The Election of 1870
The election of 1870 is most notable for its extreme serenity. Engels had been highly successful during the previous 5 years whilst most Marxists and Anarchists had both taken a clear shift away from the extremes. This left votes with a choice between 3, comparatively harmonious, factions none of whom promised anything particularly harmful to the others (with the exception of the Anarchists whose call for votes for farmers risked totally re-shaping the political scene).
The first round of votes, the Party votes, gave Engels’ United Front a decided advantage with over 40% of votes going to his faction. Whilst enjoying a small recovery from their electoral failure in 1865 the Marxists could only attract a disappointingly small portion of the Party vote, indeed they again finished in third place. The Anarchists expanded their share of the Party vote by around 5% but were still left far behind the dominant Engelsite camp.
Amongst the workers it was a very different story. The old calls of Anarchist freedom and Marxist equality resonated throughout the Republic’s factories, mines, offices and barracks as strongly as ever. The United Front’s call for moderation and Anarchism mixed with Marxism were quite simply unpopular with the common Workers. Those who wanted freedom for their rural Comrades and a more worldwide revolution voted Anarchist, those who wanted further social reforms and a more rapid revolution in Europe voted Marxist. With the threat of Civil War gone there was little reason to side with the champions of cooperation and the United Front’s share of the Worker’s Vote noticeable plummeted.
Yet in the end their domination of the Party vote secured the United Front a second consecutive election victory as for the second time they relied on a strong showing within the Party to make up for a lack of popular support. Once again victory came by the finest of margins. The United Front’s margin of victory over the Anarchists was increased from just 0.08% in 1865 to 0.256%. Even the Marxists came close to victory as they finished just 2.404% behind the United Front.
Another 5 years of Engels as Chairman awaited.
However for the Anarchist faction this marked not a continuation of things but the end of an era as Bakunin retired from politics. With him went the last major figure of the early Anarchist movement still active in the VSVR. He had played a highly important role in the initial Rhineland Revolution – organising the Anarchist mob into a strong fighting force and thus ensuring that the Anarchists were not left out when the pan-factional People’s Party was founded. However after both he and Proudhon failed to secure an electoral victory in two decades of trying (despite coming within a whisker of doing so) Bakunin decided to pass the torch on to the next generation.
The new leader was the Anarcho-Communist Kropotkin. His ascension to the faction’s leadership traditionally marks the end of the Collectivist-Anarchist era as without Bakunin’s force driving the idea forward it faded away in favour of the Anarcho-Communist model advocated by the younger figures of the faction.
Another figure to benefit from the withdrawal of Bakunin was the young Italian 22 year old Errico Malatesta. At just 16 he had joined Garibaldi’s Republican war machine in Italy but after his General compromised with the Pope and Sardinian King – founding a Kingdom of Italy rather than a Republic – Malatesta turned against the state he had fought to construct. For the next two years (between the ages of 18 and 20) he fought against the Kingdom of Italy in a movement called the United Anarchists of Italy. The bomb throwing, riotous, revolutionary actions of the UAI made them the single most dangerous force to the Italian state and the Kingdom’s powerful police and army cracked down on them hard. As the UAI’s leaders had a very short life expectancy Malatesta actually became leader of the faction in 1868, however he was forced to flee across the Northern Italian border (through Italian Switzerland) and into the South German states before eventually making his way to the VSVR. From there he joined the People’s Party with a formidable reputation and an army of Anarchist admirers. Malatesta himself was of the Anarcho-Communist persuasion but came from the more extreme of the spectrum of Anarcho-Communist. He was against Trade-Unions, political parties and organisations of any kind. He claimed that one should only associate with a body if one was actively going to participate in it; there was no point in merely calling oneself an Anarchist if one was not going to actively do something to promote the Anarchist cause. However he was amongst the staunchest supporters of freedoms and believed that even in the VSVR, the freest nation on earth, the people were not totally free – in particular the peasantry. He was now a part of the Central Committee of the United Socialist People's Republic.