My dear Friend,
I hope you have received the copy of the Address of the General Council on the Civil War in France that I sent you to the address in Florence which you left me. I shall send you another copy to Barletta in a day or two, also in letter form for greater safety.

I was very pleased to receive your letter from Barletta, to which I would have replied sooner but the Address has given us a good deal of work, for it was violently attacked by the press and we had to reply to various newspapers. I am also engaged in translating it into German for our Leipzig paper (Volksstaat). A Dutch translation is being published in the Toekomst (The Future) of The Hague. If you can arrange the publication of an Italian translation, this would help you greatly in material terms for your propaganda, giving the Italian workers ready means to learn the opinions of the General Council, and the principles and modes of action of your association.

Upon second thought I think it best to send two copies of our address to Castellazzo in Florence asking him to forward you one in a letter. With this opportunity I shall open correspondence with him, which will be kept up regularly. You must excuse my not having written to him before, but besides Italy I have to correspond with Spain and Belgium as well. Now, as regards Naples and Caporusso, the latter attended one of our Congresses, only he never kept up regular correspondence with the Council, and to explain this I must go into some historical details.

Caporusso and his friends were sectarians of the Russian Bakunin. Bakunin has a theory of his own, consisting rather of a mixture of Communism and Proudhonism; the wish to unite these two theories in one shows that he is absolutely ignorant of political economy. He has picked up from Proudhon among other phrases that of anarchy, as 
the final state of society, and he is nevertheless opposed to all political actions on the part of the working classes, inasmuch as they would recognise the political state of things, and further that all political acts are in his opinion “authoritarian”. How he expects the present political oppression and the tyranny of capital to be broken, and how he further intends to carry through his pet ideas on the abolition of inheritance without “acts of authority” he does not explain. But when the insurrection at Lyon was put down by force in September 1870, he decreed the abolition of the State from the Hôtel de Ville, without taking any measures against all the bourgeois of the national guard who quietly marched into the Hôtel de Ville, threw Bakunin out and re-established the State, all in less than an hour. However, Bakunin has founded a sect on his theories, to which belong a small portion of French, Swiss, many of our men in Spain and some in Italy, among them Caporusso and his friends: so that Caporusso does honour to his name. He has a Russian for his leader.

Now our Association was established to provide a central medium of communication and co-operation between the working-class societies existing in the different countries and to aim at the same end, namely, protection, progress and complete emancipation of the working classes (the Rules of the Association). The special theories of Bakunin and his friends standing under this rule, there would be no objection to accepting them as members and allowing them to do what they can to propagate their ideas by every suitable means. We have people of all sorts in our Association, Communists, Proudhonists, Unionists, Trade Unionists, Co-operators, Bakunists etc., and even in our General Council we have men of very different opinions.

The moment the Association were to become a sect, it would be lost. Our power consists in the liberality with which the first rule is interpreted, namely that all men who are admitted aim at the complete emancipation of the working classes. Unfortunately the Bakunists, with that narrowness of spirit common to all sects, were not satisfied with that. The General Council, according to them, consisted of reactionaries, the programme of the Association was too vague. Atheism and Materialism (which Bakunin himself had learnt from us Germans) was to be made obligatory, the abolition of inheritance and of the State, etc., were to be part of our programme. Now Marx and I are almost as old 
and good atheists and materialists as Bakunin, as are still almost all our members; that this inheritance is nonsense we know as well as he does, albeit we differ from him as to the importance and expediency of putting forward its abolition as the deliverance from every evil, and “the abolition of the State” is an old German philosophical phrase, which we made much use of when we were mere youths. But to put all these things into our programme would be to alienate an immense number of our members, and to divide instead of uniting the European proletariat. When the efforts to have the Bakunist programme adopted as the programme of the Association failed, an attempt was made to push the Association in an indirect way.

Bakunin formed at Geneva an “Alliance of Socialist Democracy” which was to be an international association separate from our own. The most radical minds of our sections, the Bakunists, were to form everywhere sections of this alliance, and these sections were to be subject to a separate General Council at Geneva (Bakunin) and to have separate national councils alongside ours; and at our general congress the Alliance was to sit in the morning in our Congress and in the afternoon hold a separate congress of its own.

This fine plan was laid before the General Council in November 1868, but on 22 December 1868 the General Council annulled these rules as contrary to the statutes of our Association and declared that the sections of the Alliance could only be admitted separately and that the Alliance must either dissolve or cease to belong to the International. On 9 March 1869 the General Council informed the Alliance that “il n’existe pas section de l’Alliance en sections de l’Ass. Int. des travailleurs si la dissolution et l’entrée des sections dans l’Int. étaient définitivement décidées il deviandrait nécessaire d’après nos règlements d’informer le Conseil sur les résidences et la force numérique de chaque nouvelle section”. These conditions were never exactly fulfilled, but the Alliance as such was disavowed everywhere except in France and Switzerland, where it ended by creating a split, in consequence of which about 1,000 Bakunists — not a tenth of our men — withdrew from the French and Swiss federation and are now appealing to the Council to be recognised as a separate federation, which the Council will most probably not prevent.

From this you see that the main result of the action of the Bakunists has been to create divisions in our ranks. No one hindered their special dogma, but they were not satisfied with that and wanted to command and impose their doctrines on all our members. We resisted as was our duty, and if they will consent to remain quietly alongside our other members, we have neither the right nor the will to exclude them. But it is a question whether it is advisable to give prominence to such elements, and if we can win over the Italian sections which are not imbued with this special fanaticism, we shall certainly be able to work better together. You will be able to judge for yourself according to the circumstances you find in Naples. The programme cited in Jules Favre’s circular against us, as the programme of the Int., is a truly Bakunist programme such as mentioned above. Our reply to Favre you will find in The Times of London of 13 June.

Mazzini in 1864 tried to turn our Association to his own account, but failed. His chief instrument was a Garibaldian, Major Wolf (his real name Prince Thurn and Taxis), who has now been discovered to be a spy of the French police by Tibaldi. When M. saw that the Int. could not serve him as a means, he attacked it with great violence and has seized every opportunity to insult it, but as you say, the time is soon past, and God and the people is no longer the watchword of the Italian working class.

We are well aware that the system of fittaiuoli or métayers has been the basis of agricultural production in Italy from the time of the Romans down to our own day. This system undoubtedly gives the fittaiuoli a wider political independence, compared to the proletarian, than is allowed to tenant farmers here. But if we are to believe Sismondi and the recent writers on this subject, the exploitation of the tenant farmers by the landlords is as great in Italy as everywhere else, and the burdens on the lowest class of peasants exceedingly heavy. In Lombardy, where the farms are extensive, the fittaiuoli, when I was there, were tolerably well off, but there still existed a certain class of rural proletarians employed by the tenant farmers, who did the actual work and who derived no benefit from this system. In other parts of Italy, where there are fewer tenant farmers, the métayer system, as far as I can judge from a distance, does not protect them from the same misery, 
ignorance and degradation which is the lot of the small tenant farmers in France, Germany, Belgium and Ireland. Our policy with regard to the agricultural populations has generally and naturally been this: where there are large estates, the tenant farmer is a capitalist vis-à-vis the labourers, and there we must press for the labourer; where, on the other hand, there are small holdings, the tenant farmer, although nominally a small capitalist or even owner (as in France and part of Germany), is in reality generally reduced to the same misery as the proletarian, and we must then work for him. No doubt it must be the same in Italy. But the Council will be very much obliged to you if you will give us some information on this point, and also on the recent legislation in Italy regarding landed property and other social questions.

After many interruptions I finish this letter on 3 July, and ask you only to be so good as to send me a prompt reply. I am writing to Castellazzo today.
Yours most devotedly,
Signed F. Engels.