 But if the persistent efforts of certain meddlers to deliberately maintain confusion between the International and a society [the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy] which has been hostile to it since its inception allowed the General Council to maintain this reserve, the support which European reaction finds in the scandals provoked by that society at a time when the International is undergoing the most serious trial since its foundation obliges it to present a historical review of all these intrigues. On the other hand, the International found a very powerful means of propaganda in the bourgeois press and particularly in the leading English newspapers, which the Address forced to engage in a polemic kept going by the General Council's replies. The arrival in London of numerous refugees from the Commune made it necessary for the General Council to constitute itself as a relief committee and function as such for more than eight months, besides carrying on its regular duties. It goes without saying that the vanquished and exiles from the Commune had nothing to hope for from the bourgeoisie. As for the working class, the appeals for aid came at a difficult moment. Switzerland and Belgium had already received their contingent of refugees whom they had either to support or send on to London. The funds collected in Germany, Austria, and Spain were sent to Switzerland. In England, the big fight for the nine-hour working day, the decisive battle of which was fought at Newcastle, had exhausted both the workers' individual contributions and the funds set up by the trade unions, which could be used, incidentally, according to the rules, only for labor conflicts. Meanwhile, by working diligently and sending out letters, the Council managed to accumulate, bit by bit, the money which it distributed weekly. The American workers responded more generously to its appeal. It is unfortunate that the Council could not avail itself of the millions which the terrified bourgeoisie believed the International to have amassed in its safes! After May 1871, some of the Commune s refugees were asked to join the Council, in which, as a result of the war, the French side was no longer represented. Among these new members were some old Internationalists and a minority composed of men known for their revolutionary energy whose election was an act of homage to the Paris Commune. Along with these preoccupations, the Council had to prepare for the Conference of Delegates that it had just called. The violent measures taken by the Bonapartist government against the International had prevented the holding of the Congress at Paris, which had been provided for by a resolution of the Basel Congress. Using the right conferred upon it by Article 4 of the Rules, the General Council, in its circular of July 12, 1870, convened the Congress at Mainz. In letters addressed at the same time to the various federations, it proposed that the General Council should transfer its seat from England to another country and asked that delegates be provided with definite mandates to that effect. The federations unanimously insisted that it should remain in London. The Franco-Prussian War, which began a few days latter, made it necessary to abandon any plans for convening the Congress. It was then that the federations which we consulted authorized us to fix the date of the next Congress as may be dictated by the political situation. As soon as the political situation permitted, the General Council called a private Conference, acting on the precedents of the 1865 Conference and the private administrative meetings of each Congress. A public Congress was impossible and could only have resulted in the continental delegates being denounced at a moment when European reaction was celebrating its orgies; when Jules Favre was demanding from all governments, even the British, the extradition of refugees as common criminals; when Dufaure was proposing to the Rural Assembly a law banning the International, a hypocritical counterfeit of which was later presented by Malou to the Belgians; when in Switzerland a Commune refugee was put under preventive arrest while awaiting the federal government's decision on the extradition order; when hunting down members of the International was the ostensible basis for an alliance between Beust and Bismarck, whose anti-International clause Victor Emmanuel was quite eager to adopt; when the Spanish Government, putting itself entirely at the disposal of the butchers of Versailles, was forcing the Madrid Federal Council to seek refuge in Portugal; at a time, lastly, when the International's prime duty was to strengthen its organization and to accept the gauntlet thrown down by the governments. All sections in regular contact with the General Council were invited in good time to the Conference, which, even though it was not to be a public meeting, nevertheless faced serious difficulties. In view of the internal situation, France was, of course, unable to elect any delegates. In Italy, the only organized section at the time was that of Naples; but just as it was about to nominate a delegate it was broken up by the army. In Austria and Hungary, the most active members were imprisoned. In Germany, some of the more well-known members were prosecuted for the crime of high treason, others landed in jail, and the party's funds were spent on aid to their families. The Americans, though they sent the Conference a detailed memorandum on the situation of the International there, employed the delegation's money for maintaining the refugees. All federations, in fact, recognized the necessity of substituting the private Conference for a public Congress. After meeting in London from September 17 to 23, 1871, the Conference authorized the General Council to publish its resolutions; to codify the Administrative Regulations and publish them with the General Rules, as reviewed and corrected, in three languages; to carry out the resolution to replace membership cards with stamps; to reorganize the International in England; and, lastly, to provide the necessary money for these various purposes. Following the publication of the Conference proceedings, the reactionary press of Paris and Moscow, of London and New York, denounced the resolution on working-class policy as containing such dangerous designs the Times accused it &ldquo;of coolly calculated audacity&rdquo; that it would outlaw the International with all possible speed. On the other hand, the resolution that dealt a blow at the fraudulent sectarian sections gave the international police a long-awaited excuse to start a noisy campaign ostensibly for the unrestricted autonomy of the workers whom it professed to protect against the despicable despotism of the General Council and the Conference. The working class felt itself so &ldquo;heavily oppressed&rdquo;, indeed, that the General Council received from Europe, America, Australia, and even the East Indies reports about the admission of new members and the formation of new sections. Bakunin found the necessary elements for the formation of this society in the relationships he had formed during his stay in Italy, and in a small group of Russian emigrants, serving him as emissaries and recruiting officers among members of the International in Switzerland, France, and Spain. Yet it was only after repeated refusals of the Belgian and Paris federal councils to recognize the Alliance that he decided to submit for the General Council's approval his new society's rules, which were nothing but a faithful reproduction of the &ldquo;misunderstood&ldquo; Bern program. The Council replied with the following circular dated December 22, 1868. approved by IWMA General Council December 22, 1868 [written in French] March 9, 1869 [written in French and English issued to all International section] Even before the Basel Congress, when Nechayev came to Geneva, Bakunin got together with him and founded, in Russia, a secret society among students. Always hiding his true identity under the name of various "revolutionary committees", he sought autocratic powers based on all the tricks and mystifications of the time of Cagliostro. The main means of propaganda used by this society consisted in compromising innocent people in the eyes of the Russian police by sending them communications from Geneva in yellow envelopes stamped in Russian on the outside "secret revolutionary committee". The published accounts of the Nechayev trial bear witness to the infamous abuse of the International's name. The Alliance commenced at this time a public polemic directed against the General Council, first in the Locle Progres, then in the Geneva Egalite, the official newspaper of the romance Federation, where several members of the Alliance had followed Bakunin. The General Council, which had scorned the attacks published in Progres, Bakunin's personal organ, could not ignore those from Egalite, which it was bound to believe were approved by the romance Federal Committee. It, therefore, pubblished the circular of January 1, 1870. The January 1, 1870, circular, like those of December 22, 1868, and March 9, 1869, was approved by all International societies. It goes without saying that none of the conditions accepted by the Alliance have ever been fulfilled. Its sham sections have remained a mystery to the General Council. Bakunin sought to retain under his personal direction the few groups scattered in Spain and Italy and the Naples section which he had detached from the International. In the other Italian towns, he corresponded with small cliques composed not of workers but of lawyers, journalists, and other bourgeois doctrinaires. At Barcelona, some of his friends maintained his influence. In some towns in the South of France, the Alliance made an effort to found separatist sections under the direction of Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, of Lyon, about whom we shall have more to say later. In a word, the International within the International continued to operate. The big blow the attempt to take over the leadership of French Switzerland was to have been executed by the Alliance at the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress, opened on April 4, 1870. The battle began over the right to admit the Alliance delegates, which was contested by the delegates of the Geneva Federation and the Chaux-de-Fonds sections. Although, on their own calculation, the Alliance supporters represented no more than a fifth of the Federation members, they succeeded, thanks to repetition of the Basel maneuvers, in procuring a fictitious majority of one or two votes, a majority which, in the words of their own organ (see Solidarite of May 7, 1870), represented no more than 15 sections, while in Geneva alone there were 30! On this vote, the French-Switzerland Congress split into two groups which continued their meetings independently. The Alliance supporters, considering themselves the legal representatives of the whole of the Federation, transferred the Federal Committee's seat to Chaux-de-Fonds and founded at Neuchatel their official organ, Solidarite, edited by Citizen Guillaume. This young writer had the special job of decrying the Geneva factory workers , those odious bourgeois , of waging war of L'Egalite, the Federation newspaper, and of preaching total abstention from politics. The authors of the most important articles on this theme were Bastelica in Marseilles and Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc in Lyon, the two big pillars of the Alliance. On their return, the Geneva delegates convened their sections in a general assembly which, despite opposition from Bakunin and his friends, approved their actions at the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress. A little later, Bakunin and the more active of his accomplices were expelled from the old Romance Federation. Hardly had the Congress closed when the new Chaux-de-Fonds Committee called for the intervention of the General Council in a latter signed by F. Robert, secretary, and by Henri Chevalley, president, who was denounced two months later as a thief by the Committee's organ, Solidarite, on July 9. After examining the case of both sides, the General Council decided on June 28, 1870, to keep the Geneva Federal Committee in its old functions and invite the new Chaux-de-Fonds Federal Committee to take a local name. In the face of this decision which foiled its plans, the Chaux-de-Fonds Committee denounced the General Council's authoritarianism, forgetting that it had been the first to ask for its intervention. The trouble that the persistent attempts of the Chaux-de-Fonds Committee to usurp the name of the Romance Federal Committee caused the Swiss Federation, obliged the General Council to suspend all official relations with the former. Louis Bonaparte had just surrendered his army at Sedan. From all sides arose protests from International members against the war s continuation. In its address of September 9, the General Council, denouncing Prussia s plans of conquest, indicated the danger of her triumph for the proletarian cause and warned the German workers that they would themselves be the first victims. In England, the General Council organized meetings which condemned the pro-Prussian tendencies of the court. In Germany, the International workers organized demonstrations demanding recognition of the Republic and an honorable peace for France .... Meanwhile, his bellicose nature gave the hotheaded Guillaume (of Neuchatel) the brilliant idea of publishing an anonymous manifesto as a supplement, and under cover, of the official newspaper Solidarite, calling for the formation of a Swiss volunteer corps to fight the Prussians, something which he had doubtless always been prevented from doing by his abstentionist convictions. Then came the Lyon uprising. Bakunin rushed there and, supported by Albert Richard, Gaspard Blanc, and Bastelica, installed himself on September 28 in the town hall where he refrained from posting a guard, however, lest it be viewed as a political act. He was driven out in shame by some of the National Guard at the moment when, after a difficult accouchement, his decree on the abolition of the state had just seen the light of day. In October 1870, the General Council, in the absence of its French members, coopted Citizen Paul Robin, a refugee from Brest, one of the best-known supporters of the Alliance, and, what is more, the instigator of several attacks on the General Council in L Egalite, where, since that moment, he has acted constantly as official correspondent of the Chaux-de-Fonds Committee. On March 14, 1871, he suggested the calling of a private Conference of the International to sift out the Swiss trouble. Foreseeing that important events were in the making in Paris, the Council flatly refused. Robin returned to the question on several occassions and even suggested that the Council take a definite decision on the conflict. On July 25, the General Council decided that this affair would be one of the questions for the Conference due to be convened in September 1871. On August 10, the Alliance, hardly eager to see its activities looked into by a Conference, declared itself dissolved as from August 6. But, on September 15, it reappeared and requested admission to the Council under the name of the Atheist Socialist Section. According to Administrative Resolution No. V. of the Basel Congress, the Council could not admit it without consulting the Geneva Federal Committee, which was exhausted after its two years of struggle against the sectarian sections. Moreover, the Council had already told the Young Men s Christian Association that the International did not recognize theological sections. On August 6, the date of the dissolution of the Alliance, the Chaux-de-Fonds Federal Committee renewed its request to enter into official relations with the Council and said that it would continue to ignore the June 28 resignation and to regard itself, in relation to Geneva, as the Romance Federal Committee, and that it was up to the General Congress to judge this affair . On September 4, the same Committee challenged the Conference s competence, even though it had been the first to call for its convocation. The Conference could have replied by questioning the competence of the Paris Federal Committee, which the Chaux-de-Fonds Committee had, before the siege of Paris, asked to deliberate on the Swiss conflict. But it confined itself to the General Council decision of June 28, 1870 (see the reasons given in L'Egalite of Geneva, October 21, 1871). The Geneva members of the International did all they could for the emigrants. They came to their aid right from the beginning, initiated a wide campaign, and prevented the Swiss authorities from serving an extradition order on the refugees as demanded by the Versailles government. Several risked grave danger by going to France to help the refugees reach the frontier. Imagine the surprise of the Geneva workers when they saw several of the ringleaders, such as B. Malon , immediately come to an understanding with the Alliance people and with the help of N. Zhukovsky, ex-secretary of the Alliance, try to found at Geneva, outside the Romance Federation, the new Socialist Revolutionary Propaganda and Action Section . In the first article of its rules, it pledges allegiance to the General Rules of the International Working Men's Association, while reserving for itself the complete freedom of action and initiative to which it is entitled as a logical consequence of the principle of autonomy and federation recognized by the Rules and Congresses of the Association. In other words, it reserves for itself full freedom to continue the work of the Alliance. In a letter from Malon of October 20, 1871, this new section for the third time asked the General Council for admission to the International. Confirming to Resolution V of the Basel Congress, the Council consulted the Geneva Federal Committee, which vigorously protested against the Council's recognizing this new seedbed of intrigues and dissentions . The Council acted, in fact, in a rather authoritarian manner, so as not to bind the whole Federation to the will of B. Malon and N. Zhukovsky, the Alliance's ex-secretary. Solidarite having gone out of business, the new Alliance supporters founded the Revolution Sociale under the supreme management of Madame Andre Leo, who had just said at the Lausanne Peace Congress that Raoul Rigault and Ferre were the two sinister figures of the Commune who, up till then (up till the execution of the hostages), had not stopped calling for bloody measures, albeit in vain. From its very first issue, the newspaper hastened to put itself on the same level as Figaro, Gaulois, Paris-Journal, and other disreputable sheets which have been throwing mud at the General Council. It thought the moment opportune to fan the flames of national hatred, even within the International. It called the General Council a German Committee led by a Bismarckian brain.  After having definitely established that certain General Council members could not boast of being Gauls first and foremost , the Revolution Sociale could find nothing better than to take up the second slogan put in circulation by the European police and to denounce the Council's authoritarianism . What, then, were the facts on which this childish rubbish rested? The General Council had let the Alliance die a natural death and, in agreement with the Geneva Federal Committee, had prevented it from being resurrected. Moreover, it had suggested to the Chaux-de-Fonds Committee that it take a name which would permit it to live in peace with the great majority of International members in French Switzerland. Apart from these authoritarian acts, what use did the General Council make, between October 1869 and October 1871 of the fairly extensive powers that the Basel Congress had conferred upon it? During the last days of the Conference, a French section of 1871, about 35 members strong, was formed in London among the Commune refugees. The first authoritarian act of the General Council was to publicly denounce the secretary of this section, Gustave Durand, as a French police spy. The documents in our possession prove the intention of the police first to assist Durand to attend the Conference and then to secure for him membership in the General Council. Since the rules of the new section directed its members not to accept any delegation to the General Council other than from its section, Citizen Theisz and Bastelica withdrew from the Council. On October 17, the section delegated to the Council two of its members, holding imperative mandates; one was none other than Mr. Chautard, ex-member of the artillery committee. The Council refused to admit them prior to an examination of the rules of the 1871 Section.  Suffice it to recall here the principal point of the debate to which these rules gave rise. Article 2 states: The 1871 Section, far form being satisfied with this reply, published on December 14 a declaration signed by all its members, including the new secretary, who was shortly expelled as a scoundrel from the refugee society. According to this declaration, the General Council, by refusing to usurp the legislative functions, was accused of a gross distortion of the social idea . Here are some sample of the good faith displayed in the drawing up of this document: The London Conference approved the conduct of the German workers during the [Franco-Prussian] war. It was apparent that this resolution, proposed by a Swiss delegate [Outine], seconded by a Belgian delegate, and approved unanimously, referred only to the German members of the International, who paid and are still paying for their anti-chauvinist behavior during the war by imprisonment. Furthermore, in order to avoid any possible misinterpretation, the Secretary of the General Council for France [Serraillier] had just explained the true sense of the resolution in a letter published by the journals Qui Vive!, Constitution, Radical, Emancipation, Europe, etc. Nonetheless, eight days later, on November 23, 1871, 15 members of the French Section of 1871 inserted in Qui Vive! a protest full of abuse against the German workers and denouncing the Conference resolution as irrefutable proof of the General Council s pan-Germanic idea . On the other hand, the entire feudal, liberal, and police press of Germany seized avidly upon this incident to demonstrate to the German workers how their international dreams had come to naught. In the end, the November 29 protest was endorsed by the entire 1871 Section in its December 14 declaration. Naturally enough, the 1871 Section was in continuous contact with the dissident of Geneva and Neuchatel. One Chalain, a member who has shown more energy in attacking the General Council than he had ever shown in defending the Commune, was unexpectedly rehabilitated by B. Malon, who had earlier leveled very grave charges against him in a letter in to a Council member. The French Section of 1871, however, had scarcely launched its declaration when civil war exploded in its ranks. First Theisz, Avrial, and Camelinat withdrew. Thereafter, the section broke up into several small groups, one of which was led by Mr. Pierre Vesinier, expelled by the General Council for his slander against Varlin and others, and then expelled for the International by the Belgian Commission appoint by the Brussels Congress of 1868. Another of these groups was founded by B. Landeck, who had been relieved by the sudden flight of police prefect Pierri, on September 4, of his obligation, scrupulously fulfilled, not to engage any more in political affairs, nor in the International in France (see Third Trial of the International Working Men s Association in Paris, 1870 , p.4). On the other hand, the mass of French refugees in London have formed a section which is in complete harmony with the General Council. The Sonvillier Congress was composed of 16 delegates claiming to represent nine section in all, including the new "Socialist Revolutionary Propaganda and Action Section" in Geneva. The Sixteen made their debut by publishing the anarchist decree declaring the Romance Federation dissolved, and the latter retaliated by restoring to the Alliance members their autonomy by driving them out of all sections. However, the Council had to recognize that a stroke of good sense brought them to accept the same Jura Federation, which the London Conference had given them. The Congress of Sixteen then proceeded to reorganize the International by attacking the Conference and the General Council in a Circular to All Federations of the International Working Men's Association . Those responsible for the circular accused the General Council primarily of having called a Conference instead of a Congress in 1871. The preceding explanations show that these attacks were made directly against the International as a whole, which had unanimously agreed to convene a Conference, at which, incidentally, the Alliance was conveniently represented by Citizens Robin and Bastelica. The General Council has had its delegates at every Congress; at the Basel Congress, for example, it had six. The Sixteen claim that the majority of the Conference was fraudulently assured in advance by the admission of six General Council delegates with a deciding vote . In actual fact, among the General Council delegates at the Conference, the French refugees were none other than the representatives of the Paris Commune, while its English and Swiss members could take part in the sessions only on rare occassions, as is attested to by the minutes, which will be submitted before the next Congress. One Council delegate had a mandate from a national federation. According to a letter addressed to the Conference, the mandate of another [Marx] was withheld because of the news of his death in the papers. That left one delegate. Thus, the Belgians alone outnumbered the Council by 6-to-1. The international police, who in the person of Gustave Durand were kept out, complained bitterly about the violation of the General Rules by the convening of a secret conference. They were not conversant enough with our General Regulations to know that the administrative sittings of the Congress have to be in private. Their complaints, nonetheless, found a sympathetic echo with the Sonvillier Sixteen, who cried out: At the general assembly of the Geneva sections, held on December 2, 1871, which gave a bad reception to Citizens Malon and Lefrancais, the latter put forward a proposal confirming the decrees passed by the Sonvillier Sixteen and censuring the General Council, as well as disavowing the Conference. The Conference had resolved that Citizens Malon and Lefrancais complain further that Incidentally, the general Council had no need of the London Conference to publicly denounce and disavow the improper use of the press, for the Basel Congress had decided (Resolution II) that: After having challenged the convocation of the Conference and, later, its composition and its allegedly secret character, the Sixteen s circular challenged the Conference resolutions. Stating first that the Basel Congress had surrendered its rights having authorized the General Council to grant or refuse admission to, or to suspend, the sections of the International, it accuses the Conference, farther on, of the following sin: The contradictions contained in the circular of the Sixteen may be summed up as follows: the 1871 Conference is responsible for the resolutions of the 1869 Basel Congress, and the General Council is guilty of having observed the Rules which require it to carry out Congress resolutions. Actually, however, the real reason for all these attacks against the Conference is of a more profound nature. In the first place, it thwarted, by its resolutions, the intrigues of the Alliance men in Switzerland. In the second place, the promoters of the Alliance had, in Italy, Spain, and part of Switzerland and Belgium, created and upheld with amazing persistence a calculated confusion between the program of the International Working Men s Association and Bakunin s makeshift program. The Conference drew attention to this deliberate misunderstanding in its two resolutions on proletarian policy and sectarian sections. The motivation of the first resolution, which makes short work of the political abstention preached by Bakunin s program, is given fully in its recitals, which are based on the General Rules, the Lausanne Congress resolution, and other precedents.  The first phase of the proletariat s struggle against the bourgeoisie is marked by a sectarian movement. That is logical at a time when the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to act as a class. Certain thinkers criticize social antagonisms and suggest fantastic solutions thereof, which the mass of workers is left to accept, preach, and put into practice. The sects formed by these initiators are abstentionist by their very nature i.e., alien to all real action, politics, strikes, coalitions, or, in a word, to any united movement. The mass of the proletariat always remains indifferent or even hostile to their propaganda. The Paris and Lyon workers did not want the St.-Simonists, the Fourierists, the Icarians, any more than the Chartists and the English trade unionists wanted the Owenites. These sects act as levers of the movement in the beginning, but become an obstruction as soon as the movement outgrows them; after which they became reactionary. Witness the sects in France and England, and lately the Lassalleans in Germany, who after having hindered the proletariat s organization for several years ended up becoming simple instruments of the police. To sum up, we have here the infancy of the proletarian movement, just as astrology and alchemy are the infancy of science. If the International were to be founded, it was necessary that the proletariat go through this phase. Contrary to the sectarian organization, with their vagaries and rivalries, the International is a genuine and militant organization of the proletarian class of all countries, united in their common struggle against the capitalists and the landowners, against their class power organized in the state. The International s Rules, therefore, speak of only simple workers societies , all aiming for the same goal and accepting the same program, which presents a general outline of the proletarian movement, while having its theoretical elaboration to be guided by the needs of the practical struggle and the exchange of ideas in the sections, unrestrictedly admitting all shades of socialist convictions in their organs and Congresses. Just as in every new historical phase old mistakes reappear momentarily only to disappear forthwith, so within the International there followed a resurrection of sectarian sections, though in a less obvious form. The Alliance, which considers the resurrection of the sects a great step forward, is in itself conclusive proof that their time is over: for if initially they contained elements of progress, the program of the Alliance, in the tow of a Mohammed without the Koran , is nothing but a heap of pompously worded ideas long since dead and capable only of frightening bourgeois idiots or serving as evidence to be used by the Bonapartist or other prosecutors against members of the International.  The Conference, at which all shades of socialism were represented, unanimously acclaimed the resolution against sectarian sections, fully convinced that this resolution, stressing once again the International's true character, would mark a new stage of its development. The Alliance supporters, whom this resolution dealt a fatal blow, construed it only as the General Council's victory over the International, through which, as their circular pointed out, the General Council assured the domination of the special program of some of its members, their personal doctrine , the orthodox doctrine , the official theory, and only one permissible within the Association . Incidently, this was not the fault of those few members, but the necessary consequence, the corrupting effect , of the fact that they were members of the General Council, for it is absolutely impossible for a person who has power (!) over his fellows to remain a moral person. The General Council is becoming a hotbed of intrigue . According to the opinion of the Sixteen, the General Rules of the International should be censured for the grave mistakes of authorizing the General Council to co-opt new members. Thus authorized, they claim, the Council could, whenever it saw fit, co-opt a group numerous enough to completely change the nature of its majority and its tendencies . They seem to think that the mere fact of belonging to the General Council is sufficient to destroy not only a person's morality, but also his common sense. How else can we suppose that a majority will transform itself into a minority by voluntary co-options? At any rate, the Sixteen themselves do not appear to be very sure of all this, for they complain farther on that the General Council has been composed for five years running of the same persons, continually reelected , and immediately afterwards they repeat: Most of them are not regular mandatories, not having been elected by a Congress. The fact is that the body of the General Council is constantly changing, though some of the founding members remain, as in the federal councils in Belgium, French Switzerland, etc. The General Council must fulfill three essential conditions if it is to carry out its mandate. In the first place, it must have a numerically adequate membership to carry on its diverse functions; second, a membership of workingmen belonging to the different nations represented in the International Association ; and, lastly, laborers must be the pre-dominant element therein. Since the exigencies of the worker s job incessantly cause changes in the membership of the General Council, how can it fulfill all these indispensable conditions without the right of co-option? The Council nonetheless considers a more precise definition of this right necessary, as it indicated at the recent Conference. The reelection of the General Council s original membership, at successive Congresses at which England was definitely under-represented, would seem to prove that it has done its duty within the limits of the means at its disposal. The Sixteen, on the contrary, view this only as a proof of the blind confidence of the Congresses , carried at Basel to the point of a sort of voluntary abdication in favor of the General Council . In their opinion, the Council s normal role should be that of a simple correspondence and statistical bureau . They justify this definition by adducing several articles extracted from an incorrect translation of the Rules. Contrary to the rules of all bourgeois societies, the International s General Rules touch only lightly on its administrative organization. They leave its development to practice, and its regularization to future Congresses. Nevertheless, inasmuch as only the unity and joint action of the sections of the various countries could give them a genuinely international character, the Rules pay more attention to the Council than to the other bodies of the organization. Article 6 of the original Rules states: The General Council shall form an international agency between the different national and local groups , and proceeds to give some examples of the manner in which it is to function. Among these examples is a request to the Council to see that when immediate practical steps should be needed as, for instance, in case of international quarrels the action of the associated societies be simultaneous and uniform. The article continues: The same Congress resolved (Administrative Resolution of Geneva, Article 14): In the second place, who is to establish whether or not the particular rules conform to the General Rules? Evidently, if there were no authority charged with this function, the resolution would be null and void. Not only could police and hostile sections be formed, but also the intrusion of declassed sectarians and bourgeois philanthropists into the Association could warp its character and, by force of numbers at Congresses, crush the workers. Since their origin, the national and local federations have exercised in their respective countries the right to admit or reject new sections, according to whether or not their rules conformed to the General Rules. The exercise of the same function by the General Council is provided for in Article 6 of the General Rules, which allows local independent societies i.e., societies formed outside the federal body in the country concerned the right to establish direct contacts with the General Council. The Alliance did not hesitate to exercise this right in order to fulfill the conditions set for the admission of delegates to the Basel Congress. Article 6 of the Rules deals further with legal obstacles to the formation of national federations in certain countries where, consequently, the General Council is asked to function as a Federal Council (see Minutes of the Lausanne Congress, etc., 1867, p.13). Since the fall of the Commune, these legal obstacles have been multiplying in the various countries, making action by the General Council therein, designed to keep doubtful elements out of the Association, more necessary than ever. That is why the French committees recently demanded the General Council s intervention to rid themselves of informers, and why in another great country [Austria] members of the International requested it not to recognize any section which had not been formed by its direct mandates or by themselves. Their request was motivated by the necessity to rid themselves of agents-provocateurs, whose burning zeal manifested itself in the rapid formation of sections of unparalleled radicalism. On the other hand, the so-called anti-authoritarian sections do not hesitate to appeal to the Council the moment a conflict arises in their midst, or even to ask it to deal severely with their adversaries, as in the case of the Lyons conflict. More recently, since the Conference, the Turin Workers' Federation decided to declare itself a section of the International. As the result of the split that followed, the minority formed the Emancipation of the Proletariat Society. It joined the International and began by passing a resolution in favor of the Jura people. Its newspaper, Il Proletario, is filled with outbursts against all authoritarianism. When sending in the society's subscriptions, the secretary [Carlo Terzaghi] warned the General Council that the old federation would probably also send its subscriptions. Then he continues: Another function of the General Council is to aid strikers and organize their support by the entire International (see General Council reports to the various Congresses). The following fact, inter alia, indicates the importance of its intervention in the strike movement. The Resistance Society of the English Foundrymen is in itself an international trade union with branches in other countries, notably in the United States. Nonetheless, during a strike of American foundrymen, the latter found it necessary to invoke the intercession of the General Council to prevent English foundrymen being brought into America. The growth of the International obliged the General Council and all federal councils to assume the role of arbiter. The Brussels Congress resolved that: Here are two resolutions of the Basel Congress: The resolutions cited above refer to sections in the process of formation, while the resolutions given below refer to sections already recognized: We arrive, at last, at a function imposed on the General Council by the needs of the struggle. However shocking this may be for supporters of the Alliance, it is the very persistence of the attacks to which the General Council is subjected by all the enemies of the proletarian movement that has placed it in the vanguard of the defenders of the International Working Men s Association. First, the General Council should be nominally a simple correspondence and statistical bureau. Once it has been relieved of its administrative functions, its correspondence would be concerned only with reproducing the information already published in the Association's newspapers. The correspondence bureau would thus become needless. As for statistics, that function is possible only if a strong organization, and especially, as the original Rules expressly say, a common direction are provided. Since all that smacks very much of authoritarianism , however, there might perhaps be a bureau, but certainly no statistics. In a word, the General Council would disappear. The federal councils, the local committees, and other authoritarian centres, would go by the same token. Only the autonomous sections would remain. What, one may ask, will be the purpose of these autonomous sections , freely federated and happily rid of all superior bodies, even of the superior body elected and constituted by the workers ? Here, it becomes necessary to supplement the circular by the report of the Jura Federal Committee submitted to the Congress of the Sixteen: All of which is but a paraphrase of the old Alliance program, which begins with these words: Apart from this theoretical mission , the new organization proposed for the International also has its practical aspect. Bakunin, however, the better to establish that, despite their consistent study , the Sixteen did not hatch this pretty project of disorganization and disarmament in the International when it was fighting for its existence, has just published the original text of that project in his report on the International's organization (see Almanach du Peuple pour 1872, Geneve). On the other hand, the advent of the Paris Commune gave an unprecedented boost to the expansion of the International and to a vigorous support of its principles by sections of all nationalities, except the Jura sections, whose report continues thus: Leaving aside the dissolved Alliance, since replaced by the Malon section, the Committee had to report on the situation in 20 sections. Among them, seven simply turned their backs on the Alliance. This is what the report has to say about it: Another section, that of engravers and designers of the Courtelary district, after three years of stubborn perseverance... at the present time... is forming a resistance society independent of the International, which does not in the least deter them from sending two delegates to the Congress of the Sixteen. Next come four completely defunct sections: Now we come to four sections whose existence is more than problematical. There remains the model section, which, to judge by its name of central section, is nothing but the residue of other defunct sections. Certainly these men, who make more noise than their stature warrants, have had an incontestable success. The whole of the liberal and police press have openly taken their side; they have been backed in their personal slander of the General Council and the insipid attacks aimed against the International by ostensible reformers in many lands: by the bourgeois republicans in England, whose intrigues were exposed by the General Council; by the dogmatic free-thinkers in Italy who, under the banner of Stefanoni, have just formed a Universal Rationalist Society with permanent headquarters in Rome, and authoritarian and hierarchical organization of monasteries for atheist monks and nuns, whose rules provide for a marble bust in the Congress hall for every bourgeois who donates 10,000 francs; and lastly by the Bismarck socialists in Germany who, apart from their police mouthpiece, the Neuer Social-Demokrat, played the role of white shirts for the Prusso-German Empire. The Sonvillier conclave, in a pathetic appeal, requests all sections of the International to insist on the urgency of an immediate Congress to curb the consistent encroachments of the London Council, according to Citizens Malon and Lefrancais, but actually to replace the International with the Alliance. This appeal received such an encouraging response, that they immediately set about falsifying a resolution voted at the last Belgian Congress. Their official organ (Revolution Sociale, January 4, 1872) writes as follows: In accordance with the will of the vast majority of members of the International, the General Council is to convene the annual Congress only in September 1872. In January 1872, they dropped their mask by publishing a pamphlet entitled The Empire and the New France. Call of the People and the Youth to the French Conscience, by Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, Brussels, 1872. With the modesty characteristic of the charlatans of the Alliance, they declaim the following humbug: Fortunately, however, the true tradition has survived, and Messrs. Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc have not been shot! Thus, their own contribution consists in setting a new course for the International in central and southern France to follow, by an effort to found Bonapartist sections, ipso facto basically autonomous . As for the constitution of the proletariat as a political party, as recommended by the London Conference, After the restoration of the Empire, we Richard and Blanc shall quickly deal not only with the Socialist theories but also with any attempts to implement them through revolutionary organization of the masses. Briefly, exploiting the great autonomy principle of the sections which constitute the real strength of the International... especially in the Latin countries (Revolution Sociale, January 4), these gentlemen base their hopes on anarchy within the International. Anarchy, then, is the great war horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of slogans. All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement i.e., abolition of classes is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions. It proclaims anarchy in proletarian ranks as the most infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext, it asks the International, at a time when the Old World is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its organization with anarchy. The General Council intends to demand at the next Congress an investigation of this secret organization and its promoters in certain countries, such as Spain, for example.
The International Workingmen's Association, Fictitious Splits in the
  International