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Title: Selected writings Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1 May 1995 Language: en Topics: Life, equality, liberty, anti-state Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bakunin/sp000112.txt][www.spunk.org]] and [[http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bakunin/sp000113.txt
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 influences 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 and 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 State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the
possessing classes over the masses the most flagrant, the most cynical,
and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal
solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into
association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and
enslaving all the rest. This flagrant negation of humanity which
constitutes the very essence of the State is, from the standpoint of the
State, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue. Thus, to offend, to
oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave one’s
fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on the
other hand, from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are
done for the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the
extension of its power, it is all transformed into duty and virtue This
explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a
series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present,
of all times and all countries---statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and
warriors---if judged from the standpoint of simply morality and human
justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to
hard labor or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege,
or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery,
no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily
being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other
pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible:
“for reasons of state.”
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, 1953.
Michael Bakunin, Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism, found in Noam
Chomsky, For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973.
Cutler, Robert M. (Ed.); From Out of the Dustbin Bakunin’s Basic
Writing’s 1869–1871, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985.