Letter to Carlo Cafiero, July 1-3, 1871

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 1 July 1871


First published in La Società, No. 4, 1951
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


ENGELS TO CARLO CAFIERO[1]

IN BARLETTA

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[2] 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.[3]

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).[4] 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 I think it would be opportune to send two copies of our Address to Castellazzo in Florence, asking him to send one of them to you in a letter.—This will give me the opportunity of establishing a correspondence with him,[5] 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[6] 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 Hôtel de Ville[7] the abolition of the state, without taking any measures against all the bourgeois of the National Guard, who calmly walked into the Hôtel de Ville, kicked Bakunin out and put the state back on its feet, all in less than an hour.[8] 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.[9]

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).[10] 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 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 Council in November 1868, but on 22 December 1868 the General Council 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.[11] On 9 March 1869, the General Council informed the Alliance that 'there exists, 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.'[12] 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.[13] You will find our reply to Favre in the London Times of 13 June.[14]

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.[15] 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.

We are well aware that the system of tenant farmers or métayère 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[16] 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

  1. ↑ Engels' letters to Carlo Cafiero of 1-3, 16 and 28 July 1871, written in English, were confiscated by the police when Cafiero was arrested in August 1871. They were translated into Italian by a police translator. These copies were discovered in 1946 by the Italian historian Aldo Romano among the documents of the prefecture at the State Archives in Naples. Engels' original letters have not been traced. In the texts published in this volume, obvious distortions and errors by the translator and copyist have been corrected. The letter of 1-3 July 1871 was published in English for the first time in part in: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
  2. ↑ K. Marx, The Civil War in France.
  3. ↑ See this volume, pp. 170-71.
  4. ↑ The German translation of Marx's The Civil War in France was made by Engels and published in Der Volksstaat (Nos. 52-61, 28 June and 1, 5, 8, 12, 16, 19, 22, 26 and 29 July 1871), and, in abridged form, in Der Vorbote in August-October 1871; it also came out as a pamphlet in Leipzig.
  5. ↑ Engels' intention to establish correspondence with L. Castellazzo, whose address he knew from Carlo Cafiero, did not materialise. In his letter of 28 June 1871, Cafiero informed Engels that Castellazzo and the Florentine Società Democratica Internazionale were being harassed by the police.
  6. ↑ the Basle Congress of 1869
  7. ↑ town hall
  8. ↑ On 19 September 1870 The Times (under the heading 'Russia') published an excerpt from the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg of 17 September 1870 stating that France's prestige would not suffer if, in concluding a peace treaty, she agreed to demolish her fortresses on the border with Germany.
  9. ↑ A pun: in Italian 'capo' means 'boss' and 'russo'—Russian.
  10. ↑ Rules of the International Working Men's Association, London, [1867].
  11. ↑ K. Marx, The International Working Men's Association and the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy.
  12. ↑ 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).
  13. ↑ A reference to Jules Favre's Circular of 6 June 1871 addressed to the diplomatic representatives of France (see Note 224). In his Circular Favre made use of police forgeries and documents of the Alliance.
  14. ↑ K. Marx and F. Engels, 'Statement by the General Council on Jules Favre's Circular'.
  15. ↑ At the General Council meeting of 4 July 1871, Paolo Tibaldi, a Paris Commune fighter, exposed Luigi Wolff as a paid agent of the French police. The statement was published in The Eastern Post, No. 145, 8 July 1871.
  16. ↑ Engels made a tour of Lombardy in the summer of 1841.