And, of course, there was still the menace of Michael Bakunin, who observed the wounded and limping International like a hungry hyena eyeing up its lunch. He was now intriguing more ruthlessly than ever with his new henchman Sergei Nechayev, a deranged Russian anarcho-terrorist who had come to Switzerland in 1869. Bakunin, no mean fantasist himself, was awestruck by Nechayev’s boast of having organised a network of revolutionary cells across Russia, and the dramatic account of his jailbreak from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. Although most of these tales were pure fiction, Nechayev’s appetite for violence was real enough: before fleeing from Russia he had murdered a fellow student in St Petersburg, apparently for no better reason than to prove that he could do it. Having teamed up with Bakunin he published a series of incendiary articles and proclamations, ostensibly from ‘the International’, warning of the wrath to come.
The antics of the Bakuninists split the Federation Romande, the International’s Swiss section, down the middle and caused endless confusion – not least because both factions continued to issue statements in the name of the Federation. To settle the dispute the London HQ called a special conference in September 1871, held at the Blue Posts pub off Tottenham Court Road. ‘It was hard work,’ Marx wrote to his wife, who wisely took herself off to Ramsgate for the duration. ‘Morning and evening sessions, commission sessions in between, hearing of witnesses, reports to be drawn up and so forth. But more was done than at all the previous Congresses put together, because there was no audience in front of which to stage rhetorical comedies.’
Marx, always a good performer in pubs, dominated the proceedings. He pointed out that although Bakunin had promised to disband his so-called Alliance of Socialist Democracy as a condition of admission to the International, ‘the Alliance was never really dissolved; it has always maintained a sort of organisation’. There was no direct condemnation of Bakunin but the delegates passed a motion noting that Nechayev, who had never been a member or agent of the International, ‘has fraudulently used the name of the International Working Men’s Association in order to make dupes and victims in Russia’. The Bakuninists were also ordered to stop using the name of the Federation Romande; as a sop, they were allowed to form a separate Swiss section to be known as the Jurassian Federation.
Bakunin had been let off quite lightly. But he knew that Marx was preparing for a final showdown, since the International clearly wasn’t big enough for both of them. Soon after the London conference the new Jurassian Federation held a congress of its own, at the Swiss town of Sonvillier, where there was much huffing and puffing about the ‘unrepresentative’ nature of the London conference. True enough: at the Blue Posts there had been thirteen members of the General Council but just ten delegates from the rest of the world – two from Switzerland (both anti-Bakunin), one each from France and Spain, and no fewer than six from Belgium. The Sonvillier gathering was, however, even less representative: sixteen delegates and every one a Bakuninist. They produced a circular which was distributed to International branches throughout the Continent: ‘If there is an undeniable fact, attested a thousand times by experience, it is the corrupting effect of authority on those in whose hands it is placed … The functions of members of the General Council have come to be regarded as the private property of a few individuals … They have become in their own eyes a sort of government; and it was natural that their own particular ideas should seem to them to be the official and only authorised doctrine of the Association, while divergent ideas expressed by other groups seemed no longer a legitimate expression of opinion equal in value to their own, but a veritable heresy.’ The only cure for rampant authoritiarianism, they said, was to strip the General Council of its powers and reduce it to a mere ‘letter-box’.
Over the next few months Bakunin issued a series of increasingly hysterical, phlegm-spattered circulars to International members in Spain and Italy, presenting himself as the victim of ‘a dire conspiracy of German and Russian Jews’ who were ‘fanatically devoted to their dictator-messiah Marx’. Only the ‘Latin race’, he added flatteringly, could foil the Hebrews’ secret plans for world domination.
This whole Jewish world which constitutes a single exploiting sect, a sort of bloodsucker people, a collective parasite, voracious, organised in itself, not only across the frontiers of states but even across all the differences of political opinion – this world is presently, at least in great part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand and of the Rothschilds on the other. I know that the Rothschilds, reactionaries as they are and should be, highly appreciate the merits of the communist Marx; and that in his turn the communist Marx feels irresistibly drawn, by instinctive attraction and respectful admiration, to the financial genius of Rothschild. Jewish solidarity, that powerful solidarity that has maintained itself through all history, united them.
These putrid ravings were at least sincere, if nothing else. Back in 1869 he had written a lengthy tirade against the Jews (‘devoid of all moral sense and all personal dignity’) in which he named only five exceptions to the rule: Jesus Christ, St Paul, Spinoza, Lassalle and Marx. When a friend asked why Marx had been granted absolution, Bakunin explained that he wanted to put the enemy off guard: ‘It could happen, even in a short time, that I will begin a battle with him … But there is a time for everything, and the hour for the struggle has not yet sounded.’ Now that battle had commenced, he no longer needed to hide his true feelings.
There is an important distinction to be made here. Until the Second World War, popular novelists such as Agatha Christie sometimes included throwaway anti-Semitic remarks in their books (‘He’s a Jew, of course, but an awfully nice one’); no one, however, has ever accused Christie of wanting to round up six million Jews and slaughter them. Similarly, the stereotype of the ‘economic Jew’ was almost universal in the nineteenth century: Marx himself used it in his early essay On the Jewish Question. But Bakunin directed his vicious diatribes at ‘blood Jews’, regardless of their actual religious observances, business methods, social class or political ideology. Where Marx had argued that the emancipation of mankind would free Jews from the tyranny of Judaism, Bakunin wished only to annihilate them. ‘In all countries the people detest the Jews,’ he wrote in a circular letter to the Bologna section of the International. ‘They detest them so much that every popular revolution is accompanied by a massacre of Jews: a natural consequence …’
Understandably, the General Council felt obliged to distance itself from these genocidal rants, especially at a time when every editor in Europe was looking for mud to throw at the International Working Men’s Association. In June 1872 it issued a pamphlet written by Marx, The Fictitious Splits in the International, whose very first page served only to disprove the title by confirming that there was indeed a split as big as the English Channel: ‘The International is undergoing the most serious crisis since its foundation.’ Bakunin was accused of inciting ‘racial war’ and organising secret societies as part of his anarchistic master plan to wreck the working-class movement.
He retaliated by demanding that a full congress should be summoned to settle the dispute once and for all. As there had been no congress since 1869 – first because of the Franco-Prussian war and then because of police persecution following the Paris Commune – the General Council could hardly refuse. It duly announced that a plenary assembly would open at the Hague on 2 September 1872. This was the cue for yet more howls of protest from Bakunin, who wanted it held in his own stronghold of Geneva, but the Council pointed out that Switzerland had already been the location for three of the International’s four congresses and one could have too much of a good thing. Bakunin decided to boycott the event altogether, while instructing his followers ‘to send their delegates to the Hague, but with imperative mandates, clearly set forth, ordering them to walk out of the congress in solidarity as soon as the majority has declared itself in the Marxian direction on any question whatever’.
After these preliminary skirmishes the Hague congre
ss opened in a mood of conspiratorial frenzy at the inappropriately named Concordia Hall. There were sixty-five delegates but many more reporters, spies and curious sightseers who came to gaze at the dangerous revolutionaries as if they were lions in a circus. A Belgian newspaper broke the sad news to its readers that Dr Marx, godfather of terrorism and chaos, looked like a ‘gentleman farmer’. The liberal Dutch journalist S. M. N. Calisch noted that Marx was said to have relations in Amsterdam: ‘If that is correct, then his family will have no worries about introducing him to society or drinking tea with him in the Zoo Café. The impression he makes in his grey suit is exactly comme il faut. Anyone who did not know him and had no connection with the nightmare of the feared International would take him for a tourist making a sortie on foot.’ Even so, jewellers locked and barred their shops for fear that the communists would otherwise smash the windows and steal all the trinkets. A local paper, the Haager Dagblaad, advised women and children to stay indoors.
To the dismay of police agents and pressmen, the congress immediately went into closed session while delegates’ bona fides were checked. A spy from Berlin wrote dejectedly to his masters that ‘the public is not even allowed a look into the ground floor where the meetings are held, or even so much as make an attempt to overhear through the open window a single word of what is taking place within’. The Times’s correspondent did manage to press his ear to a keyhole, but heard only ‘the tinkling of the President’s bell, rising now and again above a storm of angry voices’. The arguments were both angry and prolonged: for three days the rival factions jostled for advantage by challenging the credentials of almost all their opponents. When someone pointed out that Maltman Barry, present on behalf of the German workers in Chicago, was in fact a Tory from London and ‘not a recognised leader of English working men’, Marx replied that this was no disgrace since ‘almost every recognised leader of English working men was sold to Gladstone’ – a remark scarcely calculated to win the other English representatives to his side. Still, at least he could rely on the Germans and the French, who included Jennychen’s fiancé, Charles Longuet. Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue had cunningly smuggled himself into the Spanish delegation, the rest of which was solidly pro-Bakunin.
At the end of the three-day marathon it was clear that the anarchists were heavily outnumbered. Some delegates, unable to stay away from work any longer, then returned home without waiting for the actual debates and votes; others wandered off in search of more stimulating congress in the local brothels.
‘At last we have had a real session of the International congress,’ the newspaper Le Français reported after the doors had opened to the public on the evening of 5 September, ‘with a crowd ten times greater than the hall could accommodate, with applause and interruptions and pushing and jostling and tumultuous cries, and personal attacks and extremely radical but nevertheless extremely conflicting declarations of opinion, with recriminations, denunciations, protests, calls to order, and finally a closure of the session, if not of the discussion, which at past ten o’clock, in a tropical heat and amid inexpressible confusion, imposed itself by the force of things.’ Although he was trying to make himself inconspicuous by sitting discreetly behind Engels, no one doubted that the gentleman farmer was running the show. In the very first debate, on extending the powers of the General Council, a delegate from New York argued that the International needed a strong head ‘with plenty of brains’. There was laughter in the hall as all eyes turned simultaneously to Marx. The motion was carried by thirty-two votes to six, with sixteen abstentions.
When the result was announced, Engels suddenly rose from his chair and asked for permission to ‘make a communication to the congress’. In view of the International’s manifest disunity and the unlikelihood of ever reconciling the French with the Spaniards or the English with the Germans, he and Marx wished to propose that the home of the General Council should be moved to New York.
Unable to believe what they had heard, the delegates sat in numbed silence for a minute or two. As an English observer wrote, ‘It was a coup d’état, and each one looked to his neighbour to break the spell.’ Europe was the cradle of the new revolutionary movement, as the Paris Communards had shown little more than a year before: how could the International nurture and educate its infant from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? Engels’s tribute to the superior ‘capacity and zeal’ of organised labour in the United States was particularly unconvincing, since everyone knew that for the past couple of years the International’s American section had been preoccupied with the struggle against Victoria Woodhull and her crackpot cult. True, an all-American General Council might suffer from fewer quarrels between Proudhonists, Blanquists and Communists, but it would also lack the mighty brain of Karl Marx. Some of his bitterest enemies thoroughly approved of the idea for this very reason, just as many allies felt obliged to vote against. ‘His personal supervision and direction are absolutely essential,’ one distraught Marxist pleaded. Another said that they might as well transfer the HQ to the moon as to New York. Thanks to the anarchists’ block vote, however, Marx and Engels got their way: twenty-six votes for, twenty-three against, and six abstentions.
By exiling the International to America, Marx had deliberately condemned it to death. ‘The star of the Commune has already passed its not very elevated meridian altitude,’ the Spectator commented on 14 September, ‘and, unless it be in Russia, we shall hardly ever see it so high again.’ So why did he do it? Marxian scholars have treated the question as an insoluble riddle, but there is no great mystery: he was simply exhausted by the effort of holding the warring tribes together. One or two comrades had already been let in on the secret. ‘I am so overworked,’ he wrote to a Russian friend three months before the congress, ‘and in fact so much interfered with in my theoretical studies, that, after September, I shall withdraw from the commercial concern [a code-phrase for the General Council] which, at this moment, weighs principally on my own shoulders, and which, as you know, has its ramifications all over the world. But moderation in all things, and I can no longer afford – for some time at least – to combine two sorts of business of so very different a character.’ In a letter to the Belgian socialist César de Paepe, dated 28 May 1872, he sounded even more demob happy: ‘I can hardly wait for the next congress. It will be the end of my slavery. After that I shall become a free man again; I shall accept no more administrative functions any more …’ Marx knew that without his commanding presence the General Council would disintegrate anyway and might do serious damage to communism before expiring. Far better to put the wounded beast out of its misery.
After the New York decision, the subsequent debates at the Hague congress could only be something of an anti-climax. But Marx had prepared one more coup de théâtre with which to quit the public stage. Two weeks before travelling to Holland he had obtained a document from St Petersburg which seemed to prove that Michael Bakunin was a homicidal maniac. This he now produced, thus igniting a final bonfire of the vanities.
Back in the winter of 1869, short of money as usual, Bakunin had accepted 300 roubles from a publisher’s agent called Lyubavin to translate Capital into Russian. It would be hard to think of anyone less suited to the task: quite apart from being an incorrigible procrastinator, he was unlikely to do anything that would enhance Marx’s reputation. But Lyubavin apparently knew nothing of this, and after a few months he sent a gentle reminder that the manuscript was now due. By way of reply, in February 1870 he received a terrifying letter from Bakunin’s rabid attack-dog, young Sergei Nechayev, who claimed to be acting on behalf of a secret ‘bureau’ of revolutionary assassins. After denouncing Lyubavin as a parasite and extortioner who sought to prevent Bakunin from ‘working for the supremely important cause of the Russian people’ by forcing him on to the literary treadmill, Nechayev ordered the publisher to tear up the contract and let Bakunin keep the money – or else.
Recognising with whom you are dealing, you will therefore do everything nece
ssary to avoid the regrettable possibility that we may have to address ourselves to you a second time in a less civilised way … We are always rigorously punctual, and we have calculated the exact day on which you will receive this letter. You, in turn, should be no less punctual in submitting to these demands, so that we shall not be placed under the necessity of having recourse to extreme measures which will prove a trifle more severe … It depends entirely on you whether our relations become more amicable and a firmer understanding is created between us or whether our relationship takes a more unpleasant course.
I have the honour to be, Sir, yours truly …
As a clue as to the nature of his ‘extreme measures’, Nechayev embellished the writing paper with a crest featuring a pistol, an axe and a dagger.
This is not a technique one would recommend to an author who has missed his deadline. Bakunin later maintained that he was unaware of the letter, just as he had no idea that Nechayev was wanted for the murder of a student in St Petersburg: as soon as he discovered the ghastly truth, in the spring of 1870, he disowned his bloodthirsty associate at once. His plea of innocence has been accepted by historians and biographers ever since, but it is no more reliable than anything else emanating from this world-class fantasist.
The truth resides in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where in 1966 Professor Michael Confino discovered a long letter from Bakunin to Nechayev dated 2 June 1870 – that is, after the father of anarchism had supposedly disinherited his delinquent son. Far from repudiating him, Bakunin proposed that they continue to plot and scheme together, the only proviso being that ‘Boy’ (as he fondly called Nechayev) should be more discriminating in his choice of victims. ‘This simple law,’ he wrote, ‘must be the basis of our activity: truth, honesty, mutual trust between all Brothers and towards any man who is capable of becoming and whom you would wish to become a Brother; lies, cunning, entanglement, and, if necessary, violence towards enemies.’ So much for Bakunin’s repudiation of ‘gangsterism’.
Karl Marx Page 36