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Title: The Class War Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1870 Language: en Source: Bakunin’s Writings, Guy A. Aldred Modern Publishers, Indore Kraus Reprint co. New York 1947. Online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=678, retrieved on July 14, 2020.
Why this silence about June? Is it because the criminals of June are
bourgeois republicans of whom the above named writers have been,
morally, more or less accomplices? Accomplices in their principles and
therefore indirectly accomplices to their acts. This reason is probable,
but there is yet another which is certain. The crime of June struck
workers only, revolutionary socialists, consequently strangers to the
class and natural enemies of the principles that all these honorable
writers represent. The crime of December attacked and deported thousands
of bourgeois republicans, the social brothers of these honorable writers
and their political coreligionists. Besides, they themselves have been
its victims. Hence their extreme sensibilities to the December crimes,
and their indifference to those of June.
A general rule: A bourgeois, however red a republican he be, will be
much more keenly affected, aroused and smitten by a mishap to another
bourgeois were this bourgeois even a mad imperialist than by the
misfortune of a worker, of a man of the people. There is undoubtedly a
great injustice in this difference, but the injustice is not
premeditated. It is instinctive. It arises out of the conditions and
habits of life which exercise a much greater influence over men than
their ideas and political convictions. Conditions and habits, their
special manner of existing, developing, thinking and acting; all their
social relationships so manifold and various, and yet so regularly
convergent towards the same aim; all this diversity of interest
expressing common social ambition and constituting the life of the
bourgeois world, establishes between those who belong to this world a
solidarity infinitely more real, deeper, and unquestionably more sincere
than any that might come between a section of the bourgeoisie and the
workers. No difference of political opinions is sufficient to overcome
the bourgeois community of interests. No seeming agreement of political
opinions is sufficient to overcome the antagonism of interests that
divide the bourgeoisie from the workers. Community of convictions and
ideas are and must ever be subsidiary to a community of class interests
and prejudices.
Life dominates thought and determines the will. This is a truth that
should never be lost sight of when we wish to understand anything about
social and political phenomena. if we wish to establish a sincere and
complete community of thought and will between men, we meet found it on
similar conditions of life, or on a community of interests. And as there
is, by the very conditions of their respective existence, an abyss
between the bourgeois world and the world of the worker,-the one being
the exploiting world, the other the world of the victimized and
exploited, I conclude that if a man born and brought up in the bourgeois
environment wishes to become sincerely and unreservedly the friend and
brother of the workers, he must renounce all the conditions of his past
existence; and outgrow all his bourgeois habits. He must break off his
relations of sentiment with the bourgeois world, its vanity and
ambition. He must turn his back upon it and become its enemy; proclaim
irreconcilable war; and throw himself wholeheartedly into the world and
cause of the worker.
If his passion for justice is too weak to inspire him to such resolution
and audacity, let him not deceive himself and let him not deceive the
workers. He can never become their friend and at every crisis must prove
their enemy. His abstract thoughts his dreams of justice will easily
influence him in hours of calm reflection when nothing stirs in the
exploited world. But let the moment of struggle come when the armed
truce gives place to the irreconcilable conflict, his interests will
compel him to serve in the camp of the exploiters. This has happened to
our one-time friends in the past. It will happen again to many good
republicans and socialists who have not lost their attachment to the
bourgeois world.
Social hatreds are like religious hatreds. They are intense and deep.
They are not shallow like political hatred. This fact explains the
indulgence shown by the bourgeois democrats for the Bonapartists. It
explains also their excessive severity against the socialist
revolutionaries. They detest the former much less than the latter
because of the pressure of economic interests. Consequently they units
with the Bonapartists to form a common reaction against the oppressed
masses.