Proudhon - A Biography

EPILOGUE
national followed in almost every detail the policy laid down in
The Political Capacity of the Working Classes. Its members opposed
without compromise the political activity advocated by Marx,
who had installed himself strategically in the London General
Council and was already seeking to turn the organisation into an
instrument for furthering his own policy. Instead, the French
Internationalists sought to create credit unions, popular banks,
co-operatives and industrial associations. They looked to a decen­
tralist, federal society in which the State would vanish and free­
dom o f credit would allow every man the means of producing
independently or co-operatively. They held much more strongly
than the Marxists that the emancipation o f the workers is the task
of the workers themselves, and carried this idea so far as to pro­
pose the exclusion of all non-workers from the International.
They even proved that Proudhon’s anti-feminist ideas were in
no way repugnant to Latin working men by calling for the ex­
clusion of women as well.
For the first four years o f its life, the International was domi­
nated by the French mutualists, who consistently defeated Marx
and his policy o f collectivism and political action. ‘Proudhon has
done enormous harm,’ he complained angrily to Kugelmann in
October, 1866. ‘His appearance o f criticism and his appearance
o f opposition to the Utopians have corrupted first the young
people, the students, and then the workers.’ A t the Brussels Con­
gress o f 1868 the dominance of the mutualists was finally broken,
but they were never eliminated from the International, and
Marx overcame them only to clash with the adapted Proud-
honism of Michael Bakunin and his Swiss, Spanish and Italian
followers.
Bakunin’s anarchism differed from Proudhon’s on a number of
important points. He taught the resolute pursuit o f the class
struggle and the use of violence in certain circumstances, he
denied the possibility o f reconciliation between workers and
bourgeoisie, he was a collectivist (though he never went so far
as to call himself a communist). Finally, while he did not set out
to form a political party in the strict sense, he had a romantic
hankering after that conspiratorial activity which Proudhon es­
chewed. On the other hand, he retained many of the basic Proud-
honian ideas; he rejected the State and wished to replace it by a
federal structure o f economic and social organisations; he de-
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