Marx versus Bakunin¶
Core Argument¶
The First International was riven by a ferocious struggle between Marx and Engels and the anarchist faction led by Bakunin, a conflict that ultimately destroyed the organisation. Bakunin entered the International in 1868 after working in the bourgeois League for Peace and Freedom, then formed the secret International Alliance of Socialist Democracy as a faction within the IWA to undermine the General Council and impose his programme—a mishmash of Proudhon and utopian socialism that preached abstention from political action. Marx countered that the working class must conquer political power, and that economic struggles necessarily become political movements. The General Council refused the Alliance entry as a separate body; Bakunin falsely claimed to dissolve it while maintaining its secret organisation.
The Nechayev affair exposed Bakunin's adventurism. Nechayev, a fanatic claiming falsely to represent a revolutionary committee, murdered a doubting student; Bakunin provided him with fake International documents and defended the murder as a political act. At the Basel Congress, Bakunin proposed abolishing the right of inheritance rather than private property—an inversion of causality, since private property creates inheritance rights. His motion failed. During the Franco-Prussian War, Bakunin rushed to Lyons, proclaimed the state abolished, neglected to post guards, and was arrested. The Paris Commune, which Marx defended as a prototype workers' state, failed partly because Bakuninists opposed centralisation and politics.
The Bakuninists rejected all rules, discipline, and centralisation, refusing to recognise the democratically elected General Council. The Sonvillier circular accused the London Conference of authoritarianism, demanding the Council be reduced to a mere correspondence bureau. Marx countered that workers need strong, centralised, democratic bodies to fight the bosses. The London Conference of 1871 resolved that the working class must constitute itself as a special political party against the bourgeoisie. The Hague Congress of 1872 ratified this, expelled Bakunin and Guillaume, and moved the General Council to New York. Bakunin was also expelled for accepting an advance to translate Das Kapital, never completing the work, and allowing Nechayev to threaten the publisher's agent with death.
The First International effectively ended with the Hague Congress. Marx admitted the 1876 Geneva congress that signed its death certificate was a fiasco, but argued events would recreate the International on a higher level. The First International established the theoretical foundations for mass socialist parties and the later Second International.