Michael Bakunin
21 May 1872
To Paulo[1]
Dear Brother - I have the right to call you by this name first as one of the oldest founding brothers of the Alliance, and then as the closest friend, the true brother of the one we call Christopher, who, sent by us, came at the end of October 1861 [1868] from Geneva to Spain, and was in fact the first founder of both the International and the Alliance, first in Madrid, later in Barcelona.
[...]
Very sad news has reached us: the Alliance in Madrid as well as in Barcelona is dissolving, and in part has already dissolved. We consider this dissolution a great misfortune, from the point of view of the revolutionary solidarity amongst all countries, and those who have been the cause of this dissolution and of the publication of the secrets of the Alliance, of its very existence which must always remain secret and invisible and which none of us could betray without dishonouring ourselves and violating the highest duty that we are mutually committed to observing, are great wrongdoers.
But it is not to express useless regrets that I write you this letter, dear brother; it is to tell you that the true culprits, those who have betrayed the alliance through malice and incurable weakness, must be forever removed from it, but that the good, the energetic, the intelligent, the devoted, the zealous, the selfless, those who seek not their own glory but the triumph pf the revolution, those who are capable of sinking their individuality in collective thought and action, the passionate to the point of death and at the same time discreet - these must reconstitute the Alliance, by imposing upon themselves a supreme law: that of admitting only very serious men, both from the point of view of intelligence and revolutionary passion, but above all from the point of view of proven character.
In this regard, the dissolution that took place in some centres in Spain can be considered, in a way, fortunate, since it allows the Alliance to be reconstituted in your country on a new, much more serious basis than before. The fact that your groups could dissolve is proof that they were recruited too hastily and poorly composed. I therefore propose that you henceforth adopt and enforce a rule that has become standard practice in Alliance groups of all countries and whose beneficial effects these groups experience daily. This rule is that each group, each section of groups should henceforth only accept a new member into its midst unanimously, never just by a majority vote, that is to say, all members belonging to this section or group - If there are only 2 of you, you should only accept a third person when you are both in complete agreement and equally convinced of the usefulness, intelligence, dedication, energy and discretion that he will bring to you. And in this choice, you must never allow yourself to be guided by any consideration other than the full programme of the alliance, the perfect concordance of his feelings and ideas with that programme, and his actual capacity to serve it with energy, discretion, constancy and prudence, and above all his ability to forever renounce all isolated individual initiative and always subordinate his own action to the collective - an ability that the vain and ambitious never possess, for what they seek, often without even realising it themselves - what they seek in every group, public or secret, that they encounter is a pedestal for themselves, a stepping stone for their personal glory or elevation. Therefore, we have imposed upon ourselves this rule: never to receive into our sanctus sanctorum, into our collective intimacy and fraternity, any ambitious or vain person, however much their ideas and passionate tendencies may align with our own, however intelligent and learned they may be, and however great the potential benefit their connections and influence on the world might bring us, we prefer to do without them rather than welcome them amongst us, certain as we are that their ambition or vanity would inevitably bring amongst us the seeds of division and disorganisation sooner or later. - They would like to become leaders, directors, masters, and we recognise none amongst us, and as revolutionary socialists we must not recognise them. Only he who is capable of individually immersing himself entirely in fraternal solidarity and in the collective action of allies can and should be ours - not to become a slave there, but on the contrary to reinvigorate yourself there and find yourself strong, free, intelligent, by the strength, by the freedom, by the intelligence and by the ever-active and ever-present assistance of all.
Our goal is to create a powerful but always invisible revolutionary collective; a collective that must prepare and lead the revolution, but which will never, even in the midst of the revolution, as a group or have any of its members hold any official, public or governmental position whatever it may be, since it actually has no other goal than to dismantle all governments and make them impossible forever and everywhere, leaving to the revolutionary movement of the masses its full development and to their social organisation, from the bottom up, by way of spontaneous federation, the most absolute freedom, but always ensuring that this movement and this organisation can never reconstitute authorities, governments, States, and combating all ambitions, both collective (cliques like that of Marx) and individual, through the natural, never official, influence of all members of our alliance, scattered throughout all countries, and powerful only through their united action and the unity of the programme and goals that must always exist between them.
You now understand that to be a worthy member of the Alliance, you must possess a strong character and a serious revolutionary passion, above all to have the devil in you, and then you must have absolutely and forever renounced all self-interest, all vanity, all ambition, all careerism and all individual glory. - Do you feel capable of this? Then give us your hand.
[...]
In helping you lay the initial foundations of both A[lliance] and Y [the International] in 7896 [Spain], Christophe committed an organisational error whose effects you are now feeling. He confused the International with the Alliance and therefore provoked the 3521 [Spanish] friends to found the International with the programme of the Alliance. At first glance this may have seemed like a great triumph; in reality it is becoming a cause of confusion and disorganisation for both.
The International and the Alliance are not at all enemies as the thoroughly Marxist synagogue in London would have everyone believe. - On the contrary, the Alliance is the necessary complement to the International, a complement without which the entire International, itself transformed into a kind of monstrous international State, with a highly authoritarian government, with the dictatorship of Marx, would be transformed, as the Marxist clique is clearly tending towards today, into a compliant instrument for the realisation of ambitious projects and consequently very contrary to the real emancipation of the popular masses. - But the International and the Alliance, while tending towards the same final goal, simultaneously pursue different objectives - One has the mission of uniting the working masses, the millions of workers, across differences of trade and countries, across the borders of all States, into a single immense and compact body; the other, the Alliance, has the mission of giving these masses a truly revolutionary direction. The programmes of both, while not in any way opposed, differ in the very degree of their respective development. That of the International, if taken seriously, contains in embryo, but only in embryo, the entire programme of the Alliance. The programme of the Alliance is the ultimate elaboration of that of the International.
If the founders of the International had given this great Association a determined and positive political, socialist, philosophical doctrine, they would have committed a great error - they would have founded a very small association, a sect, not the stronghold of the proletariat of the whole world against the ruling and exploiting classes. What socialist, political, and philosophical idea could today unite millions of proletarians from all countries under its banner? With a positive doctrine, one would only manage to gather a few thousand at most, and even that? Mazzini had said: interests divide, ideas unite. That interests divide the bourgeoisie is perfectly true. But it is not true that ideas unite them very much. - As for the proletariat, it is on the contrary interests or rather the single great interest of bread and emancipation, an interest identical in all lands and at levels of civilisation and intellectual and moral development, that alone is capable of uniting it into a compact mass. - As for ideas, as ideas, that is to say as theoretical developments, let us recognise my dear, except for those very rare moments in history when the masses swept up by the ferment of revolutionary passions, rise up to them in their daily lives, under the weight of deprivations, forced labour and their daily worries that crush them - the masses, I say, are absolutely indifferent to them, if they are not hostile to them. We should not blame them for this: they are kept in a state of abject ignorance, systematically cultivated by all governments for the benefit of the privileged classes - they are crushed by stupefying work and hunger - and I think that this profound indifference they show today to both political and philosophical ideas and their exclusive preoccupation with what bourgeois idealists, with their ever-full stomachs and their dear, pleasantly pampered bodies, call “base material interests” - I think that this indifference and this preoccupation today so prevalent amongst the masses, far from being something to blame them for, should on the contrary be considered as proof of their sound instinct and their great natural common sense. For indeed material or economic Emancipation is the great basis, the unique and primary basis of all their other emancipations.
The great merit of the founders of the International and the Geneva Congress (September 1868) was that they understood this and made it the basis of the entire programme of our great Association. If atheism and materialism had been included in this programme, millions of very serious workers, that is to very oppressed, very wretched workers, would certainly have been excluded from the International. - It is not that the people are really religious; on the contrary, I happily observe that they are becoming less so every day in all countries; what they call or believe to be their religion is, on the one hand, the product of a mechanical, routine tradition, a bad habit of their collective mind; and even more, it is an instinctive, energetic, entirely practical protest against the narrowness and miseries of their current existence. Let the social revolution open a vast horizon for him on earth and he will no longer think of heaven. The masses are therefore not truly religious, but they imagine themselves to be and explicitly formulated atheism frightens their imagination. The same is true of the reactionary political and socialist ideas that still dominate the popular imagination. The proletariat instinctively detests the authority of the State, it detests it in all its possible manifestations - but attack the Church and the State, and they will not understand you, and often they will even rise up against you - out of habit. It clings to ideas that contradict its own instincts - The people are often accustomed to the authority of either the Church of the State, an authority of which they are always the victim - yet they love it, as in many households the wife endures the blows that her husband gives her - it is a slave habit, and unfortunately the masses still retain many vestiges of this detestable habit. - To cure it, there is only one way: the social revolution, the true unleashing of the masses - Only then will the masses understand all the ideas whose seeds lie dormant in their instincts, and only then will they passionately embrace, as the faithful expression of their own aspirations, the entire programme of the Alliance. But impose the programme of the Alliance upon the International, and the International will no longer have more than 2 or 3 thousand members across Europe. These will, it is true, be valuable members, the most developed, the most energetic and the most sincere revolutionary-socialists in Europe - But what are three thousand men in the face of the combined power of the wealthy classes and the State, of all the States? An absolute powerlessness. This formidable coalition of reaction and exploitation can only be broken by the organised power of the masses, of all the millions of proletarians - and certainly these millions will not accept the socialist and philosophical programme of the Alliance today.
They will also reject the Marxist programme which, besides its scientific and abstract nature, has the terrible drawback of striving for the foundation of new People’s States, that is to say, new prisons and new guardians for the people, all the more oppressive as they will oppress them in the name of the sovereign will of the people.
[...]
So neither conciliation, because it is impossible, nor submission, because it is revolting and deadly, nor division, because the unity of the International must be preserved, a supreme condition for the triumph of the proletariat in its struggle against the bourgeoisie. What then is to be done? - We must seek their unity where it is found, and not where it cannot be found. We must seek it not in political or philosophical theories, but in the shared aspirations of the proletariat of all lands for material or economic emancipation - On the terrain of economic struggle, daily practice of labour exploited by capital.
I will never cease to repeat it. This is the aim, the sole purpose of the organisation, the unique programme of the International. This programme is entirely positive, so positive and simple that there is no worker, however little developed and however clouded by religious and political prejudices he may be, who cannot, who must not understand it and embrace it with the greatest passion. Every proletarian, unless he is one of those bourgeois-workers who, rightly or wrongly, hope to rise above the masses, either through his work or his politics, in order to become a dominator and exploiter in his turn - every serious worker must curse the conditions of his existence and aspire to his emancipation. He must hate his exploiters and oppressors - if he does not express this aspiration and this hatred, it is because he believes himself powerless to realise the former and satisfy the latter - Show him that by standing in solidarity with all his comrades in slavery and misery, he can give himself, organise a power, and he will throw himself with passion into this economic struggle which the International has precisely as its sole mission to organise - And, indeed, according to our general statutes, it asks no one about his religion and politics, it only asks each person this one thing: Does he want to commit to observing in all its consequences the solidarity of the economic struggle of the workers against their exploiters? If he says yes, he becomes in effect a members of the International, which, I repeat, has no other mission than to organise this struggle, by federating and uniting across the differences of trades and the borders of States resistance funds and strikes.
This is the serious, positive, the only truly obligatory aspect of the International; all the rest, all those questions of the future social and political organisation discussed in our congresses, such as integral education, the abolition of States or emancipation of the proletariat by the State, the emancipation of women, collective ownership, the abolition of the right of inheritance, atheism, materialism or deism - all these undoubtedly constitute very interesting questions, and their discussion is highly beneficial to the intellectual and moral development of the proletariat - But no congress has the possibility or the power to resolve them in an absolute manner, nor to impose its resolutions as articles of a compulsory programme either to the sections or individually to its members; they cannot, they do not desire to, because in doing so they would proclaim absolute truths, a nonsense, and they would impose by the artificial vote of a fictitious and necessarily variable majority, an official truth - a monstrosity. - The organisation of the international, the economic, practical, daily struggle of labour against capital, this, then, is the sole explicit aim, the sole obligatory, supreme law of the International. Anyone who does not want to submit themselves to all the practical consequences of solidarity in this struggle must leave or be expelled from the International. But whoever accepts and observes them - is a member by right. This solidarity is completely independent of the different political and philosophical currents followed by the working masses in different countries. If the workers of Germany, for example, go on strike, if they revolt against the bourgeois-exploiters, you will not ask them whether they believe in God or they do not believe in him, whether they are for the State or against the State? You will support them to the best of your ability because they are workers who have risen against their exploiters - Let the German worker do the same for you, without first asking you about your political or religious creed, and the unity of the International will be founded - for it is founded solely upon the economic, not political or philosophical, solidarity of the workers of all countries.
To those who will tell me that I am diminishing the character of the International by limiting its obligatory programme and its goal to the organisation of this exclusively economic struggle, I will reply that by attempting to introduce a uniform and obligatory political, socialist or philosophical directive for all, it is destroyed, it is killed. For I challenge you to formulate any explicit doctrine which could unite millions, what am I saying, just tens of thousands of workers under its banner. And unless the beliefs of one sect are imposed on all the others, the result will be the creation of a multitude of sects, that is to say the organisation of a veritable anarchy within the proletariat for the greater triumph of the exploiting classes...
And do you think it is a small thing to unite the masses in the economic struggle? - This solidarity is already producing immense results. First, it creates a chasm between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and thereby pushing the proletariat towards revolution. Second, it gives the proletariat, through the practice of collective action and struggle, feeling, thought and strength, a socialist education and instruction, not poured into them in small doses from above, but developing spontaneously, widely, within the masses themselves, illuminated by collective passion and thought... it develops within itself, through daily practice, the thought of justice, of equality and of great popular freedom, incompatible with the authority of any guardians or teachers whatsoever. - This is what our great Association is doing - it is preparing the ground for the international and social revolution.
On this vast terrain, all ideas, all doctrines must have full freedom to emerge - the authoritarian theories of Marx, as well as our anarchic theories; provided that none has the foolish and odious pretension of imposing itself as an official truth, nor that any of them undermines in the slightest this practical solidarity of the proletariat of different countries in the economic struggle. - This is what we, men of the alliance, have always demanded and what we still demand today, against the authoritarian, official, dictatorial pretensions of the General Council in London which is increasingly dominated by the Marxist clique.
On this terrain of the International, with our explicit revolutionary programme, we organise the revolution. We do not impose our programme on anyone, but we propagate it freely, certain that it is the only one that can achieve the complete economic, political and social emancipation of the proletariat. Furthermore, as we know that the organisation of popular power cannot be achieved through theoretical propaganda alone, but requires the organisation and alliance of revolutionary characters and wills, constituted in a kind of revolutionary general staff, we have formed our secret alliance within the International itself. The London Conference, prepared and directed by Marx, hurled an anathema against secret societies. This is a hypocritical anathema. The Marxists know as well as we do that the public International, the International proper, is undoubtedly excellent for agitating, for revolutionising the masses; but it is incapable by itself of organising popular power - the latter being the ultimate force in all social struggles - and for this a secret organisation is necessary. But since they follow principles and pursue goals directly opposed to ours, they want in the International a secret society entirely opposed to ours and whose direction remains solely in their hands. This society has existed since 1847 and especially since 1848 - It is that of the German Communists founded by Marx and Engels, which has never ceased to conduct its covert propaganda within the International. The resolutions of the London Conference had no other purpose than to deliver it, through hierarchically organised committees, the entire government of the International.
[1] The pseudonym of Tomás González Morago (unknown-1885) was a leading Spanish anarchist. Morago, who was an engraver, was also a prominent member of the International in Spain, who along with typographer Anselmo Lorenzo and shoemaker Francisco Mora, helped form the nucleus of its Madrid Federation. (Translator)