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Title: Solidarity in Liberty Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1867 Language: en Topics: solidarity, liberty, workers struggle Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-08 from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Solidarity_in_Liberty][en.wikisource.org]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=677, retrieved on July 15, 2020.
From this truth of practical solidarity or fraternity of struggle that I
have laid down as the first principle of the Council of Action flows a
theoretical consequence of equal importance. The workers are able to
unite as a class for class economic action because all religious
philosophies, and systems of morality which prevail in any given order
of society are always the ideal expression of its real, material
situation. Theologies, philosophies and ethics define, first of all, the
economic Organisation of society; and secondly, the political
organisation, which is itself nothing but the legal and violent
consecration of the economic order. Consequently, there are not several
religions of the ruling class; there is one, the religion of property.
And there are not several religions of the working class: there is one,
the piety of struggle, the vision of emancipation, penetrating the fog
of every mysticism, and finding, utterance in a thousand prayers.
Workers of all creeds, like workers of all lands, have but one faith,
hope, and charity; one common purpose overleaps the barriers of seeming
hatreds of race and creed. The workers are one class, and therefore one
race, one faith, one nation, This is the theoretical truth to be induced
from the practical fraternal solidarity of the Council of Action
Organisation. Church and State are liquidated in the vital Organisation
of the working class, the genius of free humanity.
It has been stated that Protestantism established liberty in Europe.
This is a great error. It is the economic, material emancipation of the
bourgeois class which, in spite of Protestantism, has created that
exclusively political and legal liberty, which is too easily confounded
with the grand, universal, human liberty, which only the proletariat can
create. The necessary accompaniment of bourgeois legal and political
liberty, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, is the
intellectual, anti-Christian, and anti-religious emancipation of the
bourgeoisie. The capitalist ruling class has no religion, no ideals, and
no illusion. It is cynical and unbelieving because it denies the real
base of human society, the complete emancipation of the working class.
Bourgeois society, by its very nature of interested professionalism,
must maintain centres of authority and exploitation, called States. The
labourers, by their very economic needs, must challenge such centres of
oppression.
The inherent principles of human existence are summed up in the single
law of solidarity. This is the golden rule of humanity, and may be
formulated thus: no person can recognise or realise his or her own
humanity except by recognising it in others and so cooperating for its
realisation by each and all. No man can emancipate himself save by
emancipating with him all the men about him.
My liberty is the liberty of everybody. I cannot be free in idea until I
am free in fact. To be free in idea and not free in fact is to be
revolt. To be free in fact is to have my liberty and my right, find
their confirmation, and sanction in the liberty and right of all
mankind. I am free only when all men are my equals. (first and foremost
economically.)
What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However
independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear
from mundane consideration by my social status, I am enslaved to the
misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace.
Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even prime Minister, I am always
the creature of their circumstance, the conscious product of their
ignorance, want and clamouring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior
one, am enslaved in consequence.
For example if such is the case, I am enlightened or intelligent men.
But I am foolish with the folly of the people, my wisdom stunned by
their needs, my mind palsied. I am a brave man, but I am the coward of
the peoples’ fear. Their misery appals me, and every day I shrink from
the struggle of life. My career becomes an evasion of living. A rich
man, I tremble before their poverty, because it threatens to engulf me.
I discover I have no riches in myself, no wealth but that stolen from
the common life of the common people. As privileged man, I turn pale
before the people’s demand for justice. I feel a menace in that demand.
The cry is ominous and I am threatened. It is the feeling of the
malefactor dreading, yet waiting for inevitable arrest. My life is
privileged and furtive. But it is not mine. I lack freedom and
contentment. In short, wishing to be free, though I am wise, brave,
rich, and privileged, I cannot be free because my immediate associates
do not wish men to be free; and the Mass, from whom all wisdom, bravery,
riches, and Privileges ascend, do not know how to secure their freedom.
The slavery of the common people make them the instruments of my
oppression. For we to be free, they must be free. We must conquer bread
and freedom in common.
The true, human liberty of a single individual implies the emancipation
of all: because, thanks to the law of solidarity, which is the natural
basis of all human society, I cannot be, feel, and know myself really,
completely free, if I am not surrounded by men as free as myself. The
slavery of each is my slavery.
It follows that the question of individual liberty is not a personal but
a social economic question that depends on the deliverance of the
proletariat for its realization. That in turn, involves the spontaneous
organization and capacity for economic and social action through the
voluntary and free grouping of all workers’ organizations into the
Council of Action. The Red Association of these who toil!