Bakunin
Marxism, Freedom and the State
What Bismarck has done for the political and bourgeois world, Marx claims to do to-day for the Socialist world, among the proletariat of Europe; to replace French initiative by German initiative and domination; and as, according to him and his disciples, there is no German thought more advanced than his own, he believed the moment had come to have it triumph theoretically and practically in the International. Such was the only object of the Conference which he called together in September 1871 in London. This Marxian thought is explicitly developed in the famous Manifesto of the refugee German Communists drafted and published in 1848 by Marx and Engels. It is the theory of the emancipation of the proletariat and of the Organization of labor by the State.
Its principal point is the conquest of political power by the working class. One can understand that men as indispensable Marx and Engels should be the partisans of a program which, consecrating and approving political power, opens the door to all ambitions. Since there will be political power there will necessarily be subjects, got up in Republican fashion, as citizens, it is true, but who will none the less be subjects, and who as such will be forced to obey-because without obedience, there is no power possible. It will be said in answer to this that they will obey not men but laws which they will have made themselves. To that I shall reply that everybody knows how much, in the countries which are freest and most democratic, but politically governed, the people make the laws, and what their obedience to these laws signifies. Whoever is not deliberately desirous of taking fictions for realities must recognize quite well that, even in such countries, the people really obey not laws which they make themselves, but laws which are made in their name, and that to obey these laws means nothing else to them than to submit to the arbitrary will of some guarding and governing minority or, what amounts to the same thing, to be freely slaves.
There is in this program another expression which is profoundly antipathetic to us revolutionary Anarchists who frankly want the complete emancipation of the people; the expression to which I refer is the presentation of the proletariat, the whole society of toilers, as a "class" and not as a "mass". Do you know what that means? Neither more nor less than a new aristocracy, that of the workers of the factories and towns, to the exclusion of the million who constitute the proletariat of the countryside and who in the anticipations of the Social Democrats of Germany will, in effect, become subjects of their great so-called People's State. "Class", "Power", "State", are three inseparable terms, of which each necessary pre-supposes the two others and which all definitely are to be summed up by the words: the political subjection and the economic exploitation of the masses.
The Marxians think that just as in the 18th Century the bourgeoisie dethroned the nobility, to take its place and to absorb it slowly into its own body, sharing with it the domination and exploitation of the toilers in the towns as well as in the country, so the proletariat of the towns is called on to-day to dethrone the bourgeoisie, to absorb it and to share with it the domination and exploitation of the proletariat of the countryside; this last outcast of history, unless this latter later on revolts and demolishes all classes, denominations, powers, in a word, all States.
To me, however, the flower of the proletariat does not mean, as it does to the Marxians, the upper layer, the most civilized and com fortably off in the working world, that layer of semi-bourgeois workers, which is precisely the class the Marxians want to use to con stitute their fourth governing class, and which is really capable of forming one if things are not set to rights in the interests of the great mass of the proletariat; for with its relative comfort and semi-bourgeois position, this upper layer of workers is unfortunately only too deeply penetrated with all the political and social prejudices and all the narrow aspirations and pretensions of the bourgeois. It can be truly said that this upper layer is the least socialist, the most individualist in all the proletariat.
By the flower of the proletariat, I mean above all, that great mass, those millions of non-civilized, disinherited, wretched and illiterates whom Messrs. Engels and Marx mean to subject to the paternal regime of a very strong government, to employ an expression used by Engels in a letter to our friend Cafiero. Without doubt, this will be for their own salvation, as of course all governments, as is well known, have been established solely in 'the interests of the masses themselves. By the flower of the proletariat I mean precisely that eternal "meat" for governments, that great rabble of the people ordinarily designated by Messrs. Marx and Engels by the phrase at once picturesque and contemptuous of "lumpen proletariat", the "riff–raff", that rabble which, being very nearly unpolluted by all bourgeois civilization carries in its heart, in its aspirations, in all necessities and the miseries of its collective position, all the germs of the Socialism of the future, and which alone is powerful enough to-day to inaugurate the Social Revolution and bring it to triumph.
Though differing from us in this respect also, the Marxians do not reject our program absolutely. They only reproach us with wanting to hasten, to outstrip, the slow march of history and to ignore the scientific law of successive evolutions. Having had the thoroughly German nerve to proclaim in their works consecrated to the philosophical analysis of the past that the bloody defeat of the insurgent peasants of Germany and the triumph of the despotic States in the sixteenth century constituted a great revolutionary progress, they to-day have the nerve to satisfy themselves with establishing a new despotism to the so-called profit of the town-workers and to the detriment of the toilers in the country.
To support his program of the conquest of political power,
Marx has a very special theory which is, moreover, only a logical
consequence of his whole system. The political condition of each
country, says he, is always the product and the faithful expression
of its economic situation; to change the former it is only necessary
to transform the latter. According to Marx, all the secret of
historic evolution is there. He takes no account of other elements
in history, such as the quite obvious reaction of political, juridical,
and religious institutions on the economic situation. He says,
"Poverty produces political slavery, the State," but
he does not allow this expression to be turned around, to say
"Political slavery, the State, reproduces in its turn, and
maintains poverty as a condition of its own existence; so that,
in order to destroy poverty, it is necessary to destroy the State!"
And, a strange thing in him who forbids his opponents to lay the
blame on political slavery, the State, as an active cause of poverty,
he commands his friends and disciples of the Social Democratic
Party in Germany to consider the conquest of power and of political
liberties as the preliminary condition absolutely necessary for
economic emancipation.
Yet the sociologists of the school of Marx, men like Engels and
Lassalle, object against us that the State is not at all the cause
of the poverty of the people, of the degradation and servitude
of the masses; but that the wretched condition of the masses,
as well as the despotic power of the State are, on the contrary,
both the one and the other, the effects of a more general cause,
the products an inevitable phase in the economic development of
society, of a phase which, from the point of view of history,
constitutes true progress, an immense step towards what they
call the social revolution. To such a degree, in fact, that
Lassalle did not hesitate loudly to proclaim that the defeat of
the formidable revolt of the peasants in Germany in the sixteenth
century-a deplorable defeat if ever there was one, from which
dates the centuries-old slavery' of the Germans-and the triumph
of the despotic and centralized State which was the necessary
consequence of it, constituted a real triumph for this revolution;
because the peasants, say the Marxians, are the natural representatives
of reaction, whilst the modern military and bureaucratic State–a
product and inevitable accompaniment of the social revolution,
which, starting from the second half of the sixteenth century
commenced the slow, but always progressive transformation of the
ancient feudal and land economy into the production of wealth,
or, what comes to the same thing, into the exploitation of the
labour of the people by capital-this State was an essential condition
of this revolution.
One can understand how Engels, driven on by the same logic, in a letter addressed to one of our friends, Carlo Caflero, was able to say, without the least irony, but on the contrary, very seriously, that Bismarck as well as King Victor Emmanuel II had rendered immense services to the revolution, both of them having created political centralization in their respective countries.
Likewise Marx completely ignores a most important element in the historic development of humanity, that is, the temperament and particular character of each race and each people, a temperament and character which are naturally themselves the product of a multitude of ethnographical, climatological, economic, as well as historic causes, but which, once produced, exercise, even apart from and independent of the economic conditions of each country, a considerable influence on its destinies, and even on the development of its economic forces. Among these elements and these so to say natural traits, there is one whose action is completely decisive in the particular history of each people; it is the intensity of the instinct of revolt, and by the same token, of liberty, with which it is endowed or which is has conserved. This instinct is a fact which is completely primordial and animal; one finds it in different degrees in every living being, and the energy, the vital power of each is to be measured by its intensity. In man, besides the economic needs which urge him on, this instinct becomes the most powerful agent of all human emancipations. And as it is a matter of temperament, not of intellectual and moral culture, although ordinarily it evokes one and the other, it sometimes happens that civilized peoples possess it only in a feeble degree, whether it is that it has been exhausted during their previous development, or whether the very nature of their civilization has depraved them, or whether, finally, they were originally less endowed with it than were others.
Such has been in all its past, such is still to-day the Germany of the nobles and the bourgeoisie. The German proletariat, a victim for centuries of one and the other, can it be made jointly responsible for the spirit of conquest which manifests itself to-day in the upper classes of this nation? In actual fact, undoubtedly, no. For a conquering people is necessarily a slave people, and the slaves are always the proletariat. Conquest is therefore completely opposed to their interests and liberty. But they are jointly responsible for it in spirit and they will remain jointly responsible as long as they do not understand that this Pan-German State, this Republican and so-called People's State, which is promised them in a more or less near -future, would be nothing else, if it could ever be realized, than a new form of very hard slavery for the proletariat.
Up to the present, at least, they do not seem to have understood it, and none of their chiefs, orators, or publicists, has given himself the trouble to explain it to them. They are all trying, on the contrary, to inveigle the proletariat along a path where they will meet with nothing but the animadversion of the world and their own enslavement; and, as long as, obeying the directions of these leaders, they pursue this frightful illusion of a People's State, certainly the proletariat will not have the initiative for social revolution. This Revolution will come to it from outside, probably from the Mediterranean countries, and then yielding to the universal contagion, the German proletariat will unloose its passions and will overthrow at one stroke the dominion of its tyrants and of its so-called emancipators.
The reasoning of Marx leads to absolutely opposite results. Taking into consideration nothing but the one economic question, he says to himself that the most advanced countries and consequently the most capable of malting a social revolution are those in which modern Capitalist production has reached its highest degree of development. It is they that, to the exclusion of all others, are the civilized countries, the only ones called on to initiate and direct this revolution. This revolution will consist in the expropriation, whether by peaceful succession or by violence, of the present property owners and capitalists, and in the appropriation of all lands and all capital by the State, which in order to fulfill its great economic as well as political mission must necessarily be very powerful and very strongly centralized. The State will administer and direct the cultivation of the land by means of its salaried officers commanding armies of rural toilers, organised and disciplined for this cultivation. At the same time, on the ruin of all the existing banks it will establish a single bank, financing all labor and all national commerce.
One can understand that, at first sight, such a simple plan of organisation-at least in appearance-could seduce the imagination of workers more eager for justice and equality than for liberty and foolishly fancying that these two can exist without liberty–as if to gain and consolidate justice and equality, one could rely on other people, and on ruling groups above all, however much they may claim to be elected and controlled by the people. In reality it would be for the proletariat a barrack regime, where the standardized mass of men and women workers would wake, sleep, work and live to the beat of the drum; for the clever and the learned a privilege of governing; and for the mercenary minded, attracted by the immensity of the international speculations of the national banks, a vast field of lucrative jobbery.
At home it will be slavery, in foreign affairs a truceless
war, unless all the peoples of the "inferior" races,
Latin or Slav, the one tired of the bourgeois civilization, the
other almost ignorant of it and despising it by instinct, unless
these peoples resign themselves to submit to the yoke of an essentially
bourgeois nation and a State all the more despotic because it
will call itself the People's State.
The social revolution, as the Latin and Slav toilers picture it
to themselves, desire it and hope for it, is infinitely broader
than that promised them by the German or Marxian program. It is
not for them a question of the emancipation parsimoniously measured
out and only realizable at a very distant date, of the working
class but the complete and real emancipation of all the proletariat,
not only of some countries but of all nations, civilized and uncivilized–a
new civilization, genuinely of the people, being destined to commence
by this act of universal emancipation.
And the first word of this emancipation can be none other than
"Liberty", not that political, bourgeois liberty, so
much approved and recommended as a preliminary object of conquest
by Marx and his adherents, but the great human liberty, which,
destroying all the dogmatic, metaphysical, political and juridical
fetters by which everybody to-day is loaded down, will give to
everybody, collectivities as well as individuals, full autonomy
in their activities and their development, delivered once and
for all from all inspectors, directors and guardians.
The second word of this emancipation is solidarity, not
the Marxian solidarity from above downwards by some government
or other, either by ruse or by force, on the masses of the people;
not that solidarity of all which is the negation of the liberty
of each, and which by that very fact becomes a falsehood, a fiction,
having slavery as the reality behind it; but that solidarity which
is on the contrary the confirmation and the realization of every
liberty, having its origin not in any political law whatsoever,
but in the inherent collective nature of man, in virtue of which
no man is free if all the men who surround him and who exercise
the least influence, direct or indirect, on his life are not so
equally. This truth is to be found magnificently expressed in
the Declaration of the Rights of Man drafted by Robespierre, and
which proclaims that the slavery of the least of men is the
slavery of all.
The solidarity which we ask, far from being the result of any artificial or authoritarian organisation whatsoever, can only be the spontaneous product of social life, economic as well as moral; the result of the free federation of common interests, aspirations and tendencies It has for essential bases, equality, collective labor-becoming obligatory for each not by the force of law, but by the force of facts–and collective property; as a directing light, experience-that is to say the practice of the collective life; knowledge and learning; and as a final goal the establishment of Humanity, and consequently the ruin of all States.
There is the ideal, not divine, not metaphysical but human and practical, which alone corresponds to the modern aspirations of the Latin and Slav peoples. They want complete liberty, complete solidarity, complete equality; in a word, they want only Humanity and they will not be satisfied, even on the score of its being provisional and transitory, with anything less than that. The Marxians will denounce their aspirations as folly; that has been done over a long period, that has not turned them from their goal, and they will never change the magnificence of that goal for the completely bourgeois platitudes of Marxian Socialism.
Their ideal is practical in this sense, that its realization will be much less difficult than that of the Marxian idea, which, besides the poverty of its objective, presents also the grave inconvenience of being absolutely impracticable. It will not be the first time that clever men, rational and advocates of things practical and possible, will be recognized for Utopians, and that those who are called Utopians to-day will be recognized as practical men to-morrow. The absurdity of the Marxian system consists precisely in the hope that by inordinately narrowing down the Socialist program so as to make it acceptable to the bourgeois Radicals, it will transform the latter into unwitting and involuntary servants of the social revolution. There is a great error there; all the experience of history demonstrate to us that an alliance concluded between two different parties always turns to the advantage of the more reactionary of the two parties; is alliance necessarily enfeebles the more progressive party, by diminishing and distorting its program, by destroying its moral strength its confidence in itself, whilst a reactionary party, when it is guilty of falsehood is always and more than ever true to itself.
As for me, I do not hesitate to say that all the Marxist flirtations with the Radicalism, whether reformist or revolutionary, of the bourgeois, can have no other result than the demoralization and disorganization of the rising power of the proletariat, and consequently a new consolidation of the established power of the bourgeois.