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But, while the Bakouninists were forced, as a result of these views, to abandon organized effort, the newest anarchists have attempted to incorporate these ideas into the very constitution of the French Confederation of Labor.
The leaders of the Bakouninists were in the greatest dilemma. A continued political inactivity appeared more ridiculous and more impossible from day to day. The anarchists were of course very bitter over this attack on their policies, and they concluded that the socialists had become reactionaries who no longer sought the emancipation of the working class.
In all the discussions the anarchist tendencies of the congress were unmistakable, and the immense gulf between the Marxists and the Bakouninists was laid bare. The very foundation principles upon which the International was based had been overturned.
The Commune of Paris was the one uprising that had made any serious impression upon the people, and it was the one wherein the Bakouninists had played no important part. The others had failed miserably, with no other result than that of increasing the power of reaction, while discouraging and disorganizing the workers.
They are neither socialists nor anarchists. They remind one of those Bakouninists that Marx once referred to as "lawyers without cases, physicians without patients and knowledge, students of billiards, etc."
Needless to say, the decisive victory of the Bakouninists at Basel was excessively annoying and humiliating to Marx. He did not attend in person, but it was evident before the congress that he fully expected that his forces would, on that occasion, destroy root and branch the economic and political fallacies of Bakounin.
The use by the Bakouninists in Spain of the criminal elements there, the repeated exploits of the police agents in discrediting every uprising by encouraging the criminal elements to outrageous acts, and the terrible barbarities of the criminal classes at the time of the Paris Commune are all examples of how useful to reaction the rotting layers of old society may become.
Kropotkin first visited Switzerland in 1872, when he came in close contact with the men of the Jura Federation. A week's stay with the Bakouninists converted him, he says, to anarchism. He then returned to St. Petersburg, and shortly after entered the famous circle of Tchaykovsky, and, as a result of his revolutionary activity, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Fortress of St. Peter and St.
Nor am I certain that this was the origin of those ideas of organization that make of an anarchist meeting a modern Babel, wherein all seems to be utter confusion. In any case, the Bakouninists, after The Hague congress, undertook to revive the International and to base this new organization on these ideas of anarchism.
The congress at Basel was the turning point in the brief history of the International. Although the Marxists were reluctant to admit it, the Bakouninists had won a complete victory on every important issue.
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