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Title: From the Bottom Up Author: Robert Graham Date: 2015 Language: en Topics: first international, Europe, anarchist movement, history, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from https://syndicalist.us/2020/06/28/from-the-bottom-up-the-first-international-and-the-emergence-of-european-anarchist-movements/ Notes: From Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #63, Winter 2015
Robert Graham is the editor of Anarchism: A Documentary History of
Libertarian Ideas, a three-volume anthology of anarchist writings from
ancient China to the present day. He is currently working on a history
of the emergence of European anarchist movements from out of the First
International.
September 2014 marked the 150^(th) anniversary of the founding of the
International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA – in the Romance languages,
the AIT – now commonly referred to as the First International). While
much is often made of the dispute between Marx and Bakunin within the
International, resulting in Bakunin’s expulsion in 1872, more important
from an anarchist perspective is how anarchism as a distinct
revolutionary movement emerged from the debates and conflicts within the
International, not as the result of a personal conflict between Marx and
Bakunin, but because of conflicting ideas regarding working class
liberation.
Many members of the International, particularly in Italy, Spain and
French-speaking Switzerland, but also in Belgium and France, took to
heart the statement in the International’s Preamble that the
emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves.
They envisioned the International as a fighting organization for the
daily struggle of the workers against the capitalists for better working
conditions, but also looked to the International as a federation of
workers across national borders that would provide the impetus for
revolutionary change and the creation of a post-revolutionary socialist
society based on workers’ self-management and voluntary federation. It
was from out of these elements in the International that the first
European anarchist movements arose.
When the International was founded in September 1864 by French and
British trade unionists, any anarchist tendencies were then very weak.
The French delegates at the founding of the First International regarded
themselves as “mutualists,” moderate followers of Proudhon, not
anarchist revolutionaries. They supported free credit, workers’ control,
small property holdings and equivalent exchange of products by the
producers themselves. They wanted the International to become a
mutualist organization that would pool the financial resources of
European workers to provide free credit for the creation of a system of
producer and consumer cooperatives that would ultimately displace the
capitalist economic system.
The first full congress of the International was not held until
September 1866, in Geneva, Switzerland, with delegates from England,
France, Germany and Switzerland. Although the French delegates did not
call for the immediate abolition of the state, partly because such
radical talk would only result in the International being banned in
France, then under the dictatorship of Napoleon III, they did express
their rejection of the state as a “superior authority” that would think,
direct and act in the name of all, stifling initiative. They shared
Proudhon’s view that social, economic and political relations should be
based on contracts providing reciprocal benefits, thereby preserving the
independence and equality of the contracting parties. The French
delegates distinguished this “mutualist federalism” from a communist
government that would rule over society, regulating all social and
economic functions.
At the next Congress of the International in Laussane, Switzerland, in
September 1867, CĂ©sar De Paepe, one of the most influential Belgian
delegates, debated the more conservative French mutualists on the
collectivization of land, which he supported, arguing that if large
industrial and commercial enterprises, such as railways, canals, mines
and public services, should be considered collective property to be
managed by companies of workers, as the mutualists agreed, then so
should the land. The peasant and farmer, as much as the worker, should
be entitled to the fruits of their labor, without part of that product
being appropriated by either the capitalists or the landowners. De Paepe
argued that this “collectivism” was consistent with Proudhon’s
“mutualist program,” which demanded “that the whole product of labor
shall belong to the producer.” However, it was not until the next
congress in Brussels in September 1868 that a majority of delegates
adopted a collectivist position that included land as well as industry.
At the Brussels Congress, De Paepe also argued that the workers’
“societies of resistance” and unions, through which they organized and
coordinated their strike and other activities, constituted the “embryo”
of those “great companies of workers” that would replace the “companies
of the capitalists” by eventually taking control of collective
enterprises. For, according to De Paepe, the purpose of unions and
strike activity was not merely to improve existing working conditions
but to abolish wage labor. This could not be accomplished in one country
alone, but required a federation of workers in all countries, who would
replace the capitalist system with the “universal organization of work
and exchange.” Here we have the first public expression within the
International of the basic tenets of revolutionary and anarchist
syndicalism: that through their own union organizations, by which the
workers waged their daily struggles against the capitalists, the workers
were creating the very organizations through which they would bring
about the social revolution and reconstitute society, replacing
capitalist exploitation with workers’ self-management.
After the Brussels Congress, Bakunin and his associates applied for
their group, the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, to be admitted into
the International. The Alliance stood for “atheism, the abolition of
cults and the replacement of faith by science, and divine by human
justice.” The Alliance supported the collectivist position adopted at
the Brussels Congress, seeking to transform “the land, the instruments
of work and all other capital” into “the collective property of the
whole of society,” to be “utilized only by the workers,” through their
own “agricultural and industrial associations.”
In Bakunin’s contemporaneous program for an “International Brotherhood”
of revolutionaries, he denounced the Blanquists and other like-minded
revolutionaries who dreamt of “a powerfully centralized revolutionary
state,” for such “would inevitably result in military dictatorship and a
new master,” condemning the masses “to slavery and exploitation by a new
pseudo-revolutionary aristocracy.” In contrast, Bakunin and his
associates did “not fear anarchy, we invoke it.” Bakunin envisaged the
“popular revolution” being organized
from the bottom up, from the circumference to the center, in accordance
with the principle of liberty, and not from the top down or from the
center to the circumference in the manner of all authority.
In the lead-up to the Basel Congress of the International in September
1869, Bakunin put forward the notion of the general strike as a means of
revolutionary social transformation, observing that when “strikes spread
out from one place to another, they come very close to turning into a
general strike,” which could “result only in a great cataclysm which
forces society to shed its old skin.” He also supported, as did the
French Internationalists, the creation of
as many cooperatives for consumption, mutual credit, and production as
we can, everywhere, for though they may be unable to emancipate us in
earnest under present economic conditions, they prepare the precious
seeds for the organization of the future, and through them the workers
become accustomed to handling their own affairs.
Bakunin argued that the program of the International must “inevitably
result in the abolition of classes (and hence of the bourgeoisie, which
is the dominant class today), the abolition of all territorial States
and political fatherlands, and the foundation, upon their ruins, of the
great international federation of all national and local productive
groups.” Bakunin was giving a more explicitly anarchist slant to the
idea, first broached by De Paepe at the Brussels Congress, and then
endorsed at the Basel Congress in September 1869, that it was through
the International, conceived as a federation of trade unions and
workers’ cooperatives, that capitalism would be abolished and replaced
by a free federation of productive associations.
Jean-Louis Pindy, a delegate from the carpenters’ Chambre syndicale in
Paris, expressed the views of many of the Internationalists at the Basel
Congress when he argued that the means adopted by the unions must be
shaped by the ends which they hoped to achieve. He saw the goal of the
International as being the replacement of capitalism and the state with
“councils of the trades bodies, and by a committee of their respective
delegates, overseeing the labor relations which are to take the place of
politics,” so that “wage slavery may be replaced by the free federation
of free producers.” The Belgian Internationalists, such as De Paepe and
Eugène Hins, put forward much the same position, with Hins looking to
the International to create “the organization of free exchange,
operating through a vast section of labor from one end of the world to
another,” that would replace “the old political systems” with industrial
organization – an idea which can be traced back to Proudhon, but which
was now being given a more revolutionary emphasis.
The Basel Congress therefore declared that “all workers should strive to
establish associations for resistance in their various trades,” forming
an international alliance so that “the present wage system may be
replaced by the federation of free producers.” This was the high water
mark of the federalist, anti-authoritarian currents in the First
International, and it was achieved at its most representative congress,
with delegates from England, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria,
Switzerland, Italy and Spain.
Bakunin attended the Congress, drawing out the anarchist implications of
this position. He argued that because the state provided “the sanction
and guarantee of the means by which a small number of men appropriate to
themselves the product of the work of all the others,” the political,
juridical, national and territorial state must be abolished. Bakunin
emphasized the role of the state in creating and perpetuating class
privilege and exploitation, arguing that “if some individuals in
present-day society do acquire… great sums, it is not by their labor
that they do so but by their privilege, that is, by a juridically
legalized injustice.”
Bakunin expressed his antipathy, shared by other members of the
International, to revolution from above through a coercive state
apparatus. With respect to peasant small-holders, he argued that “if we
tried to expropriate these millions of small farmers by decree after
proclaiming the social liquidation, we would inevitably cast them into
reaction, and we would have to use force against them to submit to the
revolution.” Better to “carry out the social liquidation at the same
time that you proclaim the political and juridical liquidation of the
State,” such that the peasants will be left only with “possession de
facto” of their land. Once “deprived of all legal sanction,” no longer
being “shielded under the State’s powerful protection,” these small
holdings “will be transformed easily under the pressure of revolutionary
events and forces” into collective property.
The Basel Congress was the last truly representative congress of the
International. The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the Paris Commune in
1871 made it difficult to hold a congress, while the Hague Congress of
1872 was stacked by Marx and Engels with delegates with dubious
credentials. One must therefore look at the activities of the various
International sections themselves between 1869 and 1872 to see how the
anti-authoritarian, revolutionary collectivist currents in the
International eventually coalesced into a European anarchist movement.
In France, Eugène Varlin, one of the International’s outstanding
militants, described the position adopted “almost unanimously” by the
delegates at the Basel Congress as “collectivism, or non-authoritarian
communism.” Varlin expressed the views of many of the French
Internationalists when he wrote that the workers’ own organizations, the
trade unions and societies of resistance and solidarity, “form the
natural elements of the social structure of the future.” By March 1870,
he was writing that short
of placing everything in the hands of a highly centralized,
authoritarian state which would set up a hierarchic structure from top
to bottom of the labor process… we must admit that the only alternative
is for the workers themselves to have the free disposition and
possession of the tools of production… through cooperative associations
in various forms.
The revolutionary syndicalist ideas of the Belgians and Bakunin’s more
explicitly anarchist views were also being spread in Spain. Echoing De
Paepe’s comments from the Brussels Congress, the Spanish
Internationalists described the International as containing “within
itself the seeds of social regeneration… it holds the embryo of all
future institutions.” They founded the Federación Regional Española (FRE
– Spanish Regional Federation) in June 1870, which took an anarchist
position. One of its militants, Rafael Farga Pellicer, declared that:
“We want the end to the domination of capital, the state, and the
church. Upon their ruins we will construct anarchy, and the free
federation of free associations of workers.” In addition, the FRE
adopted a form of organization based on anarchist principles.[1]
In French-speaking Switzerland, as a result of a split between the
reformist minority supported by Marx and the anti-authoritarian
collectivist majority allied with Bakunin, the Jura Federation was
created in 1870. The Jura Federation adopted an anarchist stance,
declaring that “all participation of the working class in the politics
of bourgeois governments can result only in the consolidation and
perpetuation of the existing order.”
On the eve of the Franco-Prussian War during the summer of 1870, the
French Internationalists took an anti-war stance, arguing that the war
could only be a “fratricidal war” that would divide the working class,
leading to “the complete triumph of despotism.” The Belgian
Internationalists issued similar declarations, denouncing the war as a
war of “the despots against the people,” and calling on workers to
respond with a “war of the people against the despots.”
This was a theme that Bakunin was soon to expand upon in his Letters to
a Frenchman on the Present Crisis, published in September 1870. Although
many of the French Internationalists abandoned their anti-war stance,
Bakunin argued that revolutionaries should seek to transform the war
into a country-wide insurrection that would then spread the social
revolution across Europe. With the French state in virtual collapse, it
was time for the “people armed” to seize the means of production and
overthrow their oppressors, whether the French bourgeoisie or the German
invaders.
For the social revolution to succeed, Bakunin argued that it was
essential that the peasants and workers band together, despite the
mutual distrust between them. The peasants should be encouraged to “take
the land and throw out those landlords who live by the labor of others,”
and “to destroy, by direct action, every political, juridical, civil,
and military institution,” establishing “anarchy through the whole
countryside.” A social revolution in France, rejecting “all official
organization” and “government centralization,” would lead to “the social
emancipation of the proletariat” throughout Europe.
Shortly after completing his Letters, Bakunin tried to put his ideas
into practice, traveling to Lyon, where he met up with some other
Internationalists and revolutionaries. Bakunin and his associates issued
a proclamation announcing the abolition of the “administrative and
governmental machine of the State,” the replacement of the judicial
apparatus by “the justice of the people,” the suspension of taxes and
mortgages, with “the federated communes” to be funded by a levy on “the
rich classes,” and ending with a call to arms. Bakunin and his
confederates briefly took over City Hall, but eventually the National
Guard recaptured it and Bakunin was arrested. He was freed by a small
group of his associates and made his way to Marseilles, eventually
returning to Switzerland. A week after Bakunin left Marseilles, there
was an attempt to establish a revolutionary commune there and, at the
end of October, in Paris.[2]
In Paris, the more radical Internationalists did not take an explicitly
anarchist position, calling instead for the creation of a “Workers’ and
Peasants’ Republic.” But this “republic” was to be none other than a
“federation of socialist communes,” with “the land to go to the peasant
who cultivates it, the mine to go to the miner who exploits it, the
factory to go to the worker who makes it prosper,” a position very close
to that of Bakunin and his associates.
After the proclamation of the Paris Commune on March 18, 1871, the
Parisian Internationalists played a prominent role. On March 23, 1871,
they issued a wall poster declaring the “principle of authority” as
“incapable of re-establishing order in the streets or of getting factory
work going again.” For them, “this incapacity constitutes [authority’s]
negation.” They were confident that the people of Paris would “remember
that the principle that governs groups and associations is the same as
that which should govern society,” namely the principle of free
federation.
The Communes’ program, mostly written by Pierre Denis, a Proudhonist
member of the International, called for the “permanent intervention of
citizens in communal affairs” and elections with “permanent right of
control and revocation” as well as the “total autonomy of the Commune
extended to every township in France,” with the “Commune’s autonomy to
be restricted only by the right to an equal autonomy for all the other
communes.” The Communards assured the people of France that the
“political unity which Paris strives for is the voluntary union of all
local initiative, the free and spontaneous cooperation of all individual
energies towards a common goal: the well-being, freedom and security of
all.” The Commune was to mark “the end of the old governmental and
clerical world; of militarism, bureaucracy, exploitation, speculation,
monopolies and privilege that have kept the proletariat in servitude and
led the nation to disaster.”
For the federalist Internationalists, this did not mean state ownership
of the economy, but collective or social ownership of the means of
production, with the associated workers themselves running their own
enterprises. As the Typographical Workers put it, the workers shall
“abolish monopolies and employers through adoption of a system of
workers’ cooperative associations. There will be no more exploiters and
no more exploited.”
The social revolution was pushed forward by female Internationalists and
radicals, such as Nathalie Lemel and Louise Michel. They belonged to the
Association of Women for the Defence of Paris and Aid to the Wounded,
which issued a declaration demanding “No more bosses. Work and security
for all – The People to govern themselves – We want the Commune; we want
to live in freedom or to die fighting for it!” They argued that the
Commune should “consider all legitimate grievances of any section of the
population without discrimination of sex, such discrimination having
been made and enforced as a means of maintaining the privileges of the
ruling classes.”
Nevertheless, the Internationalists were a minority within the Commune,
and not all of them supported the socialist federalism espoused in
varying degrees by Varlin, Pindy and the more militant Proudhonists. The
federalist and anti-authoritarian Internationalists felt that the
Commune represented “above all a social revolution,” not merely a change
of rulers. They agreed with the Proudhonist journalist A. Vermorel that
“there must not be a simple substitution of workers in the places
occupied previously by bourgeois. … The entire governmental structure
must be overthrown.”[3]
The Commune was savagely repressed by French state forces, with the
connivance of the Prussians, leading to wholesale massacres that claimed
the lives of some 30,000 Parisians, including leading Internationalists
like Varlin, and the imprisonment and deportation of many others,
including Nathalie Lemel and Louise Michel. A handful of
Internationalists, including Pindy, went into hiding and eventually
escaped to Switzerland.
For Bakunin, what made the Commune important was “not really the weak
experiments which it had the power and time to make,” but
the ideas it has set in motion, the living light it has cast on the true
nature and goal of revolution, the hopes it has raised, and the powerful
stir it has produced among the popular masses everywhere, and especially
in Italy, where the popular awakening dates from that insurrection,
whose main feature was the revolt of the Commune and the workers’
associations against the State.
Bakunin’s defense of the Commune against the attacks of the veteran
Italian revolutionary patriot Guiseppe Mazzini played an important role
in the “popular awakening” in Italy, and the rapid spread of the
International there, from which the Italian anarchist movement sprang.
The defeat of the Paris Commune led Marx and Engels to draw much
different conclusions. For them, the defeat demonstrated the necessity
for working class political parties whose purpose would be the “conquest
of political power.” They rammed through the adoption of their position
at the September 1871 London Conference of the International, and took
further steps to force out of the International any groups with
anarchist leanings, which by this time included almost all of the
Italians and Spaniards, the Jura Federation, many of the Belgians and a
significant proportion of the surviving French members of the
International.
In response, the Jura Federation organized a congress in Sonvillier,
Switzerland, in November 1871. Prominent Communards and other French
refugees also attended. They issued a Circular to the other members of
the International denouncing the General Council’s actions, taking the
position that the International, “as the embryo of the human society of
the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our
principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning
towards authority and dictatorship,” which was much the same position as
had been endorsed by a majority of the delegates to the 1869 Basel
Congress.
The Belgian, Italian and Spanish Internationalists supported the Jura
Federation’s position, with the Italian and Spanish Internationalists
adopting explicitly anarchist positions. Even before the London
Conference, the Spanish Internationalists had declared themselves in
favor of “collective property, anarchy and economic federation,” by
which they meant “the free universal federation of free agricultural and
industrial workers’ associations.” The Italian Internationalists
rejected participation in existing political systems and in August 1872
called on the federalist and anti-authoritarian sections of the
International to boycott the upcoming Hague Congress and to hold a
congress of their own. Marx and Engels manipulated the composition of
the Hague Congress to ensure a majority that would affirm the London
Conference resolution on political action, expel Bakunin and his
associate James Guillaume of the Jura Federation from the International,
and transfer the General Council to New York to prevent the
anti-authoritarians from challenging their control.
Barely a week after the Hague Congress in September 1872, the
anti-authoritarians held their own congress in St. Imier where they
reconstituted the International along federalist lines. The St. Imier
Congress was attended by delegates from Spain, France, Italy,
Switzerland and Russia. For them, “the aspirations of the proletariat
[could] have no purpose other than the establishment of an absolutely
free economic organization and federation, founded upon the labor and
equality of all and absolutely independent of all political government.”
Consequently, turning the London Conference’s resolution on its head,
they declared that “the destruction of all political power is the first
duty of the proletariat.”
They regarded “the strike as a precious weapon in the struggle” for the
liberation of the workers, preparing them “for the great and final
revolutionary contest which, destroying all privilege and all class
difference, will bestow upon the worker a right to the enjoyment of the
gross product of his labors.” Here we have the subsequent program of
anarcho-syndicalism: the organization of workers into unions and similar
bodies, based on class struggle, through which the workers will become
conscious of their class power, ultimately resulting in the destruction
of capitalism and the state, to be replaced by the free federation of
the workers based on the organizations they created themselves during
their struggle for liberation.
The resolutions from the St. Imier Congress were ratified by the
Italian, Spanish, Jura, Belgian and, ironically, the American
federations of the International, with most of the French sections also
approving them. The St. Imier Congress marks the true emergence of a
European anarchist movement, with the Italian, Spanish and Jura
Federations of the International following anarchist programs. While
there were anarchist elements within the Belgian Federation, by 1874,
under the influence of De Paepe, the Belgians had come out in favor of a
“public administrative state” that the anarchist federations in the
anti-authoritarian International opposed. The French Internationalists
contained a prominent anarchist contingent, but it was not until 1881
that a distinctively anarchist movement arose there.
In his memoirs, Kropotkin wrote that if the Europe of the late 1870s
“did not experience an incomparably more bitter reaction than it did”
after the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Paris Commune, “Europe
owes it… to the fact that the insurrectionary spirit of the
International maintained itself fully intact in Spain, in Italy, in
Belgium, in the Jura, and even in France itself.” One can say, with
equal justification, that anarchism itself, as a revolutionary movement,
owes its existence to that same revolutionary spirit of the
International from which it was born in the working class struggles in
Europe during the 1860s and early 1870s. It was from those struggles,
and the struggles within the International itself regarding how best to
conduct them, that a self-proclaimed anarchist movement emerged.
[1] “There were no paid trade union officials or bureaucratic
hierarchies, and power flowed from the bottom upward.” George R.
Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain,
1868–1898, University of California Press, 1989, 21.
[2] Despite attempts by Marxists and some historians to portray the Lyon
uprising as a tragicomic farce, as Paul Avrich points out, news “of the
Lyon Commune touched off a chain reaction up and down the Rhone valley
and through Provence,” as well as in Marseilles and Paris. Anarchist
Portraits, Princeton University Press, 1988, 236.
[3] Proudhon’s 1848 “Election Manifesto of Le Peuple” expounded an
identical vision of a social structure based on mandated and recallable
delegates (“imperative mandate”) and an economy run by a “universal
association” of workers’ cooperatives. Iain McKay, ed., Property is
Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology, AK Press, 2011, 371–381.