Introduction

• • Introduction
  • II. The secret Alliance
  • III. The Alliance in Switzerland
  • IV. The Alliance in Spain
  • V. The Alliance in Italy
  • VI. The Alliance in France
  • VII. The Alliance after the Hague Congress
  • VIII. The Alliance in Russia
  • IX. Conclusion
  • X. Appendix
  • XI. Documents

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The International Working Men’s Association, in setting itself the aim of rallying under one banner the scattered forces of the world proletariat and thus becoming the living representative of the community of interests that unites the workers, was bound to open its doors to socialists of all shades. Its founders and the representatives of the workers’ organisations of the Old and New worlds who at international congresses sanctioned the General Rules of the Association, forgot that the very scope of its programme would allow the declassed elements to worm their way in and establish, at its very heart, secret organisations whose efforts, instead of being directed against the bourgeoisie and the existing governments, would be turned against the International itself. Such has been the case with the Alliance of Socialist Democracy.

At the Hague Congress, the General Council demanded an inquiry into this secret organisation. The Congress entrusted the task to a commission of five (citizens Cuno, Lucain, Splingard, Vichard and Walter, who resigned), which delivered its report at the session of September 7. The Congress passed the following resolution:

1. To expel from the International Mikhail Bakunin, as founder of the Alliance and also for an act committed on his own behalf;

2. To expel James Guillaume, as a member of the Alliance;

3. To publish the documents relating to the Alliance.

Since its members are scattered over various countries, the Commission of Inquiry into the Alliance was unable to publish the documents which were the basis of its report, and so Citizen Vichart, the only member resident in London, sent them to the protocol commission, which is now publishing them, on its own responsibility, in the ensuing report.

The file on the Alliance was so voluminous that the commission sitting during the Congress only had time to familiarise itself with the most important documents in order to arrive at a practical conclusion; thus, most of the Russian material could not be submitted to it; and the report presented by it to the Congress, since it only covered part of the question, can no longer be considered adequate. We have therefore been obliged to give a history of the Alliance so that the reader will be able to understand the meaning and importance of these documents.

The documents published by us belong to several categories. Some have already been published separately and mostly in French, but to understand the spirit of the Alliance properly, they must be compared with others, since, collated in this way, they appear in a new light. One of them is the programme of the public Alliance. Other documents belong to the International and are being published for the first time; still others belong to the Spanish branch of the secret Alliance, whose existence was publicly disclosed in the spring of 1872 by members of the Alliance. Anyone who has followed the Spanish movement during this period will only find more detailed information on facts which have already been made more or less public. These documents are important, not because they are being published for the first time, but because it is the first time that they have been compared in such a manner as to reveal the common secret action from which they originated, and above all because we are comparing them with the two categories of documents which follow. The first consists of documents published in Russian which disclose the true programme and methods of the Alliance. These documents, thanks to the language which protected them, remained hitherto unknown in the West, and this circumstance made it possible for the authors to give free rein to their imagination and their language. The faithful translations furnished by us will allow the reader to gauge the intellectual, moral, political and economic worth of the Alliance’s leaders.

The second category consists of a single document: the Alliance’s secret statutes; it is the only document of any substantial length that is being published, for the first time, in this report. It may be asked whether revolutionaries are permitted to publish the statutes of a secret society, of a supposed conspiracy. First, these secret statutes were expressly named among the documents whose publication was demanded at the Hague Congress by the Alliance commission and none of the delegates, not even the member constituting the minority of the commission, voted against this. This publication has therefore been formally ordered by the Congress, whose instructions we must carry out; but it is essential to point out the following:

Here we have a society which, under the mask of the most extreme anarchism, directs its blows not against the existing governments but against the revolutionaries who accept neither its dogma nor its leadership. Founded by a minority at a bourgeois congress, it infiltrates the ranks of the international organisation of the working class, at first attempts to dominate it and, when this plan fails, sets to work to disorganise it. It brazenly substitutes its sectarian programme and narrow ideas for the broad programme and great aspirations of our Association; it organises within the public sections of the International its own little secret sections which obey the same instructions and in a good many instances succeed in gaining control of the public sections by prearranged action; in its newspapers it publicly attacks all those who refuse to submit to its will, and by its own avowal provokes open warfare within our ranks. It resorts to any means, any disloyalty to achieve its ends; lies, slander, intimidation, the stab in the back—it finds them all equally suitable. Finally, in Russia it substitutes itself entirely for the International and commits, in its name, crimes against the common law, acts of fraud and an assassination for which the government and bourgeois press has blamed our Association. And the International must remain silent about all these acts because the society responsible for them is secret! The International has in its possession the statutes of this society, which is its mortal enemy; statutes in which it openly proclaims itself a modern Society of Jesus and declares that it has the right and the duty to practise all the methods employed by the Jesuits; statutes that explain in a flash the whole series of hostile acts to which the International has been subjected from this quarter; but the International must not make use of these statutes—that would be denouncing a secret society!

There is only one means of combating all these intrigues, but it will prove astonishingly effective; this means is complete publicity. Exposure of all these schemings in their entirety will render them utterly powerless. To protect them with our silence would be not only an act of naïveté that the leaders of the Alliance would be the first to ridicule; it would be sheer cowardice. What is more, it would be an act of treachery towards those Spanish members of the International who, while belonging to the secret Alliance, have not hesitated to divulge its existence and its mode of action, since it has set itself up in open hostility to the International. Besides, all that is contained in the secret statutes is to be found, in much more emphatic form, in the documents published in Russian by Bakunin and Nechayev themselves. The statutes are but their confirmation.

Let the ringleaders of the Alliance cry out that they have been denounced. We deliver them up to the scorn of the workers and the benevolence of the governments whom they have served so well in disorganising the proletarian movement. The Zurich Tagwacht, in a reply to Bakunin, had every right to say:

“If you are not a paid agent, the one thing quite certain is that a paid agent would never have succeeded in doing as much harm as you.”