And now a combination of circumstances for a time lifted the life of Marx to a steadier and more dignified plane. Wilhelm Wolff—one of the few German comrades whom Marx and Engels trusted and with whom they remained friends: Marx dedicated Das Kapital to his memory—died in the spring of 1864 and left Marx £800; and in the fall of the same year Engels became a partner in the Ermen & Engels firm, and so was in a better position to send Marx money. Laura Marx became engaged in the summer of 1866 to a young doctor from Cuba named Paul Lafargue of mixed French, Spanish, Negro and Indian blood; and they were married two years later. Jenny married in the autumn of 1872 a French socialist named Charles Longuet, who had had to leave France after the Commune and who lectured at University College in London. His daughters were thus provided for—though his sons-in-law from Marx’s point of view were not politically unexceptionable: “Longuet is the last Proudhonist,” he used to say, “and Lafargue the last Bakuninist—Devil take them!” In the spring of 1867 he completed the first volume of Das Kapital and brought it out in the fall. It was his first real expression of his general ideas in detailed and developed form. The Critique of Political Economy, which he had published in 1859, had baffled even Marx’s disciples by its relentless and opaque abstraction and had made very little impression—though, significantly, it appeared in the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species (a work which Marx recognized as supplying a “basis in natural science” for the philosophy of Historical Materialism).
And today, after the reaction of a decade, the workers’ rebellion was vigorously reviving, was achieving a new general solidarity. In England the Trade Union movement was taking the place of the Chartists. The growth of the industrial cities had caused a boom in the building and furnishing trades; and the workers in these trades had been left flat by the slump of the later fifties. Much the same thing had been happening in France, where Napoleon III had been rebuilding Paris, and where the followers of Proudhon and Blanqui were organizing the unemployed workers. We have seen how the movement of the Prussian workers had grown up under the leadership of Lassalle. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had returned from exile in 1862, had converted to Marxist socialism a young turner named August Bebel and, after having been expelled from Prussia in 1865, had been organizing in South Germany a League of German Workers’ Unions. The American Civil War of 1860–65, by shutting off the supply of cotton, had caused a crisis in the textile industry; and the American emancipation of the slaves of 1863, the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, and the Polish uprising of 1863 had been giving a general impetus to liberal and revolutionary ideas. By the July of 1863 an international workers’ movement was beginning to crystallize out. The English trade unions, whose action was being blocked by the importation of labor from Germany, France and Belgium, appealed to the workers of France for a common understanding against the employers; and the French, after delaying nearly a year, due to the uncertainty of the working-class leaders as to whether they should make the final break with the bourgeois political parties, accepted the proposal of the English. The International Working Men’s Association was founded in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on September 28, 1864. Thus, four weeks after the death of Lassalle, Marx was invited to attend the first meeting of the new working-class organization of which he was to become the directing mind, with his two sons-in-law among his lieutenants.
To read Marx’s correspondence of this period is to be struck—despite his ceaseless complaints of insomnia and physical ailments—by the effect on a personality even so self-dependent as Marx’s, of relative financial security, of the sense of intellectual accomplishment, and of a decisive responsibility in a common undertaking with other men. One gets the impression that Marx is handling the affairs of the International with considerable sense and tact. He has to deal on the General Council with the men of various parties and doctrines of whose tendencies he disapproves: old Owenites and Chartists, followers of Blanqui and Proudhon, Polish and Italian patriots; and he manages for some time to work with them without allowing himself to become embroiled in any serious personal feuds. Perhaps the fact that he was intent on finishing his book may have induced him to avoid needless trouble. Certainly, the nightmare suspicions and the hysterically abusive bitterness of the days of the break-up of the Communist League are much less in evidence now. And he has now no Lassalle to compete with.
The Marx of this period—in spite of everything—has established himself as a power whom the bourgeois power through gendarme or sheriff can never expel or dispossess, and to whom men begin to come as if to learn permanent principles of truth in that age of political illusions, as if to secure for their new voyages a pilot who has never been stranded or swept away by the tides of revolution and reaction. Lafargue has left us a picture of Marx as he seemed to a young admirer in the sixties. His study on the first floor of the house gave on Maitland Park and let in a good light. It was furnished with a simple work-table, three feet long and two feet wide, a wooden arm chair, in which he sat to work, a leather-covered couch, and one or two other pieces of furniture. There was a fireplace opposite the window, with book-cases on either side. The book-shelves presented what seemed to Lafargue an inharmonious appearance because the books were arranged according to content, with quartoes and pamphlets side by side, and there were great packets of old newspapers and manuscript that piled the top shelves to the ceiling; and everything else in the room was littered with papers and books, mixed with cigars, matches, tobacco tins and ashes. But Marx knew where everything was: he had marked the books and turned down the pages regardless of handsome editions—and could show you at once passages or figures which he had cited in conversation. The books and papers obeyed him like his arms and legs: “They are my slaves,” Marx used to say, “and they must serve me as I please.” His mind, says Lafargue in a fine simile, was like a warship with her steam up, always ready at a moment’s notice to start out in any direction on the sea of thought. The carpet had been worn down to the cord in a path between the door and the window which Marx had made by walking back and forth when he had been working and thinking alone. To this period of his later years belong the well-known photographs and portraits—distinctly different from the buttoned-up, constricted, self-conscious and hostile-eyed photograph which Lassalle had had taken in Berlin at the beginning of Marx’s sixtieth year—in which something almost of benevolence, something certainly of imaginative amplitude and of the serenity of moral ascendancy, appears with the deep eyes and the broad brow, the handsome beard and mane, now whitening, that bend from the defiance of the rebel into the authority of the Biblical patriarch.
The inaugural address which Marx drafted for the International Working Men’s Association had to steer, as I have already indicated, between shoals on every side: it had to satisfy English trade unionists, who were interested exclusively in winning strikes and cared nothing about their “historical role”; French Proudhonists, who were opposed to strikes and to the collectivization of the means of production, and who believed in coöperative societies and cheap credit; followers of the patriot Mazzini, who was chiefly interested in liberating Italy and who wanted to keep the class struggle out of it. Marx regretted, as he explained to Engels, that he had been obliged to put in some phrases about such abstractions as “duty” and “right” and a declaration that it was the aim of the International “to vindicate the simple laws of morality and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations.” But he did get into it a blasting review of the results of industrial progress in England, which tied up with his own work on Das Kapital. He showed that while the imports and exports of England had trebled in twenty years, it nevertheless now appeared that, so far from pauperism’s having been eliminated, as the middle-class apologists had said it would be, the industrial and agricultural populations were more debased and undernourished than ever. “In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those whose interest is to hedge other people in a fool’s paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that, on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labor must tend to deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms. Death of starvation rose [the English is Marx’s own] almost to the rank of an institution, during this intoxicating epoch of economical progress, in the metropolis of the British empire. That epoch is marked in the annals of the world by the quickened return, the widening compass, and the deadlier effects of the social pest called a commercial and industrial crisis.”
Marx continued to guide the International with surprising toleration and prudence through the Bâle Congress of 1869, at which the advocates of collectivization definitely defeated its opponents. He did not attend these annual congresses but controlled them through his lieutenants. He had been trying not to allow the International to take up too much of his time and on one occasion had let people believe that he had gone to the Continent on International business in order to be left in peace in London; but, as he wrote Engels: “Well, mon cher, que faire? Man muss B sagen, sobald man A gesagt.” The organization grew every year more important. By the end of the sixties it is supposed to have had eight hundred thousand regular members; and its actual power was increased by alliances with other labor unions which had declared their solidarity with it. The press of the International boasted a strength of seven millions; and the estimates in the police reports put it as high as five millions. It organized strike relief and prevented the importation of strike-breakers. The very name of the International soon became such a bogey to the employers that it had sometimes only to threaten in order to bring them around. Marx and Engels had, as it were, unexpectedly, at a time when, having resigned themselves to reaction, they were preoccupied with literary work, found themselves actually in a position of leadership of an immense proletarian movement with revolutionary possibilities. “Les choses marchent,” Marx wrote Engels in September, 1867. “And by the time of the next revolution, which may perhaps be nearer than it seems, we (that is, you and I) have this powerful engine in our hand. Compare with this the results of Mazzinis etc. operations since 30 years! And without any financial resources! With the intrigues of the Proudhonists in Paris, of Mazzini in Italy, and of the jealous Odger, Cremer and Potter in London, with Schulze-Del[itzsch] and the Lassallians in Germany! We may consider ourselves very well satisfied!”
But again, and this time with more serious results, the authority of the sedentary Marx came into conflict with an active politician, and the Marxist point of view, so rationalistic and prudent, lost its grip on a labor movement which had now reached European proportions. It was at the Congress of Bâle that the Workers’ International was first captivated by Michael Bakúnin.
He was a member of that unfortunate generation who had come to manhood in Russia during the reign of Nicholas I. Born on May 18, 1814, he had been eleven years old at the time of the Decembrist uprising—that upper-class conspiracy of officers and poets under the influence of Western ideas—in which the family of Bakúnin’s mother had played an important part. The Russia of Pushkin and the Decembrists, of the dawn of the great culture of modern Russia, was extinguished by the thirty years of Nicholas, who aborted the intellectual movement by a terrible censorship of the press and did his best to make it difficult for Russians to circulate between Russia and Western Europe. Bakúnin was a product of this frustrated movement, like his friends Turgénev and Herzen. Like them, he was driven by the oppression at home to look for freedom and light in the West, and then found himself doomed to live and work there with his mind always fretted by the problems of Russia. Herzen said that Bakúnin “had within him the latent power of a colossal activity for which there was no demand.”
He came from the province of Tver, of a family of the landed gentry. He had spent his boyhood with his brothers and sisters on an estate of “five hundred souls” in a big eighteenth-century country house above a broad and slow Russian river; and in a sense this estate and this family, so beloved and so complete in themselves, remained the background of all his life. The childhood and youth of the Bakúnins were passed in an atmosphere of fantasy, of tender emotions and intellectual excitement, which sounds like Turgénev or Chékhov. Michael was the oldest boy of ten boys and girls, and so was in a position to dominate his sisters by his sex and his brothers by his age. His attitude toward both was protective, and he was their leader in conspiracies against their father, who had been forty when he married their mother and with whom his young wife always sided. Bakúnin, on his own confession, was in love with one of his sisters, and he seems to have been jealous of them all. When they began to have admirers and get married, Mikhaíl Alexándrovich would try to turn them against their suitors and husbands just as he incited his brothers to rebel against their father. Later on, he did the same thing with other women; but though he was able to get these ladies away from their husbands, he invariably let them down afterwards by failing to become their lover. He apparently remained impotent all his life, and was evidently a case of sexual inhibition based on the incest taboo. In Siberia, when he was forty-four, he married an eighteen-year-old girl, who eventually, while still living with Bakúnin, had two children by another man.
In Russia, the young Bakúnin became a member of a literary group so intoxicated with Hegelian idealism that even their love affairs were permeated by it, and who, volatilizing in the Russian way the portentous abstractions of the German, used to toast the Hegelian categories, proceeding through the metaphysical progression from Pure Existence to the divine Idea. At twenty-six—in 1840—Bakúnin decided to visit Berlin in order to drink Hegelianism at the fount and in order to rejoin a sister whom he had alienated from her husband and whom he had induced to take her child to Germany.
Bakúnin during his early years in Russia had remained a loyal subject of the Tsar—his only insubordination had been against his father. But in Berlin, under the influence of the Young Hegelians, he gravitated toward the Left. The critical turn of his conversion to the revolutionary interpretation of Hegel seems to have come at the moment when he definitely lost his hold over his maturing brothers and sisters. His married sister became reconciled with her husband and went back to Russia to live; a brother who had joined Michael in Germany also returned and became an official; the sister whom he had loved most passionately and who was to have joined him in Germany, too, fell in love with his friend Turgénev and never left home at all. But Michael himself did not mature: he had no normal emotional development. Carried along by the current of the time, he now declared himself a political revolutionist—a revolutionist of the pure will and act, for whom upheaval was an historical necessity but who had no use for the strategy of Marx. For Bakúnin, the sincerity and the intensity of the gesture guaranteed its value, its effectiveness; and the gesture was primarily destructive. Discussing his character in his later years, he “attributed his passion for destruction to the influence of his mother, whose despotic character inspired him with an insensate hatred of every restriction on liberty.” But it was evidently also an outlet for a frustrated sexual impulse. “The desire to destroy,” he had already written in his early years in Germany, “is also a creative desire.” He had visions of ecstatic conflagration: “the whole of Europe, with St. Petersburg, Paris and London, transformed into an enormous rubbish-heap.” Herzen tells how, on one occasion, when Bakúnin was traveling from Paris to Prague, he had happened upon a revolt of German peasants, who were “making an uproar around the castle, not knowing what to do. Bakúnin got out of his conveyance, and, without wasting any time to find out what the dispute was about, formed the peasants into ranks and instructed them so skilfully [he had been an artillery officer in Russia] that by the time he resumed his seat to continue his journey, the castle was burning on all four sides.” And he was always insisting on the importance, in time of revolution, of “unleashing the evil passions.”
But he had also the magnanimity of a displaced and impersonal love: “The petty personal passions will not even have any place in the man possessed by passion; he is not even under the necessity of sacrificing them, because they do not exist in him any longer.” He wanted—though in the name of destruction—to embrace the human race, and he was able to arouse in his followers a peculiar exhilaration of brotherly feeling.
With his colossal and commanding stature, his genius for popular oratory, Bakúnin should have figured like Garibaldi or Mazzini as the leader of a great national cause. But in Russia there was no cause for him to lead; and abroad he could never make an integral part of the national movements of other countries. He was condemned to play out his career in a series of unsuccessful attempts to intervene in foreign revolutions. When, for example, in 1848, the February days broke in France, Bakúnin sped to Paris at once and served in barracks with the Workers’ National Guard—eliciting the famous verdict of the revolutionary Prefect of Police: “What a man! The first day of the revolution he is a perfect treasure; but on the next day he ought to be shot.” And then, as soon as the German revolution had got under way in March, Bakúnin moved on to Germany, where he hoped to help the Poles to revolt. He had come to believe that the liberation of Russia could only be accomplished through a general pan-Slav revolution. But the Poles were suspicious of Bakúnin: the Russian Embassy in Paris had circulated the report that he was a spy; and he was obliged to go on to Prague, where he took part in an unsuccessful Czech insurrection. After months of wandering from place to place with false passports and always with the police at his heels, he happened to find himself in Dresden in May, 1849, when the revolutionary crisis there came. The King of Saxony was refusing to accept the constitution which had been framed by the Francfort Assembly; and the pro-constitutional forces were taking to the barricades. Bakúnin had had no interest in the movement for the unification of Germany, and he did not believe that the revolution would succeed; but he could not stand by when there was trouble afoot. In the street he ran into Richard Wagner, then conductor of the Dresden opera, who was headed for the City Hall to see what was going on. Bakúnin went along. They found the Provisional Government just proclaimed. One speech was enough for Bakúnin: he presented himself to the leaders and advised them to fortify the city against the attack of the Prussian troops. The Prussians did arrive that night; the commander of the revolutionary forces, who may have been a traitor, obstructed the defense of the city; the revolutionary Polish officers, whom Bakúnin had been at pains to procure, gave the situation up and skipped out; two of the members of the provisional triumvirate also disappeared from the City Hall. The third member was left alone; and Bakúnin, with no stake in the conflict, stuck by this man to the end, making the rounds of the barricades to try to keep up the insurgents’ morale. The Prussian and Saxon soldiers battled their way into the city, shot the rebels or threw them into the Elbe. Bakúnin tried to persuade his comrades to use all that was left of their powder to blow themselves up in the City Hall. But they withdrew to Freiburg, instead. Wagner urged them to move on to Chemnitz, declaring that the industrial population would certainly rally to their support. But when the Dresden insurgents got to Chemnitz, there were no signs of revolution whatever. They were arrested that night in their beds. Bakúnin was so dead with fatigue that he did not even try to make an escape, which he afterwards thought would have been easy. He was sent back to Dresden and put in jail with the rest.
He was to remain in prison eight years. Thirteen months in jail in Dresden and in the fortress of Königstein. Then a death sentence: they waked him one night and led him out as if he were to be beheaded. But the sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, and he was merely being handed over to Austria, against which his incitement of the Czechs had been directed. Consigned to Prague as a military prisoner, he was shut up in a cell of the Hradčin citadel. Here he was denied legal representation, forbidden to answer or receive letters, and allowed only half an hours exercise a day, when he was walked up and down a corridor under the guardianship of six armed men. When he had endured nine months of this, the authorities became alarmed by a rumor that his friends were planning a rescue, and removed him to the fortress of Olmütz, where he was fettered and chained to the wall. Two months later he was tried by a military court and condemned to be hanged for high treason. Yet his sentence was again commuted, and he was now handed over to Russia.
At the frontier, the Austrian guards took off his fetters, which they claimed as their national property, and the Russians put on worse ones of their own. The Tsar clapped him in the Peter-Paul Fortress and succeeded in extorting from him one of those “confessions” of wrongdoing and penitence which were inflicted by Nicholas I as a final humiliation and which have remained to this day a feature of the paternalistic Russian system. Bakúnin had scurvy, lost all his teeth, became stupefied and flabby with imprisonment. When the sister he had loved came to see him, he slipped out to her a despairing note: “You will never understand what it means to feel yourself buried alive, to say to yourself at every moment of the day and night: I am a slave, I am annihilated, reduced to lifelong impotence. To hear even in your cell the rumblings of the coming struggle, which will decide the most vital interests of humanity, and to be forced to remain idle and silent. To be rich in ideas, of which some at least might be beautiful, and not to realize one of them; to feel love in your heart, yes, love, despite this outward petrifaction, and not be able to expend it on anything or anyone. To feel yourself full of devotion and heroism to serve a sacred cause, and to see all your enthusiasm break against the four bare walls, my only witnesses and my only confidants.” When Nicholas died in 1855 and the accession of Alexander seemed to promise a more liberal regime, Bakúnin’s mother appealed to the Tsar. At first she had no success; and Bakúnin made his brother agree to bring him poison if she should definitely fail. But he was finally offered the alternative of exile for life in Siberia.
Once outside the prison walls, Bakúnin expanded and sped away like a genii let out of his bottle. He found in the governor of Eastern Siberia a relation on the Decembrist side of his family, who gave him a job in a trading company there. It was one of his duties to travel for the company, and at the end of four years of exile he succeeded in getting away. In the spring of 1861, he induced a Siberian merchant to pay the expenses of a journey to the mouth of the Amur River and got a letter to the commanders of ships on the Amur, instructing them to give him passage. Once there, he prevailed on the officials and captains to let him transfer from ship to ship till he finally steamed out of Yokohama on an American boat bound for San Francisco. Borrowing three hundred dollars from an English clergyman with whom he had made friends on board, he made his way from San Francisco to New York by way of Panama; got Herzen, then in London, to send him some more money, and reached London the last of November.
Herzen says that Bakúnin came back to Europe like the Decembrists returning from exile, who had seemed more youthful after their prisons than the crushed young people at home; that he was one of those extraordinary spirits who, instead of being ruined by punishment, seemed actually to have been preserved by it. For Bakúnin, the reaction of the fifties, which had discouraged the exiles in London, had never existed at all; he had, says Herzen, “read through” the events of those years as if they had been chapters in a book; and it was the February days in Paris, the uprisings in Dresden and Prague, which rang in his ears and swam before his vision. He had announced to Herzen from San Francisco that he was coming to devote himself again to “the utter destruction of the Austrian Empire” and the free federation of the Slav peoples. As soon as the Polish insurrection got under way in 1863, Bakúnin offered to organize a Russian legion; but the Poles were afraid that he would compromise them with his lurid record and his extravagant ideas, and tried to induce him to stay in London. This did not restrain him from taking flight to Copenhagen in the hope of joining the rebellion or of embarrassing the Russian government by stirring up an insurrection in Finland. Eventually he embarked with a party of Poles, who had chartered a British vessel and were planning to land in Lithuania. The English captain seems to have liked his passengers—Bakúnin had talked of holding a revolver to his head— as little as the prospect of meeting Russian cruisers in the Baltic. He took the expedition to Denmark.
Thereafter Bakúnin knocked around for some years between Sweden, Italy and Switzerland, subsisting on borrowed money and on the patronage of a Russian princess; associating himself with revolutionary movements and trying to cook up movements of his own. By 1866, he had definitely come to realize that the patriotic insurrections, such as those of the Italians, the Czechs and the Poles, on which he had counted so much, were not necessarily revolutionary save in relation to the national oppressors, but were likely—as had been the case with the Polish officers and landowners who had figured in the recent revolt—to be as deeply opposed to social innovation as their imperial masters themselves. Bakúnin now believed that the social revolution could only be international; and he succeeded in introducing into the program for a “United States of Europe” of the League for Peace and Freedom, an organization of bourgeois intellectuals in which he interested himself in ‘67, a paragraph about “the liberation of the working classes and the elimination of the proletariat.”
In the summer of 1868, Bakúnin became a member of the Geneva section of the Workers’ International and made an attempt to effect a merger between it and the pacifist League; but he ran up against the refusal of Marx, who called the League “the Geneva windbag,” and the opposition of the League’s own members. He then resigned from the League and set out to organize workers; but as it was impossible for him to content himself with merely building up the International and submitting to orders from Marx, he created a league of his own called the International Social Democratic Alliance, whose activities were partly secret and whose relation to the International was ambiguous. Marx again refused, in the case of the Alliance, to allow it to merge with the original organization, and insisted that Bakúnin dissolve it and have the various sections join separately. Bakúnin complied publicly; but it can never have occurred to him for a moment to drop the web of the secret society. He thought of himself habitually as the head of a great underground organization. And he was becoming for the first time in his life a genuinely formidable power. He had, through his Italian connections, set up branches in Italy and Spain, where the International had never had any following; and he had succeeded in getting a very strong grip on certain working-class organizations in French Switzerland, where the International was to hold its next congress. He had gone among the watchmakers of the Jura, who were reduced to the bitterest misery by the competition of the new American watchmaking; had visited them in the little mountain towns and put on for them a wonderful show. And he had got from them the most useful of his lieutenants, a young schoolmaster named James Guillaume, who had the virtues of discipline and diligence that Bakúnin himself lacked. At the Bâle Congress of 1869 Bakúnin was in the position of controlling twelve of the seventy-five delegates.
The issue on which the battle was fought between the forces of Bakúnin and those of Marx was abolition of the right of inheritance. This was a measure which Bakúnin demanded passionately as “one of the indispensable conditions for the emancipation of labor”—perhaps because he had been trying unsuccessfully to induce his brothers in Russia to send him a share of the family estate. Marx contended with his usual logic that, since the inheritance of private property was merely a result of the property system, the primary thing was to attack the system rather than to bother with its incidental evils.
But Marx was away in London, and, though he had conveyed his desires to the Congress in a report from the General Council, his only spokesman was a German tailor, obedient and literal-minded, who had no powers to act for himself. Bakúnin, on the other hand, was there on the spot, an exhilarating, compelling personality. A spectator of one of his appearances at a meeting of the League of Peace and Freedom has described the immense impression that he was capable of making on an audience, “as he walked up the steps to the platform, with his heavy peasant gait … negligently dressed in his gray blouse, out of which there peeped not a shirt but a flannel vest … A great cry of ‘Bakúnin!’ went up. Garibaldi, who was in the chair, rose and went forward to embrace him. Many opponents of Bakúnin’s were present, but the whole hall rose to its feet and it seemed as if the applause would never end.” Of his oration at another meeting Baron Wrangel has written: “I no longer remember what Bakúnin said, and it would in any case scarcely be possible to reproduce it. His speech had neither logical sequence nor richness in ideas, but consisted of thrilling phrases and rousing appeals. It was something elemental and incandescent—a raging storm with lightning flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions. The man was a born speaker, made for the revolution. The revolution was his natural being. His speech made a tremendous impression. If he had asked his hearers to cut each other’s throats, they would have cheerfully obeyed him.” For all the futility of his actual enterprises, he had acquired the power of a symbol. There is perhaps something in Bernard Shaw’s idea that Wagner’s Siegfried, conceived after his experience of the Dresden revolution, was based on the character of Bakúnin. In any case, despite the practical uselessness and the political inconsistency of Bakúnin’s defiance of the Prussians, this defiance had come to signify the assertion of the disinterested bravery of the human spirit against human self-interest and timidity, just as his survival from the prisons of three despots and his escape which had encircled the world, had demonstrated the strength of that will to be free which Byron had said was “brightest in dungeons.” Bakúnin appealed to the imagination as Marx had never been able to do: he had the superhuman simplification of a hero of romantic poetry, something very rare and strange in reality. And he poured forth at the Congress so eloquent an appeal in favor of the abolition of inheritance that for the first time in the history of the International a recommendation of the General Council was rejected. Bakúnin’s resolution was voted down, with a number of delegates abstaining; but Marx’s was voted down, too, and by a majority even larger. Eccarius, the unfortunate tailor—with whom Marx was later to quarrel—could only complain in distress: “Marx will be extremely displeased.”
And now it became evident to Marx that Bakúnin was out to capture the International. Fate delivered Bakúnin into his hands.
The reign of Alexander II, the new reform tsar, in Russia had by the sixties reverted to reaction and given rise to a new revolutionary movement. But this was no longer a mere gentlemen’s conspiracy like that of the Decembrists nor a ferment of intellectuals like the Petrashévtsy of the late forties: the agitators now were poor students for whom education was being made difficult by a government which had set out to advance it, but which had discovered that allowing people to learn anything meant encouraging contempt for the Tsar. One of these students was a young man named Necháev, the son of a former serf who had got himself sufficient schooling to enroll at the University of St. Petersburg. He had read about Babeuf and Blanqui, and his dreams were all of secret societies. In St. Petersburg he became the leader of the left wing of the students’ movement and was obliged to flee to Moscow when the police set out to round this movement up. He decided to go to Geneva to see Bakúnin and the other Russian exiles, and he arrived there in the March of ‘69.
Bakúnin was fascinated by Necháev. Himself rather lazy and mild despite his impulses toward universal destruction, he seemed to find in this boy of twenty-one, energetic, determined and virulent, the type of the perfect conspirator, endowed with that “diable au corps” which he had described as indispensable to the revolutionary in one of the programs he had written for his Alliance. There was an element of Rimbaud-Verlaine about the relations between Necháev and Bakúnin. The older man saw in the younger some ideal of himself reborn—merciless, realistic, intent, speeding like a shot to his mark. He adored him, referred to him as “Boy,” submitted to all his exactions.
Together—the original manuscript is supposed to have been in Bakúnins handwriting—they concocted a hair-raising document called The Catechism of a Revolutionist, which, though it managed, as Marx and Engels said, to fuse into a single ideal the romantic attitudes of Rodolphe, Karl Moor, Monte Cristo and Macaire, must be noted for its importance as the first complete statement of a revolutionary point of view that was to continue to figure in Russian history. The revolutionist, says the Catechism, is a doomed man, with no personal interests or feelings, without even a name of his own. He has only one idea: the revolution; and he has broken with all the laws and codes of morals of the educated world. If he lives in it, pretending to be a part of it, it is only to destroy it the more surely; everything in it must be equally hateful to him. He must be cold: he must be ready to die, he must train himself to bear torture, and he must be ready to kill in himself any sentiment, including that of honor, the moment it interferes with his purpose. He may feel friendship only for those who serve his purpose; revolutionists of inferior caliber he must regard as capital to be spent. If a comrade gets into trouble, his fate is to be decided by his usefulness and by the expenditure of revolutionary force necessary to save him. As for established society, the revolutionist must classify its members, not in respect to their individual villainy, but in respect to their varying degrees of harmfulness to the cause of the revolutionist himself. The most dangerous must be immediately destroyed; but there are also other categories of persons who, if allowed temporarily at large, will promote the revolutionist’s interests by perpetrating brutal acts and infuriating the population, or who may be exploited for the good of the cause by blackmail and intimidation. The category of liberals must be exploited by making them believe that one falls in with their programs and then compromising them by involving them with one’s own. Other radicals must be pushed into doing things which in most cases will destroy them completely and, in a few, will make them real revolutionists. The sole aim of the revolutionist is the freedom and happiness of the manual workers, but, believing that this can only be accomplished by an all-destructive popular revolution, he must further with all his power the evils that will exhaust the people’s patience. The Russian must repudiate squarely the classical model of revolution in vogue in the Western countries, which is always deferring to property and to the traditional social order of so-called civilization and morality, and which only replaces one State by another; the Russian revolutionist must eradicate the State, with all its traditions, institutions and classes. Thus the group that foments the revolution will not try to impose on the people any political organization from above: the organization of the future society will doubtless arise from the people themselves. Our business is simply destruction, terrible, complete, universal and ruthless; and for this purpose we must not only unite with the recalcitrant elements of the masses but also with the bold world of bandits, the only true revolutionists in Russia. It ought to be added that Bakúnin at this time was expressing admiration for the Jesuits and talking ominously about following their example.
Bakúnin and Necháev both had the mania of secret societies; but whereas Bakúnin seems merely to have deluded himself about the size and extent of his, Necháev was a systematic liar. He had already succeeded in creating a legend that he had escaped from the Peter-Paul Fortress, in which he had actually never been confined; and he had convinced Bakúnin that he was acting as the agent of a nationwide revolutionary committee. He now returned to Russia and passed himself off on the Moscow students as a member of a secret organization with iron discipline and terrible powers, which enjoined as one of the chief duties of its adherents the distribution of a certain poem on the death of the great revolutionist Necháev. One of the ablest and most disinterested of the student movement was a young man at the agricultural school named Ivánov, who was active in the coöperative enterprises of the students and devoted all his extra time to teaching the children of the peasants. He came soon to doubt the reality of Necháev’s organization and, after challenging him to prove its existence, finally announced his intention of founding a serious organization of his own. Necháev then induced four of his companions to help him to murder Ivánov; and, this done, obtained a false passport and succeeded in getting away, leaving his comrades to take the rap. The police arrested three hundred young people; of the eighty-four brought to trial, almost all were imprisoned or exiled.
Necháev had in the meantime returned to Geneva and got hold of some revolutionary friends and a Russian émigré paper; and he now began to treat Bakúnin as the Revolutionary Catechism said liberals ought to be treated after one had got out of them all that was possible. He would neither give Bakúnin any of the money nor allow him to collaborate on the paper; and he had in the meantime cut off for his old ally one of the latter’s possible sources of income. Bakúnin had got a commission through a friend to translate Das Kapital into Russian and had received a considerable advance. But when he found the work difficult and slow and had already spent the advance, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Necháev that such drudgery was a waste of time. Necháev wrote a letter to the friend—apparently without the knowledge of Bakúnin—threatening him with a terrible punishment at the hands of the secret committee if he made any trouble about the money. And finally, he took the precaution of stealing a box of Bakúnin’s correspondence in order always to be in a position to compromise him. Bakúnin now began writing letters to people all over Europe to warn them against Necháev; and Necháev resolved to plant a spy in Bakúnin’s organization. He picked out for this purpose a Pole whom he believed to be a genuine revolutionary. But the Pole was a stoolpigeon for the Tsar and lost no time in turning Necháev in.
But so far as the International was concerned, the damage was already done. At the trials of the Russian students in 1871, which brought the Revolutionist’s Catechism to light, it came out that Necháev had presented himself in Moscow as the authorized representative of the International. He had also in one of his publications referred the reader for the principles of his social theory to the Communist Manifesto. One can imagine the horror of Marx, who detested underground machinations and who had a morbid need to feel that everything was under his personal control, at discovering that a secret society, full of talk about invisible powers, initiates and inner circles, had been spreading its fibers inside the International and becoming identified with it.
It is no doubt true that Marx envied Bakúnin, just as he did Lassalle, for his ability to charm and command. Bakúnin had a peculiar combination of childlike candor with Russian slyness, which, together with his enthusiasm and his grandiose presence, enabled him to perform miracles of persuasion. There is a story that he once visited a bishop of the heretical Russian cult of Old Believers singing a religious song, and tried to convince him that their aims were identical; and it is certain that he quite innocently succeeded in turning into a tool of his own the Tsars principal agent in Switzerland, who was masquerading as a retired Russian general: this man actually allowed Bakúnin to send him back to Russia as his own agent, to report on revolutionary activities there and to intercede with Bakúnin’s family in the matter of the family estate; and he even became mesmerized to the point of helping Bakúnin out with a considerable sum of money, which the police agent obtained from the Tsar as expenditure in the line of duty. Bakúnin had also—what was perhaps even more remarkable—succeeded in charming Marx when, in the autumn of 1864, at the time of the founding of the International, they had seen one another in London. Bakúnin had asked warmly after Engels, regretted the death of Wolff, assured Marx that the Polish insurrection had failed because the landlords had not proclaimed “peasant socialism” and that he was resolved to devote himself henceforth to no cause but the socialist movement (later, he used to write Marx that he regarded himself as a disciple of his). Marx had written of Bakúnin to Engels in terms so favorable as to be almost unique in the Marx-Engels correspondence: Bakúnin was one of the few men, Marx had said, who had developed instead of retrograding during the previous sixteen years.
It is also true that in their writings against Bakúnin, Marx and Engels did not scruple to use against him certain of the misdeeds of Necháev for which Bakúnin was not directly responsible as well as entirely unfounded scandals about Bakúnin’s career in Siberia. Yet it seems to me unfair, in this particular connection, to reproach them, as Mehring does, severely. Surely Bakúnin was a little cracked and politically quite irresponsible. All his life he was still playing at conspiracy as he had done with his brothers and sisters at home in his father’s house, that isolated childhood domain where nothing could really happen to one, just as his eternal borrowing and then dismissing the debt from his mind was a survival of infantile dependence. He was able to catch people up by the spell of a personality part of whose power resided in the fact that it had the ingenuousness of a child’s, and could launch them before they knew it on secret missions, reckless defiances, etc.; but his conspiracies were always partly imaginary, and he never himself seems quite to have known the difference between the actuality and the dream. His lack of the sense of reality was proved in the most disastrous way by his carelessness about compromising his agents and the comrades with whom he corresponded in Russia. Marx and Engels were rightly shocked by this. Bakúnin, though he reveled in secret codes, often failed to take ordinary precautions to keep his people out of the hands of the police. It is significant that, though up to his last days he was always able to recruit new disciples, he invariably eventually lost his old ones. Even the indispensable Guillaume in the long run found Bakúnin impossible.
Furthermore, he had since 1866 been promulgating a doctrine of “anarchism,” of which the total abolition of the State demanded in the Revolutionist’s Catechism was one of the fundamental tenets. He had been preaching this doctrine in a campaign against what he called Marx’s German authoritarianism. What was sound in it was the notion that revolutionary organizations ought to come from the people themselves instead of being imposed from above, and that the units of a workers’ association ought to be allowed to arrive at their decisions through a strictly democratic procedure. But Bakúnin was certainly no great theoretician, and his principles and his actual practice presented so many inconsistencies that it was quite easy for Marx and Engels to ridicule them with deadly effect when they had seriously set out to discredit him. They pointed out that, although he had boasted that the organization of the Alliance was to prefigure the future society in which the State should have been abolished, it had actually been contrived as a dictatorship by one man, “le citoyen B.,” who was to make all the decisions himself; that, on the other hand, the actual looseness of the Alliance made sensible concerted action impossible, so that its units, aroused by cataclysmic visions, were actually exposed to immediate suppression; and that, so far from following the anarchist precept to abstain from playing any official role in the politics of the existing order, the adherents of Bakúnin in Spain in the uprisings of 1873 had not hesitated to accept office in the juntas which, instead of proceeding to abolish the State, were simply setting up provincial governments.
It would have been impossible for Bakúnin and Marx ever to have worked together as equals. The Bakúninists at Bâle had attempted but had failed to get the headquarters of the General Council transferred from London to Geneva. At the next congress, held at the Hague, which did not take place till September 2, 1872, Marx and Engels for the first time made a point of attending the sessions in person, arid, since the Italian Bakuninists stayed away, succeeded in dominating the proceedings. They produced the threatening letter which Necháev had written to the Russian who had arranged for Bakúnin to translate Das Kapital, and they got Bakúnin and Guillaume expelled.
Yet their opponent was still very strong. The Paris Commune had had the effect of encouraging the program of the Bakuninists, who advocated direct action as against the patient strategy of Marx. Bakúnin had rushed into action at Lyons in the September of 1870, when a republic had been proclaimed there and a Committee of Public Safety set up; in pursuance of his anarchist policy, he had lost no time in issuing a decree in which the State was declared abolished; but, as Marx and Engels pointed out, the mere force of the anarchist will was so far from being able to abolish it that it had sufficed for the State to assert itself in the shape of two battalions of the National Guard to put the society of the future to rout. Yet the Commune had been startlingly successful. Bakúnin had been enraptured when he had heard about the burning of the Tuileries: “He entered the group room with rapid strides—though he generally walked very slowly—struck the table with his stick and cried: Well, my friends, the Tuileries are in flames. I’ll stand a punch all around!’ ” And the revolutionists of the Mediterranean countries were all for rising against priests and princes rather than waiting for the industrial development without which Karl Marx had been insisting that all attempts at revolution were vain.
And Marx now had to fight the French Blanquists as well on somewhat similar grounds. These followers of Louis Blanqui, a socialist who believed in direct action, were clamoring to announce “the militant organization of the revolutionary forces of the proletariat” as one of the immediate aims of the International. The position of Marx and Engels was furthermore weakened in England itself by the fact that the trade union movement, which had succeeded in obtaining the vote and which had been frightened by Marx’s address in favor of the Paris Commune, was now turning toward the parliamentary Liberals, and had insisted on having a special council for their own sections of the International distinct from the General Council. Engels, who had moved to London in the autumn of 1870, had proved in some ways not a very great success as a member of this General Council: the British trade union members could not forget that he was a manufacturer—he had in fact in his commerce with the British merchant classes more or less acquired their manners; and they resented the martinet methods which he had carried over from his military training. They were even saying that Marx put him forward only because Engels gave him money. In Germany, the growing socialist movement had been obliged, in order to keep out of prison, to dissociate itself from the International. And Marx himself was now old, ill and tired, and he wanted to finish Das Kapital. Marx and Engels sabotaged the International at the moment when they could no longer control it, just as they had done with the Communist League. They had the headquarters transferred to New York.
The American workers had been slow and reluctant about affiliating themselves with the International, though there had been German-American members since 1869 and the membership, principally immigrant, had at one time reached five thousand. The pressure of the panic of ‘73, when there were a hundred and eighty thousand men out of work in New York State alone, gave the organization a certain importance. It had a hand in the immense unemployed demonstrations in Chicago and New York, and it gave support to the great anthracite strike of 1873. But it encountered insurmountable obstacles. One of the sections, headed by the feminist Victoria Woodhull, tried to launch a separate American movement, which included among its aims woman’s rights and free love and which called for the affiliation of all English-speaking citizens. When London suspended this section, Miss Woodhull, paying no heed to the rebuke, went on to convoke a convention of “all male and female human beings of America,” which advocated a universal language and nominated Miss Woodhull for president. And the International very soon split on the question of adapting it to American conditions by making it more inclusive. The secretary of the General Council was an old friend of Marx’s named Sorge, who had left Germany after ’48. The Marxists stuck to their principles, and the American sections split off and founded new labor parties. The International was finished off in 1874 by a resolution of the General Council, which forbade the American members to join any political party, however reformist in character, that had been organized by the owning classes.
In Europe, the Bakuninists’ International also went to pieces during the seventies, due to the impracticabilities of anarchist doctrine. Bakúnin died July 1, 1876, announcing his disillusionment with the masses, who “did not want to become impassioned for their own emancipation,” and asserting that “nothing firm and living can be built upon Jesuitical trickery.” A young girl student from Russia had come to him as the last of his disciples; and he used to make her tell him over and over again about the countryside at home. The frogs in the garden of his Italian villa reminded him of the frogs in Russia, as he had used to hear them in the fields and ponds around the Bakúnin house; and while he listened, she says, “the hard cunning light would go out of his eyes, and sadness would contract his features and lie like a shadow about his lips.” All his trickery and all his eloquence, all his defiance and all his threats, had been powerless to effect the escape of the man who had got out of Siberia, from that family estate of boyhood. The purely emotional character of his rebellion against society is indicated in one of the last things he said. He had left the hospital one evening to call on a friend, who played Beethoven for him on the piano. “Everything will pass,” said Bakúnin, “and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.”
But the real climax of all this period of working-class organization and agitation was the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Commune was a pivotal event in European political thought. We have seen how the news of the civil war laid Michelet out with a stroke; how two months of a socialist government in Paris so filled Taine with terror that he devoted the rest of his life to trying to discredit the French Revolution; how Anatole France in his twenties shuddered at the sight of the Communards. Inversely, for that later movement which looked for historical progress to the victory of the working class, the Commune broke through into the real stream of history as the first great justification of their theory. And just as the bourgeois historians shied away from it, so these other philosophers of history took heart from it, celebrated it, studied it. “The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its State,” Marx wrote Kugelmann in April, before the fall of the Commune, “has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.” Three years later, the anarchist Kropotkin, shut up in a St. Petersburg prison, had a solace which Bakúnin had not had: he spent a week rapping out on the wall of his cell for the benefit of a young man next door the story of what had happened in Paris.
Napoleon III, through his own weakness and through the corruption of his racketeering government, had by the latter part of the sixties forfeited the confidence of all those groups save the peasants among which he had formerly kept the balance. The shell of the Second Empire collapsed with his defeat at Sedan; and now the classes quickly came to blows, as Marx had predicted they would. A provisional republican government was set up by the liberal wing of the Chamber, and Blanqui was given a small post in it as commander of a battalion of the National Guard. Blanqui demanded the arming of the whole adult population of Paris in order to defend the city against the Prussians; but the bourgeois government was now afraid of a working-class insurrection. The fall of Metz and the approach of the Prussians precipitated an attempt at revolution by Blanqui and other socialists, which was suppressed by the Provisional Government. This government signed an armistice with the Germans on January 29, ’71, agreeing to the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine and the payment of an enormous indemnity. The National Assembly which met at Bordeaux and proclaimed the Republic in February elected Thiers as its head and was committed by him to a crushing program of raising money to pay off the Germans before proceeding to internal reforms. This program put an end to the moratorium on debts and to the suspension of the requirements to pay rent which had been in operation during the siege, and stopped the pay of the National Guard. When, finally, the government of Thiers attempted to take away from the National Guard the guns that had been cast at their own expense, there was a revolt which resulted on March 26 in the election of the Paris Commune.
The Parisians had had five months of siege, were reduced to the direst privation, and saw France, which had been involved by the Empire in a humiliating and disastrous war, now bound over to the Germans by the Republic. The new government, led by social revolutionists—though Blanqui had just been arrested for his part in the earlier uprising—announced the abolition of the police force and the army and the assumption of their duties by the people, the opening to the people of the public schools, the expropriation of the clergy, and the making elective of all public offices, which were to be salaried at a yearly maximum of 6000 francs. Yet this government was afraid to go too far: they lost time on elections and organization for fear of incurring the reproach of dictatorship; they scrupulously refrained from requisitioning the three billions in the National Bank; and they hesitated to march on Versailles, to which the National Assembly had retreated, for fear of provoking civil war. The Thiers government, with no hesitation, itself laid siege to Paris. During a single week in May, when the Commune was defeated (May 25), between twenty and forty thousand Communards were cut down by the Versailles troops. The Communards themselves shot hostages, burned buildings. It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history—and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing—that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people—the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand—in that one week of the suppression of the Commune than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years.
The Workers’ International, officially, had had nothing to do with the Commune; but some of its members had played important roles. Marx and Engels had watched from England, greedily clipping the papers, with the most intense excitement. Engels had tried to give them the benefit of his studies in military strategy by advising them, without effect, to fortify the north slopes of Montmartre, And two days after the final defeat, Marx had read to the General Council his address on The Civil War in France, which had aroused British indignation. “I have the honor to be at this moment,” he wrote to his friend Dr. Kugelmann, “the best calumniated and the most menaced man in London. This really does me good after a tedious twenty-years’ idyl in my study.”
Yet the Commune had not really followed the course that Marx and Engels had previously laid down for the progress of the revolutionary movement. In so far as it had succeeded, it had justified rather the direct force idea of their opponents Blanqui and Bakúnin. And now Marx, who had always insisted that the State of the bourgeoisie would have to be taken over by the proletarian dictatorship and could be abolished only gradually, allowed himself some inconsistency in praising the bold action of the Communards in simply decreeing the old institutions out of existence.
Afterwards, he and Engels used the Commune for all it was worth, “improving its unconscious tendencies,” as Engels once admitted, “into more or less conscious plans.” The truth was that it had been much too busy during the brief two months of its existence to get far with the reorganization of society, and that it had been, in fact, from the beginning perhaps as much a patriotic as a social revolutionary movement. Yet Engels asserted, also, that the socialist pointing-up of these events was “under the circumstances justifiable, even necessary.” He was himself, on the twentieth anniversary of the Commune in 1891, to declare that if the socialist “Philistine” wanted to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat would be like, he should simply look at the Paris Commune. Let us note that a myth-making tendency is already beginning to appear in connection with that socialist view of history which most prides itself on being realistic.
And let us note that this is closely bound up with the myth of the Dialectic. It is in such terms as the following that Marx, in The Civil War in France and in his letters to Ludwig Kugelmann, habitually discusses the Commune: “What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for self-sacrifice in these Parisians! … History has no comparable example of such greatness … working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris, almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the enemies at its gates—radiant in the enthusiasm of its historical initiative… . They know that, in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which modern society is irresistibly tending by its own economic agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men… . In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with the inkhorn and the pen, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility… . Working-man’s Paris, with its Commune, will be celebrated forever as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators History has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”
History, then, is a being with a definite point of view in any given period. It has a morality which admits of no appeal and which decrees that the exterminators of the Commune shall be regarded as wrong forever. Knowing this—knowing, that is, that we are right—we may allow ourselves to exaggerate and simplify. At such a moment the Marxism of Marx himself—and how much more often and more widely in the case of his less scrupulous disciples—departs from the rigorous method proposed by “scientific socialism.”