It is hardly necessary to enlarge upon the present position of 
the International Working Men’s Association. On the one hand, 
owing to the tremendous events in Paris; it has become stronger 
and more widespread than ever before; on the other we find 
almost all the European governments united against it—Thiers 
and Gorchakov, Bismarck and Beust, Victor Emmanuel and the 
Pope,” Spain and Belgium. A general drive against the Interna- 
tional has been launched, all the powers of the old world, the 
courts-martial and civil courts, the police and the press, squires 
from the backwoods and bourgeois, vie with each other in 
persecuting it, and there is hardly a spot on the entire continent 
where every means is not used to outlaw this fear-inspiring great 
brotherhood of workers. | 

At this very moment of general and inevitable disorganisation 
caused by the forces of the old society, when unity and solidarity 
are more indispensable than ever, at this very moment a small 
number of the Internationals—whose number by their own 
admission is steadily diminishing—in some corner of Switzerland 
has chosen to throw an apple of discord in the shape of a public 
circular among the members of the International. These people— 
they call themselves the Federation of the Jura—are essentially the 
same who under the leadership of Bakunin have continuously 
undermined the unity in the French-speaking part of Switzerland 
for more than two years and who through their assiduous private 
correspondence with kindred notabilities in various countries have 

obstructed concerted action in the International. So long as these 
intrigues were confined to Switzerland or done on the quiet we 
did not want to give them wide publicity, but this circular compels 
us to speak. 

Because this year the General Council has not convened a 
Congress but a Conference,* a circular to all sections of the 
International has been adopted by the Federation of the Jura at its 
Congress at Sonvillier on November 12. Large numbers of the 
circular were printed and mailed in all directions requesting all 
sections to press for the immediate convocation of a Congress. 
Why a Conference had to take the place of a Congress is perfectly 
clear, at least to us in Germany and Austria. If we had been 
represented at a Congress our delegates on their return would 
have been immediately apprehended and placed into safe custody, 
and the delegates from Spain, Italy and France would have been 
in the same position. But a Conference which held no _ public 
debates but only committee meetings could very well take place, 
for the names of the delegates would not be published. It had the 
disadvantage that it could not decide fundamental issues or make 
any changes in the General Rules, that it had no legislative power 
at all and could pass merely administrative decisions designed to 
facilitate the putting into practice of the organisational measures 
laid down by the General Rules and Congress resolutions. But 
nothing more was required under the circumstances, it was merely 
a question of adopting measures to deal with the present 
emergency, and a Conference was sufficient for the purpose. 

The attacks on the Conference and its decisions, however, were 
merely a pretext. In fact, the present circular only makes passing 
mention of them. It considers, on the contrary, that the evil is far 
more deep-rooted. It asserts that according to the General Rules 
and the original Congress resolutions the International is nothing 
but “a free federation of autonomous” (independent) “sections”, 
whose aim is the emancipation of the workers by the workers 
themselves 

“without any directing authority, even if set up by voluntary agreement”. 

The General Council therefore was nothing but “a simple 
statistical and correspondence bureau”’. But this original basis was 
very soon distorted, first by conferring on the General Council the 
right to co-opt new members, and even more by the resolutions of 

the Basle Congress, which gave the General Council the right to 
suspend individual sections till the next Congress and to decide 
controversies provisionally until the Congress adopted a relevant 
resolution.” This placed dangerous powers in the hands of the 
General Council and turned the free association of independent 
sections into a hierarchical and authoritarian organisation of 
“disciplined sections”, so that 

“the sections are entirely under the control of the General Council, which can 
arbitrarily either refuse to admit them or suspend their work”. 

To our German readers, who know only too well the value of an 
organisation that is able to defend itself, all this will seem very 
strange. And this is quite natural, for Mr. Bakunin’s theories, 
which appear here in their full splendour, have not yet penetrated 
into Germany. A workers’ association which has inscribed upon its 
banner the motto of struggle for the emancipation of the working 
class is to be headed, not by an executive committee, but merely by 
a statistical and correspondence bureau! For Bakunin and his 
companions, however, the struggle for the emancipation of the 
working class is a mere pretext; their real aim is quite different. 

“The future society should be nothing but a universalisation of the organisation 
which the International will establish for itself. We must therefore try to bring this 
organisation as close as possible to our ideal... The International, embryo of the 
future human society, must henceforth be the faithful image of our principles of 

liberty and federation, and must reject any principle leading to authoritarianism, to 
dictatorship.” 

We Germans have earned a bad name for our mysticism, but we 
have never gone the length of such mysticism. The International is 
to be the prototype of a future society in which there will be no 
executions a la Versailles, no courts-martial, no standing armies, 
no inspection of private correspondence, and no Brunswick 
criminal court *'! Just now, when we have to defend ourselves with 
all the means at our disposal, the proletariat is told to organise not 
in accordance with requirements of the struggle it is daily and 
hourly compelled to wage, but according to the vague notions of a 
future society entertained by some dreamers. Let us try to imagine 
what our own German organisation would look like according to 
this pattern. Instead of fighting the government and _ the 
bourgeoisie, it would meditate on whether each paragraph of our 
General Rules and each resolution passed by the Congress 

presented a true image of the future society. In place of our 
executive committee there would be a simple statistical and 
correspondence bureau; it would have to deal as best it knew with 
the independent sections, which are so independent that they can 
accept no steering authority, be it even one set up by their own 
free decision; for they would thus violate their primary duty—that 
of being a true model of the future society. Co-ordination of 
forces and joint action are no longer mentioned. If in each 
individual section the minority submits to the decision of the 
majority, it commits a crime against the principles of freedom and 
accepts a principle which leads to authority and dictatorship! If 
Stieber and all his associates, if the entire black cabinet,” if all 
Prussian officers were ordered to join the Social-Democratic 
organisation in order to wreck it, the committee, or rather the 
statistical and correspondence bureau, must by no means keep 
them out, for this would amount to establishing a hierarchical 
and authoritarian organisation! And above all, there should be 
no disciplined sections! Indeed, no party discipline, no centralisation 
of forces at a particular point, no weapons of struggle! But what, 
then, would happen to the model of the future society? In short, 
where would this new organisation get us? To the cowardly, servile 
organisation of the early Christians, those slaves, who gratefully 
accepted every kick and whose grovelling did indeed after 300 
years win them the victory of their religion—a method of 
revolution which the proletariat will surely not imitate! Like the 
early Christians, who took heaven as they imagined it as the model 
for their organisation, so we are to take Mr. Bakunin’s heaven of 
the future society as a model, and are to pray and hope instead of 
fighting. And the people who preach this nonsense pretend to be 
the only true revolutionaries! 

As far as the International is concerned, all this is still a long 
way off. Until the Congress passes new decisions it is the duty of 
the General Council to carry out the Basle resolutions and it will 
do its duty. Just as it did not hesitate to expel the Tolains and 
Durands, so it will see to it that admission to the International will 
remain barred for the Stiebers & Co., even if Mr. Bakunin should 
consider this dictatorial. 

But how did these reprehensible Basle resolutions come into 
being? Very simply. The Belgian delegates proposed them, and no 
one supported them more ardently than Bakunin and his friends, 
especially Schwitzguébel and Guillaume, who signed the circular in 
question! But then matters were of course quite different. These 
gentlemen then hoped to secure a majority and that the General 

Council would be dominated by them. At that time they wanted to 
make the General Council as strong as possible. And now—now it 
is quite a different matter. Now the grapes are sour, and the 
Council is to be reduced to a simple statistical and correspondence 
bureau, so that Bakunin’s chaste future society should not have to 
blush. 

These people, professional sectarians, who, with all their 
mystical early-Christian doctrines, form an insignificant minority 
in the International, have the effrontery to reproach the General 
Council and its members with wanting 

“to make their particular programme, their personal tenets the predominant 
ones in the International; they regard their private ideas as the official theory 
which alone should be entitled to full recognition in the Association”. 

This is indeed bold language. Anyone who has been able to 
follow the internal history of the International knows that for 
nearly three years now these people have been mainly occupied in 
trying to force their sectarian doctrine on the Association as its 
general programme, and having failed in this they underhandedly 
seek to pass off Bakunin’s phrases as the general programme of 
the International. Nevertheless, the General Council protested 
only against this insinuation but has so far never challenged their 
right to belong to the International or freely to propagate their 
sectarian humbug as such. How the General Council will look 
upon their latest circular is yet to be seen. 

These people have themselves brilliantly demonstrated what 
they have achieved by their new organisation. Wherever the 
International did not encounter the violent resistance of reaction- 
ary governments, it has made enormous advances since the Paris 
Commune. What do we see, on the other hand, in the Swiss Jura, 
where these gentlemen were free to run things their own way 
during the last eighteen months? Their own report to the Son- 
villier Congress (printed in the Geneva journal La Révolution 
Sociale of November 23) says: 

“These terrible events could not but exert a partly demoralising and partly 
beneficial influence on our sections... Then the gigantic struggle which the 
proletariat has to wage against the bourgeoisie will begin, and that makes people 
think ... some withdraw (s’en vont) and hide their cowardice, others rally closer 
than ever in support of the regenerating principle of the International.—This is at 

present the dominant fact of the internal history of the International in general and of 
our Federation in particular.” 4 

November 23, 1871.— Ed. 

What is new here is the statement that this happened in the 
International in general, where just the opposite took place. It is 
true that this happened in the Jura Federation. According to these 
gentlemen themselves, the Moutier section has suffered least of all, 
but has achieved nothing: 

“Though no new sections were set up, it is to be hoped that, etc.” ... and this 
section was after all “in a particularly favourable position because of the excellent 
temper of the population” ... “the Grange section has been reduced to a small 
nucleus of workers”. 

Two sections in Biel never answered the letters of the 
Committee, and the same applies to the sections in Neuchatel and 
one in Locle; the third section in Biel 

“is for the time being dead” ... although “there is still some hope of the 
International in Biel reviving”. 

The Saint-Blaise section is dead; that of Val de Ruz has vanished, 
no one knows how; after a prolonged agony the central section at 
Locle was dissolved, but has managed to reconstitute itself, evidently 
for the purpose of the Congress elections; that of La Chaux-de- 
Fonds is in a critical position; the watch-makers’ section in Courtelary 
is now transforming itself into a trades association and adopting the 
rules of the association of Swiss watch-makers; it thus adopts the 
rules of an organisation which is not part of the International; the 
central section at the same district has suspended its activities because 
its members have formed separate sections at Saint-Imier and 
Sonvillier (which has not prevented this central section from 
sending two delegates to the Congress, in addition to the 
delegates from Saint-Imier and Sonvillier); after an outstanding 
career the Catébat section had to dissolve itself as a result 
of intrigues by the local bourgeois, and the same happened 
to the Corgémont section; finally in Geneva one section is still 
in existence. 

That is what in eighteen months the representatives of a free 
federation of independent sections headed by a statistical and 
correspondence bureau have done to a flourishing, though 
not widespread or numerous, Federation. And that in a country 
where they had complete freedom of action and at a time when 
everywhere else the International had made gigantic advances. 
And at the very moment when they themselves exhibit this pic- 
ture of their miserable failure, when they utter this cry of help- 
lessness and dissolution, they demand that we should divert 
the International from the course it has hitherto followed, a 

course which has made it what it is now, and lead it along the path 
which brought the Jura Federation from a comparatively flourish- 
ing state to complete dissolution. 

January 10, 1872