I have just received your letter through Becker  and gather from its contents that those blasted Mardocheans  intercepted my detailed letter to you dated 16 December. This is the more annoying since it contained all the necessary information on the Bakuninist intrigues and you would have been apprised of everything a whole month earlier; and also since, in view of the fact that you are a foreigner and liable to deportation, I asked you in that letter that you should rather try to be somewhat more cautious in your public agitation so that you can remain there and keep your job, which meanwhile unfortunately went to blazes... Becker writes he will let you know about Bakunin s intrigues. However I shall not rely on that and am telling you briefly the most necessary information. All this sounds extremely radical, and is so simple that it can be learnt by heart in five minutes ; that is why this theory of Bakunin's has also speedily found favour in Spain and Italy, among young lawyers, doctors and other doctrinaires. But the mass of the workers will never allow themselves to be persuaded that the public affairs of their country are not also their own affairs; they are by nature political and whoever tries to make out to them that they should leave politics alone will in the end get left in the lurch. To preach that the workers should in all circumstances abstain from politics is to drive them into the arms of the priests or the bourgeois republicans. Now as, according to Bakunin, the International is not to be formed for political struggle but in order that it may at once replace the old state organisation as soon as social liquidation takes place, it follows that it must come as near as possible to the Bakunist ideal of the society of the future. In this society there will above all be no authority, for authority = state = an absolute evil. (How these people propose to run a factory, work a railway or steer a ship without having in the last resort one deciding will, without a unified direction, they do not indeed tell us.) The authority of the majority over the minority also ceases. Every individual and every community is autonomous, but as to how a society, even of only two people, is possible unless each gives up some of his autonomy, Bakunin again remains silent. The International, then, must also be reorganised according to this model. Every section, and in every section every individual, is autonomous. To hell with the Basle resolutions, which bestowed upon the General Council a pernicious authority demoralising even to itself! Even if this authority is voluntarily bestowed it must cease simply because it is authority. Here you have in brief the main points of the swindle. ... But who are the originators of the Basle resolutions? Well, Mr Bakunin himself and his associates! When these gentlemen saw at the Basle Congress that their plan to remove the General Council to Geneva, that is, to get it into their hands, would not succeed, they followed a different tack. They founded the Alliance de la D mocratie Socialiste, an international Society within the big International, on a pretext which you will now encounter again in the Bakuninist Italian press, for instance, in the Proletario and Gazzettino Rosa: for the hot-blooded Latin races, it is claimed, a more outspoken programme is necessary than for the cool, slow-moving Northerners. This little scheme came to naught because of the resistance of the General Council, which of course could not tolerate any separate international organisation within the International. It has since reappeared in various shapes and forms in connection with the efforts of Bakunin and his crew to substitute the Bakunin programme for that of the International. On the other hand it was precisely Bakunin s empty boastful phrases that were always seized upon by the reactionaries, from Jules Favre  and Bismarck to Mazzini, whenever it was a question of attacking the International. Hence the necessity of my statement of 5 December against Mazzini and Bakunin, which was also published in the Gazzettino Rosa. The nucleus of the Bakunin crowd consists of a few dozen people in the Jura whose whole following amounts to scarcely 200 workers. Their vanguard is made up of young lawyers, doctors and journalists in Italy who everywhere now pretend to act as spokesmen of the Italian workers; a few of them are in Barcelona and Madrid and every now and then you will find one hardly ever a worker in Lyons or Brussels; in London there is a single specimen, Robin.  The conference,  convoked under the pressure of circumstances in lieu of the congress that had become impossible, served them as a pretext; and since most of the French refugees in Switzerland went over to their side because they (being Proudhonists) found some kindred views among them and for personal reasons, they sallied forth on their campaign. They counted, and not without reason, on malcontent minorities and misunderstood geniuses, who may of course be found everywhere in the International. At present their fighting strength is as follows: The Bakuninist press claims that 20 Italian sections had joined; I don t know them. At any rate, almost everywhere the leadership is in the hands of friends and adherents of Bakunin, and they are raising a terrific hubbub. But a closer examination will most likely disclose that their following is not numerous, for in the long run the bulk of the Italian workers are still Mazzinists and will remain so as long as the International is identified there with abstention from politics. At any rate, in Italy, for the time being, it is the Bakuninist crowd that has the main say in the International. The General Council has no intention of complaining on that score; the Italians have the right to commit all the absurdities they choose and the General Council will counteract them only by way of peaceful debate. These people also have the right to declare for a congress in the Jurassian sense, although it is certainly exceedingly strange that sections which have only just affiliated and cannot be posted on anything should in such a matter at once take sides, especially before they have heard both parties to the dispute! I have told the Turin members the unvarnished truth about this matter and shall do the same with the other sections which have made similar declarations. For every such declaration of affiliation is indirectly an approval of the false accusations and lies made against the General Council in the Circular.  Incidentally, the General Council will shortly issue a circular  of its own about this matter. If you can prevent the Milanese from making a similar declaration until the circular appears you will be fulfilling all our desires. The funniest thing is that the same people in Turin who declare in favour of the Jurassians and therefore reproach us here with authoritarianism, now suddenly demand that the General Council should take such authoritarian measures against the rival Federazione Operaia  of Turin as it had never taken before, should excommunicate Beghelli  of the Ficcanaso, who does not even belong to the International, etc. And all that before we have even heard what the Federazione Operaia has to say! Last Monday  I sent you the R volution Sociale  containing the Jura Circular, one issue of the Geneva galit (unfortunately I have no copies left of the issue containing the answer of the Geneva Comit F d ral, which represents twenty times as many workers as the Jura people do) and one Volksstaat which will show you what the people in Germany think about the case. The Saxon Regional Meeting 120 delegates from 60 localities declared unanimously for the General Council. The Belgian Congress (25-26 December) demands a revision of the Rules, but at the regular congress (in September). From France we are every day receiving statements expressing consent. Of course, none of these intrigues find any support here in England. And the General Council will certainly not call an extraordinary congress just to please a few intriguers and busy-bodies. So long as these gentlemen keep within legal bounds the General Council will gladly let them have their way. This coalition of the most diverse elements will soon fall apart; but as soon as they start anything against the Rules or the Congress resolutions the General Council will do its duty. If one considers that these people have launched their conspiracy precisely at the moment when a general hue and cry is being raised against the International, one cannot help thinking that the international sleuths must have a hand in the game. And so it is. In B ziers the Geneva Bakuninists have picked the chief superintendent of police as their correspondent! Two prominent Bakuninists, Albert Richard  from Lyons and Blanc,  were here and told a worker named Scholl, also from Lyons, with whom they got in touch, that the only way to overthrow Thiers  was to restore Bonaparte to the throne; and for this very reason they were travelling about on Bonaparte money to conduct propaganda among the refugees in favour of a Bonapartist restoration! That is what these gentlemen call abstaining from politics! In Berlin the Neue Sozial-Demokrat, subsidised by Bismarck, pipes the same tune. How far the Russian police is involved in this I shall leave for the present undecided, but Bakunin was deeply embroiled in the Nechayev  affair (he denies it, of course, but we have the original Russian reports here and since Marx and I understand Russian he cannot put anything over on us). Nechayev is either a Russian agent provocateur or anyhow acted as if he were. There are moreover all kinds of suspicious characters among Bakunin s Russian friends. I am very sorry you lost your position. I had expressly written to you asking you to avoid anything that might lead to that, stating that your presence in Milan was much more important for the International than the small effect one could produce by public utterances, and that one can also accomplish much on the quiet, etc. If I can be of assistance to you by getting you translations, etc, I shall do so with the greatest of pleasure. But please tell me from which languages and into which languages you can translate and how I can be useful to you. So those police swine have also intercepted my photograph. I am enclosing another one for you and would ask you to send me two of yours, one of which is to serve the purpose of inducing Miss Marx to let you have a photograph of her father (she is the only one who still has a couple of good ones left). I would also ask you to be on your guard when dealing with any of the people connected with Bakunin. It is a characteristic feature of all sects to stick together and intrigue. You can be sure that any information you give them will immediately be passed on to Bakunin. It is one of his fundamental principles that keeping promises and the like are merely bourgeois prejudices, which a true revolutionary must treat with disdain when it benefits the cause. In Russia he says this openly, in Western Europe it is an esoteric doctrine. Write to me as soon as possible. It would be very good if we could induce the Milan Section not to join in the chorus of the other Italian sections. Fraternal greetings
Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1872