My dear friend,

Yesterday evening, just as I was about to begin a rather sharp letter to the Spanish Council concerning the translation and publication of the Bakuninists’ manifesto, I received your letter, which gave me great pleasure. Although I regret the necessities that brought you to Madrid, it is a real piece of luck that you are there just now, for the reticence and the silence of the Spanish Council are truly of a nature to provoke disagreeable interpretations. It is 24 days since I wrote to Mora, and no reply, or as the only reply, the publication of the hostile manifesto; but for your letters, what were we to make of it?

I enclose the resolution of the 30 Geneva sections, for fear you may not have found it. Also, the reply of the Romande Committee to the Bakuninists, and I very much hope that *Emancipacion* will also give its readers the translation of this excellent piece. In the same number of *l’Égalité* you will find several other articles relating to this debate and to the meeting of the 30 sections. The Genevans’ reply is sufficient for the moment; the General Council will naturally have to occupy itself at once with this affair and will reply in a circular embracing all the phases of the conflict from its origin – you realise this will be long and will take us some time. What it is important, meanwhile, to point out to the Spanish is this:

1) One sees clearly from the Sonvilliers circular what these gentlemen want. The attack on the Conference was only the pretext. Now they attack the Basle resolutions, which have the force of law for the Association and which the General Council is bound to obey. This is an act of open rebellion, and it is well that these people have unmasked themselves. But

2) Whose work are these Basle resolutions? The London General Council’s? Not at all. They were proposed by the Belgian delegates (one of whom was Robin! the Bakuninist) and were most warmly supported by whom? – By Bakunin, Guillaume, Schwitzguébel, etc., the same men who today attack them as having demoralised, by their authoritarian character, the General Council. Which does not in the least prevent Guillaume and Schwitzguébel from signing that very circular. We have the witnesses here, and if Sentiñon and Farga Pellicer are not blinded by sectarianism, they will have to recall this (if they were present at the session, which I do not know). But then it was different. The Bakuninists believed that the majority was assured for them, and that the General Council would be transferred to Geneva. It turned out otherwise, and all at once the resolutions which, if carried out by a General Council of their choosing, would have been the most revolutionary thing imaginable, become authoritarian and bourgeois!

3) The convocation of the Conference was perfectly regular. The Jurassiens, represented on the Council by Robin, who himself asked that the conflict be brought before this Conference, must have been forewarned by him, as their regular correspondent. Jung, the secretary for Switzerland, could no longer remain in official correspondence with a committee which, in open defiance of a resolution of the General Council, continued to deck itself out with the title of Committee of the Romande Federation. This resolution of the General Council was taken in virtue of the power delegated to it by Administrative Resolution No. VIII of the Basle Congress (new edition of the Statutes, etc., Administrative Regulations II, Art. 7). All the other sections were officially and regularly informed.

Our friends in Spain will now see the abuse these gentlemen make of the word “authoritarian”. The moment something displeases the Bakuninists, they say: it is authoritarian, and with that they think they have condemned it forever. If, instead of being bourgeois, journalists, etc., they were workers, or if they had even studied a little the economic questions and the conditions of modern industry, they would know that no common action is possible without the imposition, on some, of an alien will – that is to say, of authority – be it the will of a majority of voters, of a directing committee, or of a single man, it is always a will imposed upon the dissenters; but without this single and directing will, no cooperation is possible. Just try running one of the great factories of Barcelona without management, that is, without authority! Or try running a railway without the certainty that every engineer, stoker, etc., is at his post at the precise moment he must be there! I should very much like to know whether the worthy Bakunin would entrust his stout body to a railway carriage if the said railway were run according to principles by which nobody would be at his post unless it pleased him to submit to the authority of the regulations – regulations which, in any possible state of society, are far more authoritarian than those of the Basle Congress! All these grand ultra-radical and revolutionary phrases merely conceal the most complete poverty of ideas and the most utter ignorance of the conditions in which the daily life of society is produced. Then do away with “all authority, even that which is consented to”, among the sailors on a ship!

You are right; we must find a means of circulating the reports of the sittings of the General Council more widely on the Continent. I am still looking for this means. Some time ago I sent *Eastern Post* to Lorenzo because he had told me they had someone who knew English. Now I am sending you the latest number of that paper, including cuttings of earlier numbers (address of Lorenzo). You may be able to make something of it for *Emancipacion*. I really have no time myself to translate all these things; Italy causes me an enormous correspondence. But I shall see what can be done – if there were someone in Barcelona who knew English, could I not send the paper there?

I have not seen Mohr today; he is hard at work on his second German edition. I shall give him your letter this evening. We are very well; Jenny is well, and Mohr tolerably. I make him take his walks as often as possible; he needs plenty of open air. My wife sends you her compliments, and a happy new year. Remember us to Laura when you write.

The post closes.

Yours truly,
The General.

Para Lafargue, if he is in Madrid, and if not, for Mora and Lorenzo