II. The secret Alliance

• • 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 Alliance of Socialist Democracy is entirely bourgeois in origin. It did not emerge from the International; it is the off spring of the League of Peace and Freedom, a still-born bourgeois republican society. The International was already firmly established when Mikhail Bakunin took it into his head to play the part of the proletariat’s emancipator. The International only offered him a field of activity common to all its members. In order to secure advancement there, he would have had to win his spurs by dint of hard and dedicated work; he thought he would find a better opportunity and an easier path on the side of the bourgeois members of the League.

Thus, in September 1867, he had himself elected member of the Permanent Committee of the League of Peace, and he took his part seriously; it could even be said that he and Barni, now a deputy at Versailles, were the life and soul of this committee. Posing as theoretician of the League, Bakunin was to have published under its auspices a work entitled Le fédéralisme, le socialisme et l’anti-théologisme. However, he soon realised that the League was still an insignificant society and that the liberals of which it was composed only saw in its congresses a means of combining pleasure trips with high-flown harangues, while the International, in contrast, was growing from day to day. He now dreamed of grafting the League onto the International. To put this plan into practice, Bakunin, on Elpidin’s introduction, had himself accepted in July 1868 as member of the Geneva Central Section; on the other hand, he got the League Committee to adopt a proposal suggesting that the International Congress of Brussels should form a pact of offensive and defensive alliance between the two societies; and in order that the League’s Congress should sanction this fiery initiative, he drew up, and then made the Committee endorse and distribute, a confidential circular to the “Gentlemen” of the League. In it, he admitted frankly that the League, hitherto a hopeless farce, could not gain in importance except by opposing the alliance of the oppressors with

“the alliance of the peoples, the alliance of the workers ... we will not become anything unless we wish to be the sincere and serious representatives of millions of workers.”

The providential mission of the holy League was to present a bourgeois parliament, nominated by itself, to the working class, which was invited to entrust this body with its political management.

“In order to become a beneficial and real power,” concludes the circular, “our League must become the pure political expression of the great economic and social interests and principles which are triumphantly developed and propagated today by the great International Association of the Working Men of Europe and America.”

The Congress of Brussels had the temerity to reject the League’s proposition. Bakunin’s disappointment and fury knew no bounds. On the one hand, the International was slipping out of his protection. On the other, the League’s chairman, Professor Gustav Vogt, read him a stern lecture.

“Either you were not sure,” he wrote to Bakunin, “of the effect of our invitation, in which case you have compromised our League; or you knew what a surprise your friends of the International had in store for us, in which case you have most infamously deceived us. I ask you what we are going to tell our Congress...”

Bakunin replied in a letter which anyone was invited to read.

“I could not have foreseen,” he said, “that the Congress of the International would reply with an insult as gross as it was pretentious, but this is due to the intrigues of a certain clique of Germans who detest the Russians” (verbally, he explained to his audience that this clique was Marx’s). “You ask me what we are going to do. I earnestly request the honour of replying to this gross insult on behalf of the Committee, from the platform of our Congress.”

Instead of keeping his word, Bakunin changed his tune. He proposed to the League’s Berne Congress a programme of fantasy socialism in which he called for equalisation of classes and individuals, in order to outdo the ladies of the League who had hitherto only demanded equalisation of the sexes. Defeated again, he left the Congress with an insignificant minority and went to Geneva.

The alliance of bourgeois and workers dreamed of by Bakunin was not to be limited to a public alliance. The secret statutes of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy (see Documents, No. 1) contain indications which make it clear that, in the very heart of the League, Bakunin had laid the foundations for the secret society which was to control it. Not only are the names of the governing bodies identical to those of the League (Permanent Central Committee, Central Bureau, National Committees), but the secret statutes declare that the “majority of the founder members of the Alliance” are “former members of the Berne Congress”. In order to win recognition for himself as head of the International, he had to present himself as head of another army whose absolute devotion to him was to be ensured by a secret organisation. After having openly planted his society in the International, he counted on extending its ramifications into all sections and on taking over absolute control by this means. With this aim, he founded the (public) Alliance of Socialist Democracy in Geneva. Ostensibly, this was only a public society which, although entirely absorbed by the International, was, however, to have a separate international organisation, a central committee, national bureaux, and sections independent of our Association; alongside our annual Congress, the Alliance was to hold its own publicly. But this public Alliance covered another which, in its turn, was controlled by the even more secret Alliance of the international brethren, the Bodyguard Hundred of the dictator Bakunin.

The secret statutes of the “organisation of the Alliance of the international brethren” indicate that in this Alliance there were “three grades: I. The international brethren; II. the national brethren; III. the half-secret, half-public organisation of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy”.

I. The international brethren, whose number is limited to a “hundred”, form the college of cardinals. They are subordinate to a central committee and to national committees organised into executive bureaux and supervisory committees. These committees are themselves responsible to the “constituent”, or general, assembly of at least two-thirds of the international brethren. These members of the Alliance

“have no homeland other than the world revolution, no foreign land and no enemy other than the reaction. They reject any policy of negotiation and concession, and regard as reactionary any political movement which does not have as its immediate and direct goal the triumph of their principles”.

But since this article relegates to the Greek Calends the political action of the Hundred, and since these irreconcilable ones do not intend to renounce the advantages attached to public functions, Article 8 reads:

“No brother shall accept a public post except with the consent of the Committee to which he belongs.”

We shall see, when we come to discuss Spain and Italy, how the leaders of the Alliance hastened to implement this article in practice. The international brethren

“are brethren ... each of whom must be sacred to all the others, more sacred than a blood brother. Each brother shall be helped and protected by all the others to the limits of the possible.”

The Nechayev affair will show us what this mysterious limit of the possible is.

“All the international brethren know one another. No political secret must ever exist among them. None may take part in any secret society whatever without the positive consent of his Committee and, if necessary, should the latter so demand, without that of the Central Committee. And he may take part only on condition that he reveals to them all the secrets that could interest them directly or indirectly.”

The Pietris and the Stiebers only use inferior or lost people as informers; but by sending their false brethren into secret societies to betray secrets of the latter, the Alliance imposes the role of spy on the very men who, according to its plan, should take control of the “world revolution”.— Moreover, the revolutionary buffoon crowns the ignoble with the grotesque.

“Only he may become an international brother who has sincerely accepted all the programme in all its consequences, theoretical and practical, and who adds revolutionary passion to intelligence, energy, honesty” (!) “and discretion—he who has the devil in his flesh.”

II. The national brethren are organised in each country as a national association by the international brethren and under the same plan, but in no case should they suspect even the existence of an international organisation.

III. The Secret International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, whose members are recruited everywhere, has a legislative body in the Permanent Central Committee which, when it meets, christens itself the General Secret Assembly of the Alliance. This meeting takes place once a year during the Congress of the International, or, in special cases, when convoked by the Central Bureau or else by the Geneva Central Section.

The Geneva Central Section is the “permanent delegation of the permanent Central Committee”, and the “Executive Council of the Alliance”. It is subdivided into the Central Bureau and the Supervisory Committee. The Central Bureau, consisting of 3 to 7 members, is the real executive power of the Alliance:

“it will receive its guidance from the Geneva Central Section and will pass on its communications, not to say its secret orders, to all the National Committees, from which it will receive secret reports at least once a month.”

This Central Bureau has found a way of having its cake and eating it, of being secret and public at the same time; for, as part of the

“secret central section, the Central Bureau shall be a secret organisation ... as the executive directorate of the public Alliance, it shall be a public organisation”.

And so it can be seen that Bakunin had already organised all the secret and public direction of his “dear Alliance” even before it existed, and that the members who took part in any election were only puppets in a play staged by himself. Moreover, he did not hesitate to say so, as we shall soon see.—The Geneva Central Section, whose task was to guide the Central Bureau, was itself only part of the comedy; for its decisions, although settled by majority vote, were only binding on the Bureau if the majority of its members did not wish to appeal against them to the general assembly, which it must convoke at three weeks’ notice.

“To be regular, the General Assembly, when thus convoked, must be composed of two-thirds of all its members.”

It can be seen that the Central Bureau had surrounded itself with all the constitutional guarantees necessary to ensure its independence.

One might be naive enough to believe that this autonomous Central Bureau had at least been freely elected by the Geneva Central Section. Nothing of the kind. The provisional Central Bureau had been

“presented to the Geneva initiating group as provisionally elected by all the founder members of the Alliance, of whom the majority, as former members of the Berne Congress, have returned to their countries” (except for Bakunin) “ after having delegated their powers to Citizen B.”

The founder members of the Alliance were thus nothing more than a few bourgeois secessionists from the League of Peace.

In this way, the Permanent Central Committee, which had annexed the constituent and legislative power over the whole Alliance, was nominated by itself. The permanent executive delegation of this Permanent Central Committee, the Geneva Central Section, was nominated by itself and not by this Committee. The Central Executive Bureau of this Geneva Central Section, instead of being elected by it, was imposed on it by a group of individuals who had all “delegated their powers to Citizen B.”

And so “Citizen B.” is the pivot of the Alliance. To retain his pivotal function, the secret statutes of the Alliance say literally:

“Its ostensible form of government will be that of a presidency in a federative republic”,—

a presidency prior to which the president already existed in permanent “Citizen B.”

Since the Alliance is an international society, each country is to have a National Committee formed

“of all the members of the Permanent Central Committee who belong to the same nation”.

It only requires three members to constitute a National Committee. To ensure the regularity of the hierarchical ladder,

“the National Committees will serve as the sole intermediaries between the Central Bureau and all the local groups of their country”.

The National Committees

“shall have the task of organising the Alliance in their countries so that it shall always be dominated and represented at the Congresses by members of the Permanent Central Committee”.

This is what is known in the language of the Alliance as organising from the bottom to the top. These local groups only have the right to approach the National Committees with their programmes and rules so that they might be submitted

“for confirmation by the Central Bureau, without which the local groups cannot belong to the Alliance”.

Once this despotic and hierarchic secret organisation had been injected into the International, all that remained to finish matters was to disorganise it. All it needed for this was to anarchise and autonomise its sections and transform its central organs into simple letter-boxes—”correspondence and statistical bureaus”—as was, indeed, attempted later.

The list of revolutionary services rendered by permanent “Citizen B.” was not so glorious that he could hope to make permanent in the secret Alliance, much less in the public one, the dictatorship which he had appropriated for his own convenience. He therefore had to hide it under democratic-sounding humbug. And so the secret statutes prescribe that the provisional Central Bureau (for which read the permanent citizen) will function until the Alliance’s first public general assembly, which would nominate the members of the new Permanent Central Bureau. But

“as it is urgent that the Central Bureau should always consist of members of the Permanent Central Committee, this latter, through the organ of its National Committees, will take care to organise and direct all the local groups in such a way that they will delegate to this assembly only members of the Permanent Central Committee or, failing them, men absolutely devoted to the leadership of their respective National Committees, so that the Permanent Central Committee should always have the upper hand in the entire organisation of the Alliance”.

These instructions were not given by a Bonapartist minister or prefect on the eve of the elections, but, in order to ensure his permanence, by the anti-authoritarian, quintessential, immense anarchist, the archpriest of the organisation from bottom to top, the Bayard of the autonomy of sections and the free federation of autonomous groups—Saint-Michael Bakunin.

So far we have analysed the secret organisation designed to perpetuate the dictatorship of “Citizen B.”; now let us deal with his programme.

“The association of international brethren aims for a universal revolution, simultaneously social, philosophical, economic and political, so that of the present order of things—based on private property, exploitation, and the principle of authority, whether religious, metaphysical, bourgeois-doctrinaire, or even Jacobinrevolutionary—not a stone shall remain standing, first in all Europe and then throughout the rest of the world. With the cry of peace for the workers, liberty for all the oppressed and death to the rulers, exploiters and guardians of all kinds, we seek to destroy all states and all churches along with all their institutions and laws, religious, political, juridical, financial, police, university, economic and social, so that all these millions of poor human beings, deceived, enslaved, tormented and exploited, delivered from all their directors and benefactors, official and officious, collective and individual, may breathe at last with complete freedom.”

Here indeed we have revolutionary revolutionism! The first condition for the achievement of this astounding goal is to refuse to fight the existing states and governments with the means employed by ordinary revolutionaries, but on the contrary to hurl resounding, grandiloquent phrases at

“the institution of the State and that which is both its consequence and basis—i.e., private property”.

Thus it is not the Bonapartist State, the Prussian or Russian State that has to be overthrown, but an abstract State, the State as such, a State that nowhere exists. But while the international brethren in their desperate struggle against this State that is situated somewhere in the clouds know how to avoid the truncheons, the prison and the bullets that real states deal out to ordinary revolutionaries, we see on the other hand that they have reserved themselves the right, subject only to papal dispensation, to profit by all the advantages offered by these real bourgeois states. Fanelli, an Italian deputy, Soriano, an employee of the government of Amadeus of Savoy, and perhaps Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, Bonapartist police agents, show how amenable the Pope is in this respect... That is why the police shows so little concern over “the Alliance or, to put it frankly, the conspiracy” of Citizen B. against the abstract idea of the state.

The first act of the revolution, then, must be to decree the abolition of the state, as Bakunin did on September 28 in Lyons, despite the fact that this abolition of the state is of necessity an authoritarian act. By the state he means all political power, revolutionary or reactionary,

“for it matters little to us that this authority calls itself church, monarchy, constitutional state, bourgeois republic, or even revolutionary dictatorship. We detest them and we reject them all alike as infallible sources of exploitation and despotism”.

And he goes on to declare that all the revolutionaries who, on the day after the revolution, want “construction of a revolutionary state” are far more dangerous than all the existing governments put together, and that

“we, the international brethren, are the natural enemies of these revolutionaries”

because to disorganise the revolution is the first duty of the international brethren.

The reply to this bragging about the immediate abolition of the state and the establishment of anarchy has already been given in the last General Council’s private circular on “Fictitious Splits in the International”, of March 1872, page 37:

“Anarchy, then, is the great war-horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of labels. All socialists see anarchy as the following programme: once the aim of the proletarian movement, i.e., abolition of classes, is attained, the power of the State, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions. The Alliance reverses the whole process. It proclaims anarchy in proletarian ranks as the most infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext, it asks the International, at a time when the old world is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its organisation with anarchy.”

Let us see, however, just what the consequences of the anarchist gospel are; let us suppose the state has been abolished by decree. According to Article 6, the consequences of this act will be: the bankruptcy of the state, an end to the payment of private debts by the intervention of the state, an end to the payment of all taxes and all contributions, the dissolution of the army, the magistrature, the bureaucracy, the police and the clergy (!); the abolition of official justice, accompanied by an auto-da-fé of all title-deeds and all judicial and civil junk, the confiscation of all productive capital and instruments of labour for the benefit of the workers’ associations and an alliance of these associations, which “will form the Commune”. This Commune will give individuals thus dispossessed the strict necessaries of life, while granting them freedom to earn more by their own labour.

What happened at Lyons has proved that merely decreeing the abolition of the state is far from sufficient to accomplish all these fine promises. Two companies of the bourgeois National Guards proved quite sufficient, on the other hand, to shatter this splendid dream and send Bakunin hurrying back to Geneva with the miraculous decree in his pocket. Naturally he could not imagine his supporters to be so stupid that they need not be given some sort of plan of organisation that would put his decree into practical effect. Here is the plan:

“For the organisation of the Commune—a federation of permanently acting barricades and the functioning of a Council of the Revolutionary Commune by the delegation of one or two deputies from each barricade, and one per street, or per block, these deputies being invested with imperative mandates and always responsible and revocable at any time” (odd barricades, these barricades of the Alliance, where instead of fighting they spend their time writing mandates). “The Commune Council, thus organised, will be able to elect from its membership special Executive Committees for each branch of the revolutionary administration of the Commune.”

The insurgent capital, thus constituted as a Commune, then proclaims to the other communes of the country that it renounces all claim to govern them; it invites them to reorganise themselves in a revolutionary way and then to send their responsible and recallable deputies, vested with their imperative mandates, to an agreed place where they will set up a federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces and organise a revolutionary force capable of triumphing over reaction. This organisation will not be confined to the communes of the insurgent country; other provinces or countries will be able to take part in it, while “the provinces, communes, associations and individuals that side with the reaction shall be debarred from it”.

So the abolition of frontiers goes hand in hand with the most benevolent tolerance towards the reactionary provinces, which would not hesitate to resume the civil war.

Thus in this anarchistic organisation of the tribune-barricades we have first the Commune Council, then the executive committees which, to be able to be anything at all, must be vested with some power and supported by a public force; this is to be followed by nothing short of a federal parliament, whose principal object will be to organise this public force. Like the Commune Council, this parliament will have to assign executive power to one or more committees which by this act alone will be given an authoritarian character that the demands of the struggle will increasingly accentuate. We are thus confronted with a perfect reconstruction of all the elements of the “authoritarian State”; and the fact that we call this machine a “revolutionary Commune organised from bottom to top”, makes little difference. The name changes nothing of the substance; organisation from bottom to top exists in any bourgeois republic and imperative mandates date from the Middle

Ages. Indeed Bakunin himself admits as much when (in Article 8) he describes his organisation as a “new revolutionary State”.

As for the practical value of this plan of revolution with its talking instead of fighting, we shall say nothing.

Now we shall reveal the secret of all the Alliance’s double and triple-bottomed boxes. To make sure that the orthodox programme is adhered to and that anarchy behaves itself properly,

“it is necessary that in the midst of popular anarchy, which will constitute the very life and energy of the revolution, unity of revolutionary idea and action should find an organ. This organ must be the secret and world association of the international brethren.

“This association proceeds from the conviction that revolutions are never made either by individuals or by secret societies. They come about, as it were, of their own accord, produced by the force of things, by the course of events and facts. They are prepared over a long time deep in the instinctive consciousness of the popular masses, and then they flare up.... All that a well-organised secret society can do is, first, to assist in the birth of the revolution by spreading among the masses ideas corresponding to their instincts, and to organise, not the army of the revolution—the army must always be the people” (cannon fodder), “but a revolutionary General Staff composed of devoted, energetic, intelligent and above all sincere friends of the people, who are not ambitious or vain, and who are capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea” (monopolised by them) “and the popular instincts.”

“The number of these individuals should not, therefore, be too large. For the international organisation in the whole of Europe a hundred firmly and seriously united revolutionaries would be sufficient. Two or three hundred revolutionaries would be enough for the organisation of the biggest country.”

So everything changes. Anarchy, the “unleashing of popular life”, of “evil passions” and all the rest is no longer enough. To assure the success of the revolution one must have unity of thought and action. The members of the International are trying to create this unity by propaganda, by discussion and the public organisation of the proletariat. But all Bakunin needs is a secret organisation of one hundred people, the privileged representatives of the revolutionary idea, the general staff in the background, self-appointed and commanded by the permanent “Citizen B”. Unity of thought and action means nothing but orthodoxy and blind obedience. Perinde ac cadaver We are indeed confronted with a veritable Society of Jesus.

To say that the hundred international brethren must “serve as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the popular instincts”, is to create an unbridgeable gulf between the Alliance’s revolutionary idea and the proletarian masses; it means proclaiming that these hundred guardsmen cannot be recruited anywhere but from among the privileged classes.