Imperative Mandates at the Hague Congress

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José Mesa, an editor of La Emancipacion, informed Engels in his letter of October 5, 1872, that he had received Engels’ article on October 4 and found it “very good and very opportune”. The editors tried to make it look like an article written in Spain and published it unsigned. It was published in English for the first time in The Hague Congress of the First International. September 2-7, 1872. Reports and Letters, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978.

The betrayals of their electors committed recently by many deputies to parliament have caused the return to fashion of the old imperative mandates of the Middle Ages which had been abolished by the Revolution of 1789. We shall not discuss here the principle of such mandates. We shall only note that if all electors gave their delegates imperative mandates concerning all points on the agenda, meetings and debates of the delegates would be superfluous. It would be sufficient to send the mandates to a central counting office which would count up the votes and announce the results. This would be much cheaper.

What is important for us to show is the most unusual situation in which imperative mandates place their holders at the Hague Congress—a situation which can serve as a very good lesson to the enthusiastic supporters of such mandates.

The delegates of the Spanish Federation, elected, as we know, owing to the influence of the Federal Council, had an imperative mandate to ask

“that the votes be counted according to the number of those represented by the delegates holding an imperative mandate; that the votes of those represented by delegates not provided with an imperative mandate will not count until the sections or federations which they represent have discussed and voted on the questions debated at the Congress... In case the Congress persists in the traditional system of voting, our delegates will take part in the discussion, but will abstain from voting.” *

This mandate therefore demands that the Congress, before dealing with anything else, should adopt the following three decisions:

1. To change the articles of the Administrative Regulations dealing with the mode of voting.

2. To decree that delegates not holding an imperative mandate should not have the right to vote.

3. To declare that these changes would apply immediately to the present Congress.

It was immediately pointed out to the delegates of the Spanish Federation that even if the Congress adopted their petitions Nos. 1 and 2, petition No. 3 would be inadmissible. The Hague Congress had been called on the basis of certain of the Association’s organisational rules. It certainly had the right to change them, but if it did change them, it would at the same time have destroyed the basis of its own existence and would have placed itself in the absolute necessity to dissolve itself immediately, after convoking a new congress, whose delegates would be elected on the basis of the new organisational rules. To apply these new rules to the present Congress would be to make them retroactive and to violate every principle of justice. Consequently, whether or not the Congress adopted proposals Nos. 1 and 2, it could by no means adopt proposal No. 3; and if the Spanish delegates had received and accepted a mandate which was in flagrant contradiction with itself, a mandate which made it impossible for them to vote at any session of the Congress, whose fault was it?

The case was so clear that neither the minority, nor even the delegates of our region, found words to contest it. Consequently they remained present at the Congress without voting, and this ultimately so much exasperated the Dutch that one of them asked:

* The Jura Bulletin, which is known to be the organ of the Alliance leaders, published in its latest issue a short account of the sessions of the Hague Congress, the authenticity of which can be judged by the following, which we translate word for word: “The Spaniards, who are supported by the Belgians and the Jurassians, demanded that the voting should be conducted not by individuals, but by federations.” Is this what the mandate of the Spanish Federation demanded?

“Why didn’t you stay at home if you have a mandate which forbids you to vote and deprives the minority of four votes every time a vote is taken?”

But for a real Alliance mandate and an Alliance way of using it, the Jura Federation had no peers.

Here is the mandate of its delegates:

“The delegates of the Jura Federation are given an imperative mandate to present to the Congress of The Hague the following principles as the basis of the organisation of the International:

“Any group of workers which accepts the programme of the International as it has been formulated by the preamble to the General Rules voted at the Geneva Congress, and which undertakes to observe economic solidarity in respect of all the workers and groups of workers in the struggle against monopoly capital shall be a section of the International enjoying full rights.”

Here, indeed, the General Rules and Regulations are abolished. If the preamble is allowed to remain, that is only because, no conclusions being drawn from it, it is simply lacking in common sense.

“The federal principle being the basis of the organisation of the International,” the mandate continues, “the sections federate freely among themselves and the federations federate freely among themselves, and do so with full autonomy, setting up, in accordance with their needs, all the organs of correspondence, statistics bureaux etc., which they deem suitable.

“The Jura Federation sees as a consequence of the above-mentioned principles the suppression of the General Council and of all authority in the International.”

Thus, the General Council, the federal councils, the local councils, and various kinds of rules and regulations which possess “authority” are to be abolished. Each one will act as he thinks fit, “with full autonomy”.

“The Jura delegates must act in complete solidarity with the Spanish, Italian and French delegates and all those who openly protest against the authoritarian principle. Consequendy, refusal to admit a delegate of these federations must lead to the immediate withdrawal of the Jura delegates. Similarly, if the Congress does not accept the organisational principles of the International set forth above, the delegates will have to withdraw in agreement with the delegates of the anti-authoritarian federations.”

Let us now see what use the Jura delegates made of this imperative mandate. In the first place, there were no French anti-authoritarian delegates at the Congress except one, a madman, who did, in fact, “withdraw” very noisily many times, but always returned because he could never get a single other anti-authoritarian delegate to follow him. The mandate of Sauva of Section No. 2 (anti-authoritarian) of New York was annulled, but the Jurassians remained at the Congress. That of the Section of Propaganda and Revolutionary Socialist Action in Geneva—a section which belonged directly to the Jura Federation — remained suspended until the end of the Congress, “ and the Jurassians behaved as though nothing had happened. The mandate of Section No. 12 of New York which they themselves had encouraged to resist the General Council, was annulled, and the Jurassians remained undisturbed. As for the mandate of the Italian delegate that was present, they did not even attempt to present it.

But were the principles of organisation—or rather disorganisation—proposed by the Jurassians, adopted by the Congress? Not at all; exactly the opposite: the Congress decided to strengthen the organisation, that is, according to them, the authority. Did they withdraw after this? Nothing of the sort. They merely declared that they would abstain from voting in future.

So this was the proper way to use an imperative mandate. The delegate complies with it if it suits him and if not, he pleads unforeseen circumstances and ultimately does what is to his advantage. After all, is it not a duty for the anti-authoritarians to disregard the authority of imperative mandates just as all other authority? The radically Alliancist spirit which was so well revealed in the imperative mandate of the Jurassians was supplemented by the really anarchist manner in which they ignored that mandate. Does it not follow from this that these delegates are more initiated members of the Alliance than their Spanish counterparts?

The Jura mandate gives occasion for other reflections too. This mandate reveals on the whole the activities taking place in the Alliance, where, despite all the talk about anarchy, autonomy, free federation etc., there are in reality only two things: authority and obedience. A few weeks before Schwitzguébel and Guillaume wrote their own mandates, abolishing the General Rules except for the preamble, their friends, delegates, who did not belong to the International, at the Rimini Conference, drew up the rules of the self-styled Italian Federation, consisting of the preamble to the general rules and the regulations of the federation. Thus the organisation whose creation had been voted by the Rimini Conference rejected the General Rules. It is obvious that in their activities the men of the Alliance always obey secret and uniform orders. It was such secret orders that were undoubtedly obeyed by the Barcelona Federacion too, when it unexpectedly started preaching the disorganisation of the International. This was because the strong organisation of our Association in Spain was becoming a threat to the secret leaders of the Alliance. This organisation gives the working class too much strength and creates thereby difficulties to the secret rule of the gentlemen of the Alliance, who know perfectly well that fish are best caught in troubled waters.

Destroy the organisation, and the waters will be as troubled as you can wish. Destroy above all the trade unions, declare war on strikes, reduce working-class solidarity to empty words and you will have complete freedom for your pompous but empty and doctrinarian phrases. That is, if the workers of our region allow you to destroy the result of their four years of work, the organisation, which is, beyond doubt, the best in the whole of the International.

Returning to the imperative mandates, we still have one question to solve: Why do the Alliancists, who are inveterate enemies of the principle of authority in any form, so obstinately insist on the authority of imperative mandates? Because for a secret society like theirs, one existing within a public organisation like the International, there is nothing more convenient than the imperative mandate. The mandates of the Alliance members will all be identical, while the mandates of the sections not influenced by the Alliance or opposing it will contradict one another, so that very often the absolute majority, and always the relative majority, will belong to the secret society; whereas at a congress where there are no imperative mandates, the common sense of the independent delegates will swiftly unite them in a common party against the party of the secret society. This is an extremely effective means of domination, which is why the Alliance, despite all its anarchism, supports its authority.

Before finishing we must say that for the Spanish Federal Council, consisting of Alliancists, the most convenient form of action was the creation of a collective imperative mandate, a fact which was bound to lead to this mandate being the mandate of the Federal Council, or, what is the same, an Alliance mandate. All federations of our region that accepted the proposal of the Council contrary to the Regulations, sent extraordinary subscriptions to Valencia to pay the travelling expenses of the delegates, and together with these subscriptions the results of the voting in each local federation, and together with the results of the voting—the imperative mandate of the federation, in order to “unite all the mandates and create a collective imperative mandate”. We readily admit that given a loyal attitude and good will, the Regional Council would have been able to count the votes of all the local federations, but to join in one the different opinions of all the federations, the Regional Council needed either supreme intelligence or a miraculous crucible in which it would probably have fused the various imperative mandates. And what came out of this new sort of crucible? What was bound to come out—the opinion of the Regional Council. We defy all the Alliancists to point out to us a chemico-electoral procedure which could produce another result.

The Spanish Federal Council, so anti-authoritarian, so anarchistic etc., thus centralised subscriptions in its hands so as to send delegates to The Hague; it conducted the elections of those delegates itself, and did it so skilfully that only Alliancists were elected, and, to crown it all, it composed the collective imperative mandate, which, it maintained, expressed the will of the members of the International in Spain.

Greater respect cannot be paid to autonomy.