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Title: Where I Stand Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1862 Language: en Topics: anti-authoritarianism, anti-state Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-08 from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Where_I_Stand Notes: The original edition was published in 1862. This translated edition was published in the United States in 1947 by Modern Publishers, Indore Kraus Reprint Co, without copyright renewal under the title Bakunin’s Writings.
I am a passionate seeker after truth (and no less embittered enemy of
evil doing fictions) which the party of order, this official, privileged
and interested representative of all the past and present religions,
metaphysical, political, juridical and “social” atrociousness claim to
employ even today only to make the world stupid and enslave it, I am a
fanatical lover of truth and freedom which I consider the only
surroundings in which intelligence, consciousness and happiness develop
and increase.
I do not mean the completely formal freedom which the State imposes,
judges and regulates, this eternal lie which in reality consists always
of the privileges of a few based upon the slavery of all – not even the
individualist, egotistical, narrow and fictitious freedom which the
school of J.J. Rousseau and all other systems of property moralists,
middle class bourgeoisism and liberalism recommend – according to which
the so called rights of individuals which the State “represents” has the
limit in the right of all, whereby the rights of every individual are
necessarily, always reduced to nil. No, I consider only that as freedom
worthy and real as its name should imply, which consists in the complete
development of all material, intellectual and spiritual powers which are
in a potential state in everyone, the freedom which knows no other
limits than those prescribed by the laws of our own nature, so that
there be really no limits – for these laws are not enforced upon us by
external legislators who are around and over us, these laws are innate
in us, clinging to us and form the real basis of our material,
intellectual and moral being; instead of therefore seeing in them a
limitation, we must look upon them as the real condition and the actual
cause of our freedom.
I mean that freedom of the individual which, instead of stopping far
from the freedom of others as before a frontier, sees on the contrary
the extending and the expansion into the infinity of its own free will,
the unlimited freedom of the individual through the freedom of all;
freedom through solidarity, freedom in equality; the freedom which
triumphs over brute force and over the principle of authoritarianism,
the ideal expression of that force which, after the destruction of all
terrestrial and heavenly idols, will find and organize a new world of
undivided mankind upon the ruins of all churches and States. I am a
convinced partisan of economic and social equality, for I know that
outside this equality, freedom, justice, human dignity and moral and
spiritual well-being of mankind and the prosperity of nation, and
individuals will always remain a lie only. But as an unconditional
partisan of freedom, this first condition of humanity, I believe the
equality must be established through the spontaneous organization of
voluntary cooperation of work freely organized, and into communes
federated, by productive associations and through the equally
spontaneous federation of communes-not through and by supreme
supervising action of the State. This point separates above all others
the revolutionary socialists or collectivists from the authoritarian
“communists”, the adherents of the absolute initiative necessity of and
by the State. The communists imagine that condition of freedom and
socialism (i.e., the administration of the society’s affairs by the
self-government of the society itself without the medium and pressure of
the State) can be achieved by the development and organization of the
political power of the working class, chiefly of the proletariat of the
towns with the help of bourgeois radicalism, while the revolutionary
(who are otherwise, known as libertarian) socialists, enemies of every
double-edged allies and alliance believe, on the very contrary that the
aim can be realised and materialized only through the development and
organization not of the political but of the social and economic, and
therefore anti-political forces of the working masses of the town and
country, including all well disposed people of the upper classes who are
ready to break away from their past and join them openly and accept
their programme unconditionally.
From the difference named, there arise two different methods. The
“Communists” pretend to organize the working classes in order to
“capture the political power of the State”. The revolutionary socialists
organize people with the object of the liquidation of the States
altogether whatever be their form. The first are the partisans of
authoritiveness in theory and practice, the socialists have confidence
only in freedom to develop the initiative of peoples in order to
liberate themselves. The communist authoritarians wish to force class
“science” upon others, the social libertarians propagate empirical
science among them so that human groups and aggregations infused with
conviction in and understanding of it, spontaneously, freely and
voluntarily, from bottom up wards, organize themselves by their own
motion and in the measure of their strength – not according to a plan
sketched out in advance and dictated to them, a plan which is attempted
to be imposed by a few “highly intelligent, honest and all that” upon
the so-called ignorant masses from above. The revolutionary social
libertarians think that there is much more practical reason and common,
sense in the aspirations and the of the people than in the “deep”
intelligence of all the learned, men and tutors of mankind who want to
add to the many disastrous attempts “to make humanity happy” a still
newer attempt. We are on the contrary of the conviction that humankind
has allowed itself too long enough to be governed and legislated for and
that the origin of its misery is not to be looked for in this or that
form of government and man-established State, but in the very nature and
existence of every ruling leadership, of whatever kind and in whatever
name this may be. The best friends of the ignorant people are those who
free them from the thraldom of leadership and let people alone to work
among themselves with one another on the basis of equal comradeship.