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Pioneers of Anti-Parlimentarism
by Guy A. Aldred



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It is quite true that the Marxist Congress was convened at the Hague in September, 1872: and that a few days later Bakunin and his comrades convened an Anti-Parliamentary Congress at St. Imier. This Congress met on September 13th, and accepted the rules and principles of the secret society, the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists, that Bakunin had drawn up at Zurich since August 30th, 1872. It is true also that whilst the Marxist General Council at New York simply abolished the International, the Anti-Parliamentarians and Anarchists reorganized the Association on the basis of St. Imier principles, and convened a Congress at Geneva (September, 1873), and further Congresses at Brussles, Berne, and Veniers. But virtually the International was dissolved. One does not identify the Anarchist propaganda that resulted from those conferences with Anti-Parliamentarism, necessarily. Rather this anarchism merely balanced the Parliamentarism that came into existence. Anti-Parliamentarism regards both as parodies of the real struggle. It does not share the Anarchist objection to abstract authority : it does not make the state the author of economic society : it does believe in class struggle : it does negate political society : it does stand for the liquidation of political and property society in industrial and useful society.

From this period of activity (1848-1873), anti-Parliamentarism accepts, not uncritically, but gladly, though critically, all Marx's writings of importance: his Communist Manifest (as he suggested correcting it]; Eighteenth Brumaire ; and the Civil War in France ; Revolution and Counter-Revolution ; the Poverty of Philosophy . The Anti-Parliamentary movement ahs not the same interest in Marx's Eastern Question. But it grounds its Teaching on Capital and Wage-Labour and Capital. As a movement, we would say that Anti-Parliamentarism has not much regard for Value, Price, and Profit. Personally, we consider this work unsatisfactory and intended to justify palliation and reform. Opinion is divided as to its worth but, personally, the present writer has deemed it, except for an odd paragraph, an elaborate joek, an attempted repudiation of Marxist logic written by Marx in the same spirit, and to the same end, as Lenin wrote his Infantile Sickness of the Left-Wing.

Anti-Parliamentarism accepts gratefully most of Bakunin's writings. Unlike the Anarchist disciplines of Bakunin, it makes Bakunin's criticism of The Paris Commune and the State Idea, in political and working class usefulness, below Marx's Civil War in France. Anti-Parliamentarism endorses Bakunin's healthy opposition to the God idea, the deification of the abstract General Idea.

Whilst agreeing, in the main, with the Marxists in their distinction between Scientific and Utopian Socialism, Anti- Parliamentarism does not believe in the neglect of the Utopian Socialists. Anti-Parliamentarians believe that St. Simon, for

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