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Selected writings
by Michael Bakunin
Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of
decisively interfering in the life of someone else....
The worse it is for those who are so ignorant of the natural and
social law of human solidarity that they deem possible or even
desirable the absolute independence of individuals in regard to one
another. To will it is to will the disappearance of society.... All men,
even the most intelligent and strongest are at every instant of their
lives the producers and the product. Freedom itself, the freedom of
every man, is the ever-renewed effect of the great mass of physical.
intellectual, and moral influonces to which this man is subjected by
the people surrounding him and the environment in which he was
born and in which he passed his whole life.
To wish to escape this influence in the name of some . . . self-
sufficient and absolutely egoistical freedom. is to aim toward non-
being.
To do away with this reciprocal influence is tantamount to
death. And in demanding the freedom of the masses we do not intend
to do away with natural influences to which man is subjected by
individuals and groups. All we want is to do away with is factitious.
legitimized influences. to do away with the privileges in exerting
influence.
- * -
Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the
serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person ant his
liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf
because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his
head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions
imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist,
the employer.... The worker always has the right to leave his
employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to
sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same
hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.
The worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom.
lacking any means for its possible realization. ant consequently it is
only a fictitious liberty. an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole
life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of
terms of serfdom--"voluntary from the juridical point of view but
compulsory from an economic sense--broken up by momentarily brief
interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is
real slavery.
- * -
We see that the richest property owners . . . are precisely those who work
the least or who do not work at all.
It is evident to anyone who is not blind about this matter that
productive labor creates wealth and yields the producers only misery,
and it is only non-productive, exploiting labor that yields property....
What is property, what is capital in their present form? For
the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the
right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since
neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by
labor--that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the
work of someone else. The right to exploit the work of those who
possess neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell
their productive power to the lucky owners of both.
- * -
The only thing that the State can and must do . . . is gradually
to modify the right of inheritance so as to achieve its complete
abolition as soon as possible. . . . We claim that this right will
necessarily have to be abolished because as long as inheritance lasts,
there will be hereditary economic inequality--not the natural
inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes--which
will necessarily continue to be expressed in hereditary inequality of
the development and cultivation of intelligence and will remain the
source and sanction of all political and social inequality.
- * -
Will this abolition be just?
A man, we are told, has acquired through his labor several tens
or hundreds of thousands of francs, 8 million, and he will not have
the right to leave them as an inheritance to his children Is this not an
attack on natural right, is this not unjust plunder?
It has been proven 8 thousand times that an isolated worker
cannot produce much more than what he consumes. We challenge any
real worker, any worker who does not enjoy a single privilege, to
amass tens or hundreds of thousands of francs, or millions That
would be quite impossible. Therefore, if some individuals in present-
day society do acquire such great sums, it is not by their labor that
they do so but by their privilege, that is, by a juridically legalized
injustice. And since a person inevitably takes from others whatever he
does not gain from his own, we have the right to say that all such
profits are thefts of collective labor, committed by a few privileged
individuals with the sanction of the State and under its protection."
Maximoff, G. P. (Ed.); The Political Philosophy of Bakunin:
Scientific Anarchism, N.Y: Free Press, l953.
Cutler, Robert M. (Ed.); From Out of the Dustbin
Bakunin's Basic Writing's 1869-1871, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985.