At the moment when the future of the International seemed most promising
and the political ideas of Marx were actually taking root in nearly all
countries, an application was received by the General Council in London
to admit the Alliance of Social Democracy. This, we will remember, was
the organization that Bakounin had formed in 1868 and was the popular
section of that remarkable secret hierarchy which he had endeavored to
establish in 1864. The General Council declined to admit the Alliance,
on grounds which proved later to be well founded, namely, that schisms
would undoubtedly be encouraged if the International should permit an
organization with an entirely different program and policies to join it
in a body. Nevertheless, the General Council declared that the members
of the Alliance could affiliate themselves as individuals with the
various national sections. After considerable debate, Bakounin and his
followers decided to abandon the Alliance and to join the International.
Whether the Alliance was in fact abolished is still open to question,
but in any case Bakounin appeared in the International toward the end of
the sixties, to challenge all the theories of Marx and to offer, in
their stead, his own philosophy of universal revolution. Anarchism as
the end and terrorism as the means were thus injected into the
organization at its most formative period, when the laboring classes of
all Europe had just begun to write their program, evolve their
principles, and define their tactics. With great force and magnetism,
Bakounin undertook his war upon the General Council, and those who
recall the period will realize that nothing could have more nearly
expressed the occasional spirit of the masses--the very spirit that Marx
and Engels were endeavoring to change--than exactly the methods proposed
by Bakounin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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