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Title: The Social Revolution Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1910 Language: en Topics: social revolution, revolution Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-27 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/mikhail-bakunin-social-revolution-1871/ Notes: Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur.
This work, like all the writings, themselves not very numerous, that I
have published thus far, is born of events. It is the natural
continuation of my “Letters to a Frenchman” (September 1870), in which I
had the simple, sad honor of foreseeing and predicting the horrible
misfortunes that today strike France, and, with it, the whole civilized
world; misfortunes for which there has been and now still remains only
one single remedy: The Social Revolution. [one paragraph omitted]
The task I have imposed on myself is not easy, I know, and I could be
accused of presumption, if I bore in this work the slightest personal
ambition. But, I can assure the reader, that is not the case. I am not a
scholar, nor a philosopher, nor even a writer by trade. I have written
very little in my life and I have only ever done so, so to speak, when
my life depended on it, and only when a passionate conviction forced me
to conquer my instinctive aversion to all exhibition of my own self in
public.
So who am I and what is it that urges me now to publish this work? I am
a passionate seeker of truth and an equally fierce enemy of all the
destructive fictions of which the party of order,—that official,
privileged and self-interested representative of all the religious,
metaphysical, political, juridical, economic and social turpitudes,
present and past, still claims the use today in order to stupefy and
enslave the world. I am a fanatical lover of liberty, considering it the
only milieu in the heart of which that purely formal liberty granted,
determined and regulated by the State,—an eternal lie, which in reality
never represents anything but the privilege of a few founded on the
slavery of everyone,—can develop and grow; not of that individualist,
selfish, local, miserly and fictive liberty extolled by the school of
J.J. Rousseau, and by all the other schools of bourgeois liberalism,
which considers the so-called right of all, represented by the State, as
the limit of the right of each, which always, necessarily leads to the
reduction of the right of each to zero. No, I mean the only liberty that
is truly worthy of the name, the liberty that consists of the full
development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers found in
the state of latent faculties in each; the liberty that recognizes no
other restrictions than those drawn for us by the laws of our own
nature; so that, properly speaking, there are no restrictions, since
these laws are not imposed on us by some outside legislation, whether
residing beside or above us; they are immanent within us, inherent,
constituting the very basis of our whole being, as much material as
intellectual and moral; so instead of taking them for a limit, we should
consider them the real conditions and effective reason of our liberty.
I mean that liberty of each that, far from ending at the liberty of
others, as if at a boundary, finds there, on the contrary, its
confirmation and indefinite extension; the unlimited liberty of each
through the liberty of all, liberty through solidarity, liberty in
equality; liberty triumphant over brutal force and the principle of
authority, which was never anything but the ideal expression of that
force; that liberty that, after having toppled all the idols, celestial
and terrestrial, will found and organize a new world, that of united
humanity, on the ruins of all the Churches and all the States.
I am a convinced partisan of social and economic Equality, because I
know that apart from that equality, liberty, justice, human dignity,
morality and the well-being of individuals, as well as the prosperity of
nations, will never be anything but so many lies. But still being a
partisan of liberty, that first condition of humanity, I think that
equality must be established in the world by the spontaneous
organization of labor and of collective property, of productive
associations freely organized and federalized in the communes, and by
the equally spontaneous federation of the communes, but not by the
supreme, tutelary action of the State.
This is the principal point that divides the revolutionary socialists or
collectivists from the authoritarian communists, partisans of the
absolute initiative of the State. Their aim is the same; both parties
equally desire the creation of a new social order, founded solely on the
organization of collective labor, inevitably imposed on each and all by
the very force of things, with conditions economically equal for all,
and on the collective appropriation of the instruments of labor. Only,
the communists imagine that they can arrive there through the
development and organization of the political power of the working
classes, and especially of the proletariat in the towns, with the aid of
bourgeois radicalism, while the revolutionary socialists, enemies of
every alloy and every suspect alliance, think, on the contrary, that
they could achieve this end only through the development and
organization, not of the political power, but of the social, and
consequently non-political power of the working masses, both in the
cities and in the country including all the men of good will of the
upper classes who, breaking with their past, honestly wish to join with
them and completely accept their program.
From this, two different methods arise. The Communists believe it
necessary to organize the strength of the workers in order to seize the
political power of the States. The revolutionary socialists organize it
in anticipation of the destruction or, if you wish a more polite term,
the liquidation of the States. The Communists are partisans of the
principle and practice of authority; the revolutionary socialists have
confidence only in liberty. Both being equally partisans of science,
which must kill superstition and replace faith, the first would like to
impose it, while the other strive to propagate it, so that the human
groups, convinced, organize and federalize spontaneously, freely, from
the bottom up, by their own movement and in accordance with their real
interests, but never according to a plan drawn up in advance and imposed
on the ignorant masses by a few superior intelligences.
The socialist revolutionaries think that there is much more practical
reason and intellect in the instinctive and real needs of the popular
masses than in the profound intelligence of all these doctors and tutors
of humanity, who, having so often tried and failed to make it happy,
still claim to add their efforts. The revolutionary socialists, on the
contrary, think that humanity has let itself be governed for so long,
too long, and that the source of its misfortunes is not to be found in
this or that form of government, but in the principle, in the very fact
that there is government.
This, finally, is the contradiction, already historic, that exists
between the scientific communism developed by the German school and
accepted in part by the authoritarian and English socialists on one
side, and the Proudhonism, fully developed and pushed to its last
consequences, preferred, on the other, by the proletariat of the Latin
countries. [1] Revolutionary socialism just attempted a first striking,
practical demonstration in the PARIS COMMUNE.
[1] It is also accepted, and will be more and more, by the essentially
non-political instinct of the Slavic peoples.