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Title: Our Program Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1868 Language: en Topics: Libertarian Socialism Source: Retrieved on 23/1/2021 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/program-of-the-russian-socialist-democracy-narodnoe-delo-1868/ Notes: Originally published as "Our Program" in Russian in Narodnoe Delo, Geneva, 1868. Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur from the French version titled "Program of the Russian Socialist Democracy", which can be accessed on https://search.iisg.amsterdam/Record/ARCH00018#
We want the emancipation of the people, their intellectual, economic,
social and political emancipation.
I. The intellectual emancipation of the popular masses is indispensable
in order for their political and social liberty to become complete and
solid. Faith in God, the belief in the immortality of the soul, and, in
general, all the idealist or supernatural utopias, necessarily based on
a false principle, contrary to science, have been for the peoples a
constant cause of slavery and misery. On the one hand, they have always
served as a justification and support to all the enslavers of humanity,
to all the exploiters of the labor of the masses; on the other, they
have demoralized the peoples themselves, dividing their conscience and
their being between two absolutely opposing tendencies: the one
celestial and the other terrestrial, and at the same time depriving them
of the energy necessary to win their human rights and give themselves a
happy, free existence. It follows from this that we are francs partisans
of atheism and scientific, humanitarian materialism.
II. We want the economic, social emancipation of the people, without
which all liberty would be nothing but a vain word and a disgusting lie.
The economic situation of the peoples has always been the cornerstone
and real explanation of their political situation. All the political and
civil organizations, past and present, have for principal bases: the
brutal act of conquest; the patriarchal right of the husband and father;
the right of hereditary property, and the blessing of all these historic
rights by the Church in the name of some god. The ensemble of all these
things hierarchically coordinated is called the State. Thus, the
inevitable consequence of every State constitution will always be the
enslavement of millions of laborers condemned to a fatal ignorance, for
the profit of a privileged, exploiting and so-called civilized minority.
The State – that younger brother of the Church – in inconceivable
without political, legal and civil privileges, which have a a natural
basis the economic privileges.
Desiring the real and definitive emancipation of the popular masses, we
want:
1) The abolition of the right of hereditary property.
2) The complete equalization of the political and social rights of women
with those of men and, as a consequence: the abolition of laws regarding
the family, as well as that of religious, political and civil marriage,
historical corollary of the right of inheritance.
3) The abolition of marriage, as a religious, political legal and civil
institution, will immediately raise question of the education of
children; their upkeep, from the moment when the pregnancy of the mother
is determined the age of their majority; their education and
instruction, equal for all at all degrees, from primary school to the
highest developments of science in the more advanced schools; –
scientific and industrial at the same time, and preparing the man as
much for muscular labor as for nervous labor, – must fall primarily to
the charge of society.
We pose as the bases of economic justice the following principle:
The earth must only belong to those who cultivate it with their own arms
– and as all human labor is only productive insofar as it is
associated,- we claim the land for the communes or rural associations;
as well as capital and other instruments of labor for the industrial
associations, both based on the most complete liberty and on the perfect
economic and political equality of the laborers
III. In the future, no political organization should be anything but a
free federation of free associations, whether agricultural or
industrial.
Consequently, in the name itself of the political and social
emancipation of the popular masses, we desire the destruction, or if you
prefer the liquidation, of the State – it’s radical extirpation, with
all its institutions, whether ecclesiastical, political or civil,
university, legal or financial , military or bureaucratic.
We want absolute liberty for all peoples, Russian and non-Russian,
crushed today by the empire of all Russias; with the absolute right of
each to manage their own affairs, and to govern themselves according to
their own instincts, according to their needs and will; so that,
federalizing from bottom to top, those among them who desire to become
members of the Russian people, can create with it a truly free society,
United federatively with other similar societies, who, taking for their
basis the same principles, will freely organize together in Europe and
in the entire world.
For us there principal foundations of our program will be obligatory.
This is why we believe it necessary to announce that we will not accept
articles in our newspaper, nor people among us, that are not entirely in
agreement with us.
The development of the program will be the subject of a series of
articles under the title: How to Pose the Revolutionary Question, and
it, of course, will also be the content of our entire newspaper.