Chapter 29. Reaction and Revival

Even as Louis Napoleon brought the Revolution of 1848 to a definitive end in France, the high hopes that swept over Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and even the Slavic countries under Turkish and Austrian rule were smothered by counterrevolution and the triumph of reaction. Dreams of a unified Germany and Italy, a sovereign Hungary, a constitutional monarchy in Austria, and independent Czech, Slovak, and south Slav nations were effaced by a renewal of authoritarian rule, press censorship, increased surveillance, the arrest of coundess nationalists and republicans, and the fading of social ideals. Throughout the 1850s the French, Prussian, Austrian, and Russian governments unrelentingly persecuted their domestic radicals, suppressing their writings and lectures, censoring their press, and honeycombing their meetings with police and spies when they did not execute, jail, or exile them. The dark cloud of repression setded over the continent, instilling lisdessness in the masses and despair among their leaders.

Blanqui, convicted for his participation in the May 15 joume’e, spent ten years in prison, often under unbearable conditions. Cooped up with his rival Barbes in the penitentiary of Belle-Ue-en-Mer, his futile attempts at escape from their mutual harassment resulted in transfers to even more punitive dungeons. A forgiving Louis Napoleon finally pardoned the innocuous if adventuristic Barbes and allowed him to return to his comfortable life on his southern estate. But Blanqui himself remained in debilitating confinement until 1859.

As for Proudhon, he had not supported the June insurrection. But in the Assembly, of which he was still a member, he rallied to the defense of the insurgents, making fiery speeches on their behalf and attacking the regime in his newspaper Le Peuple, which had acquired an immense readership among the working class for its militancy. When he published an article accusing Louis Napoleon of plotting to enthralled the people of France, both Le Peuple and his other paper, Le Representant du peuple, were suppressed, and he was expelled from the Assembly. Faced with arrest, Proudhon fled to Belgium but was detected upon his return to Paris and sentenced to prison for three years, a term that he served out in various jails. There, in contrast to Blanqui, he spent

some of the best years of his life. French political prisoners in that happy age underwent a mild confinement. Proudhon was well-housed and well-fed; he could write, study, and receive his friends; he was even allowed to go out of his prison once a week to look after his affairs.[508]

Other revolutionists fled to England, Switzerland, or the United States. Cabet had returned to his utopian experiment in the United States even before the June insurrection; he died there, unknown, and was soon forgotten even in the land of his birth. Louis Blanc fled to England and became increasingly reformist; when he returned to France, upon on the overthrow of Napoleon III in 1870, he would participate in the National Assembly and oppose the Paris Commune of 1871. When Blanqui, by contrast, was released from prison in 1859, he immediately renewed his conspiratorial activities against the Second Empire; jailed again in 1861, he escaped from a prison hospital four years later and took refuge in Belgium.

Nothing so clearly conjures up the reactionary nightmare that descended on Europe in the 1850s than the treatment of Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian aristocrat-tumed-revolutionary who became one of the most important anarchist leaders of the century. Owing to his violent rhetoric and behavior Bakunin had earned the bitter acrimony of Czar Nicholas I, the spearhead of reaction in Europe. Although the Russian anarchist was by no means a regicide, his impassioned words and his collectivist views separated him markedly from the basically pacifistic and individualistic Proudhon, despite his encomiums to the Frenchman, whose anti-authoritarian ideas remained a lifelong inspiration to him

But following an abortive uprising in Dresden in March 1849, in which he participated with Richard Wagner, Bakunin was captured by Saxon authorities and imprisoned for a year. The Saxons sentenced him to death, only to issue a reprieve so that he could be handed over to the Austrians, who in turn chained him to a dungeon wall for eleven months before sentencing him once again to death. Finally they commuted his sentence at the request of the czar, and he was sent back to Russia, where Nicholas immured him in the recesses of the dreaded Peter and Paul Fortress, in St Petersburg. Bakunin languished in the fortress for six years, often under harsh conditions, neglected and plagued by scurvy, his isolation broken only by occasional visits from members of his family. With the advent of a more enlightened czar, Alexander II, he was sent into exile in Siberia, where he remained for still another four years, after which he escaped, making his way back to Europe by crossing the Pacific Ocean to North America and then journeying eastward to London.

EXILE IN LONDON

London had become the home of many exiles, who gravitated toward the English capital because of the freedom England offered to refugees from the counterrevolutionary governments on the continent. Nevertheless, the exiles—Prussian, French, Russian, and Austrian-—were sdll the targets of continental policc spies, who infiltrated their radical groups and reported on them in detail to their respective governments. These governments, in turn, tried to persuade the British home secretary to crack down on the exiles. They embroidered their reports with lurid plots, accusing some exiles of planning to assassinate Queen Victoria and, more absurdly, all the crowned heads of Europe. In 1850 the Austrian ambassador warned the home secretary that “the members of the Communist League, whose leaders were Marx, Engels, Bauer, and Wolff, discussed even regicide,” while the next year the Prussian interior minister pressed the home secretary to take “decisive measures against the chief revolutionaries known by name” and transport them to the colonies. Happily for the exiles, the British authorities usually ignored these police accounts. As David McClellan notes in his biography of Marx, the Austrian ambassador

got the reply: “under our laws, mere discussion of regicide, so long as it does not concern the Queen of England and so long as there is no definite plan, does not constitute sufficient grounds for the arrest of the conspirators”. The most the Home Office was prepared to do in answer to these demands was to give financial assistance to those refugees willing to emigrate to the United States.[509]

Marx himself had by no means played a radical role in the German Revolution of 1848–49. Enamored of his “stages” theory of revolution, he had decided that the liberal German bourgeoisie, struggling to assert its supremacy over the feudal classes of the ancien regime, must take the lead in the unfolding revolutionary events. According to this theory, the bourgeoisie had to carry out its own revolution and establish a highly centralized republic, free of all feudal encumbrances, subdivisions, and obstacles to free trade and nationhood, before the workers could hope to achieve their own socialist goals.

Although Marx’s writings from the 1840s had often spoken of the need for the workers to create their own revolutionary parties, independendy of the bourgeoisie, during the 1848–49 revolutions he expressly advised them to subordinate their demands to those of bourgeois parties. The working class, he felt, was obliged to render critical support to the creation of a middle-class republic and assist the bourgeoisie in pushing the revolution toward the goal of a unified, industrialized, and commercially viable Germany. “The proletariat has not the right to isolate itself,” he declared; “however hard it may seem, it must reject anything that could separate it from its allies.”[510] Accordingly, he suppressed The Communist Manifesto (which he had co-written with Engels in 1847) and essentially disbanded the Communist League (which he had headed) in all but name. This policy of middle-class liberalism aroused the bitter opposition of the militant labor organizer Stephan Bom, who was trying to form an all-German workers’ movement, into which, as P. H. Noyes tells us, “such revolutionary force as workers had in 1848 was channeled.”[511]

In contrast to Bom, Marx was determined to have nothing to do with an independent workers’ movement and instead became editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a Cologne newspaper (backed by Engels) that called itself “An Organ of Democracy” and dedicated itself to the emancipation of the bourgeoisie from feudal exactions. As editor, Marx pandered to the middle- class Cologne Democratic Union—the Zeitung even contained stock market reports—and established an editorial line that was hardly distinguishable from that of the liberal bourgeoisie, thoroughly antagonizing the workers of the city. Andreas Gottschalk, the militant leader of the Cologne Workers’ Union, a socialist labor organization, excoriated the newspaper for being “in the hands of confirmed aristocrats, indeed the most dangerous of all, the aristocrats of money” and took Marx sharply to task for his essentially liberal editorial role.[512]

Upon the collapse of the German revolution in the spring of 1849, the newspaper was shut down, and Marx was expelled from Prussia. He and his family arrived in Paris in time for the June 13 demonstration against Louis Napoleon’s breach of the constitution by invading Rome. But in August disappointment with Bonaparte’s reactionary regime forced him to go to London, where he encountered various exile groups from the continent.

Soon after his arrival in London, however, Marx radically altered his policy. In an 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” (which had been revived in 1849), he and Engels essentially adopted Gottschalk’s view of the relations between the workers and the “democratic” bourgeoisie, calling for an independent workers’ party that would establish its own “revolutionary workers’ governments, whether in the form of municipal committees and municipal councils or in the form of workers’ clubs and workers’ committees.”[513] Moreover, in any revolutionary situation, the “Address” argued, the workers’ party must be distrusdul and stricdy independent of its presumed bourgeois and peasant allies. At best, it could ally itself with sectors of the bourgeoisie, but only cautiously and only with the most radical sectors. Following the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, such an alliance, the “Address” warned, must come to an end. The working class must retain its independence and compete electorally for positions in the new republic, seeking the “strictest centralization” of governmental power and opposing any federalist schemes that would increase “the autonomy and independence for the [local] communities.”[514]

This document is one of the most important in the theoretical armamentarium of what in time would be called Marxism, and its strictures were to be followed—or argued about—by Marxian movements, well into the 1900s. Based on this “Address,” Marxist parties were expressly prohibited from participating in the cabinets and ministries of bourgeois governments or from forming coalition governments even with radical middle-class parties. This emphasis on the independence of the workers’ parties remained a guiding policy of Marxist parties, often leading, in periods of crisis that erupted after 1848, to bitter factional disputes and cleavages within the fold of international Marxism.

Notwithstanding popular wisdom to the contrary, Marx’s exile in London was not devoted exclusively to theoretical work. Indeed, he could hardly avoid becoming drawn into the internecine warfare that went on among his fellow exiles of various nationalities. During the 1850s and 1860s they battled each other incessandy over issues both trivial and major. Thus, republicans fought with each other and with socialists; putschist Blanquists crossed swords with advocates of a mass workers’ movement; proto-anarchists, or at least opponents of political action, denounced “authoritarian socialists,” or those who believed in parliamentary activity; and even the parliamentarian wing of the various socialist groups was divided over how and to what degree legislative activity could produce basic social change. Socialist became an ecumenical word denoting everyone from social reformers to social revolutionaries; communist was increasingly identified with those who shared Marx’s basically insurrectionary strategy; and anarchist encompassed the highly individualistic ideas of personal rebellion pioneered by Max Stirner and the Proudhonist mutualists.

Yet these conflicts should not be dismissed as mere wrangling. On the contrary, they were enormously important in sorting out major issues in revolutionary theory and strategy that had not been resolved—indeed, that could not have been resolved—during the heat of conflict The workers who reared barricades in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna in 1848 had often had no clear idea of their goals, the best methods to achieve them, the divergent interests of their middle-class “allies,” or the nature of the social forces they opposed. A man like Lamartine had been able to gain acceptance among many Parisian workers because he could veil his moderate policies in radical rhetoric, while Blanqui’s followers hurled themselves into putsches that were doomed to failure because they failed to properly assess either the mood of the workers or the power of their class opponents. If they were not to repeat the miscalculations that had cost them the revolutions of 1848, the exiles had to use the hiatus to resolve a multitude of such unsetded problems and issues. If there was to be a new revolutionary wave, as everyone expected, “exile wrangling” would be indispensable to its success.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT

It was also necessary for the exiles to analyze the deep and lasting transformations that Europe was undergoing: the spread of the Industrial Revolution to the continent, the expansion of the market economy, the emergence of still more new technologies, and the rise of a new type of worker—the factory-based industrial proletarian.

In England the Industrial Revolution, already under way for decades, catapulted her to global economic dominance, earning the country the appellation “the workshop of the world.” But in France it would not become a considerable force until the 1880s. Even during the Second Empire, the country was still rooted in an artisanal and peasant economy. Under Louis Napoleon craft production still retained a firm hold on French manufacturing, especially since the country had uniquely positioned itself as the producer of fine handcrafted products, which necessitated the purposeful retention of traditional skills. But the authoritarian regime of Louis Napoleon, undisturbed by political factions, clubs, or legislatures, laid the basis for the Industrial Revolution by greatly expanding French markets and, above all, the country’s transportation infrastructure. Steam engines, which in 1850 had numbered around 5,300, increased to 14,000 in 1860, and to 26,200 in 1869. Most important, French railway mileage soared between 1850 and 1870— from a mere 1,800 miles to 10,800. Before the establishment of the Second Empire, railroad lines had radiated out from Paris in only a few abbreviated trunk lines, but Louis Napoleon’s twenty-year regime produced a full-fledged national railway system. Between 1852 and 1870 rail lines were extended to Bayonne on the Spanish frontier, Brest on the Atlantic, Cherbourg on the Channel coast, and Grenoble near Luxembourg—and the spaces between were filled with a complex network of subbranches.

The spread of railways would soon open up hitherto untouched areas of the country to economic development, enlarging the domestic market for consumer goods and undermining traditional ties between peasants, craftspeople, and notables by drawing them into the competitive cash economy. The growing industries in the north and northeast now had relatively easy access to remote parts of the countryside, whose inhabitants, in turn, could sell their produce in markets beyond their immediate locales. Trade was breaking down old provincial barriers between regions that had barely advanced beyond barter exchange, bringing them first handmade and later factory-made commodities. By lowering its own often-prohibitive tariffs in return for lowered tariffs abroad, France greatly increased its volume of foreign trade—the value of French imports and exports increased from 2.6 billion francs in 1851 to about 8 billion in 1869, further impelling French capitalists to acquire modem machinery and use new methods of industrial production. The Paris Exposition of 1855 was a celebration not only of much-coveted French luxury goods but of French machinery and technical know-how.

Germany, for its part, was beginning to see significant industrial development as well. Although the German industrial revolution did not fully take off until the 1870s, the Zollverein, a customs union initially comprising seventeen German states, had already been established in 1834, removing internal barriers to trade, while in 1831 the Prussian government established the Gewerbe-lnstitut (Trade Institute) to stimulate the development and use of new industrial methods.

Slowly, factory machinery was introduced into the Prussian economy, especially for the weaving of cotton, while the military, recognizing the enormous importance of railroad lines in times of war, strongly encouraged their construction as well. In 1840, only 340 miles of railway track had been laid in all of the German states; in 1850, the mileage reached 3,700, nearly doubled a decade later, and even exceeded that of France, at 12,237, in 1870. Strikingly, in the same year Germany also exceeded France in output of pig iron. Despite wave after wave of emigration to the New World, Germany’s population was growing rapidly—from 35 million in 1849 to 41 million in 1871. Before the century was out, England and Germany would both be engaged in mass production, and after the 1870s German industry would outstrip the British in chemicals, electrical goods, and sophisticated machines.

As the demand for steel increased—necessary as it was for engines, railroad tracks, and other metallic goods (including arms)—the inventions that made it more plentiful and less expensive followed apace. Coal and coke, available in huge quantities, had replaced charcoal early in the nineteenth century. In 1828 the Scottish inventor James B. Neilson built a blast furnace to spurt hot air over melting iron ore, which greatly economized the smelting process and increased the height of the small furnaces of the day to forty or even sixty feet. Traditional techniques for hammering the impurities out of pig iron were replaced by puddling, in which molten iron was stirred continually to produce a more malleable metal. Finally in 1856 Henry Bessemer patented the process that bears his name, in which cold air driven through molten iron rapidly removes the impurities. The cost of producing steel now dropped precipitously, as did the amount of time required to produce it: what had formerly taken ten days with charcoal and puddling now took only ten minutes with the Bessemer process. The price of steel plummeted to a fraction of its former cost, and the metal’s availability made it a commonplace in industry, homes, and construction. At the same time the rural European landscape was changing into a modem industrial panorama, complete with tall chimneys belching smoke, and huge furnaces that produced a fiery glare against the dark polluted sky.

The technological changes of the second half of the century were comparable in every way to those of cloth production and transportation that had driven the earlier stages of the industrial revolution. But the advent of electric power and synthetic chemicals, as well as advances in mining, brought ruin to many artisans, who were in no position to compete with the cheap goods produced by capital-intensive factories. By midcentury, except in France, merchants and industrialists were vasdy diminishing both the status and function of independent masters and journeymen, increasingly making them ancillary to the larger industrial economy.

Nor could the power of the autocrats of Europe—large or small, pernicious or gende—withstand the onslaught of industrialization. News now traveled faster than ever, over electric wires and by mail trains; printing presses became ever more automatic, disseminating ideas in the form of cheap books and periodicals to all parts of Europe and the entire world. The bourgeoisie wanted free trade, open borders, “free” workers, and a major say in affairs of state. As geographical barriers began to crumble, so too did the ideological barriers of the parochial quasi-feudal past, and the obstacles to new goods and new ideas, opening the way to mass nationwide movements such as trade unions and political parties.

By the 1860s European autocrats found that they had to make concessions not only to the bourgeoisie but also to the working classes, as they awakened from the torpor of their defeats of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Working- class militancy indeed began to revive, although it took a different form from what it had been in the 1840s. The ideas of associationism—the formation of cooperatives of artisans in similar trades in order to control those trades—and mutualism—the provision of low-interest credit to small entrepreneurs, linked by nonexploitative contracts—were acquiring an expanded meaning. The very social context of labor was undergoing significant changes. Artisans, who had hitherto been pitted against small factories and merchants, could hardly expect individually to supplant the industrial bourgeoisie, with its ever-larger plants, its multitude of unskilled or partly skilled proletarians, and its vast economic resources. The word association increasingly came to include the unity of the working class as a whole—internationally as well as nationally, despite differences in craft and status groups. In addition to cooperatives and trade associations, workers began to envision powerful “armies of labor,” to use a phrase from proletarian socialism—namely, great unions, confederations, and even political parties that were sufficiendy encompassing to confront the enormous power of the industrial bourgeoisie.

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

Among the monarchs of continental Europe, none seems to have more acutely sensed that changes were in the offing than Louis Bonaparte. After 1860, under increasing fire from the French bourgeoisie, who wanted a greater say in the state, Louis was obliged to loosen his Ught grip on France’s political life. He now gave greater freedom to the press and allowed government measures to be openly criticized in the Corps Legislatif (the lower legislative house), while the throne’s annual speech could be freely debated by the parliamentarians. Indeed, before the decade was out, a republican opposidon had even been permitted to emerge and enjoy a certain measure of political autonomy.

To countervail the demands of the new industrialists, Bonaparte also tried to gain working-class support, thereby pitting one class against the other— another typically Bonapartist feature. In 1860 he allowed workers to form mutual aid and benefit associations, restored their legal right to strike, and permitted individual workers to run for public office on labor-oriented platforms—provided, to be sure, that they did not form a political party. (When the government made overtures to offer better credit terms, the Proudhonist mutualists, with their demand for the low-interest loans for artisans, were surprisingly responsive and flirted politically with members of the royal family.)

To placate the bourgeoisie, between 1860 and 1862 the emperor concluded a series of commercial treaties with Britain, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Prussia that reduced trade barriers and provided a strong stimulus to French industry. Key French companies were concentrated in fewer hands, leading to more large-scale production and technological modernization. But Bonaparte’s motives were not entirely economic. Closer cooperation between the French and English economies was spurred not only by commercial considerations but by the emperor’s own diplomacy, which was oriented, despite centuries of bitter enmity, toward forging an alliance between the two major Channel countries.

The growing entente between Britain and France nurtured not only closer economic and diplomatic ties but a closer affinity between the French and British working classes. The interlocking of English with French economic interests and the introduction of English technological innovations into French industry meant that the working classes of the two countries shared a new community of interest But French unskilled workers lagged far behind their British counterparts in self-organization and in concrete economic gains: in Britain the working day had been reduced to ten hours, but when the Bonapartist regime tried to pass similar legislation in France, the bourgeoisie was able to circumvent it. Although French workers acquired a limited right to strike, they were not permitted to organize trade unions like their class brothers and sisters in England

In 1862 a delegation of French workers crossed the Channel to attend the London International Exhibition. Their trip was subsidized by the government, which probably hoped that the moderate reform-oriented mentality that prevailed among English workers would make an impression on the more volatile French. Actually, the visit resulted in a renewed liaison between militant English trade unionists and French insurrectionists. In December 1863 British workers dispatched an appeal to their French counterparts to take common action in support of the emancipation of Poland, a cause that was almost as popular in London as it was in Paris. The British workers also had a very practical self-interest in international working-class comity: their employers had been importing continental strikebreakers during labor disputers, a practice that severely obstructed their struggles for better pay and working conditions. The trade unions were particularly eager to enlist French working-class support, in order to bring this practice to a definitive end.

As a result, contacts between working-class leaders on both sides of the Channel became more frequent; not only was the solidarity between the French and English gready strengthened, but each contributed to the other’s strike funds. Finally, they decided to hold a joint public meeting in London to strengthen their ties and to support the Poles. The meeting, which was held on September 28, 1864, in Saint Martin’s Hall, was packed with 2,000 people, many of whom claimed to represent British, Irish, and continental European workers. It proved to be of historic importance: even as almost all the governments of continental Europe were trying to crush any incipient workers’ movement, or perhaps because they were trying to do so, the working classes of various countries eagerly met to mobilize their forces and create their own unified international movement.

Ideologically, the assembly in Saint Martin’s Hall was very mixed: it consisted mainly of English trade unionists, including former Chartists and Owenites, who were eager to eliminate continental strikebreaking, but there were also French Proudhonist mutualists, Italian and Polish nationalists, and a medley of exiles from other countries. After much oratory, largely focused on solidarity with the Poles and the need for working-class unity, the meeting enthusiastically resolved to found what was to be called the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), which eventually entered into the history of socialism as the First International.

Listed last among the distinguished supporters invited to sit on the platform was one “Dr. Marx,” who had been asked to address the meeting on behalf of the German workers. Rather than speak himself, however, he gave the floor to Johann George Eccarius, his fellow exile and member of the old Communist League, who ably acquitted himself while Marx remained in the background. Thus Marx played no direct role in convening or addressing the meeting, claims that he founded the First Intemadonal (made by some historians of the labor movement) notwithstanding.

After much oratory and enthusiasm, the meeting elected a Central Committee (later renamed the General Council) to administer the organization’s affairs, consisting half of English trade unionists and the remaining half of the diverse radical and nationalist exiles in London. The Committee quickly established a subcommittee to draw up the declaration of principles and a set of governing rules for the new Association. Several plainly tendentious declarations and sets of statutes were submitted, including the provisional regulations of Mazzini’s Italian Workers Association, a highly centralized organization, strongly nationalistic in orientation, that actually had very litde standing among Italian workers. This document, despite its literary crudity and its ideological confusion, was nearly adopted by the subcommittee, but fortunately, due largely to Marx’s remonstrances, it was agreed that the proposed document should be “edited,” a task that finally fell to Marx himself, who proceeded to rewrite large portions of the declaration of principles and reduce the rules from forty to ten. The new draft, patendy superior to its Mazzinian precursor, was unanimously adopted by the Committee at its next meeting and published widely as a penny pamphlet In this respect Marx deserves the credit, if not for founding the IWMA, at least for writing its founding document, the historic “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association.” More than half of the address is occupied with contrasting the enormous increase in the wealth of the capitalist countries with the absence of progress in the material condition of workers and detailing the miseries they suffer. In its closing pages it celebrates recent working-class victories, such as the passage of the ten-hour working day by the British parliament and the growth of the cooperative movement. Marx’s hand can be seen very clearly when the address calls upon workers to unite to “conquer political power,” and very dramatically in its closing appeal, “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!” As for the “provisional rules,” its preamble opens with the assertion that “the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves,” and it closes with the slogan: “No rights without duties, no duties without rights.”[515]

This last slogan—which would later adorn the mastheads of socialist and anarchist periodicals worldwide—did not come easily from Marx’s pen; it was foisted on him, and he seems to have accepted it only reluctantly. As he wrote to Engels, shordy after the adoption of documents, he had been “obliged to insert two sentences about ‘duty’ and ‘right’ and ditto about ‘truth, morality and justice’ in the preamble to the rules, but these are so placed that they can do no harm.”[516] This passage reveals the aversion that both men shared toward any socialism that was even vaguely moralistic, in contrast to the materialistic approach they hoped to foster.

The actual role that the 1WMA played in the struggle for socialism has been greatiy exaggerated over the years, in no small part by the bourgeois press, which tried to frighten its readers by invoking a perilous “red specter” that threatened to undermine society itself. In fact, many of its national sections could not even be regarded as collectivist in oudook, let alone socialist. The English trade unionists were primarily looking for ways to make their strikes more effective, while the Proudhonist mutualists, who were hostile to strikes, loathed all forms of collectivism and regarded small-scale property and the patriarchal family as the building blocks of a new society. The Italian nationalists, following Mazzini, almost entirely eschewed socialism. It is noteworthy that neither the “Inaugural Address” nor the preamble to the rules makes any mention of collectivism, still less of socialism and communism—notions that would have been offensive to many of its members. Rather, the documents contain encomia to cooperatives, which were popular among workers in England and France at the time. As for Marx’s call to “conquer political power,” it must have been essentially smuggled into the document during an unguarded moment, for it could only have survived the scrutiny of the Proudhonists on the committee because their enthusiasm momentarily swept away their critical faculties.

Despite its many different, often bitterly conflicting tendencies, the IWMA managed to remain intact until 1876, after which it was formally dissolved. During the 1860s it consisted largely of a loose agglomeration of national and local sections or “federations,” many of which were at odds with each other over a host of political and organizational issues. Admittedly, the IWMA played a valuable practical and inspirational role in mobilizing, educating, and leading workers, often in large numbers, in common struggles to improve their material conditions. But it was largely a defensive organization: more often than not, its national sections were fighting with their backs to the wall against the assaults of their respective governments and various employers. By its very existence, however, the International gave workers a boost in morale and a sense that they were not completely isolated in their specific local struggles.

Many actions, be they strikes or uprisings, were imputed to the International with little or no regard as to whether it was actually involved in them. Although it was falsely accused of leading the Paris Commune of 1871, the International never staged an uprising anywhere in the world; nor did it lead any sizable strike or strike movement of its own. Many of the strikes that swept over Britain and the continent during the 1860s, to be sure, involved members of the International—in England, even members of the General Council—but they functioned primarily as trade unionists rather than as Internationalists. For the most part, the federations of the International tried to assist strikes and protests by publicizing workers’ grievances, opposing foreign strikebreakers, and gathering funds among other workers’ organizations for the support of their striking comrades. While these activities greatly enhanced the prestige of the International among workers throughout the world, they hardly constituted a danger to bourgeois society.

During its short existence, the IWMA held four major congresses between its founding meeting in London and its Hague Congress, where it was split irreparably in 1872, and its General Council was transferred to the United States. At no time did the delegates to these congresses ever number more than a hundred people, and although they presumably represented affiliated federations in about eleven countries, a number of delegates represented only token sections. Some delegations were merely individual exiles from countries in which all working-class activity had been completely suppressed, while others represented groups so small that they barely qualified as more than nuclei of national federations. In fact, the size of a national delegation at an IWMA congress usually depended upon the country where the congress was held. At the Geneva (1866) and Lausanne (1867) congresses, for example, the largest delegations were Franco-Swiss, more or less reflecting the general population of the area in which the congress was convened, while at Brussels (1868) the largest was, not surprisingly, the Belgian delegation. These annual congresses were often riven by a multitude of important theoretical issues that were furiously debated, often culminating in IWMA resolutions that were adopted by a majority vote. In practice, the national groups, on their return home, frequently went their own way, irrespective of the congresses’ decisions. Nevertheless, the congresses were grappling, slowly, painfully, and sometimes indecisively, with issues that would be of enormous significance for the labor movement for generations to come— indeed, because of their theoretical and practical consequences in later years, their proceedings deserve closer study than is possible here.

In the early congresses (Geneva in 1866, Lausanne in 1867, and Brussels in 1868), the most compelling issue was the debate between the so-called “Marx party” (few of whom, in fact, were Marxists doctrinally), which favored socialism, and Proudhonist individualists, who hoped to supplant capitalism by fostering small-scale peasant and artisan proprietors. The Proudhonists, whose views reflected the interests of an archaic and waning stratum of artisans and small food cultivators, were convinced that the principal causes of their economic difficulties lay with moneylenders and bankers, and that the problems of the working class could be removed by having worker- or state- controlled People’s Banks provide proprietors with low-interest credit This analysis minimized the social relations embodied in the capitalist market and industry and instead regarded the main enemy of small entrepreneurs as finance capitalists and bankers, who lived off interest rather than the fruits of productive labor. Often this emphasis took an expressly anti-Semitic turn when Jews, such as the Rothschilds, were cast as the main villains of society, rather than manufacturers and the system of capitalist social relations as such.

Proudhon bequeathed a very mixed legacy to his disciples in his On the Political Capacity oj the Working Classes, published in 1865, the year of his death. Here, as in the General Idea in 1851, he softened his aversion for associationism by allowing that it could not be avoided in large-scale industries. In a passage that had an immense influence on many Proudhonists, the maitre wrote:

Mutualism intends men to associate only insofar as this is required by the demands of production, the cheapness of goods, the needs of consumption and the security of the producers themselves, i.e. in those cases where it is not possible for the public to rely on private industry, nor for private industry to accept the responsibility and risks involved in running the concerns on their own— There is undoubtedly a case for association in the large-scale manufacturing, extractive and metallurgical industries.... What is the position if we think of the thousands of crafts and trades proliferating in the towns and even in the rural areas? For these I do not think association offers any advantages; all the more so since any benefits that might follow are already assured by the network of reciprocal guarantees, mutual credit and insurance, market control, etc. etc.[517]

Proudhon’s reluctant acknowledgment of the need for association was a pragmatic response to the rise of large-scale production and modem transportation. Although he was a federalist (as distinguished from a statist), it did not supplant in any way his commitment to individual entrepreneurship. Not surprisingly, when the anarchist Bakunin, at congresses of the International, supported collectivism, the major Proudhonist spokesmen furiously opposed him. But many workers read Proudhon’s remarks not as a circumstantial endorsement of associations (or cooperatives) in only certain large-scale industries, but as a general endorsement of them as an alternative to modem capitalist industry—that is, they wrongly concluded that economic cooperatives, confederally organized by means of contracts and credit networks, lay at the heart of Proudhon’s vision for the good society.

Nor was this the only respect in which Proudhon exhibited a regressive influence. Owing to their emphasis on the patriarchal family as the basic unit of social life, the Proudhonists rejected any role in the productive process for women (although most artisans freely used the labor of their wives, daughters, and female domestics in their workshops). Seeming to oppose all civil rights for women, they argued that woman’s place was in the home, where her “natural” limitations destined her to rear children and see to family needs, while the civil realm fell “naturally” within the purview of men. Finally, as we have seen, the Proudhonists also objected to local strikes, which they regarded as coercive and potentially violent. But life repeatedly intruded on this Proudhonist shibboleth, and the Proudhonists at the Lausanne Congress reluctantly surrendered it, together with their opposition to political action. The French delegation to the IWMA, it should be emphasized, was predominantly Proudhonist, led by Henri Tolain, a bronze engraver; Pierre Coullery, a physician from French-speaking Switzerland; and even Charles Longuet, later Marx’s son-in-law and devout supporter. Opposed to the Proudhonists were the collectivists or socialists, who called for participation in elections and the public ownership of land, railways, mines, and forests and tended to make more searching analyzes of capitalism. Marx, from London, provided much of their theoretical framework, although many groups within the IWMA supported socialistic views on their own initiative. Even in France, notable collectivists appeared, as Henryk Katz notes in his highly objective account of the International:

The repressions in France [in the 1860s] pushed the [labor] movement toward resistance societies and syndical chambers, the types of organization tolerated by the government. This was in line with the continuing trend from classical Proudhonianism toward militant syndicalism.[518]

This shift was typified most notably by the bookbinder Eugene Varlin and the dyer Benoit Malon, who had begun as Proudhonists but were drifting away from many of its key tenets.[519] Not only were they prepared to engage in political activity, in violation of Proudhon’s ideas (if not his practice), they were also committed to trade-union organization, strikes, and armed insurgency.

Most at odds with Proudhon’s views were the revolutionary syndicalist ideas that these men began to advance. Indeed, Varlin, as the ablest and most militant trade-union leader in France, may well be regarded as the father of revolutionary syndicalism. But their ideas also had a communalist dimension: they opposed both mutualism and “authoritarian Communism”—that is, both Proudhon and Marx. Varlin and Malon called themselves “collectivists” and were committed to a form of socialism or anarchism based on communal confederations as well as trade unions.[520] How far they had moved from Proudhonism may be judged by the acrimony of their clashes with their former comrades: the French Proudhonist Ernst Friborg disdainfully described them as a strong “party of liberal communists [communistes liberaux],” words that were as close as one could come in the 1860s to “libertarian communists,”[521] while Varlin, for his part, did not hesitate to dismiss Tolain and his following as “Proudhonist enrages.” In the new labor movement, says Katz,

Varlin was the recognized national leader and enjoyed increasing international prestige. He was in continuous correspondence with provincial centers and various organizations and leaders in Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany.... More than anyone else, Varlin was capable of articulating the ideas of the radicalized movement that was variously described as “Socialisme collectiviste,” “Communisme liberale,” “Communisme anti- autoritaire,” and “Socialisme revolutionnaire.”[522]

Significantly, Marx and Bakunin were both to describe Varlin as their comrade in their writings on the Paris Commune.

At its early congresses the International wrangled repeatedly over the distinctions between collectivism and Proudhonist individualism. At Geneva and Lausanne, both in French-speaking Switzerland, a sufficient number of Proudhonist delegates were in attendance to pass resolutions that favored their view, but at the Brussels Congress of 1868, the majority adopted a collectivist resolution on public ownership. At that point most—albeit not all—of the Proudhonists ceased to attend congresses of the International.

The IWMA congresses also debated other issues, such the role of violence in transforming society, the formadon of popular milidas, the coalidons (if any) that federations of the International could validly make with radical bourgeois or petty bourgeois organizations, and even the legitimacy of the presence of nonworkers in congresses and the General Council. (Excluding nonworkers would have made all intellectuals, including Marx and Bakunin, ineligible for membership.)

But the next explosive issue to confront the International was that of the state and parliamentary politics. In fact, this issue haunted every one of its later congresses and was raised repeatedly—explicidy or implicidy—in debates among socialists, collectivists, Proudhonists, trade unionists, nationalists, and anarchists. By opposing all forms of collectivism, the large contingent of Proudhonists in the early years had averted a direct confrontation between statist socialists and antistatist socialists, since all socialists felt the need to unite against the individualists. But the departure of most of the Proudhonists at Brussels freed statist and antistatist socialists for an open collision that was finally to tear the International apart.

MARX AND BAKUNIN

This conflict was shaped overwhelmingly by the duel between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin for the control of the International. Bakunin did not join the International until fairly late, in July 1868, while to all appearances he and Marx were still on excellent terms. In the 1840s Bakunin had been a friend and collaborator of Marx and Engels around the publication of Arnold Ruge’s Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher. Removed from European politics for twelve years after 1849 by his imprisonment and exile in Russia, he finally escaped from Siberia and reappeared in London at the end of 1861. In November 1864, shortly before Bakunin’s departure for Italy, Marx exhibited a very amiable attitude toward the Russian and assured Bakunin that, rumors to the contrary, he had defended Bakunin against a slander that he had been a Russian spy. Writing to Engels, Marx noted that “I liked [Bakunin] very much, more so than previously,” and said that he was “one of the few people whom after sixteen years I find to have moved forward and not backward.”[523] As a sign of friendship, Marx even sent Bakunin an inscribed copy of his newly published Capital.

Bakunin did not respond to this gesture for quite some time. He had been occupied with establishing his own international anarchist organization, the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy, a network with a central bureau in Geneva and sections in Italy, France, and Switzerland. (At the same time he was also trying to create a secret, elite, and highly disciplined vanguard group, the International Brotherhood.) The Alliance had its own statutes and program, calling for an end to religion, equality of the sexes, the abolition of inheritance, and a scattered number of other proposals. Bakunin seems to have intended that it function both inside and outside the International, ostensibly to compensate for the IWMA’s emphasis on economic questions by placing a special emphasis on philosophical and religious matters. In November 1868 he applied to the General Council in London for admittance of his Alliance to the International as a relatively autonomous branch.

Up to this point, as Franz Mehring observes, Marx had “continued to harbor feelings of friendship for the old revolutionary Bakunin, and he opposed various attacks which were made or planned against Bakunin among his, Marx’s, immediate circle.”[524] But Marx had strong disagreements with the formulations in the program and statutes of the Alliance, producing a disaffection toward Bakunin that was exacerbated by personal gossip. Moreover, the Alliance’s application for admittance appeared to be a de facto proposal for the existence of two parallel internationals, each with its own central body, that would inevitably come to loggerheads. This caused Marx to develop strong suspicions about Bakunin’s intentions in joining the International.

Needless to say, the General Council decided to reject the Alliance’s application—and ironically, it was on this very day that Bakunin finally responded to inquiries that Marx had indirecdy passed on to Bakunin about his intentions. “You ask whether I am still your friend,” Bakunin wrote.

Yes, more than ever, my dear Marx, for I understand better than ever how right you were to walk along the broad avenue of the economic revolution, to invite us all to follow you, and to denounce all those who wandered off into the byways of nationalist or exclusively political enterprise.... My fatherland is now the International, whose chief founder you have been. You see, then, dear friend that 1 am your pupil—and 1 am proud to be this.[525]

Marx may very well have perceived in the letter a Proudhonist subtext that denied the importance of “political enterprise.” Be that as it may, the General Councd did not reject the Alliance altogether: rather, it permitted Bakunin and his supporters to enter the International—on the condition that they disband the Alliance as an international organization and convert its sections into branches of the IWMA. Bakunin agreed, but whether he really intended to dissolve the only successful international organization he had created up to that time is a much-disputed issue. Surprisingly, however, the Council agreed to let him retain his central bureau in Geneva as a propaganda group, which Bakunin and his supporters readily accepted, allowing as it did a distinctive organizational center for themselves. There is ample evidence to show that in 1870–71, as the dispute between Bakunin and Marx escalated, the old Alliance sections generally retained their libertarian identity and ideas. But that they continued to exist as a parallel organization, as Marx maintained, is arguable.

Many accounts of the dispute between the Bakuninists and Marxists tend to focus so strongly on the unsavory machinations by both sides that their important theoretical and organizational differences are often neglected. In principle, Marx was committed to a strong, highly centralized workers’ movement, ultimately a workers’ party, that would use the political arena to mobilize the entire working class to attain state power. Where artisanal socialists in the 1840s had merely called upon the state to foster the development of associations, Marx persistendy argued for the nationalization of the economy and for planned production and distribution Following the success of the workers in a revolutionary confrontation with capitalism, there would eventually emerge a communist society that would be guided not by profit but by the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

This approach, for Marx, presupposed the existence of the state—a workers’ state, to be sure, but a state nonetheless—that would initially exercise dictatorial powers to suppress the bourgeoisie and rapidly develop the productive forces to eliminate material want and reduce the long working hours that inhibited the community’s participation in public life. Writing in the 1850s and 1860s, Marx assigned a “historically progressive role” to capitalism, namely the development of modem industrial technology, without which arduous toil and material scarcity could not be eliminated. Moreover, the modem factory, in Marx’s view, would play the additional role of organizing the working dass in huge industrial units and bringing it into direct confrontation with the industrial bourgeoisie.

This theoretical orientation had distinct political consequences. Marxian socialists welcomed the elimination of archaic barriers to capitalism such as guild restrictions, artisanship, small-scale peasant agriculture, and the like, indeed all decentralized political and economic entities that might impede the centralization of the state and the economy, and the opening of the domestic market for capitalist expansion. Hence, Marx vehemendy championed the formation of centralized nation-states as the most suitable economic terrain for the growth of industry and technology.

By the same token, he favored the formation of a highly centralized workers’ party that would ultimately challenge the political sovereignty of the bourgeoisie, through elections where possible, through insurrection, or both. In the ‘‘Inaugural Address” for the International, Marx had consciously compromised his basic views in order to satisfy the largely artisanal working dass, at a time when forging unity among workers was a far more important task than highlighting doctrinal differences. But it was precisely the industrial proletariat that he believed was capable of bringing about the demolition of capitalism and ultimately the achievement of a communist society.

To be sure, Bakunin shared many views with Marx—his materialistic approach to history and contemporary social problems, his emphasis on class struggle, and his advocacy of the collective ownership of property. Allowing for many ambiguities, both men championed a collectivist society that, be it gradually or rapidly, would lead to the elimination of private property and classes and to the resolution of the historic “social question”—notably, the existence of oppression, exploitation, poverty, and domination. But Bakunin’s differences with Marx were also enormous. In contrast to Marx’s reliance on the industrial proletariat, Bakunin, drawing on his experiences in Russia and Italy, favored small-scale artisans, peasants, and even lumpenproletarians (whom Marx despised) as constituting the hegemonic strata for the destruction of capitalism. Moreover, Bakunin considered the state as the principal support of oppression and saw no need for it in any form—bourgeois or proletarian. Indeed, in his view, the centralization of the state, far from advancing the workers’ and peasants’ prospects for social change, would have detrimental effects on them, remaking them in its own technocratic and bureaucratic image. It subverted their “instinct” for resistance and revolution, as he put it, blunting their “natural” impulse for freedom. Engaging in politics, Bakunin held, and especially forming centralized parties, would oblige workers and peasants to create centralized political bureaucracies that would eventually bring them into complicity with their own oppression in the political as well as the economic sphere.

To Marx’s centralistic and statist views, Bakunin, taking his cue from Proudhon, opposed a confederal system of production and social administration.[526] Confederalism denoted a system of contractual agreements among workshops, factories, and communities that were collectively controlled by their members, in which collective affairs are managed through confederal councils of mandated and recallable delegates. These councils, Bakunin believed, would not constitute a state: their principal functions would be administrative, coordinating the decisions of the people in a given commune and among communes at the various regional, national, and international levels of confederation.

Bakunin’s vision of an anarchist society was most succincdy expressed in “Principles and Organization of the International Brotherhood,” where he sketched out a “federal government,” based on “the absolutely autonomous commune, always represented by the majority vote of all the inhabitants,” as well as “workers’ associations,” which would be pyramidally structured into regional and national confederations. This society would have its own libertarian “social constitution,” with “laws,” “courts,” and “parliaments”— structures that are by no means compatible with the “absolute and complete freedom” of the individual that Bakunin, like Proudhon, also prized[527]

It is difficult to say whether Bakunin used words such as “social constitutions,” “laws,” “courts,” and “parliaments” literally or metaphorically. Well versed neither in economics nor in history, he seems ultimately to have relied on the “revolutionary instinct” of the masses to achieve workable collectivist agreements, and on their “revolutionary spontaneity” and on public opinion to administer an equitable anarchist society based on quasi- communistic principles. Marx, for his part, maintained that the proletariat would be compelled toward class consciousness and revolution not by any “revolutionary instinct” but by the “inexorable laws” of capitalist economic development.

The differences between Marx’s centralistic, political, and statist approach and Bakunin’s decentralistic, antipolitical, and confederalist approach were to be hardened into dogmas by their disciples, opening a chasm between them that seemed unbridgeable, far greater, perhaps, than either man ever intended But before this hardening took place, Marx and Bakunin were extraordinarily flexible and open to the effects of new social developments on their political ideas. Occasionally they also advanced ideas, especially concerning methods of changing society, that were very much at odds with their seemingly rigid ideological premises.

Despite his affirmations of “revolutionary spontaneity,” for example, Bakunin clearly believed that a well-disciplined, secret vanguard organization, indeed a “general staff” (as he called it in one of his several programs for the International Brotherhood), would be necessary to shepherd the masses through a social revolution. He explicitly rejected endowing it with powers of “dictatorship and custodial control,” but in achieving the overthrow of capitalism, it would doubdess have to play a guiding role at the very least[528] Moreover, although abstention from participation in the institutions of the state was a cardinal principle of Bakunin’s libertarian faith, one that he propounded with all his vigor, he sometimes encouraged his own supporters to stand as candidates in parliamentary elections. In a letter to one of his adherents, Carlo Gambuzzi, Bakunin seemed to fully agree that he should run for the Italian Chamber of Deputies. “You will perhaps be surprised that I, a determined and passionate abstentionist from politics,” he wrote,

should now advise my friends [members of the Alliance] to become deputies—this because circumstances have changed. First, all my friends, and most assuredly yourself, are so inspired by our ideas, our principles, that there is no danger that you will forget, deform, or abandon them, or that you will fall back into the old political habits. Second, times have become so grave, the danger menacing the liberty of all countries so formidable, that all men of goodwill must step into the breach, and especially our friends, who must be in a position to exercise the greatest possible influence on events.[529]

Bakunin’s confidence in the anarchistic integrity of his supporters was surely misplaced—he had already seen more than one of them become Marxists, strict parliamentarians, or worse, over the passage of time.

Again, despite his decentralist views, Bakunin was quite prepared, even eager, to grant the IWMA’s General Council enormous powers—-powers that, in fact, were later to be used with serious effect against him. The Basel Congress of 1869 gave the Council the right to admit or refuse entry to individuals or groups, and to suspend any section that it regarded as working against the interests of the International. Such actions on the part of the Council, to be sure, could be appealed to the International’s congresses, which alone had the authority to reverse them. But the measure, passed with Bakunin’s strong

By the same token, Marx could seem, at times, almost as libertarian as Bakunin. In The Civil War in France, a set of addresses that he wrote on behalf of the General Council, Marx extolled the Paris Commune of 1871 in extraordinarily quasi-libertarian terms. The Commune, as we will see, was a revolt against state centralization as such and was deeply influenced by antiauthoritarian concepts of confederalism. Surprisingly, Marx decidedly did not reject this opposition to state centralization—indeed, the libertarianism of this book is highly unusual in the bulk of his writings concerning the state and stands very much at odds with the centralized ideas that dominate the “Address” of 1850. As we shall see, he hailed the Commune’s decentralized organizational structure profusely and for a time seemed to regard it as a model structure to be followed by proletarian revolutions.

After 1868 the conflicts between Marx and Bakunin played themselves out at the congresses of the International. In 1868–69 it became clear that despite Bakunin’s concessions to the General Council, the Alliance had not fully merged into the International. Bakunin continued to champion the Alliance’s program, especially its antipolitical views and its call for the abolition of inheritance as a decisive step in attaining the abolition of private property. To Marx, abolishing inheritance first, before private property, was like placing the cart before the horse: inheritance was merely a peripheral issue, in his analysis, and like all aspects of capitalist relations, it would obviously be swept away when the proletariat became the majority in a given country and direcdy abolished private property as such.

Bakunin also continued to recognize the right to the private ownership of land (a Proudhonist precept), which, he maintained, would finally disappear only when inherited property reverted to the community. It seems very likely that, while personally supporting the abolition of private property, he camouflaged his antipropnetarian views (which conflicted with Proudhon) in order to avoid antagonizing the peasantry and possibly his artisan supporters. Once again, Marx argued that land ownership would necessarily be abolished along with all private property. Indeed, capitalism, Marx held, would eventually eliminate nearly all preindustrial classes, or at least draw them into the orbit of the capitalist market. Hence only the proletariat would be capable of abolishing capitalist society, possibly with the aid of other oppressed strata.

These conflicts came into the open at the Basel Congress of 1869, where Bakunin and his supporters made the abolition of inheritance “the most hody contested issue” on the agenda, as G.D.H. Cole puts it.[530] After considerable debate, a plurality of the delegates voted in favor of Bakunin’s position, but they failed to acquire the absolute majority that was necessary for the position to be officially adopted by the International. The respective supporters of Marx and Bakunin now girded themselves for a bitter confrontation at the next congress—but only two weeks before the 1870 congress was to convene, Louis Napoleon was provoked into declaring war against Prussia.

History, as it were, now intervened to push the International to the background, for searing events not only rendered all abstract theoretical discussions academic, they led to the creation of the Paris Commune of 1871, an uprising that was to acquire legendary proportions in the history of Marxism and anarchism alike.