Bakunin
Marxism, Freedom and the State
Iam a passionate seeker
after Truth and a not less passionate enemy of the malignant fictions
used by the "Party of Order", the official representatives
of all turpitudes, religious, metaphysical, political, judicial,
economic, and social, present and past, to brutalize and enslave
the world; I am a fanatical lover of Liberty; considering it as
the only medium in which can develop intelligence, dignity, and
the happiness of man; not official "Liberty", licensed,
measured and regulated by the State, a falsehood representing
the privileges of a few resting on the slavery of everybody else;
not the individual liberty, selfish, mean, and fictitious advanced
by the school of Rousseau and all other schools of bourgeois Liberalism,
which considers the rights of the individual as limited by the
rights of the State, and therefore necessarily results in the
reduction of the rights of the individual to zero.
No, I mean the only liberty which is truly worthy of the name,
the liberty which consists in the full development of all the
material, intellectual and moral powers which are to be found
as faculties latent in everybody, the liberty which recognizes
no other restrictions than those which are traced for us by the
laws of our own nature; so that properly speaking there are no
restrictions, since these laws are not imposed on us by some outside
legislator, beside us or above us; they are immanent in us, inherent,
constituting the very basis of our being, material as well as
intellectual and moral; instead, therefore, of finding them a
limit, we must consider them as the real conditions and effective
reason for our liberty.
I mean that liberty of each individual which, far from halting
as at a boundary before the liberty of others, finds there its
con firmation and its extension to infinity; the illimitable liberty
of each through the liberty of all, liberty by solidarity, liberty
in equality; liberty triumphing over brute force and the principle
of authority which was never anything but the idealized expression
of that force, liberty which, after having overthrown all heavenly
and earthly idols, will found and organize a new world, that of
human solidarity, on the ruins of all Churches and all States.
I am a convinced upholder of economic and social equality, because
I know that, without that equality, liberty, justice, human dignity,
morality, and the well-being of individuals as well as the prosperity
of nations will never be anything else than so many lies. But
as upholder in all circumstances of liberty, that first condition
of humanity, I think that liberty must establish itself in the
world by the spontaneous organisation of labor and of collective
ownership by productive associations freely organised and federalized
in districts and by the equally spontaneous federation of districts,
but not by the supreme and tutelary action of the State.
There is the point which principally divides the Revolutionary
Socialists or Collectivists from the Authoritarian Communists,
who are upholders of the absolute initiative of the State. Their
goal is the same; each party desires equally the creation of a
new social order founded only on the organisation of collective
labor, inevitably imposed on each and everyone by the very force
of things, equal economic conditions for all, and the collective
appropriation of the instruments of labor. Only, the Communists
imagine that they will be able to get there by the development
and organisation of the political power of the working-classes,
and principally of the proletariat of the towns, by the help of
the bourgeois Radicalism, whilst the Revolutionary Socialists,
enemies of all equivocal combinations and alliances, think on
the contrary that they cannot reach this goal except by the development
and organisation, not of the political but of the social and consequently
anti-political power of the working masses of town and country
alike, including all favorably disposed persons of the upper classes,
who, breaking completely with their past, would be willing to
join them and fully accept their program.
Hence, two different methods. The Communists believe they must
organize the workers' forces to take possession of the political
power of the State. The Revolutionary Socialists organize with
a view to the destruction, or if you prefer a politer word, the
liquidation of the State. The Communists are the upholders of
the principle and practice of authority, the Revolutionary Socialists
have confidence only in liberty. Both equally supporters of that
science which must kill superstition and replace faith, the former
would wish to impose it; the latter will exert themselves to propagate
it so that groups of human beings, convinced, will organize themselves
and will federate spontaneously, freely, from below upwards, by
their own movement and conformably. to their real interests, but
never after a plan traced in advance and imposed on the "ignorant
masses" by some superior intellects.
The Revolutionary Socialists think that there is much more practical
sense and spirit in the instinctive aspirations and in the real
needs of the masses of the people than in the profound intellect
of all these learned men and tutors of humanity who, after so
many efforts have failed to make it happy, still presume to add
their efforts. The Revolutionary Socialists think, on the contrary,
that the human race has let itself long enough, too long, be governed,
and that the source of its misfortunes does not lie in such or
such form of government but in the very principle and fact of
government, of whatever type it may be. It is, in fine, the contradiction
already become historic, which exists between the Communism scientifically
developed by the German school and accepted in part by the American
and English Socialists on the one hand, and the Proudhonism largely
developed and pushed to its last consequences, on the other hand,
which is accepted by the proletariat of the Latin countries.
It has equally been accepted and will continue to be still more
accepted by the essentially anti-political sentiment of the Slav
peoples.