14. THE ONLY LIBERTY DESERVING OF THE NAME

That Capital can be a challenging read is hardly news; the fact that there are several books offering to introduce Marx, explain him, make him easy, or let the beginner understand it is proof enough. Rendering it from German to Russian soon became loathsome toil for Bakunin. “Marx’s frightful work, Das Kapital, 748 pages in tiny letters,” was “terribly difficult” to translate, he admitted to Ogarev; he was lucky to get through five pages a day. Later he would call it an “extremely important, learned, and profound, if very abstract” work, but in the meantime, it was tough going.[320] He did have a few other things on his mind. In December 1869, Antonia returned from Italy to join him in Locarno. Pregnant and seasick, she arrived two days late, due to a storm in the Mediterranean. Bakunin had waited anxiously for her and young Carl, but her return was not an unmixed blessing, for their complicated relationship was strained, as Bakunin noted in a letter to Ogarev. “Dear friend,” he wrote, “I will explain to you once and for all my relationship with Antonia and her veritable spouse. I did something frightfully stupid, even more, I committed a crime, in marrying a woman almost two and a half times younger than me.” Antonia is “a gentle being and a beautiful spirit, and I love her as much as a father could love his daughter.” Thus when she found “her true love” in Gambuzzi, Bakunin insisted that whatever the cost to himself, Antonia had to be “entirely free” to follow her heart. He hoped she would choose to stay with him, but he would not oppose her if she went to Gambuzzi, especially since her lover was his friend and a fellow revolutionary. The letter describes how Antonia hid the love affair, the subsequent pregnancy, and the birth of Carlo from Bakunin, how she was torn between two very different men and two very different relationships, how the three of them tried to resolve the situation, and how each genuinely cared for the others. Bakunin had finally put the matter plainly; Antonia could renounce Gambuzzi’s love while remaining his friend and return to Switzerland, where Bakunin would accept “my son and future child,” or stay with Gambuzzi, who would openly acknowledge Antonia as his spouse and the children as his. Gambuzzi, according to Bakunin, was not keen on formally recognizing his paternity or raising the children, and this outraged Antonia; at the same time, she had grown accustomed to Bakunin and could not consider living without him. Respecting her decision to live with him, Bakunin told Ogarev, “I have adopted Gambuzzi’s children, without denying his incontestable right to take responsibility for, and to direct, with Antonia, their education.” Gambuzzi promised to send money for them, and “we remain together, Antonia and I, as long as the revolution doesn’t call me. Then I shall belong only to the revolution and to myself.”[321] It was entirely in keeping with his commitment to women’s rights and the lessons he had learned from the struggles of his sisters so long ago, though, like most of life’s lessons, not without considerable pain and perhaps some self-deception.

It was a lesson reinforced by a criminal act facilitated by the state. In July 1869, Zoe Obolensky’s husband, with the connivance of the Swiss authorities, kidnapped their children from their mother and spirited them away to Russia. Bakunin sprang to her defense in a lengthy pamphlet entitled “The Bears of Berne and the Bears of St. Petersburg.” He defended Zoe Obolensky as a mother who had left oppressive Russia to raise her children in liberty. In doing so, she had forfeited all the wealth she had brought to the marriage to live in relative poverty in Switzerland. That Swiss and Russian governments alike had upheld the so-called “rights of husband and father” and allowed him to “use force to kidnap, if not the mother, then at least the children,” revealed the true, oppressive nature of both republic and autocracy. Further complicating Bakunin’s work and life was the association with Nechaev that had begun in March 1869. While Bakunin would finally break with him by June 1870, their relationship was hardly conducive to the peace and tranquility needed for translation. Indeed, much of “The Bears of Berne and the Bears of St. Petersburg” was aimed at the Swiss authorities who harassed the Russian radical community, including Nechaev.[322]

The final difficulty came from an expected quarter. Marx had resumed his campaign against Bakunin immediately after the Basel congress. Among Marx’s allies—by now Bakunin was undoubtedly thinking of them as “known associates” and “henchmen”—was Nicholas Utin, who pressed his attack on the Swiss front. A sincere revolutionary in his student days and a devoted Marxist after his break with Bakunin, Utin would break with the revolutionary movement in 1875. Unlike Bakunin in his “confession,” Utin did write the tsar in repentance, and in return received a pardon. Allowed to return to Russia, Utin went into the family liquor business and diversified, becoming rich as a contractor to the tsar’s war machine. In the meantime, he engineered a split in the Fédération Romande and requested the General Council in London to recognize his new faction as the official Swiss affiliate of the International, with the right to keep the original name. Since this was essentially an appeal to Marx in a cause Marx supported, the request was granted with unseemly haste. That Marx used the powers that Bakunin himself had voted to give the General Council was undoubtedly a bit of delicious and bitter irony, respectively. Utin also took over the editorship of L’Egalité just as he had The People’s Cause earlier. He then created a Russian section of the International in Geneva, offering Marx the position of corresponding secretary of the new section, a proposal that Marx agreed to with alacrity. With the Federation Romande now officially a Marxist group, Bakunin and his supporters regrouped and formed the Jura Federation of the International.

For his part, Marx sent a lengthy “Confidential Communication on Bakunin” to his friend Ludwig Kugelman, an influential member of Liebknecht’s German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, in March 1870. Ostensibly a justification of the General Council’s decision to acknowledge Utin’s splinter group as the legitimate Swiss section of the International, the letter was a calculated and outrageous misrepresentation of Bakunin and the Alliance. Repeating once again the veiled accusation that Bakunin was a Russian spy, Marx charged that members of the League of Peace and Freedom had kept an eye on Bakunin as a “Russian suspect.” He added that in a speech to the League, Bakunin had “denounced the Occidental bourgeoisie in the same tone that the Muscovite optimists use to attack Western civilization in order to minimize their own barbarism.” This odd comment was more serious than it sounds, for it played to the deeply rooted German fear that Russian hordes would sweep across from the steppes and destroy Western civilization, with Bakunin as their point man. In the twentieth century, this same fear would fuel Germany’s two aggressive wars. Bakunin was an opportunist, Marx railed, who had deliberately introduced to the League radical resolutions he knew would fail so he could storm out and enter the International in a burst of revolutionary élan. The program of the Alliance was nothing more than an “olla podrida [roughly, “mulligan stew”] of polished commonplaces,” and the Alliance itself an organization of “Bakuninist private mysticism.”

Marx then launched into the indictment he and subsequent Marxists would make for generations to come: that Bakunin had joined the International to split it and sow dissension for his own self-aggrandizement. The Alliance, Marx insisted, had only one function, that of “a machine for the disorganization of the International,” while Bakunin was “one of the most ignorant of men in the field of social theory,” and worse, nothing more than a “sect founder.” Ignoring his own eagerness to put the motion on the floor, Marx then suggested that Bakunin’s resolution on inheritance at Basel had been a cunning ploy to take over the International, for if it had passed, it would “show the world that he has not gone over to the International, but the International has gone over to him.” Since Bakunin had failed to get his way, he was now attacking the General Council in L’Egalité and Progres and was agitating to move it from London to Geneva, where it would fall under the control of the anarchists. These allegations were simply untrue. While some anarchists did agitate to move the General Council and reduce its powers, Bakunin himself declared publicly that this would be a great mistake. He was not even in place to take advantage of such a move, for he had already moved to Locarno. Nor did Bakunin critique the General Council in the anarchist press. His articles on the International predated Basel, and were restrained and generally supportive; where he was critical of the International at this time, he expressed his differences in the mildest terms. The only pieces of his that appeared in the anarchist papers after the congress were the texts of two speeches he had made at the congress, and neither was critical of the International. That other writers were more hostile was no reason to paint Bakunin with the same brush, but undoubtedly Marx believed he had detected the hand of his archenemy in the articles. Finally, Marx added an outright fabrication, probably passed on to him by Utin, who was regarded by Marx as uniquely positioned to expose the intricate dealings of the Russian expatriate community. Alexander Herzen had died in early January 1870. Marx claimed Herzen had received twenty-five thousand francs a year, a very significant sum, from a Russian pan-Slavist group. Marx then accused Bakunin, “despite his hatred of the right of inheritance,” of appropriating this money from Herzen’s estate. This was a distorted account of the Bahkmetov money that Herzen helped administer and that Bakunin had used to fund Nechaev, but any anti-Bakunin reader could be counted on to connect the dots and conclude from these falsehoods that Herzen and Bakunin were in league together, that both were supporters of the Russian empire, that both were in essence little more than agents of the tsar, and that Bakunin was a thief. Marx finished his letter by noting that the next step of Utin’s brand-new Russian branch would be “to tear off Bakunin’s mask publicly, because that man speaks two entirely different languages, one in Russia and one in Europe. Thus the game of this highly dangerous intrigant—at least on the terrain of the International—will soon be played out.”[323]

Marx’s hostility reflected more than personal antipathy, though that certainly gave his polemic a particularly unscrupulous and nasty edge. The brutal fact was that the International was growing only in those regions where Bakunin had some influence. Its nominal strength numbered in the tens of thousands, but that was misleading, for it represented union members who had been affiliated to the International by their leadership and who probably neither knew nor cared about it. They certainly didn’t pay dues or a per capita levy; if one counted paid-up members, the International listed only a few hundred. The English were losing interest and feuding with Marx. The Germans were split between the Lassalleans, whom Marx disliked and distrusted, and Liebknecht’s much smaller Social Democratic Workers’ Party. These two groups were more interested in fighting each other than building the International; anyway, creating sections of the International was illegal under German law, and that made organization difficult. France was the strongest national section, but it largely ignored the General Council and could not be counted on. The only real growth was taking place in Switzerland, Belgium, and especially Spain and Italy. There conditions made Bakunin’s message much more appealing. Spain and Italy had only recently begun the process of industrialization, and the shock treatment of capitalism left workers militant and radical. Nor had the newly created wealth trickled down to create a significant layer of labor aristocrats who would counsel against revolution or who could afford to take the long view of reform. Furthermore, workers had no legal means to press their demands. Trade unions were banned, the vote was restricted, and workers’ political parties were nonexistent. Reformism and political action, therefore, seemed both irrelevant and impossible, and so the antipolitical, direct action of anarchism made a great deal of sense. Bakunin’s colleagues had been active in Italy and in Spain, and had received a warm reception. There was little doubt that the influence of anarchism in the International would grow by the next congress, set for September 1870 in Paris, and Marx worked hard to counter this growing tendency.

His efforts had to be put on hold, for the French government was cracking down on radicals and unionists, and discretion dictated the congress change its venue to Mainz, Germany. The new plan, however, was rendered impossible by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War on 19 July 1870.

The war had long been predicted. Bismarck eagerly sought the conflict, seeing in war the best chance to bring into Prussia’s fold the German states, such as Bavaria, that preferred to remain politically independent. Victory over France would also bring Germany control of the Alsace-Lorraine, greedily eyed for its vineyards, and, perhaps nearly as important for the emperor, its rich coal and iron deposits. Pushing into the region would also improve Germany’s strategic position. France had little territory or resources to gain from war with its neighbor, but Napoleon III had long played on nationalist sentiment and hysteria to blunt the socialist and labor movements and his political opposition. War seemed an easy way to whip up popular support for himself and his government. The pretext for the conflict was a dispute over the succession to the Spanish Queen Isabella II. France prevailed upon the obvious candidate, a Hohenzollern, to decline, and pressed its luck by demanding that Germany promise not to support his candidacy in the future. It was an offer that Bismarck and Wilhelm I were delighted to refuse, and when they did so in most insulting terms through the so-called Ems dispatch, Napoleon III declared war.

French socialists opposed the war, while the German parties split on the issue. The socialists elected to the Reichstag overwhelmingly supported the war, believing, or claiming to believe, that Germany was fighting a defensive war. To their credit, Liebknecht and Bebel, both sitting in the Reichstag, abstained from voting for war credits. Their abstention, however, mattered little. The German military machine smashed through the French lines, trapping an entire army of 155,000 men at Metz on 19 August and another of 130,000, including Napoleon III himself, at Sedan on 1 September. Three days later, Parisian crowds took over the local government, declared the fall of the Second Empire, and proclaimed a republican Government of National Defense. But by 20 September, Paris was surrounded by the invader. Attempts to rally the provinces to relieve the city won initial support, but were quickly defeated. When the national government signed an armistice, Paris remained recalcitrant and decided to hold out against the German army and the French government.

From his home in Switzerland, Bakunin began a series of “Letters to a Frenchman” in August 1870, outlining the failure of France’s government and demonstrating that the same politicians and raison d’etat that had brought the nation to disaster could not possibly extricate it. What could France do? It could surrender, of course, or it could launch a people’s war against the German invader. “No army in the world, however well organized and equipped with the most extraordinary weapons” could hope to defeat thirty-eight million people, he argued. But it was crucial that the people’s army wage a revolutionary war at the same time. Only if they truly believed they had a new world to win would the people mobilize effectively. A people’s army, however, would not be considered by the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, who feared the masses even more than they feared Germany. Nor could they lead a regular army; they had already proved themselves unequal to that task. Even worse, the so-called leaders of France were happy to treat with Bismarck’s Germany, for they preferred to serve in hell rather than create a heaven on earth that would cost them their privilege and profit.

The people’s army could not be organized from Paris, Bakunin insisted, for Paris had to defend itself. At the same time, it could not rely on its old habit of issuing orders to the provinces, for they had no wish to remain under the yoke of the capital city, however revolutionary it might be. Only free uprisings throughout the country could save France. These would be spear-headed by workers in the larger cities such as Lyon, Marseilles, and Rouen, and by peasants in the countryside. The peasants, Bakunin admitted, were problematic. They occupied a very different social and economic position than the Russian peasants who had saved their homeland from the invader. French peasants were small landowners, more like independent farmers than serfs or agricultural laborers. Because they tended to see themselves as rural proprietors, they often hated and feared urban workers. It was, after all, the peasants who had originally elected Napoleon III and supported his reactionary policies. Nonetheless, Bakunin maintained that they could be enlisted in a people’s war. While they were property owners, they were not wealthy and had little privilege to defend. As small property owners, they felt the pressure of big capital and despised the large absentee landowners. Finally, if the peasants’ sense of possessing the land translated into a fierce patriotism, it could easily become a hatred of the German invader.

The slogans and ideas that rallied urban workers would not work on peasants, Bakunin warned. Their experience was different and it was important not to tread too heavily on their traditions and prejudices. Attacking Napoleon III, for example, would bring cheers in Paris, but would anger the peasants who had seen in him their only protection from the local authorities and capitalists. Talk about collectivizing the land would outrage them and was unnecessary anyway, as peasant proprietorship was not the same as capitalism and need not be abolished to make the social revolution. Ordering peasants to rebel and rally to the revolution in the cities, as generations of radicals from 1789 on had done, was utterly unproductive. Worse, it was precisely the sort authoritarianism that workers themselves were fighting. Urban radicals had to dispel their own prejudices about the peasantry and understand that it was a constituency to organize and ally with. While historically the peasants had often been won over to the side of reaction, they still had “socialist passions.” It was, after all, the peasants’ desire for freedom and equality that Napoleon III had played upon to win their support. What the revolutionary had to do was to “direct these same passions toward their true goal, toward a goal that conformed to those profound instincts.” There was no doubt that the peasants’ instinct was “profoundly socialist,” because it was in essence the hatred shared by “all workers against all the exploiters of labor.” And that economic fact was at the heart of all “elementary, natural, and real socialism.” The systems, doctrinaire thought, and abstract theory of too many socialist thinkers tended to cloud that fact; strip them away to that essence and the revolutionary would find the peasantry ready for revolution. But not for any socialism that promised centralization and state control; that the peasants would always reject. Part of the appeal of Napoleon III was his promise, always broken, that he would reduce government regulation, taxes, and supervision. Only free socialism—anarchism—would win the peasants over.[324]

It was a masterful document that showed Bakunin’s deep understanding of the peasantry, and he was, at first, content to comment on events from afar. He was, after all, fifty-seven years old and had never recovered from the blows to his health he suffered in prison. But when the bell of revolution rang out, the old fire horse responded. When the last French army surrendered at Sedan, Bakunin determined to join his comrades at Lyon in the hope that workers there would launch an insurrection as a preliminary round in the people’s war and the social revolution. He had already argued that the only hope for France lay in the insurrection of the cities, and if cooler heads reckoned it a faint hope, he still knew which side he was on. By the time he arrived at Lyon on 15 September 1870, the city, like Paris, had proclaimed itself a republic. Drawing on the tradition of the French Revolution of 1789, it created an emergency Committee for Public Safety to replace the defunct government and held free elections. Factories were nationalized into democratic workshops and charged to provide full employment rather than profits for the capitalist. It was not the revolution, as Bakunin admitted frankly, but it was an example of propaganda by the deed, an instance of people organizing themselves freely from the bottom up the moment official “order” collapsed and surrendered.

Keeping the momentum going was more difficult. While other uprisings broke out across France in the aftermath of the German invasion, they were not coordinated or well planned. In Lyon, Bakunin helped organize a Committee for the Saving of France and organized public demonstrations that called for increased taxation of the wealthy and the free election of military officers. A manifesto announced that people’s justice would now replace the state’s judicial system. Taxes, save for those on the rich, and mortgages were abolished and the Committee would begin to prepare to defend France. The ideas were largely Bakunin’s, and they met with popular support in demonstrations and parades. But Lyon was not as unified as it first appeared, and differences in opinion soon became deep fissures. Bakunin, who had some experience in these matters, argued that it was necessary to arrest those who were organizing to crush the newborn republic. Some of his colleagues balked at such a drastic step and so left a fifth column in their ranks. Worse, the municipal council cut the wages in the workshops, a move that virtually guaranteed spontaneous rallies to oppose the republic. At one demonstration called to protest the wage cuts, Bakunin and several score other people took over the hotel where the council met and proclaimed a new provisional government. But time had run out for the Lyon republic. The French National Guard arrived and marched on the hotel while the city’s military commander quickly remembered a previous engagement and retired from the scene. Bakunin was arrested, but in the chaos and the halfhearted efforts of the National Guard, was quickly freed by his friends and made his way back to Switzerland by the end of September.

Lyon of 1870 was not Paris of 1848 and it was not the social revolution. Bakunin’s critics have been quick to denounce his involvement as quixotic and reckless, a foolhardy attempt that endangered the lives of others who were swept away by his rhetoric. There is no question that the Lyon insurrection failed. Yet those who believe that “resistance is futile” turn the dismal pronouncement into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thomas Jefferson and Lenin might well have stayed in bed if they had weighed the odds meticulously; it is relatively easy to take up the fray when you know you are going to win and easier still to denounce failed efforts from the vantage point of history. One of those critics was Karl Marx. The day after the Franco-Prussian war broke out, he declared to Engels, “The French need a drubbing.” A Prussian victory, he went on, would centralize state power and aid in the “centralization of the working class.” It would also mean that Germany would replace France as the “center of the working class movement in Western Europe.” This, Marx believed, would be a good thing, since “the German working class is theoretically and organizationally superior to the French.” Furthermore, a Prussian triumph would “mean at the same time the superiority of our theory over Proudhon’s.”[325] Upon reflection, he would temper this considerably, but he continued to argue that the war was a “defensive war” for Germany, even if Prussia remained responsible for it by allowing the corrupt Bonapartist regime to flourish and adopting all its vices for its own. The real issues, he realized, were whether German workers could prevent the state from shifting the war from a defensive one to an aggressive one, and whether German and French workers would unite across national boundaries to ultimately “kill war” itself.[326] As for the insurrection at Lyon, “At first everything went well,” Marx wrote. “But those asses, Bakunin and Cluseret, arrived at Lyon and spoiled everything.” Both he and Engels opposed the very idea of workers’ insurrections to combat the German invasion, believing that such action would set them back twenty years, or perhaps fifty.[327]

Events in Paris would soon force Marx and Engels to reevaluate their predictions and their politics. The French national government was increasingly reactionary and there was certainly no indication that the German army was about to return home and advance the socialist revolution. But the working-class population of Paris was determined to hang on to the freedom it had won by declaring the republic, and it reasserted its revolutionary tradition. On 18 March 1871, the citizens of Paris refused to allow the French army to remove its artillery from the city. Instead, they created their own militia, declared Paris a free city—the Commune—and raised the red flag over the Hotel de Ville. Fearing a repeat of 1848, when French troops had gone over to the rebels, the national government ordered its army out of the city. The Communards organized soup kitchens, hospitals, a newspaper, and municipal services. Equally important, they created a new political structure for the city, one based on universal suffrage and representative wards. All government positions were elected, and all officials were immediately responsible to and recallable by the voters. There was no distinction between the legislature and the executive: Elected representatives all shared in the work, and were paid the same salaries as ordinary workers. The people of Paris called for other cities to join them in insurrection against the German invaders and the French government that had betrayed them, and they prepared to defend the city, not from the German army that was still in place, but from the French government that was positioning its army for an assault on its own citizens.

On 11 April 1871, the French army attacked, and though they had been under siege for months, the volunteers of the Commune now took on the same troops and government that had surrendered to Germany. They fought in the streets and boulevards until munitions, food, and time ran out and the army could claim victory. The so-called “Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution had sent perhaps twenty-five hundred aristocrats to the guillotine over several months; la Semaine Sanglante, “the Bloody Week” of 21–28 May, saw over twenty thousand Communards slaughtered, many after they had laid down their arms and surrendered. It was gory proof of Bakunin’s observation that reaction was always more violent than the revolution could ever be.

The Paris Commune was, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, “extraordinary, heroic, dramatic, and tragic.” That it was also brief did not reassure its enemies or tarnish its importance to the left. Both sides understood that it represented the power of the working class and the promise of the future. That promise is repeated in the verses of the left-wing hymn “The Internationale,” written by Eugene Pottier, a Proudhonist member of the First International who had been on the barricades of 1848 and returned to them during the Commune. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!” it dares. “We have been naught, we shall be all.” Another Communard, Jean-Baptiste Clement, had written “Le Temps des Cerises” five years before the Commune. Covered by contemporary artists ranging from Yves Montand to Juliette Greco to Nana Mouskouri, the haunting lyrics were sung by the workers who fought in the streets of Paris and promised that none would forget the time of the cherries. The Commune continues to intrigue and inspire; in 2000, Peter Watkins used it as the subject of a six-hour film to comment on politics and the media in the new millennium. But the Commune was not an explicitly Marxist or anarchist uprising. While anarchists such as Louise Michel and Elisée Reclus participated, Marxists, Jacobins, and Blanquists played an equal role. Probably the largest political contingent was comprised of Proudhonists, and it was as difficult to slot them as it is to slot Proudhon himself. While the International was often blamed for the Commune, and while it was often pleased to take credit for it, in fact it had little to do with it, though some of its members were found on the governing council and undoubtedly more were found among its dead.

Nonetheless, the Paris Commune, Bakunin argued, was the first attempt to realize the principles of revolutionary socialism and to replace the state with the self-organization of the people. It was true that it had not even made explicit, let alone created, socialism; neither were most Communard socialists. And yet the people of Paris, without aid of, or more to the point, in opposition to, the central government, organized, fed, and armed a population of hundreds of thousands under the siege guns and bayonets of two armies. Could the Commune have gone further? Undoubtedly; but to reproach it for failing to create socialism ignored the gulf between the ideal world of the theoreticians and the practical world of the people, Bakunin argued. The social revolution could not be decreed from above, and the socialism of the Commune lay not in programs or theories but in the “spontaneous action of the masses, of the popular groups and associations.” That was the lesson of the Commune: The future society must be made “from the bottom up, by the free association and federation of workers, first in their unions, then in communes, then in regions and nations, and finally in a great international and universal federation,” with neither God nor state nor master. Bakunin wrote as a “fanatical lover of liberty,” not that “formal freedom granted, measured, and regulated by the state,” but “the only liberty which is truly deserving of the name, the liberty that consists of the full development of all the material, intellectual, and moral powers latent in everyone.” But freedom required equality, he reminded his readers, and these could only be achieved by the “voluntary organization of work and collective property, of freely organized and federated associations of producers in communes.” These could not be accomplished through the state, he warned, and it was precisely this point that divided the “socialists or revolutionary collectivists” from the “authoritarian communists.” Their goals were the same: the “creation of a new social order, founded solely on the organization of collective labor,” economic equality, and “the collective appropriation of the instruments of labor,” or, more loosely, the means of production. But the authoritarian socialists believed this could be achieved by the “development and organization of the political power of the working classes.” Anarchists insisted that it could obtained through the “development and organization not of political power but the social, and so in consequence, antipolitical, power of the working masses of the cities and country.” While the authoritarian socialists spoke of capturing state power, the anarchists demanded instead the “destruction” or the “liquidation” of the state. Both groups believed in rationality and science, but where authoritarian socialists sought to impose it, anarchists sought to propagate it. The revolutionary, anarchist socialists understood that “humanity has let itself be governed long enough, too long, and that the source of its unhappiness does not lie in this or that form of government but in the principle and the very fact of government itself.”[328]

Bakunin’s analysis was aimed as carefully at Marx as it was at capital and the state. Marx himself was initially as unenthusiastic about the Commune as he had been about Lyon. In part, his skepticism was based on a realistic assessment of its chances. At the same time, the Paris Commune was a powerful counterargument against his analysis of reform, the German working class, and the state. He alternately criticized the Communards first for rising and then for failing to go far enough soon enough; throughout the Commune’s brief existence, the official voice of the International remained silent. But if the Lyon uprising could be safely ignored, the Paris Commune could not. Lyon and Paris were social experiments, arguably the most important European working-class actions since 1848, and they pushed Marx to rethink some of his ideas in a pamphlet called The Civil War in France. Originally commissioned to outline the International’s position on the Commune, the essay was not finished until the conclusion of la Semaine Sanglante: it was not a birth announcement for the revolution but an obituary. As Samuel Johnson noted, one is not on oath in such circumstances, and historians have argued how accurately Marx’s stirring words reflected his considered thought on the subject. Nonetheless, the essay shows him at his most libertarian, and it is an effective antidote to those who work so hard to draw a straight line from Capital to the gulag. In it, Marx, like Bakunin, praised the autonomous action of the Paris workers and heralded their democratic self-organization as the model for future socialist societies. Certainly the Commune pushed Marx to rethink some of his ideas on the state. As he noted in the preface to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto, published a year after the Paris uprising, the Commune proved that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”; the machinery so well-adapted for the rule of the bourgeoisie could not provide the model for socialism.[329]

“That’s just what I’ve been on about!” Bakunin exclaimed. The old foes eyed each other warily until the realization sunk in. Then each extended his arms, crying out “Comrade!” as they embraced in a particularly hairy hug that, to be honest, left both men feeling a little awkward. “But I thought you ...” “I was a fool to put it that way ...” “No more than I!” “How could we have been so ... ?” Reconciled at last, they agreed to work together and use that dynamic tension that had so divided them to build a united socialist movement and well and truly launch humanity’s history anew.

Perhaps in a parallel universe. The opportunity the Commune offered for unity was soon squandered in another wave of mutual distrust and maneuvering. War, insurrection, and repression made it impossible to convene a congress of the International. Instead, the General Council, headed by Marx, was given the authority to arrange the next meeting as it saw fit. It opted for a private conference in a small London pub in September 1871. In essence by invitation only, fewer than twenty-five delegates attended the sessions. While it was undoubtedly difficult for European delegates to make their way to England in the wake of reaction—“Business or pleasure trip, sir?” “Bit of both, really, just off to smash the state”—there was no attempt to represent the general membership of the International. Thirteen of the delegates were members of the General Council; Utin was asked to represent Switzerland while the Bakuninist Jura Federation was excluded; there were no German delegates, and the few French participants were refugees who represented only themselves. Though the conference was authorized only to deal with administrative questions, the small showing made it possible for Marx to control the agenda and resolutions, and he did so with enthusiasm. The London conference, in other words, looked a lot like a secret organization within the International, of the type Marx claimed to abhor, and in fact, it was.

The conference set out, depending on which side one was on, to put an end to sectarian squabbling or to smash legitimate dissent. It resolved that none of the branches, sections, or groups that made up the International could “designate themselves by sectarian names such as positivists, mutualists, collectivists, communists, etc., or form separatist bodies under the name of sections of propaganda, etc., pretending to accomplish special missions, distinct from the common purposes of the Association.” This was obviously a slap at Bakunin’s Alliance and its avowed mission to study political and philosophical questions. If there was any doubt about who this was aimed at, a subsequent resolution identified the Alliance by name and reiterated that the General Council had the right to refuse the admittance of any new group or section to the International. For good measure, the conference reaffirmed the General Council’s recognition of Utin’s faction as the official Swiss branch of the International and, singling out the anarchist papers Progres and Solidarité, warned that the General Council would “publicly denounce and disavow all organs of the International” that discussed “questions exclusively reserved for the local or Federal Committees and the General Council, or for the private and administrative sitting of the Federal or General Congresses.”

Finally, the conference decided to resolve the question of political action once and for all. With few anarchists or Proudhonists in attendance, it was easy enough to do. Marx gave a potted history of the International to insist that it had always been in favor of political action. He reminded the delegates that his original rules held that the “political movement” was a subordinate means for economic emancipation. His inaugural address of 1864 had upped this to making conquering political power “the great duty of the working class,” while the 1867 congress had resolved that “the social emancipation of the workmen is inseparable from their political emancipation.” A subsequent declaration of the General Council, moved by Marx, had announced that the “special mission” of all branches of the International was “to support, in their respective countries, every political movement tending toward the accomplishment of our ultimate end, the economical emancipation of the working class.” Political action had always been part of the International’s brief, Marx maintained, and anyone who denied that was relying on “false translations” and “various interpretations which were mischievous to the development and action of the International.” Therefore, he now insisted, “the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes.” Furthermore, he continued, the “constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end—the abolition of classes.” Now, he concluded, “in the militant state of the working class, its economical movement and its political action are indissolubly united.” Engels weighed in for good measure, insisting that “complete abstention from political action is impossible.” The “only means” to abolish classes, he finished, “is political domination of the proletariat.”[330]

This interpretation of the history of the International was disingenuous and distorted. Political action had not been the creed of the International; it had been the subject of intense debate and dispute from the very beginning. For all the talk about opposing sects and splitters, Marx and the London delegates had, in a particularly high-handed and undemocratic way, imposed a narrow political program on the International and made dissent punishable by expulsion. Whatever their intentions, the predictable result of forcing such a program was to split the International. Numerous sections registered their protest at the actions of the General Council and several resigned en masse. Others determined to counter what seemed to be—indeed, what could hardly be interpreted otherwise—as the growing authoritarianism of the General Council. Anarchists hastily arranged a congress at Sonvillier, Switzerland, and pulled together sixteen delegates from nine of twenty-two sections, rivaling the London conference in size despite the short notice. While Bakunin did not attend the congress, the Sonvillier Circular it produced clearly bore his influence. It condemned the London conference and its decisions, even though the anarchists were prepared to accept that the General Council had acted in “good faith.” For whatever its motives and beliefs, the actions of the General Council were proof of the anarchist contention that “it is absolutely impossible for a man who wields power to remain a moral man.” It was, they continued, only to be expected that people in authority would confuse their interests with those of the greater community and would seek to impose their ideas on others. The membership of the General Council rarely changed and was not accountable between congresses, and so naturally would come to have a proprietary interest in the International and to view competing ideas as sacrilege. Furthermore, the Sonvillier Circular insisted, it was entirely consistent, if completely mistaken, for those who sought the “conquest of political power by the working class” to wish to transform the International “into a hierarchical organization directed and controlled by the General Council.” In a sense that was the core argument of anarchism. Precisely because humanity was not made up largely of saints, it was necessary to create institutions and organizations that prevented anyone taking power. Thus it was necessary to counter the tendency toward authoritarianism by dismantling the apparatus of authority the General Council had created for itself. The new society that all desired required new forms of organization, for it was impossible “for an egalitarian society to emerge out of an authoritarian organization.” Acknowledging that there was still a need for a coordinating body, the anarchists called for a new congress of the International to be held as soon as possible, and for the General Council to be reorganized, its powers reduced to that of a correspondence and statistics bureau, no greater or less than any national federation.[331]

In response, Marx and Engels penned a circular of their own entitled “Fictitious Splits in the International,” where they laid out their side and denounced the work of the “Sonvillier Sixteen” and Bakunin, the “Pope of Locarno.” They repeated all their intimations about the Alliance doing the work of the police, Bakunin’s “makeshift program” and the “economic and social equalization of classes,” and the “old Saint-Simon rubbish” of the inheritance question. This time they went further and accused Bakunin of mailing letters stamped “secret revolutionary committee” on the envelopes to Russian comrades and so identifying the recipients to the Russian Third Section. The screed then turned on those anarchists and others who had opposed the actions taken at the London conference, launched a general attack on the historical origins and futility of sectarianism, including that of Lassalle, and then intimated that the Alliance and Bakunin were effectively, if not knowingly, doing the work of the police. Marxists and anarchists alike regrouped for the next congress of the International, planned for the Hague in 1872.[332]

In truth, the anarchists did little to prepare for what would be the last meaningful gathering of the International. Bakunin wrote, furiously, to make his position clear and to urge others to weigh in, but he was more concerned with elaborating anarchist ideas, and produced some of his most interesting work in the middle of this fray. The Marxist contingent, on the other hand, spared no effort to rid the International of its last internal opponents.

Its chief tactic was to try to prove that some secret form of the Alliance existed, contrary to the orders of the London conference. This became the primary charge leveled against Bakunin and his followers at the congress of the Hague, and has been used ever since by his critics on the left and the right. The Alliance itself declared itself officially dissolved in a letter to the International in August 1871. Did secret anarchist organizations remain in the International, as Marx charged? Undoubtedly, though this was often denied, even by those who belonged to the groups and groupuscles. Many of the organizations were probably a secret kept from Bakunin, as no one felt it necessary to report to Anarchist HQ whenever two or more gathered together in his, or anyone’s, name.

The question, however, is an entirely misleading one. Until the resolutions of the London conference, Bakunin and his colleagues had a perfect right to create any sort of group they wished, from a book club to a newspaper, within the International, without advertising for members or announcing meeting times from a bullhorn. They had the right, moreover, to be critical members. They even had the fundamental democratic right to try to stack meetings, as long as the members were selected and appointed according to the rules of the organization. But the General Council now had the self-granted power to summarily expel any group calling itself the “Alliance,” anyone who belonged to such a group, anyone who was organizing or publishing without the express and explicit consent of the General Council, or was involved in a “secret” organization as defined by the General Council. Engels, Paul Lafargue, and others were soon dispatched across Europe to hunt up proof—testimony, letters, anything—that some sort of secret, now illegal, Alliance existed with Bakunin’s knowledge or support. Given Bakunin’s capacity to generate reams of letters, manifestos, catechisms, instructions, and paper organizations, such proof would not be hard to find. More importantly, the London conference made any organized work by Bakunin and his comrades illicit by definition. Previously allowed activities were now officially banned. This proved especially difficult for the anarchists in Spain. When Giuseppe Fanelli went there in 1868, he, like Bakunin, believed that the Alliance would be accepted into the International without difficulty, and organized workers into both associations. The Alliance and the anarchist program were much more successful than the International or Marxism, and Fanelli, caring little for titular niceties or sectarian squabbles taking place far away, went with the flow. The situation in Italy was similar. There Mazzini had denounced the Paris Commune, and Bakunin had fired off lengthy ripostes that made it clear the anarchist rejected Mazzini’s idealism, mysticism, and republicanism in equal measure. Bakunin’s arguments and the organizational efforts of other anarchists garnered a great deal of support, and, as in Spain, this support was to the ideas of the Alliance, not the International. To abandon the Alliance because of an ukase of the General Council would be folly.[333]

Furthermore, Marx and the General Council guaranteed, practically by definition, that opposition to their undemocratic actions and resolutions would have to be taken in secret. It was clear—or it seemed clear—that despite his talk about democracy and letting a thousand flowers bloom, Marx would expel groups with whom he disagreed on the narrowest of pretexts. In that situation, it was crucial to organize caucuses and gather delegates for the next congress in order to be heard, and there was no reason, or ethical, moral, or political imperative, to broadcast this intent and get purged before the congress. Keeping the caucus a secret became a matter of self-defense, not conspiratorial intrigue. In this way, Marx created what he claimed he most feared: the rending of the International into opposing factions.

The important question of Bakunin’s “secret organizations” is not whether they existed. They did, in various forms, ranging from circles of friends to affinity groups to fantasies to caucuses within the International. The real question is, what was the purpose of these groups? As members of the International, they did not have a right to organize a coup or to unilaterally change the rules or principles of the organization. And they did nothing of the sort. Even Marxist critics have acknowledged there is no evidence that Bakunin ever wanted or tried to take over or destroy the International. There was no secret conspiracy to take over the International undemocratically, to split the organization through nefarious means, or to wrest control from the General Council unilaterally. But the London conference had defined heresy and given the General Council the power to root it out.

The International’s 1872 congress presented the opportunity to use that power. Early plans to hold the congress in Geneva were abandoned in favor of the Hague, and a map of Europe suggests why. It was easy enough for the German, British, and French supporters of Marx to make it to the Hague, and rather more difficult for the Swiss, Italian, and Spanish anarchists. The Italian sections, strongly Bakuninist, boycotted the congress and resigned from the International in protest. The tally of the delegates confirms the geographic reality: of the sixty-five seated delegates, nineteen came from Germany and four from Switzerland. Twenty-one were members of the General Council itself, while the Bakuninists could count only twenty-five of their adherents. It was the only congress Marx attended, but both he and Engels showed up for the showdown. Bakunin could not make it, for he was broke and risked arrest if he entered France or Germany on his way to Holland. After considerable wrangling over who would be confirmed as a delegate, for control of the credentials committee is crucial for political schemers of every persuasion, the congress settled down to business. Among the first items was the appointment of a special five-person “Commission to Investigate the Alliance.” It was chaired by Theodore Cuno, who had been briefed, inaccurately, on Bakunin by Engels in a long letter months before the congress. Another member of the commission, ironically enough, turned out later to be a spy for the French police. Engels submitted a twelve-page report along with the letters and testimony he and Lafargue had gathered up, and the commission rendered its verdict on the last day of the congress. Despite the best efforts of Marx, Engels, Lafargue, and others, they had produced no smoking gun. With one member of the commission dissenting from the majority report, the commission declared that the secret Alliance “has existed, but it has not been sufficiently proved to the commission that it still exists.” On Bakunin’s role, it reported that it was convinced that “this citizen has attempted, perhaps successfully, to found in Europe a society called the Alliance, with rules completely at variance, from the social and political point of view, with those of the International Working Men’s Association.”

From the social and political point of view? What the hell did that mean? Read in the context of Engels’s report, it clearly meant that whatever traces had been found of the Alliance were in violation of the London resolutions. That was hardly surprising, because the London resolutions had been drafted precisely to purge Bakunin and the Alliance. Even more odd, the commission then called for the expulsion of James Guillaume and another anarchist, on the grounds that the two belonged to an Alliance the commission was not sure existed. The travesty continued, for the commission threw in another charge against Bakunin: that he had “resorted to dishonest dealings with the aim of appropriating the whole or part of another person’s property, which constitutes an act of fraud. Furthermore, in order to avoid fulfilling his contract, he or his agents have resorted to intimidation.” The commission did not produce any evidence for this charge, asking instead only for a vote of confidence in its findings. It did not produce evidence, for there was none. The charge was a reference to the advance Bakunin had received for translating Capital and to Nechaev’s letter to the Russian publisher, which threatened terrible consequences if Bakunin was not released from the contract. Failing to return an advance or complete the work is not a nice thing, but it is hardly a capital or even a Capital offense; nor was it one Marx was innocent of. As for Nechaev’s threat, while the publisher declared himself happy to help discredit Bakunin, he made it plain there was no proof the anarchist even knew of the letter. Though Marx was informed of this before the congress, he did not hesitate to read Nechaev’s note to the commission and imply that Bakunin had instigated it.[334]

The slander over the advance and Nechaev’s intimidation was only part of a larger campaign undertaken by Utin. He had been given the task of investigating the entire Nechaev affair, and he took it up with great enthusiasm and no scruples. With his ties to the Russian movement and émigré communities, he was well placed to gather every bit of gossip, lie, and innuendo to build a dossier against Bakunin. In the end, his report to the congress blamed Bakunin for all of Nechaev’s activities. Utin, without adducing any evidence, attributed authorship of the notorious “Catechism” to Bakunin alone and held him indirectly responsible for the murder of Ivanov. Not content to restrict himself to the recent past, Utin accused Bakunin of adding falsely to his street cred by claiming his sentence in Siberia was to hard labor, rather than simple exile. Bakunin was then charged of first sucking up to the Siberian governor-general, his cousin Muraviev-Amursky, and then of betraying his trust. Coming from a revolutionary pledged to the overthrow of the tsar, the accusation of lying to the tsar’s agent to make his escape was a little rich. Utin continued to pile on the charges, though even Marx rolled his eyes at the accusation that Bakunin borrowed large sums of money. In a final document that filled 114 typescript pages, Utin scoured Bakunin’s writings looking for any heresy he could find, regardless of when it was written or of context, ranging from sexism to pan-Slavism to brigandage, to, yes, once again, hints that Bakunin was a Russian spy.

The lies and distortions in Utin’s report were obvious, but in the hostile atmosphere of the congress, little could be done to defend Bakunin or anarchism. The delegates who remained—over a third had already left—voted to expel Bakunin and Guillaume. The congress had already voted to increase the powers of the General Council, yet again, and to insist on political action; the banishment of the anarchists was both unnecessary and a foregone conclusion. What did surprise the delegates was the motion by Marx and Engels to transfer the General Council from London to New York. Despite their victory at the Hague, the two understood that the anti-Marxist forces, ranging from British trade unionists to Blanquists to anarchists, were gaining in strength; furthermore, Marx was eager to return to his study and his studies, and was not content to let the International find its own way in his absence. The Blanquist contingent walked out when the resolution was narrowly passed and condemned the move, writing, “Called upon to do its duty, the International collapsed. It fled from the revolution over the Atlantic Ocean.” And they were right. While the International staggered on until 1876, Marx noted that it was dead in England by 1874, and Engels observed in the same year that “the old International is anyhow entirely wound up and at an end.” In another reflection, Engels made it clear that he and Marx had had no intention of building unity, fearing that if the congress had “come out in a conciliatory way,” the “sectarians, especially the Bakuninists, would have had another year in which to perpetrate, in the name of the International, still greater stupidities and infamies.” Better to destroy the International in order to save it, in other words; in Engels’s own words, “a party proves itself victorious by splitting and being able to stand the split.” That the International did not survive the split was a point that seemed to escape him. Unity at any price may not be a virtue, but it might be thought a tad hypocritical to ban a group for sectarianism while working doggedly to engineer a split. In any case, the determined efforts of the Marxists to ram through their own political agenda and fracture the International was further proof to the anarchists of the pitfalls of authoritarian socialism and political maneuvering.[335]

In response to their purge, the anarchists created their own International at a founding convention at St. Imier, Switzerland, a week after the Hague congress adjourned. There they repudiated the old International and voiced their solidarity with Bakunin, Guillaume, and the others. Particularly outraged by the continuing personal attacks on Bakunin, one comrade suggested they might pay Marx and Engels back in kind and launch a slanderous assault of their own. In the words of one witness, the prominent anarchist Errico Malatesta, “Bakunin rose up like a wounded lion” to his full height and shouted, “What are you saying, you wretch! No, it is better to be slandered a thousand times, even if people believe it, than to shame oneself by becoming a slanderer.” Malatesta remained a Bakunin partisan and related the story years later; it may have improved with age, but it captures the respect the venerable anarchist had earned among the comrades and their sense that they had acted always from principle and never from expediency. The St. Imier convention then moved from the personal to the political. Not surprisingly, it rejected the resolutions and policies of the old International and structured itself on the basis of free association and autonomy. It further determined that it was “absurd and reactionary” to attempt to impose a political program on the working class,” and that all political organizations were “the organization of rule in the interests of a class and to the detriment of the masses.” Even if the proletariat would seize the state, it would then itself “become a ruling and exploiting class.”[336]

Bakunin dashed off a number of letters and notes defending himself and the Alliance and putting forward his own version of the fight in the International. These included a long letter for La Liberté, written in October 1872 but never sent. In it he suggested that the Marxists “are worshipers of state power, and so also prophets of political and social discipline. [They are] the champions of order established from the top down, always in the name of universal suffrage and the sovereignty of the masses, for whom they reserve the fortune and honor of obeying the commanders, the elected masters.” Unlike the Marxists, Bakunin continued, the anarchists rejected the idea, even as a transitional phase, of “national conventions, constituent assemblies, or so-called revolutionary dictatorships,” for such concentrations of power in a few hands “inevitably and immediately become reaction.” This was the fundamental point on which anarchists and Marxists differed, and it was one Bakunin would return to in his last major works.[337]

[320] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Ogarev, 16 December 1869; “Rapports personnels avec Marx. Pieces justificatives,” no. 2, December 1871.

[321] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Ogarev, 16 December 1869.

[322] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “The Bears of Berne and the Bears of St. Petersburg,” March 1870.

[323] Marx to Ludwig Kugelman, “Confidential Communication on Bakunin,” 28 March 1870, Collected Works, volume 21, pages 112–24. See Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936, pages 421–2, for Bakunin on moving the General Council and his articles on the International.

[324] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Lettre a un Francais, Continuation III,” 27 August 1870. Bakunin’s draft was polished and edited by James Guillaume; his edited version is titled “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis.”

[325] Marx to Engels, 20 July 1870, cited in Mehring, page 438, and McLellan, page 389.

[326] Karl Marx, “First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War,” Selected Works, volume 2, page 192.

[327] Engels to Marx, 12 September 1870, Selected Correspondence, page 234; see McLellan, pages 389–90.

[328] Usually titled “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” this article is a fragment of Bakunin’s The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution. Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Revolution Sociale. Preambule pour la seconde livraison,” 5–23 June 1871. See also Dolgoff, pages 259–73, and Lehning, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pages 195–213.

[329] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, “Preface to the German Edition of 1872,” Selected Works, volume 1, page 99.

[330] Documents of the First International, volume 4, 1870–1871, pages 440–50. That Marx initiated the motion on the “special mission” of the working class is noted in Documents of the First International, volume 3, 1868–1870, pages 231–2. Engels, “Apropos of Working-Class Political Action,” Selected Works, volume 2, pages 245–6.

[331] The text of the Sonvillier Circular may be found in James Guillaume, L’Internationale: Documents et souvenirs, volume 2, pages 237–41. See Kenafick, pages 261–5; Dolgoff, pages 44–5; Carr, page 427; Steklov, pages 250–2; Thomas, pages 321–7.

[332] Marx and Engels, “Fictitious Splits in the International,” Selected Works, volume 2, pages 247–86.

[333] For Bakunin in Spain, see George R. Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, and Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. For Italy, see T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988.

[334] “Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Alliance Society,” The Hague Congress of the First International, September 2–7, 1872, Minutes and Documents, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976, pages 481–3. See Engels to Cuno, 24 January 1872, Selected Correspondence, pages 257–62. For the publisher’s note to Marx, see Nikolaj Ljubavin to Karl Marx, 8 August 1872, in Bakounine et les autres, pages 308–10.

[335] The Blanqui pamphlet is cited in Mehring, page 490. See McLellan, page 410, for Marx and his studies, and Marx’s note that the International was dead. See Engels to Sorge, 12 September 1874, Selected Correspondence, page 270, and Engels to Bebel, 20 June 1873, Selected Corresepondence, pages 265–8.

[336] See Guillaume, LTnternationale: Documents et souvenirs, volume 3, reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969, pages 1–11, for the St. Imier program. See Errico Malatesta, in Bakounine et les autres, pages 315–6, for Bakunin’s rejection of the slander campaign. I am grateful to Davide Turcato for bringing this story to my attention.

[337] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to the journal La Liberte de Bruxelles, 1–8 October 1872.