Bakunin
Marxism, Freedom and the State
All work to be performed
in the employ and pay of the State– such is the fundamental principle
of Authoritarian Communism of State Socialism. The State having
become sole proprietor–at end of a certain period of transition
which will be necessary to let society pass without too great
political and economic shocks from the present organisation of
bourgeois privilege to the future organisation of the official
equality of all–the State will be also the only Capitalist, banker;
money-lender, organiser, director of all national labor and distributor
of its products. Such is the ideal, the fundamental principle
of modern Communism.
Enunciated for the first time by Babeuf, towards the close of
the Great French Revolution, with all the array of antique civism
a revolutionary violence, which constituted the character of the
epoch, it was recast and reproduced in miniature, about forty-five
years later by Louis Blanc in his tiny pamphlet on The Organisation
of Labor, in which that estimable citizen, much less revolutionary,
and much more indulgent towards bourgeois weaknesses than was
Babeuf, tried to gild and sweeten the pill so that the bourgeois
could swallow it without suspecting that they were taking a poison
which would them. But the bourgeois were not deceived, and returning
brutality for politeness, they expelled Louis Blanc from France.
In spite that, with a constancy which one must admire, he remained
alone faithfulness to his economic system and continued to believe
that the whole future was contained in his little pamphlet on
the organisation of Labor.
The Communist idea later passed into more serious hands. Karl
Marx, the undisputed chief of the Socialist Party in Germany–a
great intellect armed with a profound knowledge, whose entire
life, one can say it without flattering, has been devoted exclusively
to the greatest cause which exists to-day, the emancipation of
labor and of the toilers–Karl Marx who is indisputably also,
if not the only, at least one of the principal founders of the
International Workingmen's Association, made the development of
the Communist idea the object a serious work. His great work,
Capital, is not in the least a fantasy, an "a priori"
conception, hatched out in a single day in the head of a young
man more or less ignorant of economic conditions and of the actual
system of production. It is founded on a very extensive, very
detailed knowledge and a very profound analysis of this system
an of its conditions. Karl Marx is a man of immense statistical
and economic knowledge. His work on Capital, though unfortunately
bristling with formulas and metaphysical subtleties, which render
it unapproachable for the great mass of readers, is in the highest
degree a scientific or realist work: in the sense that it absolutely
excludes any other logic than that of the facts.
Living for very nearly thirty years, almost exclusively among
German workers, refugees like himself and surrounded by more or
less intelligent friends and disciples belonging by birth and
relationship to the bourgeois world, Marx naturally has managed
to form a Communist school, or a sort of little Communist Church,
composed of fervent adepts and spread all over Germany. This Church,
restricted though it may be on the score of numbers, is skillfully
organised, and thanks to its numerous connections with working-class
organizations in all the principal places in Germany, it has already
become a power. Karl Marx naturally enjoys an almost supreme authority
in this Church, and to do him justice, it must be admitted that
he knows how to govern this little army of fanatical adherents
in such way as always to enhance his prestige and power over the
imagination of the workers of Germany.
Marx is not only a learned Socialist,he is also a very clever
politician and an ardent patriot. Like Bismarck, though by somewhat
different means, and like many other of his compatriots, Socialists
or not, he wants the establishment of a great Germanic State for
the glory of the German people and for the happiness and the voluntary,
or enforced civilization of the world.
The policy of Bismarck is that of the present; the policy of Marx,
who. considers himself at least as his successor, and his continuator,
is that of the future. And when I say that Marx considers himself
the continuator of Bismarck, I am far from calumniating Marx.
If he did not consider himself as such, he would not have permitted
Engels, the confidant of all his thoughts, to write that Bismarck
serves the cause of Social Revolution. He serves it now in his
own way; Marx will serve it later, in another manner. That is
the sense in which he will be later, the continuator, as to-day
he the admirer of the policy of Bismarck.
Now let us examine the particular character of Marx's policy let
us ascertain the essential points on which it is to be separated
from the Bismarckian policy. The principal point, and, one might
say the only one, is this: Marx is a democrat, an Authoritarian
Socialist, and a Republican; Bismarck is an out and out Pomeranian,
aristocratic monarchical Junker. The difference is therefore very
great, very serious, and both sides are sincere in this difference.
On this point, there is no possible understanding or reconciliation
possible between Bismarck and Marx. Even apart from the numerous
irrevocable pledges that Marx throughout his life, has given to
the cause of Socialist democracy, his very position and his ambitions
give a positive guarantee on this issue. In a monarchy, however
Liberal it might be, or even cannot be any place, any role for
Marx, and so much the more so in the Prussian Germanic Empire
founded by Bismarck, with a bugbear of an Emperor, militarist
and bigoted, as chief and with all the barons and bureaucrats
of Germany for guardians. Before he can arrive at power, Marx
will have to sweep all that away.
Therefore he is forced to be Revolutionary. That is what separates Marx from Bismarck–the form and the conditions of the Government. One is an out and out aristocrat and monarchist; and in a Conservative Republic like that of France under Theirs, there the other is an out and out democrat and republican, and, into the bargain a Socialist democrat and a Socialist republican.
Let us see now what unites them. It is the out and out cult of the State. I have no need to prove it in the case of Bismarck, the proofs are there. From head to foot he is a State's man and nothing but a State's man. But neither do I believe that I shall have need of too great efforts to prove that it is the same with Marx. He loves government to such a degree that he even wanted to institute one in the International Workingmen's Association; and he worships power so much that he wanted to impose and still means to-day to impose his dictatorship on us. It seems to me that that is sufficient to characterize his personal attitude. But his Socialist and political program is a very faithful expression of it. The supreme objective of all his efforts, as is proclaimed to us by the fundamental statutes of his party in Germany, is the establishment of the great People's State (Volksstaat)
But whoever says State, necessarily says a particular limited State, doubtless comprising, if it is very large, many different people and countries, but excluding still more. For unless he is dreaming of the Universal State, as did Napoleon and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, or as the Papacy dreamed of the Universal Church, Marx, in spite of all the international ambition which devours him to-day, will have, when the hour of the realization of his dreams has sounded for him–if it ever does sound-he will have to content himself with governing a single State and not several States at once. Consequently, who ever says State says, a State, and whoever says a State affirms by that the existence of several States, and whoever says several States, immediately says: competition, jealousy, truceless and endless war. The simplest logic as well as all history bear witness to it.
Any State, under pain of perishing and seeing itself devoured by neighboring States, must tend towards complete power, and, having become powerful, it must embark on a career of conquest, so that it shall not be itself conquered; for two powers similar and at the same time foreign to each other could not co-exist without trying to destroy each other. Whoever says conquest, says conquered peoples, enslaved and in bondage, under whatever form or name it may be.
It is in the nature of the State to break the solidarity of
the human race and, as it were, to deny humanity. The State cannot
preserve itself as such in its integrity and in all its strength
except it sets itself up as supreme and absolute be-all and end-all,
at least for its own citizens, or to speak more frankly, for its
own subjects, not being able to impose itself as such on the citizens
of other States unconquered by it. From that there inevitably
results a break with human, considered as universal, morality
and with universal reason, by the birth of State morality and
reasons of State. The principle of political or State morality
is very simple. The State, being the supreme objective, everything
that is favorable to the development of its power is good; all
that is contrary to it, even if it were the most humane thing
in the world, is bad. This morality is called Patriotism. The
International is the negation of patriotism and consequently the
negation of the State. If therefore Marx and his friends of the
German Socialist Democratic Party should succeed in introducing
the State principle into our program, they would kill the International.
The State, for its own preservation, must necessarily be powerful
as regards foreign affairs; but if it is so as regards foreign
affairs, it will infallibly be so as regards home affairs. Every
State, having to let itself be inspired and directed by some particular
morality, conformable to the particular conditions of its existence,
by a morality which is a restriction and consequently a negation
of human and universal morality, must keep watch that all its
subjects, in their thoughts and above all in their acts, are inspired
also only by the principles of this patriotic or particular morality,
and that they remain deaf to the teachings of pure or universally
human morality. From that there results the necessity for a State
censorship; too great liberty of thought and opinions being, as
Marx considers, very reasonably too from his eminently political
point of view, incompatible with that unanimity of adherence demanded
by the security of the State. That that in reality is Marx's opinion
is sufficiently proved by the attempts which he made to introduce
censorship into the International, under plausible pretexts, and
covering it with a mask.
But however vigilant this censorship may be, even if the State were to take into its own hands exclusively education and all the instruction of the people, as Mazzini wished to do, and as Marx wishes to do to-day, the State can never be sure that prohibited and dangerous thoughts may not slip in and be smuggled somehow into the consciousness of the population that it governs. Forbidden fruit has such an attraction for men, and the demon of revolt, that eternal enemy of the State, awakens so easily, in their hearts when they are not sufficiently stupefied, that neither this education nor this instruction, nor even the censorship, sufficiently guarantee the tranquillity of the State. It must still have a police, devoted agents who watch over and direct, secretly and unobtrusively, the current of the peoples' opinions and passions. We have seen that Marx himself is so convinced of this necessity, that he believed he should fill with his secret agents all the regions of the International and above all Italy, France, and Spain. Finally, however perfect may be, from the point of view of the preservation of the State, the organisation of education and instruction for the people, of censorship and the police, the State cannot be secure in its existence while it does not have, to defend it against its enemies at home, an armed force. The State is government from above downwards of an immense number of men, very different from the point of view of the degree of their culture, the nature of the countries or localities that they inhabit, the occupation they follow, the interests and the aspirations directing them-the State is the government of all these by some or other minority; this minority, even if it were a thousand times elected by universal suffrage and controlled in its acts by popular institutions, unless it were endowed with the omniscience, omnipresence and the omnipotence which the theologians attribute to God, it is impossible that it could know and foresee the needs, or satisfy with an even justice the most legitimate and pressing interests in the world. There will always be discontented people because there will always be some who are sacrificed.
Besides, the State, like the Church, by its very nature is a great sacrificer, of living beings. It is an arbitrary being, in whose heart all the positive, living, individual, and local interests of the population meet, clash, destroy each other, become absorbed in that abstraction called the common interest, the public good, the public safety, and where all real wills cancel each other in that other abstraction which bears the name of the will of the people. It results from this, that this so-called will of the people is never anything else than the sacrifice and the negation of all the real wills of the population; just as this so-called public good is nothing else than the sacrifice of their interests. But so that this omnivorous abstraction could impose itself on millions of men, it must be represented and supported by some real being, by some living force or other. Well, this being, this force, has always existed. In the Church it is called the clergy, and in the State-the ruling or governing class.
And, in fact, what do we find throughout history? The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, and aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, a finally a bureaucratic class, when, all the other classes having become exhausted, the State falls or rises, as you will, to the condition of a machine; but it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of the State that there should be some privileged class or other which is interested in its existence. And it is precisely the united interest of this privileged class which is called Patriotism.
By excluding the immense majority of the human race from its bosom, by casting it beyond the pale of the engagements and reciprocal duties of morality, justice and right, the State denies humanity, and with that big word, "Patriotism", imposes injustice and cruelty on all its subjects, as a supreme duty. It restrains, it mutilates, it kills humanity in them, so that, ceasing to be men, they are no longer anything but citizens-or rather, more correctly considered in relation to the historic succession of facts-so that they shall never raise themselves beyond the level of the citizen to the level of a man.
If we accept the fiction of a free State derived from a social contract, then discerning, just, prudent people ought not to have any longer any need of government or of State. Such a people can need only to live, leaving a free course to all their instincts: justice and public order will naturally and of their accord proceed from the life of the people, and the State, ceasing to be the providence, guide, educator, and regulator of society, renouncing all its repressive power and falling to the subaltern role which Proudhon assigns it, will no longer be anything else but a simple business office, a sort of central clearing house at the service of society.
Doubtless, such a political organisation, or rather, such a reduction of political action in favor of liberty in social life, would be a great benefit for society, but it would not at all please the devoted adherents of the State. They absolutely must have a State–Providence, a State directing social life, dispensing justice, and administering public order. That is to say, whether they admit it or not, and even when they call themselves Republicans, democrats, or even Socialists, they always must have a people who are more or less ignorant, minor, incapable, or to call things by their right names, riff-raff, to govern; in order, of course, that doing violence to their own disinterestedness and modesty, they can keep the best places for themselves, in order always to have the opportunity to devote themselves to the common good, and that, strong in their virtuous devotion and their exclusive intelligence, privileged guardians of the human flock, whilst urging it on for its own good and leading it to security, they may also fleece it a little.
Every logical and sincere theory of the State is essentially founded on the. principle of authority-that is to say on the eminently theological, metaphysical and political idea that the masses, always incapable of governing themselves, must submit at all times to the benevolent yoke of a wisdom and a justice, which in one way or another, is imposed on them from above. But imposed in the name of what and by whom? Authority recognized and respected as such by the masses can have only three possible sources–force, religion, or the action of a superior intelligence; and this supreme intelligence is always represented by minorities.
Slavery can change its form and its name-its basis remains
the same. This basis is expressed by the words: being a slave
is being forced to work for other people–as being a master is
to live on the labor of other people. In ancient times, as to-day
in Asia and Africa, slaves were simply called slaves. In the Middle
Ages, they took the name of "serfs", to-day they are
called "wage-earners". The than that of slaves, but
they are none the less forced by hunger as well as by the political
and social institutions, to maintain by very hard work the absolute
or relative idleness of others. Consequently, they are slaves.
And, in general, no State, either ancient or modern, has ever
been able, or ever will be able to do without the forced labor
of the masses, whether wage-earners or slaves, as a principal
and absolutely necessary basis of the liberty and culture of the
political class: the citizens.
Even the United States is no exception to this rule. Its marvelous
prosperity and enviable progress are due in great part and above
all to one important advantage–the great territorial wealth of
North America. The immense quantity of uncultivated and fertile
lands, together with a political liberty that exists nowhere else
attracts every year hundreds of thousands of energetic, industrious
and intelligent colonists . This wealth, at the same time keeps
off pauperism and delays the moment when the social question will
have to be put. A worker who does not find work or who is dissatisfied
with the wages offered by the capitalist can always, if need be,
emigrate to the far West to clear there some wild and unoccupied
land.
This possibility always remaining open as a last resort to all
American workers, naturally keeps wages at a level, and gives
to every individual an independence, unknown in Europe. Such is
life the advantage, but here is the disadvantage. As cheapness
of the products of industry is achieved in great part by cheapness
of labor, the American manufacturers for most of the time are
not in a condition to compete against the manufacturers of Europe–from
which there results, for the industry of the Northern States,
the necessity for a projectionist tariff. But that has a result,
firstly to create a host of artificial industries and above all
to oppress and ruin the non-manufacturing Southern States and
make them want secession; finally to crowd together into cities
like New York, Philadelphia, Boston and many others, proletarian
working mass who, little by little, are beginning to find themselves
already in a situation analogous to that of the workers in the
great manufacturing
States of Europe. And we see, in effect, the social question already
being posed in the Northern States, just as it was posed long
before our countries.
And there too, the self-government of the masses, in spite of
all the display of the people's omnipotence, remains most of the
time in a state of fiction. In reality, it is minorities which
govern. The so-called Democratic Party, up to the time of the
Civil War to emancipate the slaves, were the out and out partisans
of slavery and of the ferocious oligarchy of the planters, demagogues
without faith or conscience, capable of sacrificing everything
to their greed and evil–minded ambition, and who, by their detestable
influence and actions, exercised almost unhindered, for nearly
fifty years continuously, have greatly contributed to deprave
the political morality of North America.
The Republican Party, though really intelligent and generous,
is still and always a minority, and whatever the sincerity of
this party of liberation, however great and generous the principles
it professes, do not let us hope that, in power, it will renounce
this exclusive position of a governing minority to merge into
the mass of the nation so that the self-government of the people
shall finally become a reality. For that there will be necessary
a revolution far more profound than all those which hitherto have
shaken the Old and New Worlds.
In Switzerland, in spite of all the democratic revolutions that
have taken place there, it is still always the class in comfortable
circumstances, the bourgeoisie, that is to say, the class privileged
by wealth, leisure, and education, which governs. The sovereignty
of the people–a word which, anyway, we detest because in our
eyes, all sovereignty is detestable–the government of the people
by themselves is likewise a fiction. The people is sovereign in
law, not in fact, for necessarily absorbed by their daily labor,
which leaves them no leisure, and if not completely ignorant,
at least very inferior in education to the bourgeoisie, they are
forced to place in the hands of the latter their supposed sovereignty.
The sole advantage which they get out of it in Switzerland, as
in the United States, is that ambitious minorities, the political
classes, cannot arrive at power otherwise than by paying court
to the people, flattering their fleeting passions, which may sometimes
be very bad, and most often deceiving them.
It is true that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times
better than the most enlightened monarchy, for at least in the
republic there are moments when, though always exploited, the
people are not oppressed, while in monarchies they are never anything
else. And then the democratic regime trains the masses little
by little in public life, which the monarchy never does. But whilst
giving the preference to the republic we are nevertheless forced
to recognize and proclaim that whatever may be the form of government,
whilst human society remains divided into different classes because
of the hereditary inequality of occupations, wealth, education,
and privilege there will always be minority government and the
inevitable exploitation of the majority by that minority.
The State is nothing else but this domination and exploitation
regularized and systematized. We shall attempt to demonstrate
it by examining the consequence of the government of the masses
of the people by a minority, at first as intelligent and as devoted
as you like, in an ideal State, founded on a free contract.
Suppose the government to be confined only to the best citizens.
At first these citizens are privileged not by right, but by fact.
The have been elected by the people because they are the most
intelligent, clever, wise, and courageous and devoted. Taken from
the mass the citizens, who are regarded as all equal, they do
not yet form a class apart, but a group of men privileged only
by nature and for that very reason singled out for election by
the people. Their number is necessarily very limited, for in all
times and countries the number of men endowed with qualities so
remarkable that they automatically command the unanimous respect
of a nation is, as experience teaches us, very small. Therefore,
under pain of making a bad choice, the people will be always forced
to choose its rulers from amongst them.
Here, then, is society divided into two categories, if not yet
to say two classes, of which one, composed of the immense majority
of the citizens, submits freely to the government of its elected
leaders, the other, formed of a small number of privileged natures,
recognized and accepted as such by the people, and charged by
them to govern them. Dependent on popular election, they are at
first distinguished from the mass of the citizens only by the
very qualities which recommended them to their choice and are
naturally, the most devoted and useful of all. They do not yet
assume to themselves any privilege, any particular right, except
that of exercising, insofar as the people wish it, the special
functions with which they have been charged. For the rest, by
their manner of life, by the conditions and means of their existence,
they do not separate themselves in any way from all the others,
so that a perfect equality continues to reign among all. Can this
equality be long maintained? We claim that it cannot and nothing
is easier to prove it.
Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralization; they are: contempt for the masses and the over–estimation of one's own merits.
"The masses," a man says to himself, "recognizing their incapacity to govern on their own account, have elected me their chief. By that act they have publicly proclaimed their inferiority and my superiority. Among this crowd of men, recognizing hardly any equals of myself, I am alone capable of directing public affairs. The people have need of me; they cannot do without services, while I, on the contrary, can get along all right by myself: they, therefore, must obey me for their own security, and in condescending to command them, I am doing them a good turn."
Is not there something in all that to make a man lose his head and his heart as well, and become mad with pride? It is thus that power and the habit of command become for even the most intelligent and virtuous men, a source of aberration, both intellectual and moral.
But in the People's State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all. All will be equal, not only from the juridical and political point of view, but from the economic point of view. At least that is what is promised, though I doubt very much, considering the manner in which it is being tackled and the course it is desired to follow, whether that promise could ever be kept. There will therefore be no longer any privileged class, but there will be a government, and, note this well, an extremely complex government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do to-day, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organisation and direction of commerce,, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many "heads overflowing with brains" in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a, minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!
Such a regime will not fail to arouse very considerable discontent in this mass and in order to keep it in check the enlightenment and liberating government of Marx will have need of a not less considerable armed force. For the government must be strong, says Engels, to maintain order among these millions of illiterates whose brutal uprising would be capable of destroying and overthrowing everything, even a government directed by heads overflowing with brains.
You can see quite well that behind all the democratic and socialistic
phrases and promises of Marx's program, there is to be found in
his State all that constitutes the true despotic and brutal nature
of all States, whatever may be the form of their government and
that in the final reckoning, the People's State so strongly commended
by Marx, and the aristocratic-monarchic State, maintained with
as much cleverness as power by Bismarck, are completely identical
by the nature of their objective at home as well as in foreign
affairs. In foreign affairs it is the same deployment of military
force that is to say, conquest; and in home affairs it is the
same employment of this armed force, the last argument of all
threatened political powers against the masses, who, tired of
believing, hoping, submitting and obeying always, rise in revolt.
Marx's Communist idea comes to light in all his writings; it is
also manifest in the motions put forward by the General Council
of the International Workingmen's Association, situated in London,
at the Congress of Basel in 1869, as well as by the proposals
which he had intended to present to the Congress which was to
take place in September, 1870, but which had to be suspended because
of the Franco-German War. As a member of the General Council in
London and as corresponding Secretary for Germany, Marx enjoys
in this Council, as is well known, a great and it must be admitted,
legitimate influence, so that it can be taken for certain that
of the motions put to the Congress by the Council, several are
principally derived from the system and the collaboration of Marx.
It was in this way that the English citizen Lucraft, a member
of the General Council, put forward at the Congress of Basel the
idea that all the land in a country should become the property
of the State, and that the cultivation of this land should be
directed and administered by State officials, "Which,"
he added, "will only be possible in a democratic and Socialist
State, in which the people will have to watch carefully over the
good administration of the national land by the State."
This cult of the State is, in general, the principal characteristic
of German Socialism. Lassalle, the greatest Socialist agitator
and the true founder of the practical Socialist movement in Germany
was steeped in it. He saw no salvation for the workers except
in the power of the State; of which the workers should possess
themselves, according to him, by means of universal suffrage.