Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

CHAPTER 5

Marx, Bakunin and
the International

The most immediate difference between Marx’s dispute with Bakunin
and his earlier attacks on Proudhon and Stirner is that it took place
within an institutional setting. It was not the only political dispute
that animated the International, but it was the most fundamental
dispute of its kind in the history of this body, since what was at stake
in it was not just the doctrinal superiority of one or another set of
propositions but the shape, and the future, of the International itself.
Proudhonists as well as Bakuninists attempted to use the International
as a platform, even though Proudhonism did not fare too well and had
effectively burned itself out by the time of Bakunin’s entry. The
transition, if we may so characterize it, from Proudhonism to Bakuninism

• 
  the two, as we shall see, were very different forms of anarchism -
  raised the stakes of any possible conflict. The shift was from a form of
  doctrine having some vague and, as far as Marx was concerned, irksome
  appeal, mainly among some French Internationalists, to an anarchist
  movement having a considerable, and widespread, appeal across national
  boundaries.
  

Marx and Bakunin each joined the International, a body that was
instituted by, and in the name of, neither of them, for broadly similar
reasons. Each of them saw in the International a readily available
platform and base of operations; and this - whatever the intentions of
its non-Marxist, non-anarchist founders - is, inter alia, what it became.
Marxism and Bakuninism alike were to owe a great deal to the Inter-
national; it provided them both with a medium of existence, and a
forum where points of doctrine could be set out and - as it happened

• 
  bitterly disputed. The doctrines in question were, in a word, no
  longer merely doctrinal; they came to have directly political implications
  and ramifications since the rivalry between them called into question
  the raison d’etre of the International itself. Without Bakunin, it has
  rightly been pointed out, ‘anarchism would have existed, but perhaps
  not an anarchist movement as such’;¹ what needs adding is that without
  the International the anarchist movement might have taken a very differ-
  ent, and much less potent, form. Much as Marx used the International
  

to create what we today know as Marxism, Bakunin succeeded in
using the International to create Bakuninism and, by extension, to
bring into being anarchism as a revolutionary social movement.

There is something extraordinary about the International’s double
service - both to Marx and to Bakunin; we know, with the benefit of
hindsight, that no institutional setting, whatever its form, could long
have survived as a vehicle for both Marxism and Bakuninism. We
know, from our own vantage point, that ‘the bubble’, as Engels was
to put it, after the event, ‘was bound to burst’. Yet hindsight is not all
benefit; it can mislead; and it might make us forget that the reasons
why the ‘bubble’ burst and the reasons why Marx and Bakunin were
at loggerheads are different. That each had a bearing on the other is
not in dispute; but we should remember that the International was
something more than a trampoline for Marx and Bakunin’s various
doctrinal gymnastics. This recognition suggests that it is too easy to
explain the de facto demise of the International in 1872, eight years
after its foundation, as being in some way the inevitable outcome of
the Marx-Bakunin dispute - even though a remarkable number of
subsequent accounts proceed on such an assumption of inevitability.
The demise of the International, which really took the form of its
fragmentation, was occasioned by events over which neither Marx
nor Bakunin had any control, events which cannot be reduced to, or
explained by, the hostility between the two.

The most important of these events, the Paris Commune of 1871,
was neither a Marxist nor a Bakuninist initiative. Neither Marxists nor
Bakuninists played any significant role in it - although both groups
could scarcely have avoided claiming some subsequent credit for so
celebrated and (as it seemed) so forward looking a revolutionary
uprising. Marx, after all, was not alone in regarding the Commune as
the ‘glorious harbinger of a new society’.² Marx, Bakunin and others
wished to glory in various ways in the Commune (a wish that was by
no means shared by all their fellow Internationalists); yet they owed
more to the Commune than the Commune owed to either of them.
The extent of the Commune’s debt to various Internationalists, in and
out of Paris, is disputed; that the International was far less important
to the Commune than was the Commune - and its defeat - to the
International is, on the other hand, indisputable.

The wave of counter-revolutionary reaction that came in the wake of
the savage repression of the Commune - a minor White Terror that was
in no way restricted to France - was one that threatened to engulf the
International; this threat to its continued existence came at a time
when the International was already weakened by the divisive effects of
the Marx-Bakunin dispute. That this dispute came to a head at the very
time when the International was most threatened from without certainly
made this newly beleaguered body less able to stand the strain. Yet the




strain in and of itself was considerable; that the International would
buckle under it was made more likely by the bitter dispute - a dispute
about fundamentals - between Marx and Bakunin. This dispute, which
does help explain why the International did not long survive the sup-
pression of the Commune, did not lead inevitably and inexorably,
however, to its collapse.

This said, it may be likely that an International run along Marxist
lines and an International run along Bakuninist lines would be incom-
patible enterprises; and it may be legitimate to infer such a conclusion
from the dispute between Marx and Bakunin (as did the disputants
themselves). Yet any such inference must remain conjectural, since
the International itself was neither ‘Marxist’ nor ‘Bakuninist’. It con-
tained a powerful Marxist tendency and a growing Bakuninist movement
that threatened to displace it; but these groups existed alongside many
others which were just as characteristic of the kind of organization the
International was, but which by the same token were by no means
reducible either to Marxism or Bakuninism. It is a point of some
importance that what came later to be known as the First International
was in one crucial respect quite different from subsequent Internationals:
it was not, and was never intended to be, an ideologically monolithic
body. It may seem disingenuous to insist upon this point since Marx
in the course of his dispute with the Bakuninists came perilously close
to making the International homogeneous and doctrinally monolithic,
doing much in this way to ensure that future Internationals would be
monolithic where the first was not. Yet this very qualification points
to a real difficulty. It is all too easy to assume that because subsequent
Internationals were ideological monoliths, what is important about the
First International is whatever monolithic tendencies it exhibited. Yet
this assumption is merely a variant of the post hoc ergo propter hoc
fallacy, a confusion of the subsequent with the consequent; it can lead
us to read back the present into the past, later outcomes into earlier
developments.

What we need to do in order to understand the conflict between
Marx and Bakunin, however, is to resist this easy assumption and
attempt to respect the intentions of the actors involved, together with
their own understandings of what they were doing and why they were
doing it, rather than pre-judging them in the light of subsequent events.
To say this is not to insist that we close our eyes to questions of where
the dispute between Marx and Bakunin was to lead; to do so would
itself be a disservice to these protagonists, who were themselves aware
that the issues involved in their arguments would outlive them. The
point is, however, that our awareness, at this remove, of the longevity
of these issues, their continuity from the 1860s to our own time,
should not be allowed to distort our view of how and why they came
originally to be raised. Yet remaining on our guard is easier said than




done in the case of this debate, because of the very nature of its issues.
Bakunin’s accusations about Marx’s autocratic tendencies appear to
have a certain prima facie validity because of the autocratic tendencies
we all know existed in subsequent communist movements. To read
these subsequent tendencies back into Marx’s dispute with Bakunin
is, however, to beg too many questions. Similar questions are begged
by all too many commentaries on the dispute, which abound, in many
cases, in ahistorical judgments of the most egregious kind. Commen-
tators who take it upon themselves to applaud Bakunin’s ‘perception’
of ‘techno-bureaucratic’ tendencies among the European proletariat³
are a case in point - though admittedly an extreme one.

It may be true that Bakunin in a sense was remarkably prescient, or
(if you will) prophetic about what might defuse revolutionary sentiment
among proletarians, and what might undercut revolutionary potential
in proletarian political organizations; his disputes with Marx provide
the seeker with a veritable storehouse of quotations that can be used
to point up this moral.⁴ In similar vein, it may be true that Bakunin’s
comments about the International in some ways foreshadow later
analyses of working-class political movements that were to stress ‘the
iron law of oligarchy’⁵ and the like. Yet in appraising these comments
we would do well to bear in mind that Bakunin himself was faced with
a proletariat in the 1860s and 1870s that was not even united, let alone
characterized by ‘oligarchic’ or, worse still, ‘techno-bureaucratic’
tendencies. Likewise, Bakunin’s persistent, indeed obsessive, complaints
about what he insisted were ‘dictatorial’ powers exercised by the
General Council of the International, a ‘pan-German agency’, or so he
would describe it ‘guided by a brain like Bismarck’s’ - these protestations
should not be torn from their context in order to provide a ‘prophetic’
critique-in-advance of Leninist democratic centralism, or what you will;
they should be arrayed alongside the real powers the General Council
can be seen to have enjoyed (which conspicuously did not include the
power to stifle Bakunin). If this is done, many of Bakunin’s most
characteristic judgments will emerge not as remarkable prophecies but
as wilful exaggerations, or even fantasies.

Even though the point here is not to declare any premature parti
pris in the Marx-Bakunin dispute - Marx, too, was quite capable, and
guilty, of wilful, malicious misapprehension of his antagonist’s positions
- some imaginary Bakuninist interlocutor might protest that Bakunin’s
objections to the General Council were, at base, objections to Marx’s
presence on it (as indeed they were, as the reference to Bismarck
indicates) and that Marx did prove himself capable in the heat of battle
of acting in a high-handed ‘authoritarian’ manner. This protest, as far
as it goes, is true; but, unless we assume (with Bakunin) that Marx had
an ‘authoritarian’ temperament that ‘explains’ his actions, and which,
running up against Bakunin’s ‘anti-authoritarian’ temperament, made




‘conflict’ inevitable - an assumption that begs so many questions it
explains nothing at all - the question that arises is why Marx acted in
an ‘authoritarian’ manner when he acted in an ‘authoritarian’ manner
The point here is not a trivial one, for if we examine Marx’s dispute
with Bakunin with this question in mind, we discover something quite
striking. Each party’s perception of the other influenced the responses
of the other in a certain way. As the dispute intensifies, Marx comes
to entertain a view of Bakunin as someone capable only of wrecking
the International because of his obstinate adherence to certain ill-
founded beliefs about the kind of body it ought to become. Bakunin,
conversely, comes to entertain a view of Marx as being someone capable
only of arrogating to himself certain powers and of ruling the Inter-
national in so dictatorial a manner that by its very ‘command-response’
structure the organization contradicts, and cannot avoid contradicting,
its goal, which is that of emancipation from illegitimate demands of
this, or any other, type.

Once the antagonists’ opinion of each other is formed, and as the
conflict between the two antagonists reaches its apogee, Marx tends
to act just as Bakunin ‘knew all along’ he would act, and Bakunin, too,
tends increasingly to act just as Marx ‘knew all along’ he would act. It
is as though, in a confrontation having its dramatic aspects, each actor
played out the role the other had in mind for him; or, along the lines
of a psychodrama, it is as though each protagonist acted out the other’s
nightmare. Marx acted - or, what is more to the point, seemed to
Bakunin to be acting - in such a way as to confirm and reconfirm
Bakunin’s worst suspicions and most horrible imaginings; in so doing
he in a sense became what Bakunin suspected him of being all along.
Bakunin, for his part, acted in such a way, or seemed to Marx to be
acting in such a way, as to confirm - and in Marx’s eyes to validate -
Marx’s worst suspicions of him, so that he too became, or turned into,
his antagonist’s version of him. In this way each side’s misgivings about
the other became progressively confirmed, in a kind of spiral of sus-
picion and confirmation. The effect of each twist in the spiral was to
reinforce a position deja prise; each antagonist acted or appeared to
act in such a way as to validate his counterpart’s view of him.

This view of the dispute is not designed to detract from the import-
ance of the issues involved in it, but merely to help account for the way
or ways these issues were seen by the protagonists. It also helps account
for mistakes that they made. What runs through E.H. Carr’s biography
of Bakunin in its account⁶ - an important source - of the debate with
Marx is the idea, which is really an unexamined proposition, that each
side in the dispute was at all stages quite straightforwardly, and deliber-
ately, plotting against the other, plotting as though full foreknowledge
of the outcome of each and every move could have been appraised. Yet
neither antagonist had, or could have had, the kind of foreknowledge




that Carr (who in this is not alone) in effect ascribes to them. Both
made serious mistakes (which neither would subsequently admit). The
idea that Bakunin’s dealings with the International reveal a single-
minded and ‘Machiavellian’ pursuit of power, with its concomitants
of seizing the main chance and exquisitely timed treachery, is quite
unwarranted (although it could be derived from some of Marx’s com-
ments about him, taken at face value). There seem to have been times
when Bakunin presumably would have benefited from greater ruthless-
ness; yet even though he was an extraordinarily manipulative man-an
‘operator’, as we now say - with a marked taste for conspiracy, his
conspiracies often failed ignominiously. Had Bakunin really been the
arch-conspirator of legend he would not have voted, for instance, for an
extension of the powers of the General Council at the Congress of
Basel in 1869; he would not have permitted the Italian socialists to
hold back all their delegates from the International’s Congress at The
Hague in 1872, an oversight he could have avoided which probably
cost him his majority there; and he would not have stayed away from
the Hague himself. All such examples, which along with similar blunders
on Marx’s part will be dealt with more fully in their proper place,
should serve to remind us that the dispute between Marx and Bakunin
- which can be reduced neither to the ‘temperament’ of the protagonists
nor to ultimate effects of which they could have known nothing - was
a political dispute, a dispute in which penalties were paid, in short
order, for mistakes made and in which each main participant’s way of
viewing his rival played its part in helping along the eventual outcome.

Two points are important, then, in what follows - which is intended
not as an adequate institutional history of the International⁷ but as an
interpretation of some of its main events. First, the International
should be regarded as neither ‘Marxist’ nor ‘Bakuninist’ tout court but
as something more than a mere framework for the Marx-Bakunin
dispute. This dispute was in large part a dispute about the International;
what was immediately at stake was the shape, form and future of the
International itself. The protagonists in the dispute had something in
common over and above their respective desires for power in, and
influence over, the International; the protagonists became counterparts
in that each acted like the other’s version of him. These points might
be taken to suggest that the Marx-Bakunin dispute was in some way
symmetrical, but such a suggestion should be resisted vigorously. Both
protagonists may have wanted to use the International in what were,
at base, similar ways; but the International Bakunin was to confront
in 1868-9 was an already established entity, and as such was very
different from the International Marx had encountered, in statu nas-
cendi, four years earlier. The point here is not simply that in 1864,
unlike 1868-9, the International had yet to be given shape; it is that
the shape the International was given - under the guiding influence




of Marx - permitted and facilitated not only Bakunin’s entry but also
the creation of Bakuninism as a revolutionary doctrine and movement.
We are dealing, then, with what was an unintended consequence and,
in what follows, with whether it could (and should) have been avoided.

The International before Bakunin

0 what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,

Is promised to the studious artisan!

Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, I, 53-5

The International Working Men’s Association was set up in 1864 by
trade unionists, but not as a purely trade union body. The first point
of its statutes attests:

This Association was founded in order to create a central means
of unity and co-operation between the associations of workers
which already exist in the various countries and aim at the same
goal, namely, the protection, the rise, and the complete emanci-
pation of the working class.⁸

It is a point of some importance that this goal was conceived as a
political goal from the very beginning; it is likely that its political
character, along with the International’s non-sectarianism, was instru-
mental in persuading Marx to participate as actively as he did.

This means that to consider the International purely as a defensive
trade unionist, or ouvrierist, association is to seriously misprize its
nature. Proudhonist attempts to exclude non-workers were given short
shrift; and it is easily pointed out that as a trade unionist body the
International was neither representative nor particularly effective.
The International, in Cole’s words, ‘gave some help in strikes both by
collecting money and by preventing the transport of strike-breakers
across national frontiers; but beyond this it could do little to guide
the course of events’. It is true, too, that ‘the course of trade union
development in both Great Britain and France, and also Belgium, can
be explained without much reference to the International’.⁹ The
reasons why this is so have to do with the International’s working-class
base. The French labour leaders who were to be important figures in
the International, and whose broadly Proudhonist sympathies are not
to be wondered at, Tolain, Limousin, Fribourg, Varlin and Dupont,
were, respectively, a carver, a lace-works machinist, an engraver, a
bookbinder and a maker of musical instruments;¹⁰ Marx’s closest




associates, for a while, included Georg Eccarius, a German tailor, and
Hermann Jung, who was - the irony will become apparent - a Swiss
watchmaker; and even in England, ‘the metropolis of capital’ as Marx
called it, the International’s ‘trade union support was to come largely
from building unions and from such relatively backward industries as
tailoring, clothing, shoemaking and cabinet-making. In mining, engin-
eering and heavy industry generally, its strength was small or non-
existent’.¹¹

Something other than its industrial base, then, must have commended
the International to Marx; indeed there was another, more political
reason why the new International could scarcely have appeared forward-
looking. The Association came into being as the outcome of a visit to
the International Exhibition in London, in 1862, of a delegation of
French workers. This delegation, though elected, was nevertheless
subsidized by the government of Louis Bonaparte, no doubt

with the idea that they would return [to Paris] impressed
by the moderation and good sense of the New Unionists and
Co-operators of the most advanced capitalist country in the
world, and in a mood to discard the revolutionary traditions
which still lived on in the underground sentiment of French
working-class society.¹²

While these workers stole the march on their sponsors by exceeding
their brief, they did so - immediately, at any rate - only up to a point:
their English counterparts from the London Trades Council were
themselves no firebrands. Yet the internationalist initiatives taken by
the London Trades Council, initiatives taken in the direction of radical
democracy rather than revolutionary socialism, meant that the bound-
aries between narrowly trade unionist and more broadly political
activity and agitation had been crossed in England, and a precedent
for the International had been set. That these developments had taken
place in England gives us one essential clue to the nature of the Inter-
national. The freedom of manoeuvre that was enjoyed by politically
minded trade union leaders in London was a freedom enjoyed also by
the numerous continental political refugees, quarante-huitards and
others, who were languishing there, and who tended to be more radical
(and less patient) than the English. Many of these emigres, who had
been marking time since 1848, were to find (at last) some focus for
their energies in the new International.

Among these refugees was, of course, Marx; yet the point needs
reiterating that the International at its inception in 1864 was in no way
Marx’s idea and (later accusations notwithstanding) not even his creation.
Marx’s commitment to the principle of international proletarian organ-
ization, ever since the days of the League of the Just, had been marked.




(The extent to which he had sought to sustain this commitment among
what was a bewildering array of emigre political associations in London
is, however, disputed.) As the former head of the Communist League
and the co-author of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx
could certainly claim some share in the background to the International,
although he did none of the ground-work setting it up. He was invited
to join, and accepted with alacrity; he found himself almost immediately
engaged in policy making. The reasons for Marx’s eagerness are not hard
to see; he was in no way blind to the limited working-class base of the
Association or to the suspiciously Proudhonist leanings of its French
avatars; what outweighed such unwanted features was something more
than the opportunity for action. Having long been isolated from what
he called the ‘real “forces"’ (‘wirkliche “Krafte”’)¹³ of the labour
movement of any country, Marx applauded what he saw, rightly enough,
as an independent, non-sectarian initiative in the direction of working-
class internationalism; henceforward he was to devote a great deal of
time and effort - which, interestingly, coincided with a tremendous
burst of intellectual work on his part¹⁴ - in its cause. He did so, as he
wrote to Joseph Weydermeyer, because ‘it involved a matter where it
was possible to do some important work’.¹⁵ Work that would be
international in its scope always seemed important to Marx; the strength
and depth of his commitment to international proletarian organization
cannot be overemphasized. What pervades Marx’s writings and career
as a revolutionist alike is his recognition that any proletarian revolution
confined within national boundaries would be doomed to failure if, as
often seemed likely, surrounding or adjacent nations remained capitalist.
This conviction of the impossibility of a restricted proletarian revol-
ution, which, of course, had as its corollary a stress on the fundamental
importance of international organization, explains why Marx set such
great store by 1848, which looked like an international uprising if ever
there was one; it also explains why Marx, later in his career, discounted
the possibility of a purely Russian revolution. He did so for the same
reason that he discounted the possibility of a purely French revolution
in the nineteenth century: that the universalizing tendencies of the
expansionist capitalist mode of production would make the survival
of isolated revolutionary regimes unlikely. The beliefs Marx expressed
at different stages of his career that an uprising in Ireland might spark
off a revolution in England, or an uprising in Russia sound the tocsin
for a revolution in Western Europe (which alone, he thought, could
ensure the survival of a revolutionary regime in Russia)-these, too, are
expressions of Marx’s fundamentally internationalist beliefs, beliefs
which all too rarely were permitted actual, institutional expression.¹⁶

To remind ourselves of these beliefs and their bearing is to see more
clearly why Marx set such store by the International, even though not
all its features could have augured well in his eyes. None of the groups




who were responsible for setting up the International - all of which
(with the exception of the Mazzinians) were to continue to coexist
uneasily within it - set out to endear themselves to Marx; and the
International itself was to founder, a mere eight years after its foun-
dation, in the midst of the kind of sectarian strife Marx had hoped
(perhaps unrealistically) it could avoid, or transcend. Yet the gamble
seemed to Marx to be one worth taking. He anticipated that the Inter-
national, however unlikely its form, might become the vehicle for, and
the embodiment of, class consciousness among the workers. Events -
events over which he could have had no real control - were to prove
Marx wrong; yet however ill-founded Marx’s hopes and expectations
may have turned out to be, the fact that they were entertained, put
forward and acted upon has much to tell us about what Marx meant
by proletarian class consciousness. The authors of one of the few
political biographies that pays adequate attention to his activities in
the International lean rather too far, in their account, in Marx’s direc-
tion; yet Nicholaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen’s assessment - which is
really a paraphrase - of the tasks Marx set himself in and around 1864
is of considerable interest, for it helps tell us what is involved in a
Marxist politics. Marx, they say, aimed

to help [the International], to bring it to awareness and
theoretical comprehension of what it must do and the
experiences through which it must pass... He avoided giving
prescriptions. This does not of course mean that he let things
take their own course. What he did rather was to help every
movement to get clear about itself, to come to an understanding
of the connections between its particular interests and the
whole, of how its special aims could not only be realized by the
realization of the demands of the whole class, by the complete
emancipation of the proletariat.¹⁷

This estimation is an assessment of Marx’s aims, not (as we shall see)
of his accomplishments; as such, it differs radically from later Bakuninist
accounts of Marx’s motives - not least because it comes closer to
recognizing the limits to what Marx could have been expected to
accomplish - and it raises some key problems of a Marxist politics.
What was at issue was the conversion - which cannot be reduced to
indoctrination - of the proletariat from the status of Klasse an sich to
the status of Klasse fur sich. (It is too often overlooked that this
distinction, made in The Poverty of Philosophy, can also be inferred
from Marx’s career as a revolutionist.) The assumption that the Inter-
national stood at a point of juncture between the two, between the
class in itself and the class for itself, may in retrospect seem a curious
one; what needs to be remembered, however, is that this unlikely


vehicle was the only one available, as Marx himself seems to have
recognized.

What, then, does the conversion of a Klasse an sich to the status of
a Klasse fur sich actually involve? Marx had reasoned, prior to 1864, that
mere numbers might be an insufficient criterion of revolutionary success.
It is frequently forgotten that in the 1847-8 period Marx pressed not
for capitalist industrialization in Germany (which would have swelled
the ranks of the German proletariat) but for a proletarian uprising;
even though the German proletariat was at the time not at all numeri-
cally strong, Marx argued in The Manifesto of the Communist Party
that German workers could make up for their numerical insufficiency
by their theoretical and organizational clear-headedness. What this
means is that a social class, if it is to become a revolutionary class
capable of undermining the conditions that constrain its existence and
its development, must be more than an objectively determined class in
itself (an sich), to be characterized by the sheer numerical strength of
a head-count. It must become a class for itself (fur sich) by attaining
consciousness of itself, its history, its placement, its potential. Marx,
arguing (not least in the Manifesto) on the basis of his assessment of
the growth of the bourgeoisie within the feudal society it eventually
outgrew and overthrew, believed that any properly revolutionary class
must complement its objective placement within the overall line-up and
deployment of social forces with a subjective understanding of itself:
of its own position, background, strength and, above all, of the futurity
it embodies.

Any social class can be said and shown to be objectively determined,
up to a point, in its placement within the overall mode of production or
within the balance (or imbalance) of forces within a given society. Such
objective placement may not, however, be crucial to the chances of any
revolutionary success. Mechanistic metaphors about the objective
balance of forces cease to apply at a certain pivotal point in the case of
a forward looking, well informed revolutionary class; objective place-
ment needs to be complemented by subjective understanding if revol-
ution is to be successful and thoroughgoing. The difference is between
position and positioning. The objective position of a class may guarantee
nothing about revolutionary success; its subjective positioning may
make all the difference to its chances. To put the same point another
way, at the point of transition between one form of society and another,
at what Marx called in his letter to Proudhon the ‘moment of action’,
conditions, however ‘objective’ they may be, have to be acted upon,
and contradictions, however objective they may be, have to be per-
ceived and appraised as such; these perceptions in their turn must be
acted upon if revolutionary change of a thoroughgoing kind is to
ensue.

What is involved in the transformation of the proletariat from


being merely a Klassean sich, defined ‘objectively’ as a group of persons
sharing a certain position within the prevailing mode of production, to
the status of Klasse fur sich, is a certain collective self-transformation.
This transformation entails a comprehension of the conditions of
existence for the class, together with an appraisal of how they are to
be changed; it entails an inner transformation, a drawing together, the
creation of bonds among members of the class in such a way that
communality of interest and concern - a communality that is not
mechanistic or numerical but which is organic - can emerge, and can
be put to work. All this is to say that the transformation in question
is political transformation, and the task of helping bring it about -
which is the task Marx set for himself in 1864 - is a political task. It is
also a task that is subject to political limitations, since the change in
question is not one that can be induced or dispensed from without.
Later Bakuninist accusations that Marx ‘indoctrinated’ the General
Council and from thence attempted, in an ‘authoritarian’ manner, to
‘indoctrinate’ the International as a whole can be shown to be, at
best, insufficient as an account of what happened during the years of
the International. They are also radically insufficient as an account of
Marx’s intentions, of what he thought he could do, when he joined
the International. Marx took it upon himself to try and act as an
agent of change, a catalyst, if you will; yet he was aware that the only
change that might matter, the transformation of a class in itself to a
class for itself, is the kind of change in attitudes, in beliefs, in con-
victions and in knowledge, that cannot be reduced to mere ‘indoctri-
nation’ and that cannot be imposed from without.

As Marx himself put it in his ‘Inaugural Address’, efforts that were
by 1864 being made in various countries ‘at the political reorganization
of the working men’s party’ possessed ‘one element of success. . .num-
bers; but numbers weigh only in the balance if united by combination
and led by knowledge’. This meant that the other elements or pre-
requisites of success were to be organizational or political:

Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of
brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of
different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each
other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised
by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts.

As this statement from his ‘Inaugural Address’ indicates, Marx was
under no illusions about the heterogeneity of the new International.
Although this heterogeneity showed signs that it might develop into
the kind of socialist sectarianism Marx abhorred, awareness of these
dangers seems to have deterred Marx not one whit. He launched him-
self into busy, indeed feverish, activity; he was persuaded (and more




than willing) to write not only the ‘Inaugural Address’ but also the
Rules of the International, together with the ‘Preamble’ to them. All
of these are important sources for an understanding of Marxist politics;
and Marx, in composing them with the kind of dedication that was not
to slacken during the existence of the International, to all appearances
was under no illusions about some of the fellow Internationalists with
whom he would have to deal. He admitted in the privacy of a letter to
Engels that in the composition of these documents it was

very difficult for [him] to phrase matters in such a way that our
own opinions would be [put forward] in a form that is acceptable
to the present point of view of the labour movement. In a few
weeks these same people [the English Internationalists] will
hold meetings with Cobden and Bright to obtain the right to
vote. It will take some time before the re-awakened movement
will be in a position to use the bold language of yore. What is
needed here is fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. . ,¹⁹

Engels, who as usual considered that the errant Marx would have been
more gainfully employed completing his Critique of Political Economy,
admitted in his reply that Marx’s ‘Inaugural Address’ should be a
veritable feat (‘muss ein wahres Kunststiick sein’) and added that ‘it is
all to the good that we are once more in contact with people who at
least are representative of their class’.²⁰

Yet, of course, it was their very representativeness that created the
difficulties. To see this, we need only look at who was being represented.
The committee elected to draft the International’s programme and
statutes had all of fifty-five members: Chartists, Owenites, Blanquists,
Proudhonists, Mazzinians and Polish radical democrats - people who
could hardly have been expected to agree about anything. Marx con-
trived to have the task of drafting the Rules and the ‘Preamble’ referred
to a sub-committee (and, eventually, to himself); they emerged in the
form of a lowest common denominator. Indeed, the ‘Inaugural Address’
Marx delivered, as well as the Rules and their ‘Preamble’ he was instru-
mental in drawing up - the three are best considered together - were not
attempts to set his own imprint on the nascent movement. Such a move
would have been either impossible or self-destructive. They were
exercises in accommodation and compromise, skills in which Marx
(whatever his private convictions or ‘temperament’) was to become
proficient, at least until the entry of Bakunin into the International.
Marx’s earliest written contributions to the International, which was
the kind of body he could not have taken under his wing even if he
had wanted to do so, took the form of attempts not to displease
rather than efforts to please, let alone convince or indoctrinate. Any
sentiments of superiority he may have had Marx was careful to restrict




to his letters. (‘I was obliged to insert two phrases about “duty” and
“right” into the “Preamble” to the Rules, ditto about “truth, morality
and justice” \ Marx confided to Engels, ‘but these are placed in such
a way that they can do little harm.’)²¹

It should not surprise us that the ‘Address’ was indeed gentle in
style (suaviter in modo). Marx was even successfully prevailed upon to
delete from it a derogatory reference to ‘profit-mongers’. It emerged as
a measured, cautious delivery, making no mention of so contentious an
issue as socialization of the means of production, an idea which ‘hardly
presented itself as an issue’. Marx, in Cole’s well-judged words, ‘could
not have come out as a collectivist without wrecking the International
at the very start’;²² indeed, he could not have got away with even
‘centralization’, a term that was anathema to the Proudhonists and
which consequently was omitted from the ‘Address’ altogether. Its
absence helps explain why even Bakunin later admitted admiring the
‘Address’.²³ Marx privately described the ‘Address’ as containing ‘a
sort of review of the adventures of the working class since 1845’.²⁴
Its point d’appui was the uncontentious thesis of the ‘ever-widening
gap’²⁵ between the wealth produced by modern industry and the
poverty of the working classes; Marx also brought into play what he
called the ‘solidarity of defeat’ that had united the English and the
Continental working classes, albeit negatively, after the dispersal
following 1848. He took care to add that a victory of the British
working class over the bourgeoisie had been embodied in the Ten
Hours Act which ‘was not only a great political success; it was the
victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight
the political economy of the middle class had succumbed to the political
economy of the working class’. Moreover, ‘there was in store a still
greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political
economy of property. . .the co-operative movement’. Co-operation
foreshadowed the disappearance of ‘a class of masters employing a class
of hands’ at the workplace. ‘Hired labour’, Marx went on, with no
small flourish, ‘is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disap-
pear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready
mind, and a joyous heart.’

Yet no co-operative measure - and by extension no purely economic
solution - would in and of itself be sufficient to emancipate the working
class; there was need also for political action at the national (and
international) level if any new industrial order were to be brought into
being and kept in being. ‘National means’, Marx argued - fatefully, as
it turned out - are necessary to develop co-operative labour to national
dimensions; and because ‘the lords of land and the lords of capital will
always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of
their economical monopolies. . . [to] conquer political power has there-
fore become the great duty of the working class’. This was a conclusion




the Bakuninists were bitterly to oppose, as we shall have ample oppor-
tunity to see; more immediately, however, it was a conclusion to a
chain of reasoning that the Proudhonists were quick to resist. Marx,
who knew full well that they would do so, was more immediately
concerned with Lassalleanism; his official capacity was as representative
of the German workers, and it was not yet clear how small a role the
Germans were themselves to play in the International.²⁶ Marx’s side-
long glances at Germany are evident throughout the ‘Address’. In
praising producers’ co-operatives he took care to single out ‘cooperative
factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands” ’ - a
word to the wise - and to insist that trade union movements had a
positive and indeed vital role to plry as instruments of political edu-
cation. Both positions were hits at the Lassallean ‘iron law of wages’
which entailed what Marx considered a dogmatic belief that trade
union activity was a waste of time (since the level of real wages falls
with every rise in money wages), and an equally dogmatic belief that
producers’ co-operatives, to survive, needed a heavy dose of state aid -
regardless, of course, of the form taken by the state in question.

Marx’s hostility, in the ‘Address’ as elsewhere, to Lassallean statism
should remind us that his understanding of the conquest of political
power - however deliberately ambiguous this phrase may have been in
the context of the ‘Address’ - differed fundamentally from, and was
much more expansive than, Lassalle’s. Bakunin’s later accusations -
he was fond of comparing Marx with Bismarck - were intended to
conflate the two; that such a confusion, be it deliberate or not, cannot
withstand examination is an important point to be discussed in its
proper place. What is of more immediate importance is that Marx’s
‘Address’, emphasizing as it did the conquest of political power as ‘the
great duty of the working class’, could not avoid alienating the Proud-
honists (although it left the Blanquists and the English unruffled by
virtue of its ambiguity). Similarly, Marx’s spirited defence of trade
unions of the kind that go on strike - which in a sense was made necess-
ary by the fact that all of the English Internationalists belonged to such
unions - was bound to antagonize the Proudhonists. Not all of them
continued to share their master’s belief that strikes were barbarous
(though some did); few actually advocated such extreme measures,
however, even after Louis Bonaparte finally legalized strikes in 1864.
On the face of things, Marx’s ‘Address’ seems to rub salt into Proud-
honist wounds in emphasizing the wrongs suffered by the Poles at the
hands of the Russians; but this emphasis, too, is something that could
scarcely have been avoided in the presence of Polish delegates and in
an atmosphere of widespread sympathy (except among the Proud-
honists) for their cause, a sympathy which Marx quite genuinely
shared.

It was impossible to please everybody, and predictable enough that




if any single group was to be selected as whipping-boy it would be the
Proudhonists, not simply because of Marx’s pronounced contempt for
Proudhon - initially, at any rate, he seems not to have despised individ-
ual French Proudhonists nearly as much - but also because of the
peculiarity of some of their inherited positions. In the wake of the
London Trades Council’s spirited and influential defence of the Union
in the American Civil War, for example, it would have been impossible
for Marx not to have voiced similar anti-slavery sentiments, even
though Proudhon had stretched his dislike of centralization to cover
support of the slave South. Marx’s ‘Address’ was well received among
the English Internationalists, who were trade unionists to a man and
proud - rightly proud, as Marx himself acknowledged²⁷ - of their
internationalist record in progressive, democratic causes; but by the
same token the Proudhonists were less captivated. Yet Marx, in David
Fernbach’s words, had ‘proved himself a friend of the English workers,
and this alliance provided the political centre of the International up
to the split of 1871 -2’.²⁸

This alliance, central though it was, had its curious features. It
could work, as ballast (so to speak) or as a base of operations from
which other adherents - the Germans, the Swiss, the Belgians, the
non-Proudhonist French - could be won only if Marx was correct in
his belief that England represented to these other countries the face
of the future. Yet this belief - that ‘with local colours changed, and on
a scale somewhat contracted, the English facts reproduce themselves
in all the industrious and progressive countries of the continent’ - was
in fact, as Collins and Abramsky point out, ‘a dangerous oversimplifi-
cation for which Marx was to pay dearly’.²⁹ His own commitment to
this predictive scheme was not in doubt; he repeated it in the ‘Preface’
to the first German edition of Capital, volume i;³⁰ yet it was this very
proposition that the growth of Bakuninism in Switzerland, in France,
in Italy and in Spain was to call into question, and indeed disprove.

Marx nevertheless made it the cornerstone of his strategy, which
was one of working outwards from a secure, English base. This strategy
rested, however, on an oddity in the International’s organizational
structure. The IWMA was not a federation either of political parties
(as the Second International was to be) or of trade unions (attempts
to exclude non-manual workers always met with resistance). Its basic
unit was the individual member, whatever his class background or
political or trade unionist connections, who would join a branch or
section. These in turn were linked to the General Council, though
usually not directly; in all countries except England, a National Federal
Council operated as an intermediary, or as what Bagehot would call in
another connection a ‘buckle’. The English Internationalists believed
that any such intermediary council would be redundant in England, as
long as the General Council remained in London (which it did until




1872); so the General Council in effect served a dual role, that of
co-ordinating centre for the International as a whole and as British
National Federal Council. The importance of this organizational acci-
dent - in the maintenance of which Marx came to have a vested interest
- can be illustrated by two controversies. At the Congress at The
Hague in 1872 Marx and Engels were driven to destroy the Inter-
national by the radically simple expedient of proposing that the seat
of the General Council be shifted from London to New York. Slightly
earlier, a dispute, about whether a National Federal Council should be
set up for England - alongside the General Council - had served to
indicate that Marx’s hitherto trouble-free alliance with the English
Internationalists was effectively at an end.³¹ Until then, English trade
unionists (and, to a lesser extent, emigres like Marx himself) were
represented disproportionately at the highest level of the International.
It is unsurprising that such disproportion, which was reflected in policy
making, became a politically charged issue, most particularly once the
International had begun to expand into previously uncharted territory,
by the agency of Bakunin.

Marx’s English alliance, with doughty trade unionists of an unim-
peachably reformist disposition, had its limits. Marx could count on
their support, in large part because these Internationalists were interested
only in an extension of the suffrage (abroad as well as at home) along
with the bread-and-butter issues of straightforward trade unionism. It
is only a slight exaggeration to say, with Raymond Postgate, that the
English members of the General Council ‘were prepared to vote for any
political resolution, however, absurd; they regarded these debates as
mere exercises, not to be taken seriously’. One of them, George Howell,
wrote in a letter about the Inaugural Congress that ‘one of the seeds of
discord was sown at this first Congress, viz., the introduction of the
religious issue by Dr. Karl Marx. From this moment the discussions
have led to interminable debates on all kinds of abstract notions,
religious, political and socialistic.. .Whatever tendencies the Association
may now have,’ added Howell, blithely, ‘they did not form part of the
original programme, which a Gladstone or a Bright might have accepted
with a good conscience’.³²

Marx, faced with this kind of response - as he often was - on the
General Council, was constrained to work ‘behind the scenes’,³³ as he
himself put it. He seems to have done so with considerable skill and
patience; mentions of Marx at a congress - he attended only one - are
few and far between, and it is safe to say that in most sections of the
International his name was unknown. Yet he did exercise influence
over the General Council, of a kind that could have beert predicted,
and was foreseen, by no one in 1864. In drafting many official docu-
ments Marx succeeded in giving them a slant that was recognizably his
own, although all of them required the Council’s approval before they




could be published. The balance was in many ways a delicate one, and
Marx succeeded in treading it (for a while) by drafting the kind of
document that would get the maximum possible support but which
would also (and not at all incidentally) inch forward acceptance of his
own views. The ‘Inaugural Address’, the ‘Preamble’ and the Rules are
examples; the programme of the London delegates to the first Geneva
Congress in 1866 - to which we shall shortly have occasion to turn -
was another.

To what, though, do these examples point? At one level, Marx simply
and straightforwardly wished to help build up an organization of the
working class that would be appropriate to its strength in the various
countries represented, and if possible not to engage in doctrinal pol-
emics of the kind that (by reinforcing sectarian tendencies that were
very much in evidence) would short-circuit the whole enterprise. At
this level, Marx’s aims differed little, at base, from those of his fellow
Internationalists on the General Council. At another level, however,
Marx had aims of his own, about which he had to keep tight-lipped,
since they were shared by very few of his fellow Internationalists; his
prudent silence does betoken a certain manipulativeness, on which his
enemies were to seize. Yet we should not exaggerate what all this
restraint and sub rosa manipulation could have been expected to
achieve; it seems in practice to have amounted to not much more than
the insinuation of ambiguous phrases into policy documents. Such
underhandedness as these moves involved is certainly not the same
thing as indoctrination, which is something that could never have
worked. What needs to be put in the balance against later, Bakuninist
accusations of indoctrination is the fact that the General Council
refrained from making any common or theoretical programme binding
upon members and sections of the International before 1871, the year
before its de facto demise, and that up until then it ‘left complete
freedom to its various national sections as to the form their organ-
ization might take, and refrained from prescribing any definite methods
of conducting the struggle’.³⁴ Indeed, the International, which was
anything but a tightly organized body, could have survived in no other
way; its heterogeneity was its strength and its weakness. Nicholaevsky
and Maenchen-Helfen point out that the International

had no programme, if by programme is meant a single, concrete,
detailed system. Marx had intentionally made the statutes so
wide as to make it possible for all socialist groups to join. An
announcement in the spring of 1870 declared that it was not the
duty of the General Council to express a theoretical opinion on
the programme of individual sections. Its only duty was to see
that they contained nothing inconsistent with the letter and
spirit of the statutes.³⁵




- statutes which were themselves very broadly framed. One of the
beneficiaries of this latitude, as we shall soon see, was Bakunin himself.

The point here, however, is not to commend Marx for his restraint
(which is what Nicholaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen’s account sets out
to do) but to recognize that no other policy could have worked if the
International was not to be stillborn, or to fizzle out in its infancy.
Nicholaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen concede too much to Marx in
insisting that ‘the groundwork for all his labour was a profound belief
in the sound instinct of the proletarian mass movement’³⁶ (a perusal
of his letters of the period suggests a very different appraisal). Their
notion, again, that Marx ‘sought [the] basis [for agitation] in the forms
of the movement which life itself created’³⁷ is the kind of frequently
encountered partisan formulation that collapses under its own weight.
Nevertheless, these inflated claims to one side, Nicholaevsky and
Maenchen-Helfen are broadly right in their claim that Marx cast him-
self in the role of guide rather than layer down of the law, having
‘become convinced that great workers’ organizations, able to develop
freely within their own country, associated with the class movement
as a whole, would find the right way in the end, however much they
might vacillate and go astray’³⁸ on the way there. The arrant providen-
tialism of such an assessment was one that Marx evidently shared; the
irony is that while it sounds as though it could have come from Proud-
hon, it was Proudhon who (albeit posthumously) put it to its first
serious test.