Gradually, however, some doubts began to creep into my mind about the soundness of the agitation which was carried on at the Temple Unique. One night, a well-known Geneva lawyer, Monsieur A., came to the meeting, and stated that if he had not hitherto joined the association, it was because he had first to settle his own business affairs; having now succeeded in that direction, he came to join the labor movement. I felt shocked at this cynical avowal, and when I communicated my reflections to my stonemason friend, he explained to me that this gentleman, having been defeated at the previous election, when he sought the support of the radical party, now hoped to be elected by the support of the labor vote. “We accept their services for the present,” my friend concluded, “but when the revolution comes, our first move will be to throw all of them overboard.”
Then came a great meeting, hastily convoked, to protest, as it was said, against “the calumnies” of the Journal de Genève. This organ of the moneyed classes of Geneva had ventured to suggest that mischief was brewing at the Temple Unique, and that the building trades were going once more to make a general strike, such as they had made in 1869. The leaders at the Temple Unique called the meeting. Thousands of workers filled the hall, and Ootin asked them to pass a resolution, the wording of which seemed to me very strange—an indignant protest was expressed in it against the inoffensive suggestion that the workers were going to strike. “Why should this suggestion be described as a calumny?” I asked myself. “Is it then a crime to strike?” Ootin concluded a hurried speech with the words, “If you agree, citizens, to this resolution, I will send it at once to the press.” He was going to leave the platform, when somebody in the hall suggested that discussion would not be out of place, and then the representatives of all branches of the building trades stood up in succession, saying that the wages had lately been so low that they could hardly live upon them; that with the opening of the spring there was plenty of work in view, of which they intended to take advantage to increase their wages; and that if an increase were refused they intended to begin a general strike.
I was furious, and next day hotly reproached Ootin for his behavior. “As a leader,” I told him, “you were bound to know that a strike had really been spoken of.” In my innocence I did not suspect the real motives of the leaders, and it was Ootin himself who made me understand that a strike at that time would be disastrous for the election of the lawyer, Monsieur A.
I could not reconcile this wire-pulling by the leaders with the burning speeches I had heard them pronounce from the platform. I felt disheartened, and spoke to Ootin of my intention to make myself acquainted with the other section of the International Association at Geneva, which was known as the Bakúnists; the name “anarchist” was not much in use then. Ootin gave me at once a word of introduction to another Russian, Nicholas Joukóvsky, who belonged to that section, and, looking straight into my face, he added, with a sigh, “Well, you won’t return to us; you will remain with them.” He had guessed right.
IX
I went first to Neuchâtel, and then spent a week or so among the watchmakers in the Jura Mountains. I thus made my first acquaintance with that famous Jura Federation which for the next few years played an important part in the development of socialism, introducing into it the no-government, or anarchist, tendency.
In 1872 the Jura Federation was becoming a rebel against the authority or the general council of the International Workingmen’s Association. The association was essentially a workingmen’s movement, the workers understanding it as such and not as a political party. In east Belgium, for instance, they had introduced into the statues a clause in virtue of which no one could be a member of a section unless employed in a manual trade; even foremen were excluded.
The workers were, moreover, federalist in principle. Each nation, each separate region, and even each local section had to be left free to develop on its own lines. But the middle-class revolutionists of the old school who had entered the International, imbued as they were with the notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of earlier times, had introduced the same notions into the Workingmen’s Association. Beside the federal and national councils, a general council was nominated at London, to act as a sort of intermediary between councils of the different nations. Marx and Engels were its leading spirits. It soon appeared, however, that the mere fact of having such a central body became a source of substantial inconvenience. The general council was not satisfied with playing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern the movement, to approve or to censure the action of the local federations and sections, and even of individual members. When the Commune insurrection began in Paris—and “the leaders had only to follow,” without being able to say whereto they would be led within the next twenty-four hours—the general council insisted upon directing the insurrection from London. It required daily reports about the events, gave orders, favored this and hampered that, and thus put in evidence the disadvantage of having a governing body, even within the association. The disadvantage became still more evident when, at a secret conference held
