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Updated: May 31, 2025
Despite the opposition of the Marxians at the congress, the proposition of Bakounin received thirty-two votes as against twenty-three given to the proposition of the General Council. As thirteen of the delegates abstained from voting, Bakounin's resolution did not obtain an absolute majority, and the question was thus left undecided.
As to Cluseret, he behaved at once like an idiot and a coward. These two men left Lyons after their failure." Bakounin's so-called abolition of the State appealed to the humor of Marx.
It was left to George Eccarius, delegate of the Association of Tailors of London, to present to that congress the views of Marx and the General Council. The report of the General Council was, of course, prepared in advance, but Bakounin's views were well known, and it was intended as a crushing rejoinder.
How far such a crusade leads one may be gathered from Bakounin's own words: "The end of revolution can be no other," he declares, "than the destruction of all powers religious, monarchical, aristocratic, and bourgeois in Europe. Consequently, the destruction of all now existing States, with all their institutions political, juridical, bureaucratic, and financial."
The whole of Bakounin's activity was there discussed, and a series of resolutions was adopted by the conference to be sent to every section of the International movement. It is perhaps as important a document as was issued during the life of the International, and it stands as the answer of Marx to what Bakounin called economic action and to what the syndicalists now call direct action.
Neither the anarchist of Bakounin's type nor the anarchist of the Wall Street type trusts the people. With their cliques and inner circles plotting their conspiracies, they are forced to travel the same subterranean passages. The one through corruption impresses the will of the wealthy and powerful upon the community.
He absolutely refused to look at the facts. Possessed of a passion for liberty, he wanted all nations, all peoples civilized, semi-civilized, or savage to be entirely free. What had historical, geographical, political, or industrial conditions to do with the matter? All this is typical of Bakounin's revolutionary sentimentalism.
Guillaume admits that he was not convinced of the absolute necessity of Bakounin's presence in Spain, but, nevertheless, since he desired to go there, Guillaume offered to secure for him fifteen hundred francs to make the journey. On the receipt of this news, Bakounin answered Guillaume that the sum would be wholly insufficient.
Such is the ideal, the fundamental principle of modern communism." This is, of all Bakounin's criticisms of socialism, the one that has had the greatest vitality. It has gone the round of the world as a crushing blow to socialist ideals. The same thought has been repeated by every politician, newspaper, and capitalist who has undertaken to refute socialism.
The failure of Herwegh's project forced Bakounin to admit later that Marx had been right. Yet, as we know, with Bakounin's advancing years the passion for insurrections became with him almost a mania. If this quarrel between Bakounin and Marx casts a light upon the causes of their antagonism, a still greater illumination is shed by the differences between them which arose in 1849.
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