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Title: Politics and the State Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1871 Language: en Topics: politics, the state Source: Retrieved on 8th August 2021 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/writings/Politics.html
We have repelled energeticly every alliance with bourgeois politics,
even of the most radical nature. It has been pretended, foolishly and
slanderously, that we repudiated all such Political connivance because
we were indifferent to the great question of Liberty, and considered
only the economic or material side of the problem. It has been declared
that, consequently, we placed ourselves in the ranks of the reaction. A
German delegate at the Congress of Basle gave classic expression to this
view, when he dared to state that, who ever did not recognise, with the
German Socialists Democracy, “that the conquest of political rights
(power) was the preliminary condition of social emancipation,” was,
consciously or unconsciously an ally, of the Ceasars!
These critics greatly deceive themselves and, “consciously or
unconsciously,” endeavour to deceive the public concerning us. We love
liberty much more than they do. We love it to the point of wishing it
complete and entire. We wish the reality and not the fiction. Hence we
repel every bourgeois alliance, since we are convinced that all liberty
conquered by the aid of the bourgeoisie, their political means and
weapons, or by an alliance with their political dupes, will prove
profitable for Messrs. the bourgeois, but never anything more than a
fiction for the workers.
Messrs. the bourgeois of all parties, including the most advanced,
however cosmopolitan they are, when it is a question of gaining money by
a more and more extensive exploitation of the labour of the people, are
all equally fervent and fanatical in their patriotic attachment to the
state. Patriotism is in reality, nothing but the passion for and cult of
the national State, as M. Thiers, the very illustrious assassin of the
parisian proletariat, and the present saviour of France, has said
recently. But whoever says “State” says domination; and whoever says
“domination” says exploitation. Which proves that the popular or
“folk’s” State, now become aud unhappily remaining today the catchword
of the German Socialist Democracy, is a ridiculous contradiction, a
fiction, a falsehood, unconscious on the part of those who extol it,
doubtlessly, but, for the proletariat, a very dangerous trap.
The State, however popular may be the form it assumes, will always be an
institution of domination and exploitation, and consequently a permanent
source of poverty and enslavement for the populace. There is no other
way, then, of emancipating the people economically and politically, of
giving them liberty and well-being at one and the same time than by
abolishing the State, all States, and, by so doing, killing, once and
for all time, what, up to now, has been called “Politics,” i e.,
precisely nothing else than the functioning or manifestation both
internal and external of State action, that is to say, the practice, or
art and science of dominating and exploiting the masses in favour of the
privileged classes.
It is not true then to say that we treat politics abstractly. We make no
abstraction of it, since we wish positively to kill it. And here is the
essential point upon which we separate ourselves absolutely from
politicians and radical bourgeois Socialists (now functioning as social
or radical democracy which is only a facade for capitalistic
democracy,). Their policy consists in the transfor- mation of State
politics, their use and reform. Our policy, the only policy we admit,
consists in the total abolition of the State, and of politics, which is
its necessary manifestation.
It is only because we wish frankly to this abolition of the State that
we believe that we have the right to call ourselves Internationalists
and Revolutionary Socialists; for whoever wishes to deal with politics
otherwise than how we do; whoever does not, like us, wish the total
abolition of politics, must necessarily participate in the politics of a
patriotic and bourgeois State. In other words, he renounces, by that
very fact, in the name of his great or little national State, the human
solidarity of all peoples, as well as the economic and social
emancipation of the masses at home.