Violence and the Labor Movement

by Robert Hunter

The congress at Basel was the turning point in the brief history of the International. Although the Marxists were reluctant to admit it, the Bakouninists had won a complete victory on every important issue. Some of the decisions future congresses might remedy, but in refusing even to discuss the question of direct legislation many of the delegates clearly showed their determination to have nothing to do with politics or with any movement aiming at the conquest of political power. In all the discussions the anarchist tendencies of the congress were unmistakable, and the immense gulf between the Marxists and the Bakouninists was laid bare. The very foundation principles upon which the International was based had been overturned. Political action was to be abandoned, while the discussion on trade unions introduced for the first time in the International the idea of a purely economic struggle and a conception of future society in which groups of producers, and not the State or the community, should own the tools of production. This syndicalist conception of socialism was not new. Developed for the first time by Robert Owen in 1833, it had led the working classes into the most violent and bitter strikes, that ended in disaster for all participants. Born again in 1869, it was destined to lie dormant for thirty years, then to be taken up once more—this time with immense enthusiasm—by the French trade unions.

Needless to say, the decisive victory of the Bakouninists at Basel was excessively annoying and humiliating to Marx. He did not attend in person, but it was evident before the congress that he fully expected that his forces would, on that occasion, destroy root and branch the economic and political fallacies of Bakounin. He rather welcomed the discussion of the differences between the program of the Alliance and that of the International, in order that Eccarius, Liebknecht, and others might demolish, once and for all, the reactionary proposals of Bakounin. To Marx, much of the program of the Alliance seemed a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with atheism and schoolboy declamation. Altogether, the policies and projects of Bakounin seemed so vulnerable that the General Council evidently felt that little preparation was necessary in order to defeat them. They seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, that Bakounin was an old and experienced conspirator. In any case, he had left no stone unturned to obtain control of the congress. Week by week, previous to the congress, l'Egalité, the organ of the Swiss federation, had published articles by Bakounin which, while professedly explaining the principles of the International, were in reality attacking them; and most insidiously Bakounin's own program was presented as the traditional position of the organization. Liberty, fraternity, and equality were, of course, called into service. The treason of certain working-class politicians was pointed out as the natural and inevitable result of political action, while to those who had given little thought to economic theory the abolition of inheritances seemed the final word. Nor did Bakounin limit his efforts to his pen. All sections of the Alliance undertook to see that friends of Bakounin were sent as delegates to the congress, and it was charged that credentials were obtained in various underhanded ways. However that may have been, the "practical," "cold-blooded" Marx was completely outwitted by his "sentimental" and "visionary" antagonist. Instead of a great victory, therefore, the Marxists left the congress of Basel utterly dejected, and Eccarius is reported to have said, "Marx will be terribly annoyed." [(18)]

That Marx was annoyed is to put it with extraordinary moderation, and from that moment the fight on Bakouninism, anarchism, and terrorism developed to a white heat. Immediately after the adjournment of the congress, Moritz Hess, a close friend of Marx and a delegate to the congress, published in the Réveil of Paris what he called "the secret history" of the congress, in which he declared that "between the collectivists of the International and the Russian communists [meaning the Bakouninists] there was all the difference which exists between civilization and barbarism, between liberty and despotism, between citizens condemning every form of violence and slaves addicted to the use of brutal force." [(19)] Even this gives but a faint idea of the bitterness of the controversy. Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, Hess, Outine, the General Council in London, and every newspaper under the control of the Marxists began to assail Bakounin and his circle. They no longer confined themselves to a denunciation of the "utopian and bourgeois" character of the anarchist philosophy. They went into the past history of Bakounin, revived all the accusations that had been made against him, and exposed every particle of evidence obtainable concerning his "checkered" career as a revolutionist. It will be remembered that it was in 1869 that Nechayeff appeared in Switzerland. When the Marxists got wind of him and his doctrine, their rage knew no bounds. And later they obtained and published in L'Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste the material from which I have already quoted extensively in my first chapter.

No useful purpose, however, would be served in dealing with the personal phases of the struggle. Bakounin became so irate at the attacks upon him, several of which happened to have been written by Jews, that he wrote an answer entitled "Study Upon the German Jews." He feared to attack Marx; and this "Study," while avoiding a personal attack, sought to arouse a racial prejudice that would injure him. He writes to Herzen, a month after the congress at Basel, that he fully realizes that Marx is "the instigator and the leader of all this calumnious and infamous polemic." [(20)] He was reluctant, however, to attack him personally, and even refers to Marx and Lassalle as "these two Jewish giants," but besides them, he adds, "there was and is a crowd of Jewish pigmies." [(21)] "Nevertheless," he writes, "it may happen, and very shortly, too, that I shall enter into conflict with him, not over any personal offense, of course, but over a question of principle, regarding State communism, of which he himself and the English and German parties which he directs are the most ardent partisans. Then it will be a fight to the finish. But there is a time for everything, and the hour for this struggle has not yet sounded.... Do you not see that all these gentlemen who are our enemies are forming a phalanx, which must be disunited and broken up in order to be the more easily routed? You are more erudite than I; you know, therefore, better than I who was the first to take for principle: Divide and rule. If at present I should undertake an open war against Marx himself, three-quarters of the members of the International would turn against me, and I would be at a disadvantage, for I would have lost the ground on which I must stand. But by beginning this war with an attack against the rabble by which he is surrounded, I shall have the majority on my side.... But, ... if he wishes to constitute himself the defender of their cause, it is he who would then declare war openly. In this case, I shall take the field also and I shall play the star rôle." [(22)]

This was written in October, 1869, a month after the Basel congress. On the 1st of January, 1870, the General Council at London sent a private communication to all sections of the International, and on the 28th of March it was followed by another. These, together with various circulars dealing with questions of principle, but all consisting of attacks upon Bakounin personally or upon his doctrines, finally goaded him into open war upon Marx, the General Council, all their doctrines, and even upon the then forming socialist party of Germany, with Bebel and Liebknecht at its head. During the year 1870 Bakounin was preparing for the great controversy, but his friends of Lyons interrupted his work by calling him there to take part in the uprising of that year. He hastened to Lyons, but, as we know, he was soon forced to flee and conceal himself in Marseilles. It was there, in the midst of the blackest despair, that Bakounin wrote: "I have no longer any faith in the Revolution in France. This nation is no longer in the least revolutionary. The people themselves have become doctrinaire, as insolent and as bourgeois as the bourgeois.... The bourgeois are loathsome. They are as savage as they are stupid—and as the police blood flows in their veins—they should be called policemen and attorneys-general in embryo. I am going to reply to their infamous calumnies by a good little book in which I shall give everything and everybody its proper name. I leave this country with deep despair in my heart." [(23)] He then set to work at last to state systematically his own views and to annihilate utterly those of the socialists. Many of these documents are only fragmentary. Some were started and abandoned; others ended in hopeless confusion. With the most extraordinary gift of inspirited statement, he passes in review every phase of history, leaping from one peak to another of the great periods, pointing his lessons, issuing his warnings, but all the time throwing at the reader such a Niagara of ideas and arguments that he is left utterly dazed and bewildered as by some startling military display or the rushing here and there of a military maneuver. In Lettres à un Français; Manuscrit de 114 Pages, écrit à Marseille; Lettre à Esquiros; Préambule pour la Seconde Livraison de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique; Avertissement pour l'Empire Knouto-Germanique; Au Journal La Liberté, de Bruxelles; and Fragment formant une Suite de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique, he returns again and again to the charge, always seeking to deal some fatal blow to Marxian socialism, but never apparently satisfying himself that he has accomplished his task. He touches the border of practical criticism of the socialist program in the fragment entitled Lettres à un Français. It ends, however, before the task is done. Again he takes it up in the Manuscrit écrit à Marseille. But here also, as soon as he arrives at the point of annihilating the socialists, his task is discontinued. In truth, he himself seems to have realized the inconclusive character of his writings, as he refused in some cases to complete them and in other cases to publish them. Nevertheless, we find in various places of his fragmentary writings not only a statement of his own views, but his entire critique upon socialism.

As I have made clear enough, I think, in my first chapter, there are in Bakounin's writings two main ideas put forward again and again, dressed in innumerable forms and supported by an inexhaustible variety of arguments. These ideas are based upon his antagonism to religion and to government. It was always Dieu et l'Etat that he was fighting, and not until both the ideas and the institutions which had grown up in support of "these monstrous oppressions" had been destroyed and swept from the earth could there arise, thought Bakounin, a free society, peopled with happy and emancipated human souls. When one has once obtained this conception of Bakounin's fundamental views, there is little necessity for dealing with the infinite number of minor points upon which he was forced to attack the men and movements of his time. On the one hand, he was assailing Mazzini, whose every move in life was actuated by his intense religious and political faith, while, on the other hand, he was attacking Marx as the modern Moses handing down to the enslaved multitudes his table of infamous laws as the foundation for a new tyranny, that of State socialism. In 1871 Bakounin ceased all maneuvering. Bringing out his great guns, he began to bombard both Mazzini and Marx. Never has polemic literature seen such another battle. With a weapon in each hand, turning from the one to the other of his antagonists, he battled, as no man ever before battled, to crush "these enemies of the entire human race."

There is, of course, no possibility of adequately summarizing, in such limited space as I have allotted to it, the thought of one who traversed the history of the entire world of thought and action in pursuit of some crushing argument against the socialism of Marx. This perverted form of socialism, Bakounin maintained, contemplated the establishment of a communisme autoritaire, or State socialism. "The State," he says, "having become the sole owner—at the end of a certain period of transition which will be necessary in order to transform society, without too great economic and political shocks, from the present organization of bourgeois privilege to the future organization of official equality for all—the State will also be the sole capitalist, the banker, the money lender, the organizer, the director of all the national work, and the distributor of its products. Such is the ideal, the fundamental principle of modern communism." [(24)] This is, of all Bakounin's criticisms of socialism, the one that has had the greatest vitality. It has gone the round of the world as a crushing blow to socialist ideals. The same thought has been repeated by every politician, newspaper, and capitalist who has undertaken to refute socialism. And every socialist will admit that of all the attempts to misrepresent socialism and to make it abhorrent to most people the idea expressed in these words of Bakounin has been the most effective. To state thus the ideal of socialism is sufficient in most cases to end all argument. Add to this program military discipline for the masses, barracks for homes, and a ruling bureaucracy, and you have complete the terrifying picture that is held up to the workers of every country, even to-day, as the nefarious, world-destroying design of the socialists.

It is, therefore, altogether proper to inquire if these were in reality the aims of the Marxists. Many sincere opponents of socialism actually believe that these are the ends sought, while the casual reader of socialist literature may see much that appears to lead directly to the dreadful State tyranny that Bakounin has pictured. But did Marx actually advocate State socialism? In the Communist Manifesto Marx proposed a series of reforms that the State alone was capable of instituting. He urged that many of the instruments of production should be centralized in the hands of the State. Moreover, nothing is clearer than his prophecy that the working class "will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State." [(25)] Indeed, in this program, as in all others that have developed out of it, the end of socialism would seem to be State ownership. "With trusts or without," writes Engels, "the official representative of capitalist society—the State—will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production." Commenting himself upon this statement, he adds in a footnote: "I say 'have to.' For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become economically inevitable, only then—even if it is the State of to-day that effects this—is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself." "This necessity," he continues, "for conversion into State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication—the post-office, the telegraphs, the railways." [(26)]

Here is the entire position in a nutshell. But Engels says the State will "have to." Thus Engels and Marx are not stating necessarily what they desire. And it must not be forgotten that in all such statements both were outlining only what appeared to them to be a natural and inevitable evolution. In State ownership they saw an outcome of the necessary centralization of capital and its growth into huge monopolies. Society would be forced to use the power of the State to control, and eventually to own, these menacing aggregations of capital in the hands of a few men. Both Marx and Engels saw clearly enough that State monopoly does not destroy the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. "The modern State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine.... The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, ... the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution." [(27)]

State ownership, then, was not considered by Marx and Engels in itself a solution of the problem. It is only a necessary preliminary to the solution. The essential step, either subsequent or precedent, is the capture of political power by the working class. By this act the means of production are freed "from the character of capital they have thus far borne, ..." and their "socialized character" is given "complete freedom to work itself out." [(28)] "Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master—free.