ENGELS TO CARLO CAFIERO””? 

London, 1{-3] July 1871 

My dear Friend, 

I hope you received the copy of the Address of the General 
Council on the Civil War in France* which I sent to the address in 
Florence that you left me. I shall send you another copy at 
Barletta in a couple of days, again in the form of a letter for 
greater safety.” 

I was very pleased to receive your letter from Barletta, which I 
would have answered sooner had the Address not made a great 
deal of work for us. It was violently attacked by the press and we 
had to reply to different newspapers.—I am also busy translating 
it into German for our Leipzig newspaper (Der Volksstaat).?° A 
Dutch translation is being published in the Toekomst (The Future) 
of The Hague. If you can arrange for an Italian translation to be 
published this will be of great material help in your propaganda, 
giving the Italian workers a ready means of knowing the opinions 
of the General Council, and the principles and methods of action 
of our Association. 

On further consideration JI think it would be opportune to send 
two copies of our Address to Castellazzo in Florence, asking him to 

a K. Marx, The Civil War in France. - > See this volume, pp. 170-71. 

send one of them to you in a letter.—This will give me the 
opportunity of establishing a correspondence with him,” which 
will be regularly maintained. You must excuse me for not writing 
to him sooner, but I have to correspond with Spain and Belgium, 
as well as with Italy. Now, as regards Naples and Caporusso, the 
latter attended one of our Congresses* although he never kept a 
regular correspondence with the Council. To explain this I need 
to go into certain historical details—Caporusso and his friends 
were followers of the Russian Bakunin. Bakunin has a theory 
peculiar to himself, which is really a mixture of communism and 
Proudhonism; the fact that he wants to unite these two theories in 
one shows that he understands absolutely nothing about political 
economy. Among other phrases he has borrowed from Proudhon 
is the one about anarchy being the final state of society; he is 
nevertheless opposed to all political action by the working classes, 
on the grounds that it would be a recognition of the political state 
of things; also all political acts are in his opinion ‘authoritarian’. 
Just how he hopes that the present political oppression and the 
tyranny of capital will be broken, and how he intends to carry out 
his favourite idea on the abolition of inheritance without ‘acts of 
authority’, he does not explain.— But when in September 1870 the 
insurrection in Lyons was put down by force he decreed in the 
Hotel de Ville’ the abolition of the state, without taking any 
measures against all the bourgeois of the National Guard, who 
calmly walked into the Hétel de Ville, kicked Bakunin out and put 
the state back on its feet, all in less than an hour. However, 
Bakunin has founded a sect upon his theories, to which a small 
portion of French and Swiss workers belong, many of our 
members in Spain and some in Italy, among whom are Caporusso 
and his friends. Thus Caporusso is true to his name: he has a 
Russian for a boss.‘ 

Now our Association has been founded to provide a central 
means of communication and joint activity for the working men’s 
societies existing in different countries and aiming at the same 
end, viz., the protection, advancement and complete emancipation 
of the working classes (1st Rule of the Association).* Since the 
particular theories of Bakunin and his friends come under this 
rule, there can be no objection to accepting them as members and 
allowing them to do what they can to propagate their ideas by 

a the Basle Congress of 1869 - © town hall - ¢ A pun: in Italian ‘capo’ means ‘boss’ 
and ‘russo’— Russian. - 4 Rules of the International Working Men’s Association, London, 
[1867]. 

every appropriate means. We have people of all sorts in our 
Association—-communists, Proudhonists, unionists, commercial- 
unionists, cooperators, Bakuninists, etc.—and even in our General 
Council we have men of widely differing opinions. 

The moment the Association were to become a sect it would be 
finished. Our power lies in the liberality with which the first rule is 
interpreted, namely that all men who are admitted aim for the 
complete emancipation of the working classes. Unfortunately the 
Bakuninists, with the narrowness of mentality common to all sects, 
were not satisfied with this. In their view the General Council 
consisted of reactionaries, the programme of the Association was 
too vague. Atheism and materialism (which Bakunin himself learnt 
from us Germans) had to become compulsory, the abolition of 
inheritance and the state, etc., had to be part of our programme.— 
Now Marx and I are almost as old and as good atheists and 
materialists as Bakunin, just like almost all our members. We know 
as well as he does that inheritance is nonsensical, although we differ 
from him over the importance and appropriateness of presenting 
its abolition as the deliverance from all evil; and the ‘abolition of 
the state’ is an old German philosophical phrase, of which we 
made much use when we were tender youths. But to put all these 
things into our programme would mean alienating an enormous 
number of our members, and dividing rather than uniting the 
European proletariat— When the efforts to get the Bakuninist 
programme adopted as the programme of the Association failed, 
an attempt was made to make the Association take a roundabout 
route. Bakunin formed in Geneva an ‘Alliance of Socialist 
Democracy’, which was to be an international association separate 
from ours.!°—The ‘most radical minds in our sections’, the 
Bakuninists, were to form sections of this Alliance everywhere, 
and these sections were to be subject to a separate General Council 
in Geneva (Bakunin) and to have national councils separate from 
ours; and at our General Congress this Alliance was to attend our 
congress in the morning and hold its own separate congress in the 
afternoon.— This delightful plan was put before the General Coun- 
cil in November 1868, but on 22 December 1868 the General Coun- 
cil annulled these rules as being contrary to the Rules of our 
Association and declared that the sections of the Alliance could 
only be admitted separately and that the Alliance must either be 
disbanded or cease to belong to the International.* On 9 March 
1869, the General Council informed the Alliance that ‘there exists, 

2 K. Marx, The International Working Men’s Association and the International Alliance of 
Socialist Democracy. 

therefore, no obstacle to the transformation of the sections of the 
Alliance into sections of the Int. W. Ass. The dissolution of the 
Alliance, and the entrance of its sections into the Int. W. Ass., once 
settled, it would, according to our Regulations, become necessary 
to inform the General Council of the residence and the numerical 
strength of each new section.’* These conditions were never 
fulfilled exactly, but the Alliance as such disapproved of them 
everywhere except in France and Switzerland where it ended up 
creating a split. About 1,000 Bakuninists—less than a tenth of our 
members—withdrew from the French and Swiss federations 
and have now appealed to the Council to be recognised as a 
separate federation, which very probably the Council will not 
oppose. From this you can see that the main result of the 
Bakuninists’ action has been to create splits in our ranks.— Nobody 
opposed their particular dogma, but they were not satisfied with 
that and wanted to be in command and impose their doctrines on 
all our members.— We have resisted, as was our duty, and if they 
will agree to work peaceably alongside our other members we have 
neither the right nor the will to exclude them. But one ought to 
consider whether the presence of these elements should be made 
apparent, and if we can win the Italian sections that are not 
steeped in this particular fanaticism we shall certainly be able to 
work better together. You will be able to judge for yourself on the 
basis of the situation you will have found in Naples. The 
programme quoted in Jules Favre’s circular against us as the 
programme of the International, is a genuinely Bakuninist 
programme mentioned above.” You will find our reply to Favre 
in the London Times of 13 June.” 

Mazzini in 1864 tried to transform our Association to suit his 
own ends, but he failed. His chief instrument was a Garibaldian 
Major Wolff (his real name was Prince Thurn und Taxis) who has 
now been exposed by Tibaldi as a French police spy.”* When 
Mazzini saw that the International could not serve him as a means, 
he attacked it with great violence and availed himself of every 
opportunity to slander it, but as you say time has passed quickly 
and ‘God and the people is no longer the slogan of the Italian 
working class. 

a The quotation, which is in French in the copy, was distorted by the police translator. 
Here it is given according to the original source (see K. Marx, The General Council of 
the International Working Men’s Association to the Central Bureau of the International 
Alliance of Socialist Democracy). - > K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Statement by the General 
Council on Jules Favre’s Circular’. 

We are well aware that the system of tenant farmers or 
‘métayers* has been the basis of agricultural production in Italy 
since Roman times. There is no doubt that this system generally 
gives tenant farmers a greater degree of political independence in 
relation to the proletariat than is permitted to tenant farmers 
here.—But if we accept what Sismondi and recent writers on the 
subject say, the rate of exploitation of tenants by landowners is as 
great in Italy as everywhere else and the lowest stratum of 
peasants are extremely severely burdened. In Lombardy, where 
the plots are extensive, the tenant farmers when I was there*” 
were moderately well-off, but there still existed a class of rural 
proletarians employed by the tenants, who practically did all the 
work and derived no benefit from this system. In the other parts of 
Italy where there are fewer tenants, the sharecropping system, so far 
as I can tell from a distance, does not protect them from the same 
poverty, ignorance and degradation which is the fate of small tenant 
farmers in France, Germany, Belgium and Ireland.—Our policy 
towards agricultural populations has been generally and naturally as 
follows: where there are extensive landholdings, the tenant farmer is 
a capitalist in relation to the worker, and there we must support the 
worker; where there are smallholdings, the tenant although 
nominally a small capitalist or landowner (as in France and part of 
Germany) is however in reality generally reduced to the same level of 
poverty as the proletarian, and we must therefore work for 
him.— Without doubt it must be the same in Italy. But the Council 
will be most obliged if you can give us information about these 
matters and also about the recent legislation in Italy concerning rural 
properties and other social questions. 

After numerous interruptions I am finishing this letter on 
3 July, and I ask you only to be so good as to reply promptly. I 
shall write today to Castelazzo. 

Your devoted 
F. Engels