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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.
Naturally, the complete failure of all their projects did not improve their temper, and they lost no opportunity to assail the Marxists. The Jura Bulletin of December 10, 1876, translated an article entitled Poco
Even this gives but a faint idea of the bitterness of the controversy. Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, Hess, Outine, the General Council in London, and every newspaper under the control of the Marxists began to assail Bakounin and his circle. They no longer confined themselves to a denunciation of the "utopian and bourgeois" character of the anarchist philosophy.
The first groups of the "International" in the Romance-speaking portions of Switzerland had increased so quickly that at a congress in Geneva in 1869 they united themselves into a league of their own, the "Romance Federation," in harmony with the "International," to which members of the "Alliance" and Marxists belonged in almost equal numbers.
The latter would accept only one kind of currency the expropriation of the private landowners without compensation and the transfer of all land into the hands of the peasant communes. The Bolsheviki themselves, as good Marxists, took no stock in the peasants' commune.
It will be easily understood that the result of such differences of opinion was a sharp divergence inside the "International" between the "Marxists" and "Bakuninists" a divergence that became irremediable at the Basle Congress of 1869.
The syndicalists do not go back to Owen as the founder of their philosophy. They constantly reiterate the claim that they alone to-day are Marxists and that it is given to them to keep "pure and undefiled" the theories of that giant mind.
The "Narodniki," or peasant Socialists, later organized into the Socialist-Revolutionary party, wanted distribution of the land belonging to the big estates among the peasant communes, to be co-operatively owned and managed. They did not want land nationalization, which was the program of the Marxists the Social Democrats.
Claiming to be Marxists and basing their program upon the economic interpretation of history, the socialists waste their energies in trying to modify the results instead of obliterating the causes. Political institutions are parasitical. Why, therefore, ignore economic foundations and waste effort remodeling the parasitical superstructure?
As a matter of fact this separation had long since taken place; the long-drawn struggle between Marxists and Bakuninists had caused a complete division between the Social Democrats and Anarchists; latterly even the adherents of Collectivism, the Possibilists, and other groups had separated from the Anarchists; and thus the Geneva Congress merely gave expression to the complete individualisation of the new movement, and it was decided to make the new programme officially known in a manifesto.
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