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Title: Letter to La Liberté Author: Michail Bakunin Date: 1872 Language: en Source: Retrieved on February 24th, 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1872/la-liberte.htm Notes: Source: Bakunin on Anarchy, translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff, 1971.
[This long letter to La Liberté (dated October 5, 1872), never completed
and never sent, was written about a month after the expulsion of Bakunin
from the International Workingmen’s Association by the Hague Congress of
September 2–7, 1872.]
Gentlemen:
Since you published the sentence of excommunication which the Marxian
Congress of the Hague has just pronounced against me, you will surely,
in all fairness, publish my reply. Here it is.
The triumph of Mr. Marx and his group has been complete. Being sure of a
majority which they had been long preparing and organizing with a great
deal of skill and care, if not with much respect for the principles of
morality, truth, and justice as often found in their speeches and so
seldom in their actions, the Marxists took off their masks. And, as
befits men who love power, and always in the name of that sovereignty of
the people which will, from now on, serve as a stepping-stone for all
those who aspire to govern the masses, they have brazenly decreed their
dictatorship over the members of the International.
If the International were less sturdy and deeply rooted, if it had been
based, as they imagine, only upon the formally organized official
leadership and not on the real solidarity of the effective interests and
aspirations of the proletariat of all the countries of the civilized
world, on the free and spontaneous federation of workers’ sections and
associations, independent of any government control, the decrees of this
pernicious Hague Congress, a far too indulgent and faithful incarnation
of the Marxist theories and practice, would have sufficed to kill it.
They would have reduced to ridicule and odium this magnificent
association, in the foundation of which, I am pleased to state, Mr. Marx
had taken an intelligent and energetic part.
A state, a government, a universal dictatorship! The dreams of Gregory
VII, Boniface VII, Charles V, and the Napoleons reappearing in new
forms, but ever with the same claims, in the Social Democratic camp! Can
one imagine anything more burlesque and at the same time more revolting?
To claim that a group of individuals, even the most intelligent and
best-intentioned, would be capable of becoming the mind, the son], the
directing and unifying will of the revolutionary movement and the
economic organization of the proletariat of all lands — this is such
heresy against common sense and historical experience that one wonders
how a man as intelligent as Mr. Marx could have conceived it!
The popes at least had the excuse of possessing absolute truth, which
they stated they held in their hands by the grace of the Holy Ghost and
in which they were supposed to believe. Mr. Marx has no such excuse, and
I shall not insult him by suggesting that he imagines he has
scientifically invented something that comes close to absolute truth.
But from the moment that absolute truth is eliminated, there can be no
infallible dogma for the International, and, consequently, no official
political or economic theory,, and our congresses should never assume
the role. of ecumenical councils which proclaim obligatory principles
for all their members and believers to follow.
There is but one law that is really obligatory upon all the members,
individuals, sections, and federations of the International, for all of
which this law is the true and the only, basis. In its most complete
form with all its consequences and applications, this law advocates the
international solidarity of workers of all trades and all countries in
their economic struggle against the exploiters of labor. The living
unity of the International resides solely in the real organization of
this solidarity by the spontaneous action of the workers’ groups and by
the absolutely free federation of the masses of workers of all languages
and all nations, all the more powerful because it is free; the
International cannot be unified by decrees and under the whip of any
sort of government whatsoever.
Who can entertain any doubt that out of this ever-growing organization
of the militant solidarity of the proletariat against bourgeois
exploitation there will issue forth the political struggle of the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie? Both the Marxists and ourselves are
in unanimous agreement on this point. But here a question comes up which
separates us completely from the Marxists.
We believe that the policy of the proletariat, necessarily
revolutionary, should have the destruction of the State for its
immediate and only goal. We cannot understand how one can speak of
international solidarity when there is a wish to preserve the State,
unless one dreams of the Universal State, that is, of universal slavery,
such as the great emperors and popes dreamed of. For the State is, by
its very nature, a breach of this solidarity and hence a permanent cause
of war. Nor can we understand how anyone could speak of the liberty of
the proletariat, or the real emancipation of the masses, within the
State and by the State. State means domination, and any domination
presupposes the subjugation of the masses and, consequently, their
exploitation for the benefit of some ruling minority.
We do not accept, even for the purposes of a revolutionary ,transition,
national conventions, constituent assemblies, provisional governments,
or so-called revolutionary dictatorships, because we are convinced that
revolution is sincere and permanent only within the masses; that when it
is concentrated in the hands of a few ruling individuals, it inevitably
and immediately turns into reaction. Such is our belief; this is not the
proper time for enlarging upon it. The Marxists profess quite contrary
ideas. As befits good Germans, they are worshippers of the power of the
State, and are necessarily also the prophets of political and social
discipline, champions of the social order built from the top down,
always in the name of universal suffrage and the sovereignty of the
masses upon whom they bestow the honor of obeying their leaders, their
elected masters. The Marxists admit of no other emancipation but that
which they expect from their so-called People’s State (Volksstaat).
Between the Marxists and ourselves there is an abyss. They are the
governmentalists; we are the anarchists, in spite of it all.
Such are the two principal political tendencies which at present
separate the International into two camps. On one side there is nothing,
properly speaking, but Germany; on the other we find, in varying
degrees, Italy, Spain, the Swiss Jura, a large part of France, Belgium,
Holland, and in the very near future, the Slav peoples. These two
tendencies came into direct confrontation at the Hague Congress, and,
thanks to Mr. Marx’s great tactical skill, thanks to the thoroughly
artificial organization of his last congress, the Germanic tendency has
prevailed.
Does this mean that the obnoxious question has been resolved? It was not
even properly discussed; the majority, having voted like a well-drilled
regiment, crushed all discussions under its vote. Thus the contradiction
still remains, sharper and more alarming than ever, and Mr. Marx
himself, intoxicated as he may be by his victory, can hardly imagine
that he has disposed of it at so small a price. And if he did, for a
moment, entertain such a foolish hope, he must have been promptly
undeceived by the united stand of the delegates from the Jura, Spain,
Belgium, and Holland (not to mention Italy, which did not even deign to
send delegates to this so blatantly fraudulent congress), a protest
quite moderate in tone, yet all the more powerful and deeply
significant.
But what is to be done today? Today, since solution and reconciliation
in the field of politics are impossible, we should practice mutual
toleration, granting to each country the incontestable right to follow
whatever political tendencies it may prefer or find most suitable for
its own particular situation. Consequently, by rejecting all political
questions from the obligatory program of the International, we should
seek to strengthen the unity of this great association solely in the
field of economic solidarity. Such solidarity unites us while political
questions inevitably separate us.
That is where the real Unity of the International lies; in the common
economic aspirations and the spontaneous movement of the masses of all
the countries — not in any government whatsoever nor in any uniform
political theory imposed upon these masses by a general congress. This
is so obvious that one would have to be dazzled by the passion for power
to fail to understand it.
I could understand how crowned or uncrowned despots might have dreamed
of holding the sceptered world in their hands. But what can one say of a
friend of the proletariat, a revolutionary who claims he truly desires
the emancipation of the masses, when he poses as a director and supreme
arbiter of all the revolutionary movements that may arise in different
countries and dares to dream of subjecting the proletariat to one single
idea hatched in his own brain?
I believe that Mr. Marx is ail earnest revolutionary, though not always
a very consistent one, and that he really desires the revolt of the
masses. And I wonder how he fails to see how the establishment of a
universal dictatorship, collective or individual, a dictatorship that
would in one way or another perform the task of chief engineer of the
world revolution, regulating and directing ail insurrectionary movement
of the masses in all countries pretty much as one would run a machine —
that the establishment of such a dictatorship would be enough of itself
to kill the revolution, to paralyze and distort all popular movements.
Where is the man, where is the group of individuals, however great their
genius, who would dare flatter themselves that they alone could
encompass and understand the infinite multitude of diverse interests,
tendencies, and activities in each country, in each province, in each
locality, in each profession and craft, and which in their immense
aggregate are united, but not regimented, by certain fundamental
principles and by a great common aspiration, the same aspiration
[economic equality without loss of autonomy] which, having sunk deep
into the conscience of the masses, will constitute the future Social
Revolution?
And what can one think of an International Congress which, in the
alleged interest of this revolution, imposes on the proletariat of the
whole civilized world a government invested with dictatorial power, with
the inquisitorial and pontifical right to suspend the regional
federations of the International and shut out whole nations in the name
of an alleged official principle which is in fact only the idea of Marx,
transformed by the vote of a fictitious majority into an absolute truth?
What can one think of a Congress which, to render its folly even more
glaring, relegates to America this dictatorial government [the General
Council of the International] composed of men who, though probably
honest, are ignorant, obscure, absolutely unknown even to the Congress
itself? Our enemies, the bourgeoisie, would be right if they mocked the
Congress and maintained that the International Workingmen’s Association
combats existing tyranny only to set up a new tyranny over itself; that
in rightfully trying to replace old absurdities, it creates new ones!
Why men like Messrs. Marx and Engels should be indispensable to the
partisans of a program consecrating political power and opening the door
to all their ambitions is understandable. Since there will he political
power, there will necessarily be subjects, who will be forced to obey,
for without obedience there can be no power. One may object that they
will obey not men but the laws which they have themselves made. But to
that I reply that everybody knows how people make these laws and set up
standards of obedience to these laws even in the most democratic and
free countries. Anyone not involved in a party which takes fiction for
reality will remember that even in these countries the people obey not
the laws made by themselves but the laws made in their name; and that
their obedience to these laws can never be anything but obedience to the
arbitrary will of some tutelary and governing minority, or, in a word, a
voluntary servitude.
We revolutionary anarchists who sincerely want full popular emancipation
view with repugnance another expression in this program: it is the
designation of the proletariat, the workers, as a class and not a mass.
Do you know what this signifies? It is no more nor less than the
aristocratic rule of the factory workers and of the cities over the
millions who constitute the rural proletariat, who, in the anticipations
of the German Social Democrats, will in effect become the subjects of
their so-called People’s State. “Class,” “power ... .. state” are three
inseparable terms, one of which presupposes the other two, and which
boil down to this: the political subjection and economic exploitation of
the masses.
The Marxists think that just as in the eighteenth century the
bourgeoisie dethroned the nobility in order to take its place and
gradually absorb and then share with it the domination and exploitation
of the workers in the cities as well as in the countryside, so the
proletariat in the cities is exhorted to dethrone and absorb the
bourgeoisie, and then jointly dominate and exploit the land workers...
Though differing with us in this respect, they do not entirely reject
our program. They only reproach us for wanting to hasten, to outstrip
the slow march of history, and for ignoring the scientific law of
successive revolutions in inevitable stages. Having proclaimed in their
works of 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 move forward,
they now have the nerve to call for the establishment of a new
despotism, allegedly for the benefit of the urban workers and to the
detriment of the toilers in the countryside.
This same logic leads the Marxists directly and fatally to what we call
bourgeois socialism and to the conclusion of a new political pact
between the bourgeois who are “radicals,” or who are forced to become
such, and the “intelligent,” “respectable” bourgeoisified minority of
city workers, to the detriment of the proletarian masses, not only in
the country but also in the cities.
Such is the meaning of workers’ candidacies to the parliaments of
existing states, and of the conquest of political power. Is it not clear
that the popular nature of such power will never be anything but a
fiction? It will obviously he impossible for hundreds or even tens of
thousands or indeed only a few thousand to exercise this power
effectively. They will necessarily have to exercise power by proxy, to
entrust this power to a group of men elected to represent them and
govern them... After a few brief moments of freedom or revolutionary
euphoria, these new citizens of a new state will awake to find
themselves again the pawns and victims of the new power clusters...
I am fully confident that in a few years even the German workers will go
the way that seems best to them, provided they allow us the same
liberty. We even recognize the possibility that their history, their
particular nature, their state of civilization, and their whole
situation today impel them to follow this path. Let the German,
American, and English toilers and those of other nations march with the
same energy toward the destruction of all political power, liberty for
all, and a natural respect for that liberty; such are the essential
conditions of international solidarity.
To support his program for the conquest of political power, Marx has a
very special theory, which is but the logical consequence of his whole
system. He holds that the political condition of each country is always
the product and the faithful expression of its economic situation; to
change the former it is necessary only to transform the latter. Therein
lies the whole secret of historic evolution according to Marx., He takes
no account of other factors in history, such as the ever-present
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 for its own existence; so that to
destroy poverty, it is necessary to destroy the State!” And strangely
enough, Marx, who forbids his disciples to consider political slavery,
the State, as a real cause of poverty, commands his disciples in the
Social Democratic party to consider the conquest of political power as
the absolutely necessary preliminary condition for economic
emancipation!
[We insert here a paragraph from Bakunin’s speech at the September 1869
Congress of the International following the same line of argument:]
The report of the General Council of the International [drawn up by
Marx] says that the judicial fact being nothing but the consequence of
the economic fact, it is therefore necessary to transform the latter in
order to eliminate the former. It is incontestable that what has been
called juridical or political right in history has always been the
expression and the product of an accomplished fact. But it is also
incontestable that after having been the effect of acts or facts
previously accomplished, this right causes in its turn further effects,
becoming itself a very real and powerful fact which must be eliminated
if one desires an order of things different from the existing one. It is
thus that the right of inheritance, after having been the natural
consequence of the violent appropriation of natural and social wealth,
becomes later the basis for the political state and the juridical
family, which guarantees and sanctions private property... .
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 a
character which are themselves the natural product of a multitude of
ethnological, climatological, economic, and historic causes, but which
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-called natural traits, there is one whose action is completely
decisive in the particular history of each people; it is the intensity
of the spirit of revolt, and by that I mean the token of liberty with
which a people is endowed or which it has conserved. This instinct is a
fact which is completely primordial and animalistic; one finds it in
different degrees in every living being, and the energy and vital power
of each is to he measured by its intensity. In Man this instinct, in
addition to the economic needs which urge him on, becomes the most
powerful agent of total human emancipation. And since it is a matter of
temperament rather than intellectual and moral culture, although these
ordinarily complement each other, it sometimes happens that civilized
peoples possess it only in a feeble degree, either because they have
exhausted it during their previous development, or have been depraved by
their civilization, or possibly because they were originally less fully
endowed with it than other peoples...
The reasoning of Marx ends in absolute contradiction. Taking into
account only the economic question, he insists that only the most
advanced countries, those in which capitalist production has attained
greatest development, are the most capable of making social revolution.
These civilized countries, to the exclusion of all others, are the only
ones destined to initiate and carry through this revolution. This
revolution will expropriate either by peaceful, gradual, or by violent
means, the present property owners and capitalists. To appropriate all
the landed property and capital, and to carry out its extensive economic
and political programs, the revolutionary State will have to be very
powerful and highly centralized. The State will administer and direct
the cultivation of the land, by means of its salaried officials
commanding armies of rural workers organized and disciplined for this
purpose. At the same time, on the ruins of the existing banks, it will
establish a single state bank which will finance all labor and national
commerce.
It is readily apparent how such a seemingly simple plan of organization
can excite the imagination of the workers, who are as eager for justice
as they are for freedom; and who foolishly imagine that the one can
exist without the other; as if, in order to conquer and consolidate
justice and equality, one could depend on the efforts of others,
particularly on governments, regardless of how they may be elected or
controlled, to speak and act for the people! For the proletariat this
will, in reality, be nothing but a barracks: a regime, where regimented
workingmen and women will sleep, wake, work, and live to the beat of a
drum; where the shrewd and educated will be granted government
privileges; and where the mercenary-minded, attracted by the immensity
of the international speculations of the state bank, will find a vast
field for lucrative, underhanded dealings.
There will be slavery within this state, and abroad there will be war
without truce, at least until the “inferior” races, Latin and Slav,
tired of bourgeois civilization, no longer resign themselves to the
subjection of a State, which will be even more despotic than the former
State, although it calls itself a People’s State.
The Social Revolution, as envisioned and hoped for by the Latin and Slav
workers, is infinitely broader in scope than that advanced by the German
or Marxist program. For them it is not a question of the emancipation of
the working class, parsimoniously doled out and realizable only in the
remote future, but rather the completed and real emancipation of all
workers, not only in some but in all nations, “developed” and
“undeveloped.” And the first watchword of this emancipation can be none
other than freedom. Not the bourgeois political freedom so extolled and
recommended as the first step in the conquest of full freedom by Marx
and bis followers, but a broad human freedom, a freedom destroying all
the dogmatic, metaphysical, political, and juridical fetters by which
everyone today is loaded down, which will give everybody, collectives as
well as individuals, full autonomy in their activities and their
development, delivered once and for all from inspectors, directors, and
guardians.
The second watchword of this emancipation is solidarity, not Marxian
solidarity, decreed from the top down by some government, by trickery or
force, upon the masses; not that unity of all which is the negation of
the liberty of each, and which by that very fact becomes a falsehood, a
fiction, hiding the reality of slavery; but that solidarity which is, on
the contrary, the confirmation and realization of every freedom, having
its origin not in any political law whatsoever but in the inherent
social nature of Man, in virtue of which no man is free if all men who
surround him and exercise an influence, direct or indirect, on his life,
are not equally free...
The solidarity which is sought, far from being the product of any
artificial authoritarian organization 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 its essential basis equality and collective
labor — obligatory not by law, but by the force of realities — and
collective property; as a guiding light, it has experience, the practice
of the collective life, knowledge, and learning; as a final goal, the
establishment of a free humanity, beginning with the downfall of all
states.
This is the ideal, not divine, not metaphysical, but human and
practical, which corresponds to the modern aspirations of the Latin and
Slav peoples. They want full freedom, complete solidarity, complete
equality; in short, they want a full-scale humanity, and they will not
accept less, even on the pretext that limited freedom is only temporary.
The Marxists will denounce these aspirations as folly, as they have been
doing for a long time ... but the Latins and Slavs will never exchange
these magnificent objectives for the completely bourgeois platitudes of
Marxian socialism.