FICTITIOUS SPLITS IN THE INTERNATIONAL 
 
 
                   written by Marx and Engels between  
                        January and March 5, 1872 
  
          adopted by the General Council as a private circular 
 
             published in Geneva 1872 as a French pamphlet  
         called _Les Pretendues Scissions dans l'Internationale_ 
 
       this etext is derived from a Progress Publisher translation 
 
 
                                    V 
 
Having dealt with the International, such as it is, the Sixteen proceed 
to tell us what it should be.  
 
First, the General Council should be nominally a simple correspondence 
and statistical bureau.  Once it has been relieved of its administrative 
functions, its correspondence would be concerned only with reproducing 
the information already published in the Association's newspapers.  The 
correspondence bureau would thus become needless.  As for statistics, 
that function is possible only if a strong organization, and especially, 
as the original Rules expressly say, a common direction are provided.  
Since all that smacks very much of "authoritarianism", however, there 
might perhaps be a bureau, but certainly no statistics.  In a word, the 
General Council would disappear.  The federal councils, the local 
committees, and other "authoritarian" centres, would go by the same 
token.  Only the autonomous sections would remain.  
 
What, one may ask, will be the purpose of these "autonomous sections", 
freely federated and happily rid of all superior bodies, "even of the 
superior body elected and constituted by the workers"? 
 
Here, it becomes necessary to supplement the circular by the report of 
the Jura Federal Committee submitted to the Congress of the Sixteen: 
 
     "In order to make the working class the real representative of 
     humanity's new interests," its organization must be "guided by the 
     idea that will triumph.  To evolve this idea from the needs of our 
     epoch, from mankind's vital aspirations, by a consistent study of 
     the phenomena of social life, to then carry this idea to our 
     workers' organizations -- such should be our aim," etc.  Lastly, 
     there must be created "amid our working population a real 
     revolutionary socialist school." 
 
Thus, the autonomous workers' sections are in a trice converted into 
_schools_, of which these gentlemen of the Alliance will be the masters.  
They "evolve" the idea by "consistent" studies which leave no trace 
behind.  They then "carry this idea to our workers' organizations".  To 
them, the working class is so much raw material, a chaos into which they 
must breathe their Holy Spirit before it acquires a shape.  
 
All of which is but a paraphrase of the old Alliance program, which 
begins with these words: 
 
     "The socialist minority of the League of Peace and Freedom, having 
     separated itself from the league," proposes to found "a new 
     Alliance of Socialist Democracy...  having a special mission to 
     study political and philosophical questions...." 
 
This is the "idea" that is being "evolved" therefrom: 
 
     "Such an enterprise...  would provide sincere socialist democrats 
     of Europe and America with the means of being understood and of 
     affirming their ideas." [7] 
 
That is how, on its own admission, the minority of a bourgeois society 
slipped into the International shortly before the Basel Congress with 
the exclusive aim of utilizing it as a means for posing before the 
working masses as a hierarchy of a secret science that may be expounded 
in hour phrases and whose culminating point is "the economic and social 
equalization of the classes." 
 
Apart from this "theoretical mission", the new organization proposed for 
the International also has its practical aspect.  
 
     "The future society," says the circular of the Sixteen, "should be 
     nothing but a universalization of the organization which the 
     International will establish for itself.  We must therefore take 
     care to bring this organization as near as possible to our 
     ideal....  How could one expect an egalitarian and free society to 
     grow out of an authoritarian organization?  That is impossible.   
     The International, embryo of the future human society, must be, 
     from now on, the faithful image of our principles of liberty and 
     federation." 
 
In other words, just as the mediaeval convents presented an image of 
celestial life, so the International must be the image of the New 
Jerusalem, whose embryo the Alliance bears in its womb.  The Paris 
Communards would not have failed if they had understood that the Commune 
was "the embryo of the future human society" and had cast away all 
discipline and all arms -- that is, the things which must disappear when 
there are no more wars! 
 
Bakunin, however, the better to establish that, despite their 
"consistent study", the Sixteen did not hatch this pretty project of 
disorganization and disarmament in the International when it was 
fighting for its existence, has just published the original text of that 
project in his report on the International's organization (see _Almanach 
du Peuple pour 1872, Geneve_).  
 
 
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