On the Rimini Conference

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

The conference of the Italian anarchist groups (Bakunin helped to prepare it) took place in Rimini on August 4-6, 1872. It resolved to set up an Italian national anarchist organisation, the self-styled Italian Federation of the International, and to sever all relations with the General Council. No section in other countries, not even Bakuninist organisations, supported the attempt of the conference to counter the coming Hague Congress of the International with an “anti-authoritarian” congress in Neuchâtel.

The Bakuninists have now finally placed themselves outside the International. A conference (ostensibly of the International, in reality of the Italian Bakuninists) has been held in Rimini. Of the 21 sections represented, only one, that from Naples, really belonged to the International. The other 20, in order not to endanger their “autonomy”, had deliberately neglected to take all the measures on which the Administrative Regulations of the International make admission conditional; they had neither written to the General Council requesting admission, nor sent their subscriptions. And these 21 “International” sections decided unanimously in Rimini on August 6:

“The Conference solemnly declares to all workers of the world that the Italian Federation of the International Working Men’s Association severs all solidarity with the General Council in London, proclaiming instead, all the louder, its economic solidarity with all workers, and urges all sections that do not share the authoritarian principles of the General Council to send their representatives on September 2, 1872 not to The Hague, but to Neuchâtel in Switzerland in order to open the general anti-authoritarian Congress there on the same day.”