Routledge Library Editions karl marx

472 KARL MARX

5. 
   The Second Conference in London
   

The conference which the General Council decided to call for September in London was intended to take the place of the annual congress which was about to fall due.

The congress in Basle in 1869 had decided that the next congress should take place in Paris, but the campaign of incitement which Ollivier organized against the French sections of the International to celebrate the plebiscite caused the General Council to use its authority to alter the venue of the congress, and in July 1870 it decided that the congress should be held in Mayence. At the same time the General Council proposed to the National Federations that its seat should be moved from London to some other place, but this proposal was unanimously rejected. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War made it impossible to hold the congress in Mayence and the Federations then instructed the General Council to convene the congress at its own discretion and in accordance with the circumstances of the moment.

The development of events made it appear undesirable to call the congress for the autumn of 1871. The pressure exerted on the members of the International in the various countries made it appear likely that they would not be able to send delegates to the congress as freely as was desirable, and that those few members who were able to attend the congress would be exposed to the visitations of their governments more than ever upon their return. The International was very unwilling to do anything which might increase the number of victims because it already had more than enough to do to assist its persecuted members, and this task made the greatest demands on its energies and its resources.

The General Council therefore decided that for the moment it would be better to call a private conference in London, similar to the one which had taken place in 1865, rather than a public congress. The poor attendance at this conference completely confirmed the misgivings of the General Council. The conference took place from the 17th to the 23rd of September and only 23 delegates were present, including six from Belgium, two from Switzerland and one from Spain. Thirteen members of the General Council were also present, but six of them had only advisory votes. Amongst the extensive and numerous decisions of the conference were a number dealing with working-class statistics, the international relations of the trade unions, and agriculture, which under the existing circumstances had only an academic significance. The chief tasks of the conference were




to defend the International against the furious attacks of the external enemy and to consolidate it against the elements which threatened to undermine it from within, tasks which, on the whole, coincided.

The most important decision of the conference referred to the political activity of the International. It appealed first of all to the Inaugural Address, the statutes, the decision of the Lausanne congress and other official announcements of the International declaring the political emancipation of the working class to be indissolubly bound up with its social emancipation, and then pointed out that the International was faced with a ruthless reaction which shamelessly suppressed every effort of the working class towards its emancipation and sought by brute force to perpetuate class differentiation indefinitely and the rule of the possessing classes based upon it. It declared that the working class could resist this violence offered to it by the ruling classes only by acting as a class, by constituting itself into a special political party against all the old party organizations of the possessing classes, that this constitution of the working class as a special political party was indispensable for the victory of the social revolution and its final aim, the abolition of all classes, and finally, that the unification of isolated forces which the working-class had already carried out up to a point by means of its economic forces must also be used as a weapon in the struggle against the political power of the exploiters. For all these reasons the conference reminded all members of the International that the economic movement and the political movement of the fighting working class were indissolubly connected.

In organizational matters the conference requested the General Council to limit the number of members which it co-opted and at the same time not to favour one nationality more than another. The title General Council was to apply exclusively to the General Council, the Federal Councils were to take their names according to the countries they represented and the local sections were to be known according to the name of their particular locality. The conference prohibited the use of any sectarian names such as Positivists, Mutualists, Collectivists and Communists. Every member of the International would continue, as previously decided, to pay one penny per year towards the support of the General Council.

For France the conference recommended vigorous agitation in the factories and the distribution of leaflets ; for England the formation of a special Federal Council to be confirmed by the General Council as soon as it had been recognized by the branches in the provinces and by the trade unions,; The conference declared




that the German workers had fulfilled their proletarian duty during the Franco-Prussian War, and it rejected all responsibility for the so-called Netchayeff conspiracy. At the same time it instructed Utin to prepare a resume of the Netchayeff process from Russian sources and to publish it in L'Egalites, but to present it for the approval of the General Council before publication.

The conference declared that the question of the Alliance was settled now that the Geneva section had voluntarily dissolved itself, and the adoption of sectarian names, indicating a special mission apart from the general aims of the International, had been prohibited. With regard to the Jura sections the conference confirmed the decision of the General Council of the 29th of June 1870 recognizing the Federal Council in Geneva as the only representative body for the Neo-Latin Swiss members, but at the same time it appealed to the spirit of unity and solidarity which must inspire the workers more than ever now that the International was being persecuted from all sides. It therefore advised the workers of the Jura sections to affiliate once again to the Federal Council in Geneva and suggested that if they found this impossible they should call themselves the Jura Federation. The conference also gave the General Council authority to disavow all alleged organs of the International which, like the Progress and the Solidarites in the Jura, discussed internal questions of the International before the bourgeois public.

Finally the conference left it to the discretion of the General Council to decide the time and place of the next congress or to replace-it by a further conference.

On the whole it cannot be denied that the decisions of the conference were guided by a spirit of objective moderation. The solution it offered the Jura sections, namely to call themselves the Jura Federation, had already been considered by the sections themselves. Only the decisions with regard to the Netchayeff affair contained a personal note of hostility which could not be justified by objective considerations. Naturally, the bourgeois press exploited the revelations in the Netchayeff affair against the International, but this represented no more than the usual slanders which were flung at the International day in and day out, and there was no particular necessity to refute them. In similar cases the International had contented itself with kicking the rubbish contemptuously into the gutter, but if it wished to make an exception in the Netchayeff case it should not have chosen a hateful intriguer like Utin as its representative, a man from whom Bakunin might expect just about as much regard for truth as from the bourgeois press.

Utin began the task entrusted to him with one of his usual




blood-and-thunder stories. In Zurich, where he intended to carry out his task and where according to his own statement his only enemies were a few Slav supporters of the Alliance under Bakunin’s orders, eight Slavs allegedly attacked him one fine day in a quiet place near a canal. They beat him, flung him to the ground and would have finished him off completely and flung his body into the water, but for the fact that four German students happened to come along and save his precious life, thus making possible his future services to the Tsar.

With this one exception, the decisions of the conference undoubtedly offered the basis for an agreement, all the more so as the whole working-class movement was surrounded by enemies and internal agreement was absolutely necessary. On the 20th of October the new Section for Revolutionary Socialist Propaganda and Action, which had been formed in Geneva from amongst the remnants of the Alliance and a number of fugitive Communards, approached the General Council with a request for affiliation. Mter the General Council had consulted the Federal Council in Geneva the request was rejected whereupon La Revolution Sociale, which had taken the place of the Solidarite, began a vigorous attack on the “ German Committee led by a brain a la Bismarck ", this being in the opinion of the editors of La Revolution Sociale a correct description of the General Council of the International. However, this slogan quickly found an echo so that Marx wrote to an American friend : “It refers to the unpardonable fact that I was born a German and that I do in fact exercise a decisive intellectual influence on the General Council. Nota bene : the German element in the General Council is numerically two-thirds weaker than the English and the French. The crime is therefore that the English and French elements are dominated (!) in matters of theory by the German element and find this dominance, i.e. German science, useful and even indispensable.”

The Jura sections made their general at.tack at a congress which they held on the 12th of November in Sonvillier, although only 9 out of 22 sections were represented by 16 delegates, and most of this minority suffered from galloping consumption. However, to make up for this they made more noise than ever. They felt deeply insulted at the fact that the London conference had forced a name on them which they had themselves already considered, but nevertheless they decided to submit and call themselves the Jura Federation in future, whilst revenging themselves by declaring the Neo-Latin Federation to be dissolved, a decision which of course was without any practical significance. However, the chief achiev ement of the congress




was the drafting and despatch of a circular to all the Federations of the International attacking the validity of the London conference and appealing from its decisions to a general congress to be called as quickly as possible.

This circular, which was drawn up by Guillaume, proceeded from the assumption that the International was on a fatal and downward path. Originally it had been formed as “ a tremendous protest against any kind of authority ”, and in the statutes each section and each group of' sections had been guaranteed complete independence, whilst the General Council as an executive group had been given definitely limited powers. Gradually, however, the members had come to place a blind confidence in the General Council and this had led in Basle to the abdication of the congress itself as a result of the fact that the General Council had bet:n given authority to accept, reject or dissolve sections pending the decisions of the next congress. The author of the circular made no reference to the fact that this decision had been adopted after Bakunin had spoken vigorously in its favour, and with Guillaume’s own approval.

The General Council, continued the circular, which had consisted of the same men and sat in the same place for five years, now regarded itself as the “ legitimate head ” of the International. As in its own eyes it was a sort of government it naturally regarded its own peculiar ideas as the official theory of the International and the only one permissible. The differing opinions which arose in other groups were regarded by the General Council as heresy pure and simple. Thus an orthodoxy had gradually developed in the International with its seat in London and its representatives in the members of the General Council. It was not necessary to complain of their intentions because they were acting according to the opinions of their own particular school, but one must fight against them vigorously because their omnipotence necessarily had a corrupting effect. It was quite impossible that a man who held such power over his equals could remain a moral character.

The London conference had continued the work of the Basle congress and taken decisions which were intended to transform the International from a free association of independent sections into an authoritarian and hierarchical organization in the hands of the General Council. And to crown it all the conference had decided that the General Council should have power to determine the time and place of the next congress, or of a conference to replace it. Thus it was being left to the arbitrary discretion of the General Council to replace the general congresses, the great open sessions of the International, by secret conferences. There




fore it had become necessary to limit the powers of the General Council to the fulfilment of its original mission, namely that of a simple bureau for correspondence and the collection of statistics, and to obtain by the free association of independent groups that unity which the General Council wished to establish by means of dictatorship and centralization. In this respect, however, the International must be the precursor of the future society.

Despite the gloomy colours in which it painted the situation, or perhaps just because of them, this circular of the Jura sections did not achieve its real aim. Even in Belgium, Italy and Spain its demand for the calling of a congress as quickly as possible met with no support. In Spain the sharp attacks on the General Council gave rise to the suspicion that jealousy between Marx and Bakunin was behind it all. In Italy the members felt no more inclined to let themselves be ordered about by the Jura than by London. Only in Belgium was a decision adopted for an alteration of the statutes of the International, in the sense that the latter .should declare itself expressly an association of completely independent federations and its General Council as “ a Centre for Correspondence and Information”.

To make up for this lack of appreciation, however, the circular of Sonvillier was welcomed enthusiastically by the bourgeois press, which pounced on it as a rare titbit. All the lies which it had spread, particularly since the fall of the Paris Commune, about the sinister power of the General Council were now confirmed from within the ranks of the International. The Bulletin Jurassien, which in the meantime had taken the place of the short-lived Revolution Sociale, had at least the pleasure of printing enthusiastic articles of approval from the bourgeois newspapers.

The noisy echo of the Sonvillier circular caused the General Council to issue an answer to it, also in the form of a circular, entitled : Les pretendues Scissions dans 1’Internationale.¹

5. 
   The Disintegration of the International
   

As far as the circular of the General Council dealt with the accusations made in Sonvillier and other places on account of alleged violations or even falsification of the statutes, fanatical intolerance and similar accusations, it conducted a thoroughly victorious polemic and one can only regret that for the greater part it was wasted on quite unimportant matters.

¹ The Alleged Disruption in the 'International.




To-day it is necessary to overcome a good deal of reluctance in order to bother one’s head at all about such insignificant affairs. For instance, when the International was founded its Paris members had omitted a phrase from its statutes in order to avoid trouble with the Bonapartist police. One passage of the statutes read that all political movements of the working class must subordinate themselves as a means to securing the economic emancipation of the working class. The expression “ as a means ” had been left out in the French text. The situation was perfectly clear, but again and again the lie was spread to the point of surfeit that the General Council had afterwards interpolated the expression “ as a means ”. And when the London conference acknowledged that the German workers had done their proletarian duty during the Franco-Prussian War this was used as an excuse for the accusation of “ Pan-Ger.. manism ”, which was alleged to dominate the General Council.

The circular tore these ridiculous charges to pieces, and when one considers that they were brought forward in order to undermine the centralization of the International, although the maintenance and consolidation of this centralization was the only possibility of saving the tottering organization from succumbing to the attacks of the reaction, it is easy to understand the bitterness of the concluding passages of the circular which accuse the Alliance of playing into the hands of the international police. “ It proclaims anarchy in the ranks of the proletariat as the infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of political and social forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext and at a moment when the old world is seeking to destroy the International it demands that the latter should replace its organization by anarchy.” The more the International was attacked by its external enemies, the more frivolous appeared the attacks made on it from within, particularly when those attacks were so baseless.

However, the clarity with which the General Council realized this side of the question was set off by its failure to see clearly the other side of the question. As its title indicated, the circular was prepared to admit no more than “ alleged disruption ” in the International. It put down the whole conflict, as Marx had already done in his Confidential Communication, to the machinations of “ certain intriguers ”, and in particular Bakunin. It brought forward the old accusations against him in connection with “ the equalization of the classes ” and in connection with the Basle congress, etc., and accused him of having been responsible together with Netchayeff for betraying innocent people to the Russian police. It also devoted a special passage to the fact




that two of his supporters had turned out to be Bonapartist police spies, a fact which was certainly extremely unpleasant for Bakunin, but no more compromising for him than it was for the General Council when, a few months later, it suffered the same misfortune with two of its own supporters. The circular also accused “ young Guillaume ” of having denounced “ the factory workers ” of Geneva as hateful “ bourgeois ”, without taking the least notice of the fact that amongst the fabrique in Geneva there was a section of highly paid workers in the luxury trades which had concluded more or less deplorable election compromises with the bourgeois parties.

However, by far the weakest point in the circular was its defence of the General Council against the accusation of “ orthodoxy ”. It appealed to the fact that the London conference had prohibited the adoption of sectarian names by any of the sections. That was certainly justifiable in view of the fact that the International was a highly diverse conglomeration of trade-union organizations, co-operatives, and educational and propaganda associations, but the interpretation the circular of the General Council placed upon this decision was highly contestable.