erefore, especially interesting to read what
Professor Hins said as early as 1869: "Societies _de resistance_ (trade
unions) will subsist after the suppression of wages, not in name, but in
deed. They will then be the organization of labor, ... operating a vast
distribution of labor from one end of the world to the other. They will
replace the ancient political systems: in place of a confused and
heterogeneous representation, there will be the representation of labor.

"They will be at the same time agents of decentralization, for the
centers will differ according to the industries which will form, in some
manner, each one a separate State, and will prevent forever the return
to the ancient form of centralized State, which will not, however,
prevent another form of government for local purposes. As is evident, if
we are reproached for being indifferent to every form of government, it
is ... because we detest them all in the same way, and because we
believe that it is only on their ruins that a society conforming to the
principles of justice can be established."[S][17]

The congress at Basel was the turning point in the brief history of the
International. Although the Marxists were reluctant to admit it, the
Bakouninists had won a complete victory on every important issue. Some
of the decisions future congresses might remedy, but in refusing even to
discuss the question of direct legislation 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 wit