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Title: God or Labor
Author: Mikhail Bakunin
Date: 1947
Language: en
Topics: atheism, labor movement
Source: Retrieved on 8th August 2021 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/writings/God.html
Notes: From Bakunin’s Writings, Guy A. Aldred Modern Publishers, Indore Kraus Reprint co. New York 1947

Mikhail Bakunin

God or Labor

You taunt us with disbelieving in God, We charge you with believing in

him. We do not condemn you for this. We do not even indict you. We pity

you. For the time of illusions is past. We cannot be deceived any

longer.

Whom do we find under God’s banner ! Emperors, kings, the official and

the officious world; our lords and our nobles; all the privileged

persons of Europe whose names are recorded in the Almana de Gotha; the

guinea, pigs of the industrial, commercial and banking world; the

patented professors of our universities; the civil service servants; the

low and high police officers; the gendarmes; the gaolers; the headsmen

or hangmen, not forgetting the priests, who are now the black police

enslaving our souls to the State; the glorious generals, defenders of

the public order; and lastly, the writers of the reptile Press.

This is God’s army !

Whom do we find in the camp opposite? The army of revolt; the audacious

deniers of God and repudiators of all divine and authoritarian

principles ! Those who are therefore, the believers in humanity, the

asserters of human liberty.

You reproach us with being Atheists. We do not complain of this. We have

no apology to offer. We admit we are. With what pride is allowed to

frail individuals -who, like passing waves, rise only to disappear again

in the universal ocean of the collective life-we pride ourselves on

being Atheists. Atheism is Truth-or, rather the basis of all Truths.

We do not stoop to consider practical consequences. We want Truth above

everything. Truth for all!

We believe in spite of all the apparent contradictions in spite of the

wavering political wisdom of the Parliamentarians-and of the skepticism

of the times-that truth only can make for the practical happiness of the

people. This is our first article of faith. It appears as if you were

not satisfied in recording our Atheism. You jump to the conclusion that

we can have neither love nor respect for mankind, inferring that all

those great ideas or emotions which, in all ages, have let heart a

throbbing are dead letters to us. Trailing at hazard our miserable

existence’s-crawling, rather then walking, as you wish to imagine us-you

assume that we cannot know of other feelings than the satisfaction of

our coarse and sensual desires.

Do you want to know to what an extent we love the beautiful things that

you revere? Know then that we love them so much that we are both angry

and tired at seeing them hanging, out of reach, from your idealistic

sky. We feel sorrow to see them stolen from our mother earth, transmuted

into symbols without life, or into distant promises never to be

realized. No longer are we satisfied with the fiction of things. We want

them in their full reality. This is our second article of faith.

By hurling at us the epithet of materialists, you believe you have

driven us to the wall. But you are greatly mistaken. Do yon know the

origin of your error?

What you and we call matter are two things totally different. Your

matter is a fiction. In this it resembles your God, your Satan, and your

immortal soul. Your matter is nothing beyond coarse lowliness, brutal

lifelessness. It is an impossible entity, as impossible as your pure

spirit-“immaterial,” “absolute” ?

The first thinkers of mankind were necessarily theolo-gians and

metaphysicians. Our earthly mind is so constituted that it begins to

rise slowly-through a maze of ignorance-by errors and mistakes-to the

possession of a minute parcel of Truth. This fact does not recommend”

the glorious conditions of the past.” But our theologians and

metaphysicians, owing to their ignorance, took all that to there

appeared to constitute power, movement, life, intelligence; and, by a

sweeping generalization, called it, spirit I To the lifeless and

shapeless residue they thought remained after such preliminary

election-unconsciously evolved from the whole world of reality-they gave

the name of matter. They were then surprised to see that this

matter-which, like their spirit existed only in their

imagination-appeared to be go lifeless and stupid when compared to their

god, the eternal spirit! To be candid, we do not know this God. We do

not recognize this matter.

By the words matter and material, we understand the totality of things,

the whole gradation of phenomenal reality as we know it, from the most

simple inorganic bodies to the complex functions of the mind of a man of

genius; the most beautiful sentiments, the highest thoughts; the most

heroic deeds; the actions of sacrifice and devotion; the duties and the

rights, the abnegation and the egoism of our social life. The

manifestations of organic life, the properties and qualities of simple

bodies; electricity, light, heat, and molecular attraction, are all to

our mind but so many different evolution’s of that totality of things

that we call matter. These evolution’s are characterized by close

solidarity, a, unity of motive power.

We do not look upon this totality of being and of forms as an eternal

and absolute substance, as Pantheist do. But we look upon it as the

result, always changed and always changing, of a variety of actions and

reactions, and of the continuous working of real beings that are born

and live in its very midst. Against the creed of the theologians I act

these propositions:-

That if there were a God who created it the world could never have

existed.

That if God were, or ever had been, the ruler of nature, natural,

physical, and social law could never have existed. It would have

presented a spectacle of complete chaos. Ruled from above, downwards, it

would have resembled the calculated and designed disorder of the

political State.

That’ moral law is a moral, logical and real law, only in so far as it

emanates from the needs of human society.

That the idea of God is not necessary to the existence and working of

the moral law. Far from this, it is a disturbing and socially

demoralizing factor.

That all gods, past and present, have owed their existence to a human

imagination unfired from the fetters of its primordial animality.

That any and every god, once established on his throne becomes the

curse of humanity, and the natural ally of all tyrants, social

charlatans, and exploiters of humanity.

That the routing of God will be a necessary consequence of the triumph

of mankind. The abolition of the idea of God will be a fateful result of

the proletarian emancipation.

From the moral point of view, Socialism is the advent of self respect to

mankind. It will mean the pawing of degradation and Divinity.

From the practical viewpoint, Socialism is the final acceptance of a

great principle that is leavening society more and more every day. It is

making itself more and more by the public conscience. It has become the

basis of scientific investigations and progress, and of the proletariat.

It is making its way everywhere. Briefly, this principle is as follows:

As in what we call material world, the inorganic matter-mechanical,

physical, and chemical is the demanding basis of the organic matter

vegetable animals in like manner in the social world, the development of

economical questions has been, and is the basis that determines our

religious, philosophical political, and social development. On this

subject Bakunin agrees with Marx.

This principle audaciously destroys all religious ideas and metaphysical

beliefs. It is a rebellion far greater than that which, born during the

Renaissance and the seven-teenth century, leveled down all scholastic

doctrine-once the powerful rampart of the Church, of the absolute

monarchy, and of the feudal nobility-and brought about the dogmatic

culture of the so called pure reason, go favorable to our latter-day

rulers the bourgeois classes. We therefore, say, through the

International : The economical enslavement of the workers-to those who

control the necessities of life and the instruments of labor, tools and

machinery-is the sole and original cause of the present slavery in all

its forms. To it are attributable mental degeneration and political

submission. The economic emancipation of the workers, therefore, is the

aim to which any political movement must subordinate its being, merely

as a means to that and. This briefly is the central idea of the

International.