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168 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
many of the delegates clearly showed their determination
to have nothing to do with politics or with any movement
aiming at the conquest of political power. In all the
discussions the anarchist tendencies of the congress were
unmistakable, and the immense gulf between the Marxists
and the Bakouninists was laid bare. The very foundation
principles upon which the International was based
had been overturned. Political action was to be abandoned,
while the discussion on trade unions introduced
for the first time in the International the idea of a purely
economic struggle and a conception of future society in
which groups of producers, and not the State or the community,
should own the tools of production. This syndicalist
conception of socialism was not new. Developed
for the first time by Robert Owen in 1833,
it had led
the working classes into the most violent and bitter
strikes, that ended in disaster for all participants. Born
again in 1869, it was destined to lie dormant for thirty
years, then to be taken up once more — this time with
immense enthusiasm— by the French trade unions.
Needless to say, the decisive victory of the Bakouninists
at Basel was excessively annoying and humiliating
to Marx. He did not attend in person, but it was
evident before the congress that he fully expected that
his forces would, on that occasion, destroy root and
branch the economic and political fallacies of Bakounin.
He rather welcomed the discussion of the differences between
the program of the Alliance and that of the International,
in order that Eccarius, Liebknecht, and others
might demolish, once and for all, the reactionary proposals
of Bakounin. To Marx, much of the program
of the Alliance seemed a remnant of eighteenth-century
philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting
of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with