that is, after the Paris Commune of 1871. The complete revolutionary impotence of the Council of the Commune, although it contained, in a very just proportion, representatives of all the revolutionary parties of that time: Jacobins, Blanquists, and Internationalists; and the incapacity of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, which was sitting in London, and its silly, harmful pretensions to govern the Parisian movement by orders issued from England; both these lessons opened the eyes of a great number. They led several Federations of the International, and several of its prominent members, including Bakunin, to meditate on the harmfulness of every kind of authority, even when it is elected with as much freedom as that of the Commune or that of the Workers' International.
Some months later, the decision taken by the General Council of the International at a private meeting convened in London in 1871, instead of an annual Congress, made the dangers of a Government in the International still more evident. By this baneful resolution the forces of the Association, which up till then gathered together for an economic, revolutionary struggle, for the direct action of the Labour Unions against the Capitalism of employers, were to engage in an electoral, political, and Parliamentary movement, which could but waste and destroy their real forces.
This resolution brought about open rebellion among the Latin Federations of the Association—Spanish, Italian, Jurassic, and partly Belgian—against the General Council; and from this rebellion dates the Anarchist movement which we see going on.
We thus see that the Anarchist movement was renewed each time it received an impression from some great practical lesson: it derived its origin from the teachings of life itself. But no sooner had it sprung up than it began to work out a general expression of its principles, and the theoretical and scientific basis of its teachings. Scientific—not in the sense of adopting an incomprehensible slang, or clinging to ancient metaphysics, but in the sense of finding a basis for its principles in the natural sciences of the time, and of becoming one of their departments.
At the same time it worked out its own ideal.
No struggle can be successful if it is unconscious, if it has no definite and concrete aim. No destruction of existing things is possible if men have not already settled for themselves, during the struggles leading to the. destruction, and during the period
