London, 30 December 1871 

My dear Friend, 

Yesterday evening, when I was on the point of writing a pretty 
tart letter to the Spanish Council regarding the translation and 
publication of the Bakuninists’ manifesto,*” a letter arrived from 
you which gave me a great deal of pleasure. Although I am sorry 
that circumstances should have necessitated your going to Madrid, 
it is most fortunate that you should be there at the moment, for 
the coyness and silence of the Spanish Council are really such as to 
invite a somewhat unpleasant interpretation. Though I wrote to 
Mora 24 days ago, I have had no reply, or rather, for all reply, 
the publication of the hostile manifesto; if it were not for your 
letters, what could we make of this? 

I am sending you herewith the resolutions of the 30 sections in 
Geneva in case they have not come your way. Likewise the 
Romance Committee’s reply to the Bakuninists and I can only hope 
that the ‘Emancipaci6n’ will provide its readers also with a translation of 
that excellent piece.** In the same issue of L’Egalité you will find 
several other articles relating to this debate and to the meeting of 
the 30 sections. For the time being the Genevans’ reply will 
suffice; needless to say, the General Council must at once take the 
matter in hand and will reply i in_a circular embracing all phases of 
the dispute from its inception”; as you can imagine, it will be 
lengthy and will take us some time. Meanwhile, what the 
Spaniards must be made to realise is [the following]: 

@ Charles Etienne Lafargue - > Laura Lafargue’s nickname - ¢ F. Engels, ‘To the 
Federal Council of the Spanish Region in Madrid’. 

1) It is plainly apparent from the Sonvilliers circular what these 
gentry are after. The attack on the Conference* was no more than 
a pretext. What is now being attacked are the Basle resolutions 
which, for the Association, have the force of law and which have to 
be obeyed by the General Council. This is an act of open rebellion 
and it is fortunate that these people should have shown their 
hand. But 

2) who were the authors of those Basle resolutions? The 
General Council in London? Certainly not. They were put forward 
by the Belgian delegates (amongst them Robin! the Bakuninist) 
and they were most warmly supported by whom?—Bakunin, 
Guillaume, Schwitzguébel, etc., the very men, that is, who are 
attacking them today as having, by their authoritarian character, 
demoralised the General Council. Not that this has prevented 
Guillaume and Schwitzguébel from signing the self-same circular. 
We have witnesses over here and, unless Sentinon and Farga 
Pellicer have been blinded by the spirit of sectarianism, they must 
surely remember this (if they were at the meeting, which I do not 
know). But then things were different. The Bakuninists believed 
that they were certain of a majority and that the General Council 
would be transferred to Geneva. It turned out otherwise, and 
resolutions which, had they been passed by a General Council of 
their choosing, would have been as revolutionary as might be, 
became all at once authoritarian and bourgeois! 

3) The convening of the Conference was absolutely in order. 
The Jurassians, represented on the Council by Robin, who himself 
requested that the dispute be brought before that Conference, must 
have been notified of it by him since he was their regular 
correspondent. Jung, the secretary for Switzerland, could not 
continue to correspond officially with a committee which, flying in 
the face of a resolution passed by the General Council, continued 
to flaunt the title of Committee of the Romance Federation.’ The 
said resolution of the General Council was taken by virtue of the 
power delegated to it by the Administrative Resolution of Basle 
No. VIII (new edition of the Rules, etc., Administrative Reg- 
ulations II, Art. 7). All the other sections were officially notified, 
and through the usual channels. 

Our friends in Spain will now realise the way in which these 
gentry misuse the word ‘authoritarian’. Whenever the Bakuninists 

a the London Conference of 1871 - > K. Marx, ‘General Council Resolution on the 
Federal Committee of Romance Switzerland’. -¢ K. Marx, General Rules and 
Administrative Regulations of the International Working Men’s Association. 

take a dislike to something, they say: ‘It’s authoritarian’ and believe 
that by so doing they damn it for ever and aye. If, instead of 
being bourgeois, journalists and so forth, they were working men, 
or if they had only devoted some study to economic questions and 
modern industrial conditions, they would know that no communal 
action is possible without submission on the part of some to an 
external will, that is to say an authority. Whether it be the will of a 
majority of voters, of a managing committee or of one man alone, 
it is invariably a will imposed on dissidents; but without that single, 
controlling will, no co-operation is possible. Just try and get one of 
Barcelona’s big factories to function without control, that is to say, 
without an authority! Or to run a railway without knowing for 
certain that every engineer, stoker, etc., is at his post exactly when 
he ought to be! I should very much like to know whether the good 
Bakunin would entrust his portly frame to a railway carriage if 
that railway were administered on the principle that no one need 
be at his post unless he chose to submit to the authority of the 
regulations, regulations far more authoritarian in any conceivable 
state of society than those of the Congress of Basle! All these 
grandiloquent ultra-radical and revolutionary catchphrases serve 
only to conceal an abysmal paucity of ideas and an abysmal 
ignorance of the conditions under which the daily life of society 
takes place. Just try abolishing ‘all authority, even by consent’, 
among sailors on board a ship! 

You are right, we must find some way of achieving a wider 
continental circulation for the reports of the General Council’s 
meetings. I am still searching for such a way. For some time I 
have been sending The Eastern Post to Lorenzo, he having assured 
me they had someone who spoke English. Now I am sending you 
the latest issue of that journal and enclosing cuttings from earlier 
issues (care of Lorenzo). You might be able to do something with 
them for the Emanctpacién. 1 really do not have the time to 
translate all these things myself, being obliged to conduct a vast 
correspondence with Italy. But I shall see what can be done—if 
there was someone in Barcelona who spoke English, might I not 
send the paper there? 

I have not seen Moor today, he is hard at work on his second 
German edition,* but I will give him your letter this evening. We 
are very well. Jenny” is keeping well and Moor passably so. I make 
him go for walks as often as possible since what he needs is fresh 

a of Volume I of Capital; see this volume, p. 283. - > Marx’s daughter 

air. My wife* sends you her compliments and wishes you a Happy