When I called for the first time at the office—my beard shaved and my top hat on—and asked the lady who opened the door, in my very best English: ‘Is Mr. Lavróff in?’ I imagined that no one would ever know who I was as long as I had not mentioned my name. It appeared, however, that the lady—who did not know me at all, but well knew my brother while he stayed at Zürich—at once recognized me and ran upstairs to say who the visitor was. ‘I knew you immediately,’ she said afterwards, ‘by your eyes, which reminded me of those of your brother.’
That time, I did not stay long in England. I was in lively correspondence with my friend James Guillaume, of the Jura Federation, and as soon as I found some permanent geographical work, which I could do in Switzerland as well as in London, I removed to Switzerland. The letters that I got at last from home told me that I might as well stay abroad, as there was nothing particular to be done in Russia. A wave of enthusiasm was rolling over the country at that time in favour of the Slavonians who had revolted against the age-long Turkish oppression, and my best friends, Serghéi (Stepniák), Kelnitz, and several others had gone to the Balkán peninsula to join the insurgents. ‘We read,’ my friends wrote, ‘the “Daily News” correspondence about the horrors in Bulgaria; we weep at the reading, and go next to enlist either as volunteers in the Balkán insurgents’ band or as nurses.’
I went to Switzerland, joined the Jura Federation of the International Workingmen’s Association, and, following the advice of my Swiss friends, settled in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
II
The Jura Federation has played an important part in the modern development of socialism.
It always happens that after a political party has set before itself a purpose, and has proclaimed that nothing short of the complete attainment of that aim will satisfy it, it divides into two fractions. One of them remains what it was, while the other, although it professes not to have changed a word of its previous intentions, accepts some sort of compromise, and gradually, from compromise to compromise, is driven farther from its primitive programme, and becomes a party of modest makeshift reform.
Such a division had occurred within the International Workingmen’s Association. Nothing less than an expropriation of the present owners of land and capital, and a transmission of all that is necessary for the production of wealth to the producers themselves, was the avowed aim of the Association at the outset. The workers of all nations were called upon to form their own organizations for a direct struggle against capitalism; to work out the means of socializing the production of wealth and its consumption; and, when they should be ready to do so, to take possession of the necessaries for production, and to control production with no regard to the present political organization, which must undergo a complete reconstruction. The Association had thus to be the means for preparing an immense revolution in men’s minds, and later on in the very forms of life—a revolution which would open to mankind a new era of progress based upon the solidarity of all. That was the ideal which aroused from their slumber millions of European workers, and attracted to the Association its best intellectual forces.
However, two fractions soon developed. When the war of 1870 had ended in a complete defeat of France, and the uprising of the Paris Commune had been crushed, and the Draconian laws which were passed against the Association excluded the French workers from participation in it; and when, on the other hand, parliamentary rule had been introduced in ‘united Germany’—the goal of the Radicals since 1848—an effort was made by the Germans to modify the aims and the methods of the whole socialist movement. The ‘conquest of power within the existing states’ became the watchword of that section, which took the name of ‘Social Democracy.’ The first electoral successes of this party at the elections to the German Reichstag aroused great hopes. The number of the social democratic deputies having grown from two to seven, and next to nine, it was confidently calculated by otherwise reasonable men that before the end of the century the social democrats would have a majority in the German Parliament, and would then introduce the socialist ‘popular state’ by means of suitable legislation. The socialist ideal of this party gradually lost the character of something that had to be worked out by the labour organizations themselves, and became state management of the industries—in fact, state socialism; that is, state capitalism. To-day, in Switzerland, the efforts of the social democrats are directed in politics toward centralization as against federalism, and in the economic field to promoting the state management of railways and the state monopoly of banking and of the sale of spirits. The state management of the land and of the leading industries, and even of the consumption of riches, would be the next step in a more or less distant future.
Gradually, all the life and activity of the German social democratic party was subordinated to electoral considerations. Trade unions were treated with contempt and strikes were met with disapproval, because both diverted the attention of the workers from electoral struggles. Every popular outbreak, every revolutionary agitation in any country of Europe, was received by the social democratic leaders with even more animosity than by the capitalist press.
In the Latin countries, however, this new direction found but few adherents. The sections and federations of the International remained true to the principles which had prevailed at the foundation of the Association. Federalist by their history, hostile to the idea of a centralized state, and possessed of revolutionary traditions, the Latin workers could not follow the evolution of the Germans.