13. HERMAPHRODITE MAN VERSUS CARBUNCLE BOY IN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

The Nechaev affair left Bakunin a great deal to sort out, including his very real poverty when Nechaev made off with funds the anarchist had hoped to share in. His life was always complicated, given his tendency to ride off madly in all directions, and if his dealings with Nechaev were the most toxic of Bakunin’s adventures in this period, they were the least important in his development as a political activist and thinker. Much more significant was the four-year fight with Marx in the First International. In part a clash of personalities, in part a replay of their disagreements of the 1840s, in part a minefield of misunderstanding and misinterpretation that both men blundered across, the conflict hinged on ideas of reform, revolution, and state. Yet principled differences soon gave way to unprincipled tactics and the collapse of the International, leaving an acrimony that taints the relationship of Marxists and anarchists to this day.

By 1868, it was clear the League of Peace and Freedom was not interested in radical politics. Bakunin, now living in Switzerland, created a new political organization, the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, sometimes called the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries, in the fall of that year. The Alliance actively recruited members and functioned openly as a political group, and Bakunin wrote an ecumenical program that outlined its goals and politics in seven points. In the first of these, the Alliance “declares itself atheist; it wants the abolition of cults, substitution of science for faith, and human justice for divine justice.” The next two points underscored Bakunin’s commitment to gender equality. One called for “political, economic, and social equalization of classes and individuals of both sexes, commencing with the abolition of the right of inheritance.” The goal was to establish that “land, [and] instruments of labor, like all other capital, on becoming collective property of the entire society, shall be used only by the workers, that is, by agricultural and industrial associations.” The next demanded equal education in “science, industry, and the arts” for “children of both sexes.” Bakunin then rejected “any political action which does not have as its immediate and direct aim the triumph of the workers’ cause against capital.” Point five suggested that even authoritarian states were “reducing their activities to simple administrative functions of public service,” and in the future would “dissolve into a universal union of free associations.” Next, the Alliance rejected “any policy based on self-styled patriotism and on rivalry between nations,” calling instead for the “international or universal solidarity of the workers of all countries.” The last point called for the “universal association of all local associations on the basis of liberty.”[283]

The program was a concise statement of anarchist principles, and in it Bakunin outlined how a new anarchist society might function, though he was deliberately vague. After all, it would hardly be consistent to argue that future generations could be free only if they obeyed the instructions and designs of long-dead gurus. “We frankly refuse to work out plans for future conditions,” he observed elsewhere, “because this does not coincide with our activity, and therefore we consider the purely theoretical work of reasoning as useless.”[284] Yet some implications may be drawn from the program of the Alliance. Workers and peasants would no longer be compelled to labor for the profits of others. Instead, they would form free associations of producers, on the land or in factories and artisanal shops. These free associations, owned by the members themselves as cooperatives and communes, would federate with others locally, regionally, and federally as necessary and as useful to provide other needs and wants that they could not supply themselves. With the capitalists gone, class struggle too would disappear. Therefore, there would be no need for the coercive function of the state to maintain exploitive class relations. There would be a need for administration and coordination, from the collectively owned farm to the shop to the region and beyond, but each smaller unit would be organized from the bottom up and would freely affiliate to the larger unit in the same way, with no centralized control or authority. Certainly disputes and differences would arise, but they could be resolved, if not always amicably, at least democratically, in part because there were no competing class interests that guaranteed one side could win only at the other’s expense. If this seems Utopian, there are examples of such associations even today in our class-riven and antagonistic societies, from library boards to volunteer fire departments to charities to food and housing cooperatives. These organizations are capable of organizing scores, even hundreds, of people to fulfill the needs of the individual and the collective without recourse to a supreme executive authority, top-down management, or the army. These groups are not free of conflict, and certainly disputes can be rancorous. But anarchists have never claimed that the goal was a world without disagreements, only that there is no need for a boss or government to resolve differences through coercion and violence while exploiting everyone in the meantime. Without hierarchies of power and profit, the collective power of humanity would be devoted to the full and equal development of all.

Turning from the broad sketch of anarchist principles, the program of the Alliance outlined several rules for the organization. Most dealt with the way members would form local and national sections, but the first rule was the most significant. It announced that the Alliance would formally join the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the International or the First International.

Though often identified with Marx and Engels, the inspiration for the International came from French and British workers who sought to express their solidarity with the ill-fated Polish uprising of 1863. They were unable to do much for the Poles, but it was obvious that international cooperation was crucial for workers in an age of transnational capital, colonization, and empire. The following year the International Working Men’s Association was created, and Marx was asked to join. He was reluctant at first. He had not been active in any political organization since 1850, and though he was living in London, had little involvement with British trade unionists, few of whom would be bumped into in the course of his research at the British Museum. Nonetheless, he accepted the invitation to attend the founding meeting and was soon elected secretary. He was also elected as one of two German representatives to the International and as the corresponding secretary for Germany, even though it had been more than twenty years since he had been in his homeland.

The International was an awkward amalgamation of revolutionaries and reformers. Socialists ranged from leftover followers of Robert Owen to anarchists, Marxists, and radicals such as the Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini, whose politics had a certain flair but little substance and even less connection to the working class. The bulk of the British trade union members had long given up the radicalism of Chartism for moderate reformism, and they had no interest in revolution. Proudhon’s ideas still reverberated in France, where workers had much less success in winning reforms under the Second Republic and Second Empire of Napoleon III and so were less inclined to favor parliamentary politics. It was difficult to know what to make of the German movements. The most important German working-class organization was the General German Workers’ Association. But it was the creation of Marx’s flamboyant rival, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Marx was disinclined to encourage its members to join the International. Even though Lassalle had been killed in a duel shortly before the International was founded, Marx found it more conducive to harmonious relations to court a much smaller group, the German Workers’ Social Democratic Party, led by Wilhelm Liebknecht, a journalist, and August Bebel, a woodworker. Ostensibly more radical than the Association, their group had little to recommend it save its willingness to declare itself opposed to Lassalle and for Marx. Later it would absorb the Lassallean party and adopt much of its program; as the German Social Democratic Party, or SPD, it would have great success in electoral politics, though it would abandon all but the pretense of remaining a revolutionary workers’ party until the 1940s, when it abandoned even the pretense.

The first order of business for the International was to constitute its rules and program. Marx was selected to serve on the subcommittee charged with drawing them up, but missed the preliminary meetings. The provisional drafts submitted by the rest of the committee appalled him, and he took over the job of revising through the time-honored practice of extending debate until the rest of the committee was exhausted and happy to let someone—anyone—finish up so they could go home. Marx then wrote a draft that he found eminently satisfactory. The first paragraphs were a model of carefully weighed political ideas, with a nod to virtually every faction. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,” it started, and no one could object to that. It held that “all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence” were based on “the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor, that is, the sources of life,” and this materialist explanation found favor with Proudhonists, trade unionists, anarchists, and socialists alike. Marx even threw in some obligatory phrases about “duty and right” and “truth, morality, and justice” to keep everyone happy, though he made sure, as he noted to Engels, to place such meaningless platitudes where they could do no harm. The rules established the International as “a central medium of communication and cooperation” between workers’ organizations throughout the world that would “proclaim the common aspirations of the working class,” and set out its structure. Individuals would form local associations that in turn would form national federations or sections. These associations, federations, and sections would send delegates to the annual General Congress to decide policy. The General Congress would also elect members to the executive of the International, the General Council, which would direct the affairs of the International between congresses. The General Council would select from its own members the officers such as secretary and treasurer and the corresponding secretaries for the different sections. In his rules and principles for the International, Marx accomplished a difficult trick rather deftly. The finished product was acceptable to all the very different groups and individuals, and he had written a platform that would not scare off the more cautious while leaving room for the revolutionary.[285]

Certainly Bakunin had no objections to the ideas and structure of the International. Nor was there any personal antipathy between him and Marx when the International was founded. After all, they had not seen each other for nearly twenty years. In the meantime, Marx had been pleased to come into possession of some books by Hegel that had once belonged to Bakunin, left behind as he traveled across Europe just ahead of the police and troops. True, in 1863, Marx could not resist passing on to Engels the gossip from a friend that “Bakunin has become a monster, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and is barely capable of walking anymore. To crown it all, he is sexually perverse and jealous of the seventeen-year-old Polish girl who married him in Siberia because of his martyrdom.”[286] But when Bakunin returned to London the following year to have a bespoke suit made, he and Marx spent a pleasant evening together. Marx’s accusation that Bakunin had been a spy had long since been forgiven, though it could hardly have been forgotten. Since then, Marx had defended Bakunin in the press against similar charges made by a conservative British journalist, coincidentally named Francis Marx, and by David Urquhart, a notorious anti-Russian whose conspiracy theories had occupied Karl for a time. On the whole, the meeting went well, and Marx passed on Bakunin’s regards to Engels, along with the observation that “I must say I liked him very much, more so than previously ... On the whole, he is one of the few people whom after sixteen years I find to have moved forward and not backward.” Undoubtedly they talked politics, for Marx had just finished writing the address and rules for the International, and the two parted as friends. Perhaps most significantly, Bakunin made it clear that he had no interest in nationalist causes, and Marx recorded approvingly that “from now on—after the collapse of the Polish affairs—he [Bakunin] will only involve himself in the socialist movement.” They exchanged a few more letters and Bakunin agreed to inform Garibaldi of the International and have its program translated into Italian. Marx hoped that Bakunin could “lay some countermines for Mr. Mazzini,” and in 1867 deplored the foolish assertion made in The Diplomatic Review that the Geneva Peace Congress was a trick of the Russian government and its “well worn-out agent Bakounine.” That same year, Marx was still sufficiently friendly to send Bakunin a copy of Capital hot off the press. For his part, Bakunin translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian and had it published by Herzen in 1869, and made the stab at translating Capital that would end badly, thanks to the work of Nechaev. Though Bakunin would write several years later that he had not been taken in by Marx’s friendly overtures, this statement was made after their battles in the International, and it is reasonable enough to believe that both men were originally prepared to give the other the benefit of the doubt.[287]

If their personal relationship had grown closer, so too had their philosophical and political thought. Bakunin had long appreciated that the very real strength of Marx’s analysis was precisely the emphasis he placed on economic factors. Marx, he argued, “was on the right path. He established the principle that religious, political, and juridical evolutions in history were not the cause, but the effect, of economic evolution. This is a great and fruitful concept ... and he is to be credited for solidly establishing it and having made it the base for his economic system.” In an unpublished section that precedes Bakunin’s best known work, God and State, the anarchist explicitly praises Marx’s historical materialism for its insistence that where the “idealists claim that ideas dominate and produce reality, the communists, in accordance with scientific materialism, claim on the contrary that reality gives birth to ideas ... and economic, material reality constitutes ... the essential base, the principal foundation from which intellectual, moral, political, and social facts are only the necessary derivatives.” Even at the height of their conflict, Bakunin would praise Marx for putting socialism on an economic rather than sentimental footing, writing, “There is a good deal of truth in the merciless critique he directed against Proudhon. For all his efforts to ground himself in reality, Proudhon remained an idealist and a metaphysician. His starting point is the abstract idea of right. From right he proceeds to economic fact, while Marx, by contrast, advanced and proved the incontrovertible truth, confirmed by the entire past and present history of human society, nations, and states, that economic fact has always preceded legal and political right. The exposition and demonstration of that truth constitutes one of Marx’s principal contributions to science.” The anarchist even adapted and incorporated some aspects of the positivism of Auguste Comte into his worldview. The French sociologist—who coined the term—sought to put the study of human nature on a scientific basis and from that standpoint rejected religion and metaphysics. The anarchist was not uncritical of Comte, however; he refused outright the idea that scientists, broadly defined to include economists and sociologists, should make policy or have any authority in the new society. He took from Comte the scientific defense of atheism and the general principle of Comte’s positivism, that science could produce “positive,” certain, and true knowledge about the world and humanity. No less than Marx, Bakunin was a philosophical realist and a materialist.[288]

Nor were Bakunin and Marx as far apart on their ideas about the relative merits of proletarians and peasants as their critics and supporters have sometimes alleged. While Bakunin argued that peasants should not be ignored, especially in countries where they made up a large percentage of the population, as we have seen he also insisted on the revolutionary role of workers. At the same time, Marx’s views on peasants have sometimes been distorted. Marx’s remarks in the Communist Manifesto about the “idiocy of rural life” are often quoted as proof he despised peasants, but we must remember that “idiocy” comes from the Greek and originally implied isolation rather than retardation. That peasants were isolated and that isolation was a problem for the revolutionary to overcome were observations Bakunin readily shared. While Marx had no great faith in the land-owning peasantry in France, he would later concede that Russian peasants might well be able to build socialism on the basis of their communal traditions. And both were aware that well-paid workers might be tempted to abandon revolution for reform. Indeed, it was Marx, not Bakunin, who would write that while the “English have all the material necessary for the social revolution,” they lacked “the spirit of generalization and revolutionary fervor.”[289]

Yet it is often the nature of political groups to fight more ferociously with one’s closest competitor than with the mutual enemy. Despite their detente in 1864, Bakunin and Marx did not remain close; indeed, they never met again and the personal and the political soon drove them apart. When Bakunin failed to acknowledge Marx’s gift of Capital in a timely fashion, Jenny Marx wrote to Johann Philip Becker, a friend of both men, asking, “Have you seen or heard anything of Bakunin? My husband sent him, as an old Hegelian, his book—not a word or a sign. There must be something underneath this! You really can’t trust all those Russians. If they don’t adhere to the tsar in Russia, then they adhere to or are kept by Herzen, which in the end comes to the same thing. Six of one and half a dozen of the other.” Bakunin’s oversight rankled Marx too, for some months later, the book still unacknowledged, he cautiously asked a mutual acquaintance if Bakunin still considered him a friend, hoping that the question would be posed discreetly to the anarchist. When Bakunin was told of Marx’s inquiry, he immediately fired off a warm letter to “my old friend,” assuring him they were, “more than ever, dear Marx,” comrades, for he had come “to understand better than ever how correct you were in following and in inviting all of us to advance on the high road of economic revolution.” Marx was correct, he continued, to criticize “those of us who were becoming lost on the footpath of national, exclusively political enterprises. I am now doing that which you began to do more than twenty years ago.” Bakunin informed Marx that he had parted company with the “bourgeois” League of Peace and Freedom and would now devote himself to the cause of workers. “My country now,” he continued, “is the International ... You see, dear friend, that I am your disciple, and I am proud to be such.” Bakunin’s letter was fulsome, in part because he had just applied to have the Alliance affiliate directly to the International. Aware of Marx’s sensitivity to academic insult, however slight and unintended, Bakunin was undoubtedly concerned that Marx would refuse to admit the Alliance if he were aggrieved, and so the letter was crafted to smooth any ruffled feathers. But the effusive letter arrived just after Bakunin’s petition to join the International and had the opposite effect. “I trust no Russian,” Marx flatly remarked to Engels, and he dismissed Bakunin’s letter as nothing more than an attempt to make a “sentimental entrée” to his good graces and the International. Why would Bakunin wish to affiliate with the International? Marx could conceive of only one reason. “The old acquaintance of mine—the Russian Bakunin—has started a nice little conspiracy against the International,” he fumed in a letter to his daughter and son-in-law. The Alliance program, he continued, “would, by a clever trick, have placed our society under the guidance and the supreme initiative of the Russian Bakunin ... I could not let this first attempt at disorganizing our society ... succeed.”[290]

There was more to Marx’s reaction than paranoia, ego, or the state of his famous carbuncles.[291] Modern times called for new forms of organization and new methods. The old sects and secret organizations had had their day. Trade unions were an established fact in nations such as England, even if their legal status was dubious; workers there had shown that they could use the existing political system to win significant gains, such as the Ten Hours Bill that limited the length of the working day. The key to new tactics was the international solidarity of workers, and that was precisely the aim of the International. Such solidarity did not require uniformity of opinion, but it did require an end to the factions and clandestine parties of the past. As Marx put it later, “The International was founded in order to replace the socialist or semisocialist sects by a really militant organization of the working class ... Sects are (historically) justified so long as the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary.” In his view, “the history of the International was a continual struggle of the General Council against the sects and amateur experiments, which sought to assert themselves within the International against the real movement of the working class.” Marx’s assessment does of course beg the question of whether he had properly divined the real movement of the working class. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to conclude that what Marx sought at first was not to dominate and control, but, in the words of two historians of the International, to provide some “cohesion” to overcome the “centrifugal force” of the different groups in the International. Admitting a separate organization holus-bolus into the International was an invitation to factional infighting and sectarian splits.[292]

Bakunin’s reputation as a revolutionary was largely based on 1848 and the old methods, and his delight in secret organizations was no secret. It is hardly surprising that Marx feared that the Alliance would be “established within and established against!” the International.[293] Bakunin’s further suggestion that the Alliance would have as its “special mission” within the International “to study political and philosophical questions on the basis of the grand principle of universal and genuine equality of all human beings on earth,” was waving a red, or rather, black, flag in front of Marx. Leaving aside the argument that such grand platitudes were largely meaningless, why would the International need a self-appointed subcommittee to examine the very questions the International posed and that had been Marx’s lifework? Furthermore, the Alliance proposed, or appeared to propose, that it would set up a parallel structure within the International, even to the point of having separate meetings at the annual congresses. Marx’s response to the Alliance’s application to affiliate with the International was logical enough, and remarkably restrained given his strong feelings. If, as it claimed, the Alliance had the same aims and goals as the International, there was no need for it to enter as a separate organization. If it didn’t agree with the principles of the International, it should not join. The International Working Men’s Association was by no means as powerful, international, or associated as its name implied, and it made some sense to avoid the factional disputes that would inevitably follow the admission of another organization. For these reasons, the International declined Bakunin’s offer of affiliation, on the grounds that “the presence of a second international body operating within and outside the International Working Men’s Association will be the most infallible means of its disorganization.” The Alliance members were welcome to join as individuals, and the following year it was agreed that certain sections of the Alliance could join not as affiliates but as newly constituted sections of the International. It was a workable compromise that suggests that while Marx was wary of Bakunin, he was hardly acting in a dictatorial or authoritarian fashion.[294]

He did, however, completely misjudge Bakunin’s motives. There was never any question of his taking over the International or creating a secret society or sect within it. Even those biographers friendly to Marx have admitted there is no evidence to support such an allegation. What Bakunin did hope to do was to establish the Alliance as a sort of revolutionary think tank that would develop ideas and strategies and so advance the political ideas of workers once they had joined the International. It was hardly a secret: he had said as much in the Alliance’s program, after all, and made it clearer a few years later when he wrote that

the Alliance is the necessary complement to the International ... But the International and the Alliance, while having the same final goal, pursue different objects. The former seeks to unify the millions of workers, to overcome the differences of craft and country, into a single immense and compact body. The latter seeks to give these masses a truly revolutionary direction. The programs of the one and the other are not at all opposed. They are different only in the degree of their respective development. The International contains in embryo, but only in embryo, the whole program of the Alliance. For its part, the Alliance is the fullest expression of the International.

Furthermore, if the Alliance joined as a separate affiliate, it would give Bakunin the support of a circle or affinity group; it would bring him into the International as an equal to Marx, and surely he deserved no less.[295]

What Marx objected to was not whether the International would have the dual purpose of bringing workers together and educating them, but who would do the educating. He had, after all, rejected the suggestion that the International have honorary memberships, with the explicit aim of keeping out the French socialist Louis Blanc. And as he noted to Engels, Marx had framed the rules and program of the International “so that our view should appear in a form acceptable from the present standpoint of the workers’ movement,” understanding that it would “take time before the reawakened movement allows the old boldness of speech.” In the meantime, it would necessary to be fortiter in re, suaviter in modo,”that is, strong in deed, but gentle in manner. Such a tactic was not necessarily duplicitous. Neither Marx nor Bakunin assumed that workers necessarily understood from their experience how the world worked or how to change it. No one expects someone to become an economist or a carpenter simply by observing the world around them, and it is not necessarily elitist to argue that people do not learn about politics that way either. It is fashionable today to disapprove of anything that hints of “false consciousness,” that is, the idea that people do not always understand or act according to their real self-interest. Yet given the truly astounding apparatus of the state, capital, religion, schools, universities, and the media, each capable of misleading people, it would be more surprising if everyone did understand naturally and instinctively how the world works and where their interests lie. No, Marx was wary of Bakunin and the Alliance because they represented a threat to Marx’s position in the International and to his belief that political action, not direct action, was the key to workers’ emancipation.[296]

From the beginning, Marx insisted that the workers’ movement had to make use of the state and participate in electoral politics. In the founding rules he set out for the International, he had carefully played down political action, holding that “the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means.” This was just acceptable to the Proudhonists, who tried unsuccessfully to have the clause removed, and it satisfied the more moderate British unionists and German socialists who believed that significant reforms could be won from the state. The Proudhonists regrouped, however, and in 1866, taking Marx at his word that the emancipation of the working class was the job of the working class itself, nearly succeeded in passing a resolution to exclude all nonworkers, including Marx, from the International. Marx counterattacked, and at the General Congress held at Lausanne in 1867, pushed the question of political action. Largely due to Marx’s efforts, the Congress resolved that “the social emancipation of the workers cannot be effected without their political emancipation” and that “the establishment of political liberty is absolutely essential as a preliminary step.”[297] While these resolutions could hardly be construed as a commitment to parliamentary procedure and capitalist highroading, they shifted political action from being the “subordinate means” to the essential task of the working class. Of such small changes and implications are doctrinal splits and schisms made. Buoyed by his success, Marx decided to push harder at the next congress, scheduled for Brussels in 1868, confiding to Engels that he would “personally make hay out of the asses of Proudhonists.”[298] The congress was held in September, before Bakunin applied to join the International, and so Marx had little organized opposition. Though he did not attend personally, Marx made good on his promise to Engels. It was no longer necessary to be gentle in manner, for the world of the artisan, the proprietor, the small landholder, and the skilled, semiautonomous worker that Proudhon spoke to was vanishing. As more people became wage workers, they, unlike Proudhon, increasingly viewed the strike as their best weapon. Nor did they share his hope that workers’ co-ops and credit unions could supplant big capital. Thus Marx’s resolutions in favor of strike action and the collective ownership of the means of production were strongly supported by the delegates, over half of whom were Belgian workers. Marx’s success in having his resolutions passed effectively ended the role of the Proudhonists in the International.

Yet his victory was short-lived. Only a few months after the Brussels congress, Bakunin and the Alliance applied to join the International. For Marx, it was déja vu all over again. If anything, Bakunin was worse, from Marx’s point of view. Proudhon had died in 1865, and his movement had no obvious leader to rally around. But Bakunin was a famous and popular figure: the ovation he received with Garibaldi at the League of Peace and Freedom was proof of that. Respected by the Proudhonists, Bakunin, unlike Proudhon, was opposed to private property and so could not be accused of “petit bourgeois” ideology. Bakunin’s refusal of the state and of political action was popular among both Proudhonists and workers in countries such as Italy and Spain who did not have the vote or recourse to parliament and so could rely only on direct action. At the same time, his revolutionary rhetoric appealed to those who did not have time to wait for the full development of productive forces and who wanted action and hope in the present, not the far-off future. Bakunin was also well equipped to challenge Marx’s position as the brain trust of the International. Engels grasped this immediately and attempted to reassure his friend. Going over the list of Alliance members, he asked Marx rhetorically, “Will we find among them men known to have devoted their whole lives to these questions? On the contrary. There is not a name whose bearer has so far dared as much as to claim to be a man of science ... I have never read anything more wretched than the [Alliance’s] theoretical program. Siberia, his stomach, and the young Polish woman have made Bakunin a perfect blockhead.” Though Marx would insist that Bakunin was “devoid of all theoretical knowledge” and “a nonentity as a theorist,” that was a demonstrable untruth. Bakunin was not an unsophisticated worker Marx could displace with academic rigor as he had Weitling; he was a competitor for theoretical correctness who also had a gift for reaching nonintellectuals. Unlike Marx, Bakunin would never be the target of a purge of the Poindexters.[299]

But what Marx could do better than anyone was read texts closely and critically. Getting it right was a sacred obligation, not because he was an authoritarian but because he was an intellectual by trade and a meticulous scholar, not to say nitpicker, by nature. He worked his way through the Alliance’s program sentence by sentence, hunting out error and deviation with the zeal that leads many to believe the expression “pedantic professor” contains a redundancy. His notes on his copy of the program demonstrate his academic bent and set the tone for the future conflict with Bakunin. “Equality of classes!” he scrawled in the margin when the phrase appeared in the opening paragraph. In Marx’s view, classes existed precisely so one could exploit the other; there could be no question of making them equal. Instead, it was “the abolition of classes, this true secret of the proletarian movement, which forms the great aim of the International Working Men’s Association.” And Marx was right, as Bakunin freely admitted to him. The watered-down statement had been a compromise originally intended for the “bourgeois audience” of the League of Peace and Freedom, he explained, and Marx admitted later that it was clear from the context that the phrase was “a mere slip of the pen.” Later, however, in his polemics against Bakunin, he would use the phrase as proof that his rival had no understanding of economics and that his ideas were but “a hash superficially scraped together from the right and the left.”[300]

Where Bakunin declared atheism as a principle of the Alliance, Marx wrote indignantly, “As if one could declare—by royal decree—abolition of faith!” While he was himself an atheist, Marx understood religion as one of the few solaces an oppressed people had. Remove the causes of their oppression, and religion would disappear, at least as a social force; whatever individuals chose to believe privately was entirely up to them. For Marx, religion was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world ... It is the opiate of the masses,” as he put it in the Introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Life in 1844. But this too was Bakunin’s position:

It is not the propaganda of free thought, but the social revolution alone that will be able to kill religion in the people ... [Religion is] a natural, living powerful protest on the part of the masses against their narrow and wretched lives. The people go to church as they go to the alehouse, to numb themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, if only for a short time, as free and as happy as everyone else. Give them a human existence, and they will no longer go to the alehouse or the church.

Marx’s more substantial point was that making atheism a principle of joining the International would alienate potential members who believed in God. But this too Bakunin understood. “We think that the founders of the International were very wise to eliminate all political and religious questions from its program,” he wrote. “Their main purpose, before all else, was to unite the working masses of the civilized world in a common movement. Inevitably they had to seek a common basis, a set of elementary principles on which all workers should agree ...” Hardly an irreconcilable difference, it would appear, but it reinforced, in Bakunin’s view, the need for a special committee of the International to consider social questions from an explicitly revolutionary perspective.[301]

Working his way through the Alliance program, Marx bridled at the call for equalization of both sexes, underlining the phrase in the text and writing beside it, “Hermaphrodite man! Just like the Russian Commune!” It is difficult to know why Marx found this objectionable; he was committed to women’s equality and had worked hard to provide good educations for his own daughters. It may be that he had his share of Victorian prejudices, or simply that he would reach for any stick to beat a dog. Equally odd was Marx’s reaction to Bakunin’s call for the abolition of the right of inheritance, a demand Marx had expressed in identical language in the Communist Manifesto. Now Marx dismissed it as “the old Saint-Simon panacea!” Bakunin believed that the right or, more accurately, the law of inheritance maintained class differences. There could be no “level playing field” if the rich could pass on their advantages to their children. Just as abolishing private property did not mean you had to share your toothbrush with the world proletariat on alternate weekends, Bakunin was quick to add that items of great personal meaning but of little monetary value could of course be passed on. Capital and land, however, had to remain “forever the collective property of all productive associations.” Personal fortunes would not be passed on, for that would begin anew the division of the world into rich and poor, owners and owned. In a rational, free society, the needs of one’s children would be taken care of by society; there would be no need to grant them the savings and investments of their parents. Furthermore, it was clear that anyone who had amassed personal wealth had not done so by their own labor alone; they had benefited from all of society and thus to society their wealth should be returned. Everyone was entitled to the necessities and luxuries of life, but these were to be earned, not bequeathed. Marx, on the other hand, argued that once private property was abolished, the right of inheritance would be meaningless. If Bakunin was instead urging the abolition of inheritance as a short-term, pragmatic goal, much the same could be accomplished through reforms in tax law. That would have the advantage of protecting what small property the poor might possess and would not alienate potential allies who would be frightened off if they believed socialism meant they couldn’t keep granddad’s pocket watch. Nonetheless, there was no particular reason why both views could not have peacefully coexisted in the International, and it is not clear why Marx would waste a moment on such trifling matters, let alone pen a special “Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance” and return to the issue repeatedly over the next few years.[302]

The problem was that each man appeared to represent the political tendency the other despised and feared most. Bakunin proposed that the Alliance join the International as a relatively independent body; Marx could conceive of no innocent reason for such a move and set out to counter what he feared would be a schism. Refusing to admit the Alliance and attacking its program struck Bakunin as authoritarian, while Marx’s manipulations to push through his resolutions on political action were reformist and sneaky. The obvious course of action was to organize one’s allies openly where possible and covertly where necessary to avoid expulsion. Such organizing in turn would convince Marx that Bakunin was interested either in taking over the International or wrecking it from within—precisely what he had feared from the outset. And so it continued, until the overreactions of each gave the ghosts they conjured in their own minds solid form. The march to folly was exacerbated by the fact that Bakunin and Marx never met again after 1864. Marx attended only one congress of the International, that held in the Hague in 1872, Bakunin only that of Basel in 1869. Their maneuvers were carried out through official pronouncements, secret memos, and dubious intermediaries that practically ensured their exchanges would degenerate into a flame war.

At first, Marx restrained the impulse to intrigue, and was critical of his allies who sought to blacken Bakunin’s name. Instead, the first unscrupulous attack on Bakunin was launched by one of Marx’s colleagues. Sigismund Borkheim despised Russians in general, and Alexander Herzen in particular. In 1868, he published a series of articles denouncing Herzen, and soon turned his aim on Bakunin. Unaware of or indifferent to Bakunin’s current political ideas, Borkheim denounced him as one of Herzen’s “Cossacks” whose observation that “the passion for destruction is a creative passion” would be rejected out of hand even by German schoolboys. That Borkheim was referring to Bakunin’s 1842 article and to a point of view that Marx and Engels had shared at the time seemed to have escaped him. To their credit, both Marx and Engels tried to rein in Borkheim and rejected his request for permission to reprint the attacks on Bakunin Engels had penned in the 1840s. Their fair-minded behavior, however, soon evaporated and they took no action when other colleagues, notably August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, began hinting in the press yet again that Bakunin was a pan-Slavist and thus acting in the interest of the Russian tsar, whether he knew it or not. As everyone knew, this was a not very subtle way of once again accusing him of being a Russian police agent, and Bakunin believed that Marx and Engels either acquiesced in the campaign of their lieutenants or were directly responsible yet again for an unprincipled attack on his name and reputation.

First, however, he had other problems to deal with. His wife, Antonia, had developed a romantic liaison with Carlo Gambuzzi, one of the Italian comrades who had followed the Bakunins to Switzerland. Short of postmortem DNA testing—hey, they did it for the Romanovs to determine if Ingrid Bergman was Anastasia—it is impossible to prove paternity, but certainly it was widely believed, even by Bakunin, that Gambuzzi was the father of Antonia’s three children. Born in 1868, the same year the Alliance was founded, Carlo lived until 1942; Sophia, born two years later, lived until 1956; Maria, born in 1873, would become a famous chemist and university professor in Italy, and lived until 1960. Gambuzzi would help support Bakunin in the last years of his life. After the anarchist’s death in 1876, he would marry Antonia, and the two would have a fourth child, Tanya, together. Such complicated relationships were hardly unknown in the nineteenth century, either in sophisticated, bohemian circles or in the practical world of working people, where short life expectancy, poverty, and love encouraged creative family structures that ranged far outside the boundaries of middle-class morality. Marx, for example, was likely the father of his live-in maid’s son, though he refused to acknowledge paternity. Engels gallantly claimed he was the father, which was credible enough, as he might charitably be described, in that quaint bourgeois expression, as a “womanizer.” Herzen, his wife, Natalie, and Georg Herwegh tried unsuccessfully to create a triangle of “love and affection” in the 1840s while later Herzen and the Ogarevs maintained a ménage a trois in which Herzen and Natalie Ogarev had three children together. As one historian has concluded, what is most striking about Michael and Antonia’s relationship are the “bonds of affection and loyalty that held the marriage together” despite the difficulties they faced.[303]

One of these difficulties was money, and now it was compounded by political fights. The Bakunins had moved from Italy to Vevey with Zoe Obolensky, and the town had become a center for Russian radical émigrés, including two former members of Land and Liberty, Nicholas Utin and Nicholas Zhukovsky, both of whom had met Bakunin in London some years before. Though Obolensky could no longer support the revolutionaries, Zhukovsky’s sister-in-law, Olga Levashov, could. She was prepared to invest in the revolution and with her support, the circle launched a radical newspaper, The People’s Cause. Edited and largely written by Bakunin and Zhukovsky, the first issue came off the presses in September 1868. As a newspaper, it was of little historical consequence. Its real importance soon became apparent: It was a prize in the contest between Bakunin and Marx. At the Geneva congress of the League of Peace and Freedom a year earlier, Utin had reintroduced himself to Bakunin as a dedicated follower of anarchism. However sincere that declaration may have been, Utin broke with Bakunin before the second issue of The People’s Cause came out and took over the editorship himself. His motives were mixed. Bakunin implied the two had a personal squabble, perhaps because the older revolutionary had not given the young radical his due and so left him miffed. Certainly the resources of Olga Levashov were at stake, as was the prestige of assuming the position of editor; revolutionary integrity is often weighed and measured exceedingly fine. And while Bakunin sniffed that they had not quarreled over political ideas, because his opponent had none, Utin did not need any; those of Karl Marx were ready to hand. Utin broke with anarchism, argued for reform and trade union politics, and shifted the editorial stance of The People’s Cause to reflect his newfound ideas. The split with Bakunin also represented a split in the working-class movement in the regions around Geneva, where native workers in the highly skilled manufacturing sector, especially the famous Swiss watchmakers, had the vote and were better paid than foreign-born, unenfranchised laborers, and so were much more interested in reform and party politics. Not surprisingly, Bakunin sided with those who had no vote and so were drawn to direct action and extraparliamentary politics as the only way to improve their condition. Utin, following Marx, looked to the reformist workers first.[304]

Whatever the precise admixture of the causes of the dispute, Bakunin found himself removed from the masthead of The People’s Cause, without a benefactor, and with a wife and another man’s child to support. He and Antonia moved to Geneva’s working-class district of Montbrillant, literally on the wrong side of the tracks, in October 1868, perhaps in the hope that Herzen, who had moved there earlier, could provide some financial aid. But the two old warriors had quarreled too often and too fiercely; while they met a few times, Herzen had little to do with his former comrade, beyond noting in a letter to Ogarev that “there is no news of Bakunin, except that his trousers have lost their last buttons, and keep up only by force of habit and sympathetic attraction.”[305] Bakunin was in danger of losing more than his trousers. In February 1869, he sent off a terse note to his sisters in Priamukhino: “Debts are crushing me. I am facing death from starvation. Help me.”[306] No help was forthcoming; somehow he struggled through. In the spring of 1869, Antonia left for an extended visit with Carlo Gambuzzi in Italy; she would return several months later, bearing another child. Perhaps the most profound result of this series of personal and political hardships was that Bakunin was left vulnerable to the blandishments and revolutionary opportunism of Nechaev, who turned up in the middle of the chaos.

There were small pleasures, however, including a banquet in Le Locle where Bakunin was the guest of honor. He still had the aversion to dancing he had noted in his youth, though now it was perhaps forced upon him by his bad heart and weight; in any case, while others danced, he expounded on politics and the seven aspects of human happiness: “first, to die fighting for liberty; second, love and friendship; third, art and science; fourth, smoking; fifth, drinking; sixth, eating; and seventh, sleeping.”[307] It is, all things considered, rather a humble list, and yet we still cannot deliver it to most of the world’s population. It may also be compared with a list of answers Marx supplied to a parlor game of “Confession,” where he noted that his favorite virtue in a man was strength, and in a woman, weakness; that his chief characteristic was singleness of purpose, his idea of happiness to fight, and his idea of misery, submission. Making much of after-dinner testimonials and games is almost as fatuous as psychohistory and cold war histrionics, yet they are suggestive of the two clashing personalities. In any event, by 1869 Bakunin had helped form a new Geneva section of the International, the Fédération Romande, or Romance Federation, and became involved with two new anarchist newspapers, L’Egalité and Progres.

Like Francis Ford Coppola, Bakunin was not always at his best when given unlimited time and resources to complete a project, and his short pieces in L’Egalité have a focus and clarity that are often missing from the long, unpolished writings. He reiterated his belief that “revolutions are not improvised. They are not made arbitrarily either by individuals or even by the most powerful associations. They occur independently of all volition and conspiracy and are always brought about by the force of circumstances. They can be foreseen and their approach can sometimes be sensed, but their outbreak can never be hastened.”[308] Could he make it any plainer? Revolution was not a question of will, it was not a matter of wishing, it was not possible anywhere, anytime. It depended greatly on social conditions; on that he and Marx were agreed, though Marx would later deny it. Nor would the social revolution resemble 1848 “in the sense of barricades and a violent overthrow of the political order,” for the revolutionaries did not “wish to kill persons, but to abolish status and its perquisites.” The “realization on earth of justice and humanity” would come through “a single means: association.” Isolated workers were powerless, isolated associations nearly so. Even national workers’ associations were not strong enough to resist international capital. Labor needed to organize internationally; it needed the ideas the International could help provide, and more importantly, it needed “solidarity in study, in labor, in public action, and life.” Through associations, cooperatives, trade unions, and mutual aid societies, “workers become accustomed to handling their own affairs,” and in that prepared the “precious seeds for the organization of the future.”[309]

Bakunin’s discussion on education remains instructive today as schooling from kindergarten to university becomes more “streamlined” to produce cannon fodder, worker-drones, and lawyers. Art, music, and literature are the first subjects dropped from the curriculum as school budgets are slashed, and education seems largely devoted to replacing critical thought with obedience and curiosity with boredom. From the vantage point of 1869, Bakunin gave a stirring plea for integrated, well-rounded, and equal education for women and men. One of the privileges the bourgeoisie kept for itself, he pointed out, was a “fuller education.” It was obvious that the person who is “broader-minded thanks to scientific learning, who grasps more easily and fully the nature of his surroundings because he better understands those facts which are called the laws of nature and society ... will feel freer in nature and society and ... will also in fact be the cleverer and stronger ... The one who knows more will naturally rule over the one who knows less,” and if only this difference remained to separate people into classes, humanity would soon find itself again divided into “a large number of slaves and a small number of rulers, the former working for the latter.” That was why the privileged called only for “some education of the people,” and not “total education.” The result of that, as Bob Dylan observed much later, was “twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift.”

Surely Bakunin could not object to the notion that some people should be allowed to devote themselves full-time to intellectual pursuits, for didn’t their “scientific discoveries” and “artistic creations” improve life for everyone? He granted that there had been “vast progress” in knowledge and art, just as capitalist industry had created more wealth than the world had ever seen before. But the greater wealth was not distributed equally, and neither were knowledge and education. Furthermore, whatever gains workers had made in absolute terms, they had lost in relative terms. He used a simple analogy to demonstrate his point. If you and I start walking at the same pace and you have a head start of one hundred paces, at the end of an hour, we have both moved ahead an equal amount though we are still one hundred paces apart. If, however, you can make sixty paces a minute to my thirty, at the end of the hour we will be nineteen hundred paces apart. Progress in wealth and education were exactly the same. If workers were better educated than they were before, the gap separating them from the privileged had grown, and as it yawned wider, the “privileged will have become more powerful and the worker will have become more dependent, more of a slave than in the beginning.” Just as wealth was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, so too was education. The net effect of all this “progress” was to “divide the world into a small, excessively affluent, learned, ruling minority and a vast majority of wretched, ignorant, slavish proletarians.”

At the same time, much of the so-called progress that resulted from this education was actually designed to oppress workers. The “science of government, the science of administration, and financial science” was nothing more than the “science of fleecing the people without making them complain too much and, when they begin to complain, the science of imposing silence, forbearance, and obedience on them by scientifically organized violence; the science of tricking and dividing the masses of people, of keeping them eternally and advantageously ignorant,” so they could never unite, and the science of the military, making it much more powerful “and allowing it to be present, to act, and to strike everywhere.”

A common objection to socialism or anarchism is the question, “Who will do the dirty work?” Marx gave one useful answer to one such interrogator. “You will!” he retorted. Bakunin confronted the question as well. If everyone were educated, who would do the necessary but unrewarding work? His response was simple: “Everyone shall work and everyone shall be educated.” When manual and mental labor were no longer separated, all work could be more interesting and useful. The more or less equal development of “muscular and mental activities” in each individual “will not impede each other but instead will support, broaden, and reinforce each other.” It followed that “in the interest of both labor and science ... there should no longer be either workers or scholars but only human beings.” If that meant there were less time for the rarefied genius to doggedly pursue research, whatever might be lost from that individual would more than be made up by the much greater contributions the rest of society could make. “Certainly, there will be fewer illustrious scholars,” Bakunin agreed, “but at the same time there will be infinitely fewer ignorant people. No longer will there be a few who touch the skies, but millions who are now crushed and degraded will walk on the earth as human beings. There will be no demigods, but neither will there be any slaves,” for society would see “the former coming down a little, the latter rising quite a bit.”

To the argument that not all people were capable of being educated to the same level, Bakunin made the obvious but still often ignored point, that at present “rich but stupid heirs will receive a superior education; the most intelligent children of the proletariat will continue to inherit ignorance ... “ Thus it was often the case that “a very bright worker must stand silent while a stupid scholar gets the better of him, not because the latter has any sense but because of the education denied the worker.” Worse, the superior education of the scholar was possible only because “the labor of the worker clothed him, lodged him, fed him, and provided him with tutors, books, and everything else he needed for his education while his stupidity was being scientifically developed in the schools.” Until humanity created a society in which wealth, leisure, and education were provided equally to all, there were no good grounds for comparison or determining who could be educated to what level. Once the artificial differences of “upbringing, education, and economic and political standing” were removed, he suspected that most humans would not be “identical, but they are equivalent and hence equal.” The differences that remained would be a resource, not a drain. There might still be extreme cases of both “geniuses” and “idiots,” but these would be a very small percentage of the population. Those who were unable to learn suffered from illness and would be cared for; with equal health care, nutrition, and resources for all, likely the number would decrease substantially. As for geniuses, they were rare enough one could be forgiven for not losing much sleep over them. Nor was it clear that geniuses were produced by superior education. Many were not called “genius” until they were dead, while many young people of promise failed to deliver. It was just about impossible to predict who might develop into what and that was, Bakunin concluded, another argument to educate everyone well and equally. More to the point, in a society where everyone was well educated, human progress would not depend on isolated, random genius but on the much greater abilities of everyone.

He then outlined briefly the content of education in the new society. It would “prepare every child of each sex for the life of thought as well as for the life of labor,” and would provide a general knowledge of all the sciences, including sociology. Since no one could encompass “every speciality of every science,” students would, after their general education, choose the particular area of study that “best suits their individual aptitude and tastes.” Undoubtedly some would make mistakes, but that was better than streaming children, for no parent or teacher could possibly make the proper decision for a child; Bakunin sided with the child’s freedom to choose over “every official, semi-official, paternal, and pedantic tutor in the world.” Scientific and theoretical education would be complemented with “industrial or practical instruction,” again divided into general and specialized schooling, and instruction, or rather, “a series of experiments” in “human morality.” Divine morality, he argued, was “based on two immoral principles: respect for authority and contempt for humanity.” Human morality was “founded on contempt for authority and respect for the freedom of humanity.” This was not the freedom of free will, for he denied that such existed. “Every so-called human vice and virtue is only the product of the combined action of nature, properly so-called, and society ... All individuals, at every moment of their life, are, without exception, what nature and society have made them.” While this might be cause for existential paralysis in some, for Bakunin it was further proof “that for human beings to be moralized, their social environment must be moralized.” Education at present could not do that, for real, integrated, and complete education could not be created in a capitalist society. What was necessary was not a revolution in education, but an education in revolution; once the people had been emancipated, “they will educate themselves.” [310]

The ideas and arguments Bakunin put forward in these short articles remain some of his most interesting and provocative. The difficulties and work of these years, however, were put aside in September 1869 as he prepared himself for the Basel congress of the International. As usual, the real battles were camouflaged as resolutions that appeared innocent enough to the uninitiated, and it first seemed that there would be no major schisms. A motion to give the General Council the power to determine which groups would be allowed to affiliate and to suspend sections of the International that threatened unity was passed easily. Even though this would centralize authority in the hands of the General Council, Bakunin sided with Marx and Liebknecht in favor of the resolution. Given his commitment to decentralization, this may seem surprising. But Bakunin sought to protect revolutionary sections of the International, including his own, from attack by national sections, such as the British and German, that tended to be less radical. The General Council, he correctly surmised, would tend to favor radicals over reformers. At the same time, he wanted to fend off an attempt to organize a new Swiss branch of the International that hoped to supplant Bakunin’s section, and so was prepared to hand the General Council stronger powers. It is a measure of Bakunin’s complete unsuitability for the role of a Machiavelli that these new powers were first used against him.[311]

The second resolution finally ended the long-standing controversy over private property, and Bakunin again voted with Marx to declare that the International stood for collective property. Whether property should be owned by the state or by the people in common was a question that all agreed could wait another day. The next resolution was on the right of inheritance. Everyone understood that more hinged on this than the issue itself: it was the test of strength between Bakunin and Marx. Bakunin had asked to have “the question of inheritance” placed on the agenda of the congress, and Marx had readily agreed, believing that he would win easily and so “be able to hit Bakunin on the head directly.”[312] The result shocked Marx. Despite his explicit instructions to his delegates and his carefully written report on the question, backed by the General Council that Marx himself headed, the majority of the delegates sided with Bakunin. Marx did not attend the congress, and Bakunin’s personal appearance helped his cause considerably. The anarchist’s speech at the congress no doubt convinced many; it was, by all accounts, an eloquent and impassioned oration, an example of Bakunin at his best, and in it, he outlined some of the differences between anarchism and Marxism, or as he called them, collectivism and communism. The Marxists, he thundered, “put themselves right in the future, and in taking collective property as their starting point, find that there is no longer any occasion to speak of a right of inheritance.” The anarchists, however, “start off from the present,” under the “regime of triumphant individual property, and, while marching toward collective property, we encounter an obstacle: the right of inheritance. We therefore think it is necessary to overthrow it.”[313] Though Bakunin’s resolution received a majority of votes cast, the number of abstentions and absences meant that it did not receive a clear majority of all the delegates, and so it failed on a technicality. But Marx’s own counterresolution was rejected by a clear majority, and the votes showed that Bakunin had much more support than Marx had thought possible. Bakunin won a moral victory and would win a public relations one as well. He demanded that the congress strike a special court of honor to force Liebknecht to put up evidence or shut up his whispering campaign that Bakunin was a Russian spy. Liebknecht had no proof and backed down, claiming he had never made such a charge. He may have been technically correct, but there was no doubt that Liebknecht’s innuendoes pointed in precisely that direction. He was severely chastised by the court of honor, which publicly handed Bakunin its written verdict. With an eye to the grand gesture, the benevolent giant rolled up the paper, lit it, then used it as a spill to light his cigar, demonstrating with some flair that he had no need of written proof of Liebknecht’s guilt and that he was prepared to forget the entire matter.[314]

The Basel delegates then voted their support of trade unions and of the need for solidarity of workers across nations. A cautious unity was forged, and both Marx and Bakunin declared themselves satisfied with the results of the congress. Subsequent events, however, would reveal that the solidarity was more apparent than real and that neither side would cease its fulminations against the other. Though both Bakunin and Marx could claim tactical victories at Basel, the congress confirmed, or appeared to confirm, the worst fears of both. Each believed he was engaged in a defensive war to protect himself from the unprincipled machinations of the other. From Bakunin’s perspective, it seemed that Marx was prepared to take up again the smear campaign he had begun in the 1840s when he could not win through force of argument. Barely three weeks after the congress, another of Marx’s colleagues, Moses Hess, who had known Bakunin in the 1840s, published another attack on the anarchist in the French newspaper Le Reveil. He accused Bakunin of secret intrigues aimed at destroying the International, and while he veiled his attack by insisting he did not wish impugn the anarchist’s revolutionary integrity, he went on to claim, falsely, that Bakunin had associated with another radical accused of being a police agent at Basel. Hess, like Borkheim and Liebknecht, further intimated that Bakunin was a “pan-Slavist.” This was more than an accusation of being a Russophile or an acknowledgment of Bakunin’s earlier belief in the necessity of Slavic revolt against the tsar. It was shorthand for “supporter of the Russian empire,” and carried with it the implication that Bakunin was doing the tsar’s bidding. Probably Marx had no prior knowledge of Hess’s article, just as he had no knowledge of Liebknecht’s earlier whispering campaign against Bakunin. But he worked closely with both, and to Bakunin, it would have be the height of naïveté not to suspect that Marx was the puppeteer.

The campaign of innuendo and slander infuriated Bakunin. Believing he had finally cleared up the muck at the Basel congress with the public renunciation of Liebknecht, Hess’s renewed assault in Le Reveil provoked Bakunin into penning a lengthy response. In it Bakunin did not counter this campaign by advancing anarchist thought so much as attempt to discredit his critics. Some of his criticisms were accurate enough, but he also attacked Marx, Hess, and Liebknecht as Jews. This anti-Semitism was a vile and disturbing theme in some of his writings in this period. It is especially disheartening in the work of a thinker who proclaimed himself in favor of freedom and equality, and no rationalization can expiate it. Since the term “anti-Semitism” may be applied to a wide range of ideas and behaviors, from preferring a Jewish doctor because one believes “Jews are smart” to participating in pogroms, it is necessary to distinguish between these poles to make sense of the charge, disturbing though the notion of a spectrum may be. In an age when it was common to ascribe physiological, mental, and cultural characteristics to such a dubious concept as “race,” racist language was common. Even Marx, for example, referred to the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle as “the Jewish nigger” and occasionally attributed his political maneuvering to his genetic origins, just as he insisted that Bakunin’s “Russian blood” made him a born conspirator. Marx even categorized his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, as a “nigger” whose romantic excesses in courting Marx’s daughter were attributable to his “race.” As a young man, Bakunin occasionally had used the Polish word zhid, that is, “yid,” to refer to Jews. In nineteenth-century Russia, the word was considered much less offensive, at least in genteel, gentile circles, than it is today, and was used in official government documents and literature, often without overt or conscious pejorative intent. That tells us something very important about the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Russia. But precisely because the use of the word was so prevalent and deep-seated, it is not in itself proof of virulent anti-Semitism. In fact, on some occasions Bakunin has been badly served by translators who turned his use of the French juif or “Jew” into zhid. In his letter to Le Reveil, Bakunin made repeated references to the “German Jewish journalists” who accused him of being a tsarist spy as he reached for the old, despicable tropes and rationalizations of anti-Semitism. Noting sardonically that some might think him capable even of cannibalism, Bakunin asserted that he was “neither the enemy nor the detractor of the Jews,” and that he did not support such a barbaric position. On the contrary, he continued, “all nations are equal in my eyes,” since each was “a product of historical ethnography and consequently not responsible for either its defaults or merits.” In a later note, Bakunin expanded on this idea to suggest that by “national characteristics” he meant not genetic or attributed racial traits but “the individual temperament and character of all races and peoples, which are themselves the product of a host of ethnographic, climatological and economic, as well as historical causes,” a claim that in itself was much more enlightened than contemporary discussions of inherent racial characteristics.[315] Furthermore, in the letter to Le Reveil he added that while historical, political, and social reality influenced people, they did not precisely determine outcomes and ideas. As a negative example, he pointed out that “in the heart of democratic America” one also found “the singularly passionate tendency toward imperialism.” As a positive example, he pointed out that not only had Judaism given the world Christ, Saint Paul, and Spinoza, it had also produced “the two most eminent socialists of our day: Marx and Lassalle.” Moses Hess, however, could not be included among such giants; he was instead one of the “Jewish pygmies” who resorted to character assassination rather than the frank exchange of political differences.

Bakunin then argued that the history of the Jews had given them an “essentially mercantile and bourgeois tendency” that meant, “taken as a nation,” they were “preeminently the exploiters of the labor of others.” While he insisted he did not categorize all Jews as exploiters and that to do so “would be an injustice and a folly,” and while he made later references not to the broad category of “Jews” but to “bourgeois Jews and Germans,” it is clear he was making a disreputable argument about ethnicity as much as an argument about class. Because they exploited workers, “Jews” had “a natural horror and fear of the popular masses” and despised them, “either openly or in secret,” and their interests were “entirely contrary to the interests and the instincts of the proletariat.” Jews constituted “a real force in Europe today,” for they “reign despotically in commerce and banking.” This was a widespread notion in the nineteenth century, shared even by Karl Marx, who wrote in 1844, “Let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion, but let us look for the secret of religion in the actual Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, an emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our age.” When Bruno Bauer argued that the Viennese Jew “controls through his money the fate of the whole Empire,” Marx agreed that “this is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only annexing the power of money but also because through him and also apart from him money has become a world power and the practical spirit of the Jew has become the practical spirit of the Christian people.”[316] The debate over whether or to what degree Marx was anti-Semitic continues today, and it is no defense of Bakunin to point out that others too were anti-Semitic. Nor is provocation a defense, though the fact that that Bakunin’s outbursts were a knee-jerk response to a persistent and malicious campaign of slander may be mitigating. His remarks make up a deplorable but miniscule part of his thought, never becoming a consistent theme in his writing or turning into generalized attacks on Jews. It is hardly the case, as one historian has asserted, that Bakunin’s anti-Semitism was “enough to corrupt his message irredeemably.”[317]

Ironically, labeling his foes as “journalists” may have been the greatest insult at the time. Journalism, especially in Germany, was widely regarded as the career choice of the educated but unsuccessful, the uninspired and disaffected who could not find gainful employment. Coming from Bakunin, such a charge was rather hypocritical, but it emphasized his belief that he was the victim of an unprincipled personal attack from the lesser lights of the left. [318] And in drawing attention to their German nationality, Bakunin emphasized that his detractors shared the prejudice of many Western Europeans against his homeland and, by extension, against him. The bulk of the thirty-eight pages he penned dealt with the specific charges made by Hess and Marx’s other supporters. While Bakunin frankly admitted his passionate belief in the Russian people, there was no stronger critic of the Russian empire than himself. After all, who among his accusers had suffered at the hands of the tsar as he had? The allegations of “pan-Slavism” were clearly false, prompted, he suggested, by the traditional German fear of Russia and Russians. Bakunin reaffirmed his support for the International and its principles, pointing out the errors and half-truths told by those who accused him of being a splitter, and he described in detail how the court of honor at the Basel congress had unanimously championed him against Liebknecht’s smears.

He then launched into a discussion of Garibaldi and Mazzini before sending the letter, unfinished, not to the newspaper, but to Herzen for his comments, with the abashed acknowledgment that the “polemic against the German Jews will seem too raw and coarse to you” and the hope that Herzen might help edit it. Herzen was appalled by the letter and penned a defense of Bakunin for Le Reveil that he sent off instead. Long himself the target of Marx’s venom, he did wonder why Bakunin had largely ignored Marx in his diatribe, and the anarchist’s answer is worth quoting at some length, for it illustrates how Bakunin was torn in the larger struggle in the International. Marx had been spared, he wrote, because

leaving aside all the foulness he has spewed against us, we cannot ignore, at least I cannot, the great service he has rendered to the socialist cause for twenty-five years. Undoubtedly he has left all of us far behind in this. He is also one of the first founders, if not the creator, of the International. This is of enormous worth, in my view, and whatever his attitude toward us, I will always acknowledge this ... Marx is undeniably a very useful man in the International. Up to now he has been a wise influence and has been the strongest bulwark for socialism, the strongest obstacle against the invasion of bourgeois ideas and tendencies. And I could never forgive myself if I destroyed or weakened his beneficial influence for the mere aim of personal vengeance.

However, he continued, it was likely that the two would soon clash, not on personal grounds but on a question of principle, that of state communism. Openly attacking Marx now would probably fail; better to pick off some of his weaker disciples first. This argument, however, was probably unconvincing to both men.[319] Herzen, quite correctly, believed that Bakunin had no ability as a political intriguer. Bakunin himself, for all his fondness for secret codes and paper organizations, had neither talent nor taste for internecine battles and infighting. Perhaps it reflected his generosity of spirit; perhaps it reflected his particular cast of mind that immediately grasped the broad strokes of a situation or argument and was happy to leave the details to others; perhaps he got bored easily. Despite his feuding with Marx, Bakunin took up the task of translating Capital into Russian shortly after the Basel congress. The publisher’s advance of three hundred rubles let him leave Geneva for Locarno on Switzerland’s Lake Maggiore; it would also prove to be the critical weapon for his opponents in the International.

[283] I have taken Bakunin’s program from Karl Marx, “Programme and Rules of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy,” in Documents of the First International, volume 3, 1868–1870, London, Moscow: Lawrence and Wishart, Progress Publishers, n.d., pages 379–83. Lehning, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pages 174–5, has a different version based on a revision printed in 1873. The chief difference is the substitution of the phrase “abolition of classes” for “equality of classes,” a change of some importance, as discussed in the body of this chapter.

[284] Cited in Pyziur, The Doctrine of the Anarchism of Michael A. Bakunin, page 113.

[285] Marx, “General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association,” Selected Works, volume 2, pages 19–21. Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864, Selected Correspondence, pages 137–40.

[286] Marx to Engels, 12 September 1863, Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 41, page 491.

[287] Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864, Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 42, page 11. Marx to Engels, 14 January 1858, Selected Works, page 93. Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Karl Marx, 7 February 1865. Marx to Engels, 11 April 1865, Collected Works, volume 42. Marx to Engels, 4 September 1867, Collected Works, volume 42, page 420. Marx to Engels, 4 October 1867, Collected Works, volume 42, page 434. Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Rapports personnels avec Marx. Pieces justificatives,” December 1871.

[288] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Freres de 1’Alliance en Espagne,” 12–13 June 1872. The appreciation of historical materialism is in Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Revolution Sociale. Suite. Dieu et l’Etat,” 1 November 1870 to April 1871. Bakunin’s support of Marx over Proudhon is in Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy. I believe the influence of Comte on Bakunin has been somewhat exaggerated; my reading is that Bakunin took from Comte what fit his own ideas rather than being shaped by Comte in any profound sense. For other views, see McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin, especially section 2.19; Gouldner, Against Fragmentation, pages 148–153; and Saltman, Bakunin, pages 72–9.

[289] Marx’s remark is in “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland,” 1870, in Documents of the First International, volume 3, page 402.

[290] Jenny Marx to Johann Philip Becker, 10 January 1868, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, volume 42, page 582. Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Marx, 22 December 1868 and “Rapports personnels avec Marx. Pieces justificatives No. 2,” December 1871. Marx to Engels, 13 January 1869, Collected Works, volume 43, page 201. Letter to Paul and Laura Lafargue, 15 February 1869, Collected Works, volume 43, page 216.

[291] Carbuncles are awful, and Marx nearly died from one attack. Nonetheless, his boils and carbuncles have garnered undue attention from generations of writers. Wheen references them eight times in the index to Karl Marx, Otto Riihle four times in the index of Karl Marx: His Life and Work, Eden and Cedar Paul, trans., New York: New Home Library, 1943. Robert Payne, Marx: A Biography, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968, has an entire section entitled “The Boils.”

[292] Marx to Friedrich Bolte, 23 November 1871, Selected Correspondence, page 253. Jacques Freymond and Miklos Milnar, “The Rise and Fall of the First International,” in The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864–1943, MiloradM. Drachkovitch, ed., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966, page 22.

[293] Marx, “Remarks to the Programme and Rules of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy,” in Documents of the First International, volume 3, page 379.

[294] Marx, “Remarks to the Programme and Rules of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy,” page 379. Marx, “The International Working Men’s Association and the International Alliance of Social Democracy,” Documents of the First International, volume 3, pages 387–9.

[295] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Tomas Gonzalez Morago, 21 May 1872. See also Dolgoff, page 157.

[296] Marx to Engels, 10 December 1864, cited in Gouldner, Against Fragmentation, page 144. Marx, “General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association,” Selected Works, volume 2, pages 19–21. Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864, Selected Correspondence, pages 137–40.

[297] Marx, “General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association,” Selected Works, volume 2, pages 19–21, cited in G. M. Stekloff, History of the First International, Eden and Cedar Paul, trans., London: Martin Lawrence, 1928, page 104. Julius Braunthal, History of the International, volume 1, 1864–1914, Henry Collins, Kenneth Mitchell, trans., New York: Praeger, 1967, page 130.

[298] Cited in McLellan, Karl Marx: His Thought and Life, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, page 380.

[299] Marx to Friedrich Bolte, 23 November 1871, Selected Correspondence, pages 253—4. Engels to Marx, 18 December 1868, Collected Works, volume 43, page 191.

[300] Marx, “Remarks to the Programme and Rules of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy,” page 379. Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Marx, 22 December 1868. Marx and Engels, “Fictitious Splits in the International—II,” Selected Works, volume 2, pages 253–4. Marx to Friedrich Bolte, 23 November 1871, Selected Correspondence, pages 253–4.

[301] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Letter to My Italian Friends,” 19–28 October 1871; “La politique de l’Internationale,” August 1869; I have also used the translation in Robert M. Cutler, The Basic Bakunin: Writings, 1869–1871, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992, page 98.

[302] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Rapport de la commission sur la question de l’heritage,” August 1869; see Cutler, pages 126–30. Marx, “Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance,” 1869, Documents of the First International, volume 3, pages 322–4. Marx went through each of these points of the Alliance’s program again in 1870 and 1871. See Marx to Ludwig Kugelman, “Confidential Communication on Bakunin,” 28 March 1870, Collected Works, volume 21, pages 112–24, and his letter to Friedrich Bolte, 23 November 1871, Selected Correspondence, pages 253–4.

[303] Shatz, “Bakunin and His Biographers,” page 232.

[304] Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx, page 118.

[305] Herzen, cited in Carr, page 334.

[306] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his sisters, 4 February 1869.

[307] Cited in Carr, page 356.

[308] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “La politique de l’Internationale,” August 1869; in Cutler, page 109.

[309] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “La double greve de Geneve,” April 1869; see Cutler, pages 145–50; the quotation on abolishing status is in Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Les endormeurs,” June-July 1869; see Cutler, page 71.

[310] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’instruction integrale,” July-August 1869; see Cutler, pages 111–25.

[311] Stekloff, page 140.

[312] Marx to Ludwig Kugelman, “Confidential Communication on Bakunin,” 28 March 1870, Collected Works, volume 21, pages 112–24.

[313] James Guillaume, VInternationale: documents et souvenirs, 1864–1878, 1905, reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969, four volumes in two, volume 1, pages 202–3.

[314] Stekloff, page 144.

[315] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Le Reveil, 18 October 1869, “Profession de foi d’un democrate socialiste russe, precedee d’une etude sur les Juifs allemands.” Bakunin, “A Letter to the Editorial Board of La Liberte,” 5 October 1872, in Lehning, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, page 256.

[316] Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in McLellan, page 66.

[317] Mendel, page 426. The charge is also made by anarchists today who wish to disassociate themselves from “classical” anarchism in favor of a new wave, new age anarchism. For a useful critique of this variety of anarchism, see Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995.

[318] See Lenore O’Boyle, “The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe, 1800–1850,” The Journal of Modern History, 42, no. 4 (December 1970), 471–95, and “The Image of the Journalist in France, Germany, and England, 1815–1848,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 10, no. 3 (April 1968), pages 290–317.

[319] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letters to Herzen, 18 October 1869 and 26 October 1869.