Violence and the Labor Movement Part 7

character of the anarchist philosophy. They went into the past history of Bakounin, revived all the accusations that had been made against him, and exposed every particle of evidence obtainable concerning his "checkered" career as a revolutionist. It will be remembered that it was in 1869 that Nechayeff appeared in Switzerland. When the Marxists got wind of him and his doctrine, their rage knew no bounds. And later they obtained and published in _L'Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste_ the material from which I have already quoted extensively in my first chapter.

No useful purpose, however, would be served in dealing with the personal phases of the struggle. Bakounin became so irate at the attacks upon him, several of which happened to have been written by Jews, that he wrote an answer ent.i.tled "Study Upon the German Jews." He feared to attack Marx; and this "Study," while avoiding a personal attack, sought to arouse a racial prejudice that would injure him. He writes to Herzen, a month after the congress at Basel, that he fully realizes that Marx is "the instigator and the leader of all this calumnious and infamous polemic."[20] He was reluctant, however, to attack him personally, and even refers to Marx and La.s.salle as "these two Jewish giants," but besides them, he adds, "there was and is a crowd of Jewish pigmies."[21]

"Nevertheless," he writes, "it may happen, and very shortly, too, that I shall enter into conflict with him, not over any personal offense, of course, but over a question of principle, regarding State communism, of which he himself and the English and German parties which he directs are the most ardent partisans. Then it will be a fight to the finish. But there is a time for everything, and the hour for this struggle has not yet sounded.... Do you not see that all these gentlemen who are our enemies are forming a phalanx, which must be disunited and broken up in order to be the more easily routed? You are more erudite than I; you know, therefore, better than I who was the first to take for principle: _Divide and rule_. If at present I should undertake an open war against Marx himself, three-quarters of the members of the International would turn against me, and I would be at a disadvantage, for I would have lost the ground on which I must stand. But by beginning this war with an attack against the rabble by which he is surrounded, I shall have the majority on my side.... But, ... if he wishes to const.i.tute himself the defender of their cause, it is he who would then declare war openly. In this case, I shall take the field also and I shall play the star role."[22]

This was written in October, 1869, a month after the Basel congress. On the 1st of January, 1870, the General Council at London sent a private communication to all sections of the International, and on the 28th of March it was followed by another. These, together with various circulars dealing with questions of principle, but all consisting of attacks upon Bakounin personally or upon his doctrines, finally goaded him into open war upon Marx, the General Council, all their doctrines, and even upon the then forming socialist party of Germany, with Bebel and Liebknecht at its head. During the year 1870 Bakounin was preparing for the great controversy, but his friends of Lyons interrupted his work by calling him there to take part in the uprising of that year. He hastened to Lyons, but, as we know, he was soon forced to flee and conceal himself in Ma.r.s.eilles. It was there, in the midst of the blackest despair, that Bakounin wrote: "I have no longer any faith in the Revolution in France. This nation is no longer in the least revolutionary. The people themselves have become doctrinaire, as insolent and as bourgeois as the bourgeois.... The bourgeois are loathsome. They are as savage as they are stupid--and as the police blood flows in their veins--they should be called policemen and attorneys-general in embryo. I am going to reply to their infamous calumnies by a good little book in which I shall give everything and everybody its proper name. I leave this country with deep despair in my heart."[23] He then set to work at last to state systematically his own views and to annihilate utterly those of the socialists. Many of these doc.u.ments are only fragmentary. Some were started and abandoned; others ended in hopeless confusion. With the most extraordinary gift of inspirited statement, he pa.s.ses in review every phase of history, leaping from one peak to another of the great periods, pointing his lessons, issuing his warnings, but all the time throwing at the reader such a Niagara of ideas and arguments that he is left utterly dazed and bewildered as by some startling military display or the rus.h.i.+ng here and there of a military maneuver. In _Lettres a un Francais_; _Ma.n.u.scrit de 114 Pages, ecrit a Ma.r.s.eille_; _Lettre a Esquiros_; _Preambule pour la Seconde Livraison de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Avertiss.e.m.e.nt pour l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Au Journal La Liberte, de Bruxelles_; and _Fragment formant une Suite de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_, he returns again and again to the charge, always seeking to deal some fatal blow to Marxian socialism, but never apparently satisfying himself that he has accomplished his task. He touches the border of practical criticism of the socialist program in the fragment ent.i.tled _Lettres a un Francais_.

It ends, however, before the task is done. Again he takes it up in the _Ma.n.u.scrit ecrit a Ma.r.s.eille_. But here also, as soon as he arrives at the point of annihilating the socialists, his task is discontinued. In truth, he himself seems to have realized the inconclusive character of his writings, as he refused in some cases to complete them and in other cases to publish them. Nevertheless, we find in various places of his fragmentary writings not only a statement of his own views, but his entire critique upon socialism.

As I have made clear enough, I think, in my first chapter, there are in Bakounin's writings two main ideas put forward again and again, dressed in innumerable forms and supported by an inexhaustible variety of arguments. These ideas are based upon his antagonism to religion and to government. It was always _Dieu et l'Etat_ that he was fighting, and not until both the ideas and the inst.i.tutions which had grown up in support of "these monstrous oppressions" had been destroyed and swept from the earth could there arise, thought Bakounin, a free society, peopled with happy and emanc.i.p.ated human souls. When one has once obtained this conception of Bakounin's fundamental views, there is little necessity for dealing with the infinite number of minor points upon which he was forced to attack the men and movements of his time. On the one hand, he was a.s.sailing Mazzini, whose every move in life was actuated by his intense religious and political faith, while, on the other hand, he was attacking Marx as the modern Moses handing down to the enslaved mult.i.tudes his table of infamous laws as the foundation for a new tyranny, that of State socialism. In 1871 Bakounin ceased all maneuvering. Bringing out his great guns, he began to bombard both Mazzini and Marx. Never has polemic literature seen such another battle.

With a weapon in each hand, turning from the one to the other of his antagonists, he battled, as no man ever before battled, to crush "these enemies of the entire human race."

There is, of course, no possibility of adequately summarizing, in such limited s.p.a.ce as I have allotted to it, the thought of one who traversed the history of the entire world of thought and action in pursuit of some crus.h.i.+ng argument against the socialism of Marx. This perverted form of socialism, Bakounin maintained, contemplated the establishment of a _communisme autoritaire_, or State socialism. "The State," he says, "having become the sole owner--at the end of a certain period of transition which will be necessary in order to transform society, without too great economic and political shocks, from the present organization of bourgeois privilege to the future organization of official equality for all--the State will also be the sole capitalist, the banker, the money lender, the organizer, the director of all the national work, and the distributor of its products. Such is the ideal, the fundamental principle of modern communism."[24] This is, of all Bakounin's criticisms of socialism, the one that has had the greatest vitality. It has gone the round of the world as a crus.h.i.+ng blow to socialist ideals. The same thought has been repeated by every politician, newspaper, and capitalist who has undertaken to refute socialism. And every socialist will admit that of all the attempts to misrepresent socialism and to make it abhorrent to most people the idea expressed in these words of Bakounin has been the most effective. To state thus the ideal of socialism is sufficient in most cases to end all argument. Add to this program military discipline for the ma.s.ses, barracks for homes, and a ruling bureaucracy, and you have complete the terrifying picture that is held up to the workers of every country, even to-day, as the nefarious, world-destroying design of the socialists.

It is, therefore, altogether proper to inquire if these were in reality the aims of the Marxists. Many sincere opponents of socialism actually believe that these are the ends sought, while the casual reader of socialist literature may see much that appears to lead directly to the dreadful State tyranny that Bakounin has pictured. But did Marx actually advocate State socialism? In the Communist Manifesto Marx proposed a series of reforms that the State alone was capable of inst.i.tuting. He urged that many of the instruments of production should be centralized in the hands of the State. Moreover, nothing is clearer than his prophecy that the working cla.s.s "will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State."[25] Indeed, in this program, as in all others that have developed out of it, the end of socialism would seem to be State owners.h.i.+p. "With trusts or without,"

writes Engels, "the official representative of capitalist society--the State--will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production."

Commenting himself upon this statement, he adds in a footnote: "I say 'have to.' For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become economically inevitable, only then--even if it is the State of to-day that effects this--is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself." "This necessity," he continues, "for conversion into State property is felt first in the great inst.i.tutions for intercourse and communication--the post-office, the telegraphs, the railways."[26]

Here is the entire position in a nutsh.e.l.l. But Engels says the State will "have to." Thus Engels and Marx are not stating necessarily what they desire. And it must not be forgotten that in all such statements both were outlining only what appeared to them to be a natural and inevitable evolution. In State owners.h.i.+p they saw an outcome of the necessary centralization of capital and its growth into huge monopolies.

Society would be forced to use the power of the State to control, and eventually to own, these menacing aggregations of capital in the hands of a few men. Both Marx and Engels saw clearly enough that State monopoly does not destroy the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. "The modern State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine.... The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, ... the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers--proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. _State owners.h.i.+p of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution._"[27]

State owners.h.i.+p, then, was not considered by Marx and Engels in itself a solution of the problem. It is only a necessary preliminary to the solution. The essential step, either subsequent or precedent, is the capture of political power by the working cla.s.s. By this act the means of production are freed "from the character of capital they have thus far borne, ..." and their "socialized character" is given "complete freedom to work itself out."[28] "Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different cla.s.ses of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master--free.

"To accomplish this act of universal emanc.i.p.ation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the new oppressed proletarian cla.s.s a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism."[29]

Engels declares that the State, such as we have known it in the past, will die out "as soon as there is no longer any social cla.s.s to be held in subjection; as soon as cla.s.s rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really const.i.tutes itself the representative of the whole of society--the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society--this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State.

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not 'abolished.' _It dies out._ This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free State,' both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand."[30]

This conception of the role of the State is one that no anarchist can comprehend. He is unwilling to admit that social evolution necessarily leads through State socialism to industrial democracy, or even that such an evolution is possible. To him the State seems to have a corporeal, material existence of its own. It is a tyrannical machine that exists above all cla.s.ses and wields a legal, military, and judicial power all its own. That the State is only an agency for representing in certain fields the power of a dominant economic cla.s.s--this is something the anarchist will not admit. In fact, Bakounin seems to have been utterly mystified when Eccarius answered him at Basel in these words: "The State can be reformed by the coming of the working cla.s.s into power."[31] That the State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the capitalist cla.s.s can neither be granted nor understood by the anarchists. Nor can it be comprehended that, when the capitalist cla.s.s has no affairs of its own to manage, the coercive character of the State will gradually disappear. State owners.h.i.+p undermines and destroys the economic power of private capitalists. When the railroads, the mines, the forests, and other great monopolies are taken out of their hands, their control over the State is by this much diminished. The only power they possess to control the State resides in their economic power, and anything that weakens that tends to destroy the cla.s.s character of the State itself. The inherent weakness of Bakounin's entire philosophy lay in this fact, that it begins with the necessity of abolis.h.i.+ng G.o.d and the State, and that it can never get beyond that or away from that. And, as a necessary consequence, Bakounin had to oppose every measure that looked toward any compromise with the State, or that might enable the working cla.s.s to exercise any influence in or through the State.

When, therefore, the German party at its congress at Eisenach demanded the suffrage and direct legislation, when it declared that political liberty is the most urgent preliminary condition for the economic emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s, Bakounin could see nothing revolutionary in such a program. When, furthermore, the party declared that the social question is inseparable from the political question and that the problems of our economic life could be solved only in a democratic State, Bakounin, of course, was forced to oppose such heresies with all his power. And these were indeed the really vital questions, upon which the anarchists and the socialists could not be reconciled. It is in his _Lettres a un Francais_, written just after the failure of his own "practical" efforts at Lyons, that Bakounin undertakes his criticism of the program of the German socialists.

Preparatory to this task, he first terrifies his French readers with the warning that if the German army, then at their doors, should conquer France, it would result in the destruction of French socialism (by which he means anarchism), in the utter degradation and complete slavery of the French people, and make it possible for the Knout of Germany and Russia to fall upon the back of all Europe. "If, in this terrible moment, ... [France] does not prefer the death of all her children and the destruction of all her goods, the burning of her villages, her cities, and of all her houses to slavery under the yoke of the Prussians, if she does not destroy, by means of a popular and revolutionary uprising, the power of the innumerable German armies which, victorious on all sides up to the present, threaten her dignity, her liberty, and even her existence, if she does not become a grave for all those six hundred thousand soldiers of German despotism, if she does not oppose them with the one means capable of conquering and destroying them under the present circ.u.mstances, if she does not reply to this insolent invasion by the social revolution no less ruthless and a thousand times more menacing--it is certain, I maintain, that then France is lost, her ma.s.ses of working people will be slaves, and French socialism will have lived its life."[32]

Approaching his subject in this dramatic manner, Bakounin turns to examine the degenerate state of socialism in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to see "what will be the chances of working-cla.s.s emanc.i.p.ation in all the rest of Europe."[33] In the first country socialism is only in its infancy. The Italians are wholly ignorant of the true causes of their misery. They are crushed, maltreated, and dying of hunger. They are "led blindly by the liberal and radical bourgeois."[34] Altogether, there is no immediate hope of socialism there. In Switzerland the people are asleep. "If the human world were on the point of dying, the Swiss would not resuscitate it."[35] Only in Germany is socialism making headway, and Bakounin undertakes to examine this socialism and to put it forward as a horrible example. To be sure, the German workers are awakening, but they are under the leaders.h.i.+p of certain cunning politicians, who have abandoned all revolutionary ideas, and are now undertaking to reform the State, hoping that that could be done as a result of "a great peaceful and legal agitation of the working cla.s.s."[36] The very name Liebknecht had taken for his paper, the _Volksstaat_, was infamous in Bakounin's eyes, while all the leaders of the labor party had become merely appendages to "their friends of the bourgeois _Volkspartei_."[37] He then pa.s.ses in review the program of the German socialists, and points to their aim of establis.h.i.+ng a democratic State by the "direct and secret suffrage for all men" and its guidance by direct legislation, as the utter abandonment of every revolutionary idea. He dwells upon the folly of the suffrage and of every effort to remodel, recast, and change the State, as "purely political and bourgeois."[38]

Democracies and republics are no less tyrannical than monarchies. The suffrage cannot alter them. In England, Switzerland, and America, he declares, the ma.s.ses now have political power, yet they remain in the deepest depths of misery. Universal suffrage is only a new superst.i.tion, while the referendum, already existing in Switzerland, has failed utterly to improve the condition of the people. The working-cla.s.s slaves, even in the most democratic countries, "have neither the instruction; nor the leisure, nor the independence necessary to exercise freely and with full knowledge of the case their rights as citizens. They have, in the most democratic countries, which are governed by representatives elected by all the people, a ruling day or rather a day of Saturnalian celebration: that is election day. Then the bourgeois, their oppressors, their every-day exploiters, and their masters, come to them, with hats off, talk to them of equality and of fraternity, and call them the ruling people, of whom they (the bourgeois) are only very humble servants, the representatives of their will. This day over, fraternity and equality evaporate in smoke, the bourgeois become bourgeois once more, and the proletariat, the sovereign people, remain slaves.

"Such is the real truth about the system of representative democracy, so much praised by the radical bourgeois, even when it is amended, completed, and developed, with a popular intention, by the _referendum_ or by that 'direct legislation of the people' which is extolled by a German school that wrongly calls itself socialist. For very nearly two years, the _referendum_ has been a part of the const.i.tution of the canton of Zurich, and up to this time it has given absolutely no results. The people there are called upon to vote, by yes or by no, on all the important laws which are presented to them by the representative bodies. They could even grant them the initiative without real liberty winning the least advantage."[39]

It is a discouraging picture that Bakounin draws here of the ignorance and stupidity of the people as they are led in every election to vote their enemies into power. What, then, is to be done? What shall these hordes of the illiterate and miserable do? If by direct legislation they cannot even vote laws in their own interest, how, then, will it be possible for them ever to improve their condition? Such questions do not in the least disturb Bakounin. He has one answer, Revolution! As he said in the beginning, so he repeats: "To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church, ... the third is the social revolution."[40] "A cure is possible only through the social revolution,"[41] that is, through "the destruction of all inst.i.tutions of inequality, and the establishment of economic and social equality."[42]

However, if Bakounin's idea of the social revolution never altered, the methods by which it was to be carried out suffered a change as a result of his experience in the International. In 1871 he no longer advocated, openly at any rate, secret conspiracies, the "loosening of evil pa.s.sions," or some vague "unchaining of the hydra." He begins then to oppose to political action what he calls economic action.[43] In the fragment--not published during Bakounin's life--the _Protestation de l'Alliance_, he covers for the hundredth time his arguments against the _Volksstaat_, which is a "ridiculous contradiction, a fiction, a lie."[44] "The State ... will always be an inst.i.tution of domination and of exploitation ... a permanent source of slavery and of misery."[45]

How, then, shall the State be destroyed? Bakounin's answer is "first, by the organization and the federation of strike funds and the international solidarity of strikes; secondly, by the organization and international federation of trade unions; and, lastly, by the spontaneous and direct development of philosophical and sociological ideas in the International....

"Let us now consider these three ways in their special action, differing one from another, but, as I have just said, inseparable, and let us commence with the organization of strike funds and strikes.

"Strike funds have for their sole object to provide the necessary money in order to make possible the costly organization and maintenance of strikes. And the strike is the beginning of the social war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, while still within the limits of legality.[T] Strikes are a valuable weapon in this twofold connection; first, because they electrify the ma.s.ses, give fresh impetus to their moral energy, and awaken in their hearts the profound antagonism which exists between their interests and those of the bourgeoisie, by showing them ever clearer the abyss which from this time irrevocably separates them from that cla.s.s; and, second, because they contribute in large measure to provoke and to const.i.tute among the workers of all trades, of all localities, and of all countries the consciousness and the fact itself of solidarity: a double action, the one negative and the other positive, which tends to const.i.tute directly the new world of the proletariat by opposing it, almost absolutely, to the bourgeois world."[46]

In another place he says: "Once this solidarity is seriously accepted and firmly established, it brings forth all the rest--all the principles--the most sublime and the most subversive of the International, the most destructive of religion, of juridical right, and of the State, of authority divine as well as human--in a word, the most revolutionary from the socialist point of view, being nothing but the natural and necessary developments of this economic solidarity. And the immense practical advantage of the trade sections over the central sections consists precisely in this--that these developments and these principles are demonstrated to the workers not by theoretical reasoning, but by the living and tragic experience of a struggle which each day becomes larger, more profound, and more terrible. In such a way that the worker who is the least instructed, the least prepared, the most gentle, always dragged further by the very consequences of this conflict, ends by recognizing himself to be a revolutionist, an anarchist, and an atheist, without often knowing himself how he has become such."[47]

This is as far as Bakounin gets in the statement of his new program of action, as this article, like many others, was discontinued and thrown aside at the moment when he comes to clinching his argument. The mountain, however, had labored, and this was its mouse. It is chiefly remarkable as a forecast of the methods adopted by the syndicalists a quarter of a century later. Nevertheless, one cannot escape the thought that Bakounin's advocacy of a purely economic struggle was only a last desperate effort on his part to discover some method of action, aside from his now discredited riots and insurrections, that could serve as an effective subst.i.tute for political action. In reality, Bakounin found himself in a vicious circle. Again and again he tried to find his way out, but invariably he returned to his starting point. In despair he tore to pieces his ma.n.u.script, immediately, however, to start a new one; then once more to rush round the circle that ended nowhere.

Marx and Engels ignored utterly the many and varied a.s.saults that Bakounin made upon their theoretical views. They were not the least concerned over his attacks upon _their_ socialism. They had not invented it, and economic evolution was determining its form. It was not, indeed, until 1875 that Engels deals with the tendencies to State socialism, and then it was in answer to Dr. Eugene Duehring, _privat docent_ at Berlin University, who had just announced that he had become "converted" to socialism. Like many another distinguished convert, he immediately began to remodel the whole theory and to create what he supposed were new and original doctrines of his own. But no sooner were they put in print than they were found to be a restatement of the old and choicest formulas of Proudhon and Bakounin. Engels therefore took up the cudgels once again, and, no doubt to the stupefaction of Duehring, denied that property is robbery,[48] that slaves are kept in slavery by force,[49] and that the root of social and economic inequality is political tyranny.[50] Furthermore, he deplored this method of interpreting history, and pointed out that capitalism would exist "if we exclude the possibility of force, robbery, and cheating absolutely...."

Furthermore, "the monopolization of the means of production ... in the hands of a single cla.s.s few in numbers ... rests on purely economic grounds without robbery, force, or any intervention of politics or the government being necessary." To say that property rests on force "_merely serves to obscure the understanding of the real development of things_."[51] I mention Engels' argument in answer to Dr. Duehring, because word for word it answers also Bakounin. Of course, Bakounin was a much more difficult antagonist, because he could not be pinned down to any systematic doctrines or to any clear and logical development or statement of his thought. Indeed, Marx and Engels seemed more amused than concerned and simply treated his essays as a form of "hyper-revolutionary dress-parade oratory," to use a phrase of Liebknecht's. They ridiculed him as an "amorphous pan-destroyer," and made no attempt to refute his really intangible social and economic theories.

However, they met Bakounin's attacks on the International at every point. On the method of organization which Bakounin advocated, namely, that of a federalism of autonomous groups, which was to be "in the present a faithful image of future society," Marx replied that nothing could better suit the enemies of the International than to see such anarchy reign amidst the workers. Furthermore, when Bakounin advocated insurrections, uprisings, and riots, or even indeed purely economic action as a subst.i.tute for political action, Marx undertook extraordinary measures to deal finally with Bakounin and his program of action. A conference was therefore called of the leading spirits of the International, to be held in London in September, 1871. The whole of Bakounin's activity was there discussed, and a series of resolutions was adopted by the conference to be sent to every section of the International movement. A number of these resolutions dealt directly with Bakounin and the Alliance, which it was thought still existed, despite Bakounin's statement that it had been dissolved.[U] But by far the most important work of the conference was a resolution dealing with the question of political action. It is perhaps as important a doc.u.ment as was issued during the life of the International, and it stands as the answer of Marx to what Bakounin called economic action and to what the syndicalists now call direct action. The whole International organization is here pleaded with to maintain its faith in the efficacy of political means. Political action is pointed out as the fundamental principle of the organization, and, in order to give authority to this plea, the various declarations that had been made during the life of the International were brought together. Once again, the old motif of the Communist Manifesto appeared, and every effort was made to give it the authority of a positive law. Although rather long, the resolution is too important a doc.u.ment not to be printed here almost in full.

"Considering the following pa.s.sage of the preamble to the rules: 'The economic emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.ses is the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate _as a means_;'

"That the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's a.s.sociation (1864) states: 'The lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emanc.i.p.ation of labor.... To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working cla.s.ses;'

"That the Congress of Lausanne (1867) has pa.s.sed this resolution: 'The social emanc.i.p.ation of the workmen is inseparable from their political emanc.i.p.ation;'

"That the declaration of the General Council relative to the pretended plot of the French Internationals on the eve of the plebiscite (1870) says: 'Certainly by the tenor of our statutes, all our branches in England, on the Continent, and in America have the special mission not only to serve as centers for the militant organization of the working cla.s.s, but also to support, in their respective countries, every political movement tending toward the accomplishment of our ultimate end--the economic emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s;'

"Considering that against this collective power of the propertied cla.s.ses the working cla.s.s cannot act, as a cla.s.s, except by const.i.tuting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied cla.s.ses;

"That this const.i.tution of the working cla.s.s into a political party is indispensable in order to insure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end--the abolition of cla.s.ses;

"That the combination of forces which the working cla.s.s has already effected by its economic struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists.

"The Conference recalls to the members of the _International_:

"That, in the militant state of the working cla.s.s, its economic movement and its political action are indissolubly united."[52]

From the congress at Basel in 1869 to the conference at The Hague in 1872, little was done by the International to realize its great aim of organizing politically the working cla.s.s of Europe. It had been completely sidetracked, and all the energies of its leading spirits were wasted in controversy and in the various struggles of the factions to control the organization. It was a period of incessant warfare. Nearly every local conference was a scene of dissension; many of the branches were dissolved; and disruption in the Latin countries was gradually obliterating whatever there was of actual organization. It all resolved itself into a question of domination between Bakounin and Marx. The war between Germany and France prevented an international gathering, and it was not until September, 1872, that another congress of the International was held. It was finally decided that it should gather at The Hague. The Commune had flashed across the sky for a moment.

Insurrection had broken out and had been crushed in various places in Europe. Strikes were more frequent than had ever been known before. And, because of these various disturbances, the International had become the terror of Europe. Its strength and influence were vastly overestimated by the reactionary powers. Its hand was seen in every act of the discontented ma.s.ses. It became the "Red Spectre," and all the powers of Europe were now seeking to destroy it. Looming thus large to the outside world, those within the International knew how baseless were the fears of its opponents. They realized that internecine war was eating its heart out. During all this time, when it was credited and blamed for every revolt in Europe, there were incredible plotting and intrigue between the factions. Endless doc.u.ments were printed, a.s.sailing the alleged designs of this or that group, and secret circulars were issued denouncing the character of this or that leader. Sections were formed and dissolved in the maneuvers of the two factions to control the approaching congress. And, when finally the congress gathered at The Hague, there was a gravity among the delegates that foreboded what was to come. The Marxists were in absolute control. On the resolution to expel Michael Bakounin from the International the vote stood twenty-seven for and six against, while seven abstained. The expulsion of Bakounin, however, occurred only after a long debate upon his entire history and that of his secret Alliance. Nearly all the amazing collection of "doc.u.mentary proof," afterward published in _L'Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste_, was submitted to the congress, and a resolution was pa.s.sed that all the doc.u.ments should be published, together with such others as might tend to enlighten the members.h.i.+p concerning the purposes of Bakounin's organization.

Two other important actions were taken at the congress. One was to introduce into the actual rules of the a.s.sociation part of the resolution, which was pa.s.sed by the conference in London the year before, dealing with political action, and this was adopted by thirty-six votes against five. The other action was to remove the seat of the General Council from London to New York. Although this was suggested by Marx, it was energetically fought on the ground that it meant the destruction of the International. By a very narrow vote the resolution was carried, twenty-six to twenty-three, a number of Marx's oldest and most devoted followers voting against the proposition. No really satisfactory explanation is given for this extraordinary act, although it has been thought since that Marx had arrived at the decision, perhaps the hardest of his life, to destroy the International in order to save it from the hands of the anarchists. To be sure, Bakounin was now out of it, and there was little to be feared from his faction, segregated and limited to certain places in the Latin countries; but everywhere the name of the International was being used by all sorts of elements that could only injure the actual labor movement. The exploits of Nechayeff, of Bakounin, and of certain Spanish and Italian sections had all conveyed to the world an impression of the International which perhaps could never be altogether erased.

Furthermore, in Germany and other countries the seeds of an actual working-cla.s.s political movement had been planted, and there was already promise of a huge development in the national organizations. What moved Marx thus to destroy his own child, the concrete thing he had dreamed of in his thirty years of incessant labor, profound study, and ceaseless agitation, will perhaps never be fully known, but in any case no act of Marx was ever of greater service to the cause of labor. It was a form of surgery that cut out of the socialist movement forever an irreconcilable element, and from then on the distinction between anarchist and socialist was indisputably clear. They stood poles apart, and everyone realized that no useful purpose would be served in trying to bring them together again.

Largely because of Bakounin, the International as an organization of labor never played an important role; but, as a melting pot in which the crude ideas of many philosophies were thrown--some to be fused, others to be cast aside, and all eventually to be clarified and purified--the International performed a memorable service. During its entire life it was a battlefield. In the beginning there were many separate groups, but at the end there were only two forces in combat--socialists and anarchists. When the quarrel began there was among the ma.s.ses no sharply dividing line; their ideas were incoherent; and their allegiance was to individuals rather than to principles. Without much discrimination, they called themselves "communists," "Internationalists," "collectivists,"

"anarchists," "socialists." Even these terms they had not defined, and it was only toward the end of the International that the two combatants cla.s.sified their principles into two antagonistic schools, socialism and anarchism. Anarchism was no longer a vague, undefined philosophy of human happiness; it now stood forth, clear and distinct from all other social theories. After this no one need be in doubt as to its meaning and methods. On the other hand, no thoughtful person need longer remain in doubt as to the exact meaning and methods of socialism. This work of definition and clarification was the immense service performed by the International in its eight brief years of life. Throughout Europe and America, after 1872, these two forces openly declared that they had nothing in common, either in method or in philosophy. To them at least the International had been a university.

FOOTNOTES:

[S] In the English report of the discussion Professor Hins's remarks are summarized as follows: "Hins said he could not agree with those who looked upon trade societies as mere strike and wages' societies, nor was he in favor of having central committees made up of all trades. The present trades unions would some day overthrow the present state of political organization altogether; they represented the social and political organization of the future. The whole laboring population would range itself, according to occupation, into different groups, and this would lead to a new political organization of society. He wanted no intermeddling of the State; they had enough of that in Belgium already.

As to the central committees, every trade ought to have its central committee at the princ.i.p.al seat of manufacture. The central committee of the cotton trades ought to be at Manchester; that of the silk trades at Lyons, etc. He did not consider it a disadvantage that trade unions kept aloof more or less from politics, at least in his country. By trying to reform the State, or to take part in its councils, they would virtually acknowledge its right of existence. Whatever the English, the Swiss, the Germans, and the Americans might hope to accomplish by means of the present political State the Belgians repudiated theirs."--pp. 31-2.

[T] These are almost the exact words that Aristide Briand uses in his argument for the general strike. See "_La Greve Generale_," compiled by Lagardelle, p. 95.

[U] One of the resolutions prohibited the formation of sectarian groups or separatist bodies within the International, such as the _Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste_, that pretended "to accomplish special missions, distinct from the common purposes of the a.s.sociation." Another resolution dealt with what was called the "split" among the workers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Still another resolution formally declared that the International had nothing in common with the infamies of Nechayeff, who had fraudulently usurped and exploited the name of the International. Furthermore, Outine was instructed to prepare a report from the Russian journals on the work of Nechayeff. Cf.

_Resolutions_ II, XVII, XIII, XIV, respectively, of the Conference of Delegates of the International Working Men's a.s.sociation, a.s.sembled at London from 17th to 23d September, 1871.

CHAPTER IX