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convocation of this Conference must not be published in the press.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.
