounced anarchist views of Bakunin on organization? For decades Bakunin and all his supporters, including his private secretary, Armand Rosse (Mikhail Sazhin), concealed the fact that Nechayev's "catechism" was written by Bakunin himself. After the October Revolution Sazhin related that this "catechism," written in Bakunin's own hand, had been found among Nechayev's papers after the latter's arrest and had been burnt by Sazhin himself. This fact proves that to serve their ends, Bakunin and his supporters were prepared to create organizations so authoritarian and centralized as to crush the will and opinions of their individual members. Such was Nechayev's Popular Retribution, which was broken up by the tsarist government before it had time to achieve anything of importance. The attempts of certain historians to represent Nechayev as a "pretender" whom Bakunin never empowered to act on his behalf are futile. When searching the apartment of a student named Uspensky, who belonged to Nechayev's organization, the tsarist secret police found a certificate signed by Bakunin and given to Nechayev by Bakunin, which read as follows:

The bearer is a trusted representative of the Russian section of the International Revolutionary Alliance. Mikhail Bakunin.
It would be wrong, of course, to identify Nechayev with Bakunin. Nechayev has views of his own with which Bakunin did not agree. For example, in Bakunin's opinion the main revolutionary force in Russia were the peasantry and the lumpen-proletariat. Nechayev, however, regarded the working class as the main revolutionary force. In a pamphlet, The Problem of Revolution, Bakunin wrote:

In Russia the highway robber is the genuine and sole revolutionary - a revolutionary without fine phrases, without learned rhetoric, a revolutionary irreconcilable, indefatigable and indomitable, a popular and social revolutionary, non-political and independent of any estate.
Nechayev, however, after having lived abroad, and especially after the Paris Commune, became convinced that:

In the West there are new fresh people to whom the future belongs. They are the workers, divided neither by state frontiers nor by difference of tribe. They are the people who still understand us, for our cause, the cause of the people, is their cause too.
Nechayev was a consistent internationalist. His good points conflicted with the views of Bakunin.6 But he copied Bakunin's mistaken anarchist views, which prevented him and his young contemporaries from evolving a correct view of the revolution and drove them into narrow conspiratorial activities.

Land and Freedom
During the 1870's a fairly strong organization called Land and Freedom came into being in Russia. This organization served to unite all the revolutionary forces of Russia at that time and included people with the most varied views, generally known as Narodniks, or populists. The majority of its members were Bakuninist anarchists, who were of the opinion that the people were ready for revolution, that there was no need to teach them anything, that it was only necessary to rouse them to rebellion. The organization also included the adherents of Peter Lavrov, who advocated the idea that history is not made by the popular masses, but by "critically thinking individuals," who can turn the people in any direction they choose. Finally, it included the supporters of Peter Tkachev, a Blanquist, who advocated the seizure of political power by means of a revolutionary conspiracy.

But the views which predominated in the Land and Freedom organization were the anarchist views of Bakunin. For this reason we shall dwell in some detail on the activities of this organization.

It would be wrong to assume that Bakunin created this organization. The Narodnik movement had been preceded and formed by the activities of the Enlighteners-Hertzen, Belinsky, Dobrolubov and Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky in particular left a deep impress on the minds of the progressive section of Russian society. He was of the opinion that the awful conditions of the Russian people could be abolished only by a peasant revolution, by an armed rising against the tsar and the landlords. It was this road that he called upon young revolutionaries to follow. In a letter to Hertzen, Chernyshevsky wrote: "Our position is terrible, unbearable. Only the axe can save us, and nothing but the axe can help." But Chernyshevsky and his followers were not anarchists. In a leaflet entitled "Young Russia," written by a revolutionary named Zaichnevsky (who was under Chernyshevsky's influence), and distributed in Russia, the slogan of a socialist and democratic republic is put forth.

Soon, soon the day will come-the leaflet said-when we shall unfurl the great banner of the future, the red banner, and loudly crying "Long live the Russian Socialist and Democratic Republic" shall march on the Winter Palace to destroy those who inhabit it.
But neither Zaichnevsky's circle nore Chernyshevsky were equal to this task....It was not until 55 years later that the working class, following the banner of the Bolshevik, Communist Party, could accomplish this great, historic task.

Unfortunately, when Chernyshevsky was arrested and confined a fortress the members of the Land and Freedom were carried away by anarchist views on revolution, and this caused great injury to the movement. This was a result of the backwardness of the movement, a result of the weakness of the proletariat in Russia at that time.

We already know that Bakunin mistakenly thought that the peasants were born rebels and communists. His supporters followed his idea of "not teaching the people, but rousing them to rebellion." For instance, they thought that the peasants and Cossacks who had risen in rebellion under the peasant leader Stenka Rasin were nearer to communism than the leaders of the utopian Socialists-Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet and others. We have seen that Bakunin regarded highway robbers and bandits as the most consistent revolutionaries. He maintained that the peasant community, notwithstanding all its defects, must serve as the unit of the anarcho-communist system: "Rebellion-Stenka Rasin, Pugachev, the religious sectarians-such is the sphere from which alone we can expect the moralization and salvation of the Russian people."

Bakunin maintained that the peasants were revolutionaries, even when they marched "calling upon the name of the tsar." He held that in their rebellion the peasants must destroy every form of state, for he was convinced that the peasant community was absolutely opposed to every form of state. All that had to be done was to organize this peasant rebellion throughout the country, for which purpose it was necessary "to go among the people."

Actually, however, the Russian peasants of the seventies, far from being born communists or socialists, did not even dream of communism. They wanted land, they were small proprietors who hated the landlords and believed in the tsar. In their attempts to rouse a nationwide rebellion and in their propaganda for socialism, the Narodniks, as a rule, met with no sympathy in the rural districts. Certain propagandists complained that their Bakuninist propaganda among the peasants "went in at one ear and came out at the other." M. Popov, a prominent figure in this movement, relates:

The hope that our propaganda would rouse the rural population to active struggle, or, at least, would inspire the peasants with confidence that such a struggle would be fruitful, was not realized. The peasant would listen to the revolutionary just as he listened to the parson preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven, and after listening to the sermon and leaving the church he went on living just as he had done before.
Vera Figner, a member of the Executive Committee of the People's Will (Narodnaya Volya) party, who spent over 20 years in solitary confinement in the Schluesselburg fortress, writes in her memoirs7:

I spent ten months in the Petrovsky county, and my comrades a somewhat longer time in the Volsky county, and not a single person joined us in all that time. Our revolutionary isolation was enough to drive on to despair.
Plekhanov, at that time a supporter of Bakunin, wrote:
The peasants listened willingly and attentively to what the propagandists had to say about the land hunger, the brutality of the landlords, the greed of the priests and the grasping avidity of the merchants, but the majority of them remained deaf to the advocacy of socialism. The socialist ideals not only failed to attract them, but absolutely failed to penetrate their minds, for the ideals prompted by their production relations largely bore the character of bourgeois individualism.
Another Bakuninist, Aptekman, says the same thing. He recalls how a peasant to whom he had been speaking about the need for rising and seizing the large estates exclaimed: "Won't it be fine when we divide the land! Why, then I'll hire two men and live like a lord!"

Of course, the tsarist government was not idle, and in 1874 alone over a thousand revolutionaries were arrested.

What did this attempt to "go among the people" show? It showed that Bakunin's idea that the peasants were the main revolutionary element in Russia, born socialists and rebels, was groundless; that Bakunin's theory that the peasants were opposed to every form of state was wrong. The strenuous efforts of the revolutionaries were wasted without benefitting the revolution. Bakunin's theories not only failed to direct the Narodniks along the right road, but actually diverted them from the more correct road which Chernyshevsky had previously called upon them to follow. Besides, Bakunin preached that a struggle for political liberty was superfluous, for such a struggle would only distract attention from the socialist ("social") revolution. He thought that Russia would go straight towards the socialist revolution, without going through the stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution; that every form of state would be at once destroyed and anarchist society ushered in. This doctrine misled those who took part in the movement and was undoubtedly harmful.

Unfortunately, this doctrine still survives among the anarchies in Spain, France and certain other countries, where their failure to understand the line of development of the revolution and the nature of the revolutionary process leads to very grave errors which can be rectified only with difficulty.

When the Bakuninist Narodniks became convinced that their anarcho-communist propaganda was meeting with no response among the peasantry, a section of them recalled Bakunin's statement that the peasants could be roused to rebellion in the name of the tsar, as had once been done by the rebel peasant leader Emelyan Pugachev.

A group of Bakuninist rebels, including Stefanovich, Bukhanovsky and Deutsch (subsequently a prominent Menshevik Social-Democrat) therefore made their way to Chigirinsky county, in the Ukraine, where the land hunger among the poor peasants was particularly severe. The peasants were agitated and resolved to send a petitioner to the tsar to ask for land. Some of the peasants were arrested. Disguised as a peasant, under the name of Dimitry Naida, Stefanovich undertook to take the petition to the tsar. Stefanovich explained his actions as follows:

All my observations had confirmed the idea that the organization I had planned would be certain of adoption only on a basis of some authority, which in this case could only be the name of Tsar Alexander II.
Stefanovich pretended to set out on a journey to St. Petersburg to present the petition to the tsar, and on his return showed the peasants a forged manifesto alleged to have been signed by the tsar, calling upon the peasants to organize a secret society under the name of the Secret Squad in order to combat the landowners, the officials and the priests, who, so the document said, prevented the tsar from carrying out his desire of giving all the land to the peasants. The manifesto promised that in the event of victory:

All the land with its forests and meadows shall become your free property, like water, the sunlight and every other gift of God to man; the nobility you detest, which knows no sympathy for you, will be abolished, and freedom and happiness will reign in the land of Russia.
To this forged manifesto Stefanovich added the rules for the Secret Squad peasant society, which were also supposed to have been approved by the tsar. In order to convince the peasants that it was all genuine, Stefanovich arranged the ceremony of taking the oath on the Bible. An ikon was placed on a table between lighted candles, a cross was formed of two knives, and at this "altar" the peasants solemnly took the oath. This secret society was soon discovered by the tsarist secret police; its members were arrested and exiled to Siberia.

Why did the Bakuninists need this masquerade, which was harmful to the revolution and most unworthy of revolutionaries? Because their whole doctrine of anarchism was fallacious. Because all their anarchist ideas about the peasantry and the revolution were groundless and worthless.

Thus the Bakuninist doctrine retarded the development of the revolution in Russia. It gave the revolution not a single idea of value. It was therefore impossible to build up a victorious working-class organization in Russia without combating all the Narodniks, and particularly the Bakuninist variety of Narodism.

It may be asked: but did not the Bakuninists in Russia conduct any propaganda among the workers? They did. They established connections with the workers and set up workers' propaganda circles. Prince Peter Kropotkin, a prominent anarchist, was one such propagandist. Another was Chaikovsky, the same who in 1918, during the proletarian revolution in Russia, headed the whiteguard interventionist government in North Russia in company with General Miller. Of course, if these propagandist leaders had not themselves been on a false track, their work among the workers would have been useful, for by this time the first volume of Marx's Capital, the Communist Manifesto and other of Marx's works had already been translated into Russian. But the Bakuninists who carried on the propaganda among the workers had no clear ideas themselves about the aims and objects of the revolution and about the methods of struggle. Kropotkin was instructed to draw up a "catechism" for the use of study circles. To the question: "Should we study the ideal future society?" he gave as the answer: "The main thing is to destroy the state; when this is achieved the people themselves will determine the principles on which the new society is to be based."

Of course, not all the workers who attended these circles blindly followed the Bakuninists. Among the workers of the seventies and the eighties there were some who had views of their own and organizational talent-progressive workers who realized the tremendous role that fell to the proletariat as the vanguard class. These people-Victor Obnorsky, Stepan Khalturin, Peter Moisseyenko, Peter Alexeyev, Semyon Agapov, and others-showed that they were head and shoulders above their teachers (the Kropotkins, Bakunins and Chaikovskys) in understanding the aims and objects of the struggle.

That is why we think that the ideas of Bakunin, Kropotkin and the rest were wrong and harmful to the development of the revolution; they hindered the formation of that larger group of class conscious workers who later, when the work of organization was undertaken by the Marxists, founded and formed that victorious, powerful organization-the Bolshevik Party-under whose leadership tsarism was overthrown, the capitalist, landlord and kulak classes destroyed and socialist society built up in the U.S.S.R.

1 1814 is meant.-E.Y.

2 From the biographical sketch of Bakunin by the anarchist Nettlau.

3 Ibid.

4 The meaning of this heading was as follows: Who is to be preferred as the leader of the revolution-Nicholas Romanov, the tsar, Pugachev, the leader of a peasant rebellion, or Pestel, the chief of the Decembrist military conspiracy?

5The much-heralded "emancipation" of the Russian serfs in 1861, while providing factory owners and landlords with cheap labor, left the peasants on the land as much to the mercy of the landlords as they had been before.

6Incidentally, in 1870 Nechayev published Bakunin's Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto.

7Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, New York, 1927-Ed.

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