Part 7 (1/2)

character of the anarchist philosophy. They went into the past history of Bakounin, revived all the accusations that had been made against him, and exposed every particle of evidence obtainable concerning his ”checkered” career as a revolutionist. It will be remembered that it was in 1869 that Nechayeff appeared in Switzerland. When the Marxists got wind of him and his doctrine, their rage knew no bounds. And later they obtained and published in _L'Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste_ the material from which I have already quoted extensively in my first chapter.

No useful purpose, however, would be served in dealing with the personal phases of the struggle. Bakounin became so irate at the attacks upon him, several of which happened to have been written by Jews, that he wrote an answer ent.i.tled ”Study Upon the German Jews.” He feared to attack Marx; and this ”Study,” while avoiding a personal attack, sought to arouse a racial prejudice that would injure him. He writes to Herzen, a month after the congress at Basel, that he fully realizes that Marx is ”the instigator and the leader of all this calumnious and infamous polemic.”[20] He was reluctant, however, to attack him personally, and even refers to Marx and La.s.salle as ”these two Jewish giants,” but besides them, he adds, ”there was and is a crowd of Jewish pigmies.”[21]

”Nevertheless,” he writes, ”it may happen, and very shortly, too, that I shall enter into conflict with him, not over any personal offense, of course, but over a question of principle, regarding State communism, of which he himself and the English and German parties which he directs are the most ardent partisans. Then it will be a fight to the finish. But there is a time for everything, and the hour for this struggle has not yet sounded.... Do you not see that all these gentlemen who are our enemies are forming a phalanx, which must be disunited and broken up in order to be the more easily routed? You are more erudite than I; you know, therefore, better than I who was the first to take for principle: _Divide and rule_. If at present I should undertake an open war against Marx himself, three-quarters of the members of the International would turn against me, and I would be at a disadvantage, for I would have lost the ground on which I must stand. But by beginning this war with an attack against the rabble by which he is surrounded, I shall have the majority on my side.... But, ... if he wishes to const.i.tute himself the defender of their cause, it is he who would then declare war openly. In this case, I shall take the field also and I shall play the star role.”[22]

This was written in October, 1869, a month after the Basel congress. On the 1st of January, 1870, the General Council at London sent a private communication to all sections of the International, and on the 28th of March it was followed by another. These, together with various circulars dealing with questions of principle, but all consisting of attacks upon Bakounin personally or upon his doctrines, finally goaded him into open war upon Marx, the General Council, all their doctrines, and even upon the then forming socialist party of Germany, with Bebel and Liebknecht at its head. During the year 1870 Bakounin was preparing for the great controversy, but his friends of Lyons interrupted his work by calling him there to take part in the uprising of that year. He hastened to Lyons, but, as we know, he was soon forced to flee and conceal himself in Ma.r.s.eilles. It was there, in the midst of the blackest despair, that Bakounin wrote: ”I have no longer any faith in the Revolution in France. This nation is no longer in the least revolutionary. The people themselves have become doctrinaire, as insolent and as bourgeois as the bourgeois.... The bourgeois are loathsome. They are as savage as they are stupid--and as the police blood flows in their veins--they should be called policemen and attorneys-general in embryo. I am going to reply to their infamous calumnies by a good little book in which I shall give everything and everybody its proper name. I leave this country with deep despair in my heart.”[23] He then set to work at last to state systematically his own views and to annihilate utterly those of the socialists. Many of these doc.u.ments are only fragmentary. Some were started and abandoned; others ended in hopeless confusion. With the most extraordinary gift of inspirited statement, he pa.s.ses in review every phase of history, leaping from one peak to another of the great periods, pointing his lessons, issuing his warnings, but all the time throwing at the reader such a Niagara of ideas and arguments that he is left utterly dazed and bewildered as by some startling military display or the rus.h.i.+ng here and there of a military maneuver. In _Lettres a un Francais_; _Ma.n.u.scrit de 114 Pages, ecrit a Ma.r.s.eille_; _Lettre a Esquiros_; _Preambule pour la Seconde Livraison de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Avertiss.e.m.e.nt pour l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Au Journal La Liberte, de Bruxelles_; and _Fragment formant une Suite de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_, he returns again and again to the charge, always seeking to deal some fatal blow to Marxian socialism, but never apparently satisfying himself that he has accomplished his task. He touches the border of practical criticism of the socialist program in the fragment ent.i.tled _Lettres a un Francais_.

It ends, however, before the task is done. Again he takes it up in the _Ma.n.u.scrit ecrit a Ma.r.s.eille_. But here also, as soon as he arrives at the point of annihilating the socialists, his task is discontinued. In truth, he himself seems to have realized the inconclusive character of his writings, as he refused in some cases to complete them and in other cases to publish them. Nevertheless, we find in various places of his fragmentary writings not only a statement of his own views, but his entire critique upon socialism.

As I have made clear enough, I think, in my first chapter, there are in Bakounin's writings two main ideas put forward again and again, dressed in innumerable forms and supported by an inexhaustible variety of arguments. These ideas are based upon his antagonism to religion and to government. It was always _Dieu et l'Etat_ that he was fighting, and not until both the ideas and the inst.i.tutions which had grown up in support of ”these monstrous oppressions” had been destroyed and swept from the earth could there arise, thought Bakounin, a free society, peopled with happy and emanc.i.p.ated human souls. When one has once obtained this conception of Bakounin's fundamental views, there is little necessity for dealing with the infinite number of minor points upon which he was forced to attack the men and movements of his time. On the one hand, he was a.s.sailing Mazzini, whose every move in life was actuated by his intense religious and political faith, while, on the other hand, he was attacking Marx as the modern Moses handing down to the enslaved mult.i.tudes his table of infamous laws as the foundation for a new tyranny, that of State socialism. In 1871 Bakounin ceased all maneuvering. Bringing out his great guns, he began to bombard both Mazzini and Marx. Never has polemic literature seen such another battle.

With a weapon in each hand, turning from the one to the other of his antagonists, he battled, as no man ever before battled, to crush ”these enemies of the entire human race.”

There is, of course, no possibility of adequately summarizing, in such limited s.p.a.ce as I have allotted to it, the thought of one who traversed the history of the entire world of thought and action in pursuit of some crus.h.i.+ng argument against the socialism of Marx. This perverted form of socialism, Bakounin maintained, contemplated the establishment of a _communisme autoritaire_, or State socialism. ”The State,” he says, ”having become the sole owner--at the end of a certain period of transition which will be necessary in order to transform society, without too great economic and political shocks, from the present organization of bourgeois privilege to the future organization of official equality for all--the State will also be the sole capitalist, the banker, the money lender, the organizer, the director of all the national work, and the distributor of its products. Such is the ideal, the fundamental principle of modern communism.”[24] This is, of all Bakounin's criticisms of socialism, the one that has had the greatest vitality. It has gone the round of the world as a crus.h.i.+ng blow to socialist ideals. The same thought has been repeated by every politician, newspaper, and capitalist who has undertaken to refute socialism. And every socialist will admit that of all the attempts to misrepresent socialism and to make it abhorrent to most people the idea expressed in these words of Bakounin has been the most effective. To state thus the ideal of socialism is sufficient in most cases to end all argument. Add to this program military discipline for the ma.s.ses, barracks for homes, and a ruling bureaucracy, and you have complete the terrifying picture that is held up to the workers of every country, even to-day, as the nefarious, world-destroying design of the socialists.

It is, therefore, altogether proper to inquire if these were in reality the aims of the Marxists. Many sincere opponents of socialism actually believe that these are the ends sought, while the casual reader of socialist literature may see much that appears to lead directly to the dreadful State tyranny that Bakounin has pictured. But did Marx actually advocate State socialism? In the Communist Manifesto Marx proposed a series of reforms that the State alone was capable of inst.i.tuting. He urged that many of the instruments of production should be centralized in the hands of the State. Moreover, nothing is clearer than his prophecy that the working cla.s.s ”will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State.”[25] Indeed, in this program, as in all others that have developed out of it, the end of socialism would seem to be State owners.h.i.+p. ”With trusts or without,”

writes Engels, ”the official representative of capitalist society--the State--will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production.”

Commenting himself upon this statement, he adds in a footnote: ”I say 'have to.' For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become economically inevitable, only then--even if it is the State of to-day that effects this--is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself.” ”This necessity,” he continues, ”for conversion into State property is felt first in the great inst.i.tutions for intercourse and communication--the post-office, the telegraphs, the railways.”[26]

Here is the entire position in a nutsh.e.l.l. But Engels says the State will ”have to.” Thus Engels and Marx are not stating necessarily what they desire. And it must not be forgotten that in all such statements both were outlining only what appeared to them to be a natural and inevitable evolution. In State owners.h.i.+p they saw an outcome of the necessary centralization of capital and its growth into huge monopolies.

Society would be forced to use the power of the State to control, and eventually to own, these menacing aggregations of capital in the hands of a few men. Both Marx and Engels saw clearly enough that State monopoly does not destroy the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. ”The modern State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine.... The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, ... the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers--proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. _State owners.h.i.+p of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution._”[27]

State owners.h.i.+p, then, was not considered by Marx and Engels in itself a solution of the problem. It is only a necessary preliminary to the solution. The essential step, either subsequent or precedent, is the capture of political power by the working cla.s.s. By this act the means of production are freed ”from the character of capital they have thus far borne, ...” and their ”socialized character” is given ”complete freedom to work itself out.”[28] ”Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different cla.s.ses of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master--free.

”To accomplish this act of universal emanc.i.p.ation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the new oppressed proletarian cla.s.s a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.”[29]

Engels declares that the State, such as we have known it in the past, will die out ”as soon as there is no longer any social cla.s.s to be held in subjection; as soon as cla.s.s rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really const.i.tutes itself the representative of the whole of society--the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society--this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State.

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not 'abolished.' _It dies out._ This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free State,' both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.”[30]

This conception of the role of the State is one that no anarchist can comprehend. He is unwilling to admit that social evolution necessarily leads through State socialism to industrial democracy, or even that such an evolution is possible. To him the State seems to have a corporeal, material existence of its own. It is a tyrannical machine that exists above all cla.s.ses and wields a legal, military, and judicial power all its own. That the State is only an agency for representing in certain fields the power of a dominant economic cla.s.s--this is something the anarchist will not admit. In fact, Bakounin seems to have been utterly mystified when Eccarius answered him at Basel in these words: ”The State can be reformed by the coming of the working cla.s.s into power.”[31] That the State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the capitalist cla.s.s can neither be granted nor understood by the anarchists. Nor can it be comprehended that, when the capitalist cla.s.s has no affairs of its own to manage, the coercive character of the State will gradually disappear. State owners.h.i.+p undermines and destroys the economic power of private capitalists. When the railroads, the mines, the forests, and other great monopolies are taken out of their hands, their control over the State is by this much diminished. The only power they possess to control the State resides in their economic power, and anything that weakens that tends to destroy the cla.s.s character of the State itself. The inherent weakness of Bakounin's entire philosophy lay in this fact, that it begins with the necessity of abolis.h.i.+ng G.o.d and the State, and that it can never get beyond that or away from that. And, as a necessary consequence, Bakounin had to oppose every measure that looked toward any compromise with the State, or that might enable the working cla.s.s to exercise any influence in or through the State.

When, therefore, the German party at its congress at Eisenach demanded the suffrage and direct legislation, when it declared that political liberty is the most urgent preliminary condition for the economic emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s, Bakounin could see nothing revolutionary in such a program. When, furthermore, the party declared that the social question is inseparable from the political question and that the problems of our economic life could be solved only in a democratic State, Bakounin, of course, was forced to oppose such heresies with all his power. And these were indeed the really vital questions, upon which the anarchists and the socialists could not be reconciled. It is in his _Lettres a un Francais_, written just after the failure of his own ”practical” efforts at Lyons, that Bakounin undertakes his criticism of the program of the German socialists.

Preparatory to this task, he first terrifies his French readers with the warning that if the German army, then at their doors, should conquer France, it would result in the destruction of French socialism (by which he means anarchism), in the utter degradation and complete slavery of the French people, and make it possible for the Knout of Germany and Russia to fall upon the back of all Europe. ”If, in this terrible moment, ... [France] does not prefer the death of all her children and the destruction of all her goods, the burning of her villages, her cities, and of all her houses to slavery under the yoke of the Prussians, if she does not destroy, by means of a popular and revolutionary uprising, the power of the innumerable German armies which, victorious on all sides up to the present, threaten her dignity, her liberty, and even her existence, if she does not become a grave for all those six hundred thousand soldiers of German despotism, if she does not oppose them with the one means capable of conquering and destroying them under the present circ.u.mstances, if she does not reply to this insolent invasion by the social revolution no less ruthless and a thousand times more menacing--it is certain, I maintain, that then France is lost, her ma.s.ses of working people will be slaves, and French socialism will have lived its life.”[32]

Approaching his subject in this dramatic manner, Bakounin turns to examine the degenerate state of socialism in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to see ”what will be the chances of working-cla.s.s emanc.i.p.ation in all the rest of Europe.”[33] In the first country socialism is only in its infancy. The Italians are wholly ignorant of the true causes of their misery. They are crushed, maltreated, and dying of hunger. They are ”led blindly by the liberal and radical bourgeois.”[34] Altogether, there is no immediate hope of socialism there. In Switzerland the people are asleep. ”If the human world were on the point of dying, the Swiss would not resuscitate it.”[35] Only in Germany is socialism making headway, and Bakounin undertakes to examine this socialism and to put it forward as a horrible example. To be sure, the German workers are awakening, but they are under the leaders.h.i.+p of certain cunning politicians, who have abandoned all revolutionary ideas, and are now undertaking to reform the State, hoping that that could be done as a result of ”a great peaceful and legal agitation of the working cla.s.s.”[36] The very name Liebknecht had taken for his paper, the _Volksstaat_, was infamous in Bakounin's eyes, while all the leaders of the labor party had become merely appendages to ”their friends of the bourgeois _Volkspartei_.”[37] He then pa.s.ses in review the program of the German socialists, and points to their aim of establis.h.i.+ng a democratic State by the ”direct and secret suffrage for all men” and its guidance by direct legislation, as the utter abandonment of every revolutionary idea. He dwells upon the folly of the suffrage and of every effort to remodel, recast, and change the State, as ”purely political and bourgeois.”[38]

Democracies and republics are no less tyrannical than monarchies. The suffrage cannot alter them. In England, Switzerland, and America, he declares, the ma.s.ses now have political power, yet they remain in the deepest depths of misery. Universal suffrage is only a new superst.i.tion, while the referendum, already existing in Switzerland, has failed utterly to improve the condition of the people. The working-cla.s.s slaves, even in the most democratic countries, ”have neither the instruction; nor the leisure, nor the independence necessary to exercise freely and with full knowledge of the case their rights as citizens. They have, in the most democratic countries, which are governed by representatives elected by all the people, a ruling day or rather a day of Saturnalian celebration: that is election day. Then the bourgeois, their oppressors, their every-day exploiters, and their masters, come to them, with hats off, talk to them of equality and of fraternity, and call them the ruling people, of whom they (the bourgeois) are only very humble servants, the representatives of their will. This day over, fraternity and equality evaporate in smoke, the bourgeois become bourgeois once more, and the proletariat, the sovereign people, remain slaves.

”Such is the real truth about the system of representative democracy, so much praised by the radical bourgeois, even when it is amended, completed, and developed, with a popular intention, by the _referendum_ or by that 'direct legislation of the people' which is extolled by a German school that wrongly calls itself socialist. For very nearly two years, the _referendum_ has been a part of the const.i.tution of the canton of Zurich, and up to this time it has given absolutely no results. The people there are called upon to vote, by yes or by no, on all the important laws which are presented to them by the representative bodies. They could even grant them the initiative without real liberty winning the least advantage.”[39]

It is a discouraging picture that Bakounin draws here of the ignorance and stupidity of the people as they are led in every election to vote their enemies into power. What, then, is to be done? What shall these hordes of the illiterate and miserable do? If by direct legislation they cannot even vote laws in their own interest, how, then, will it be possible for them ever to improve their condition? Such questions do not in the least disturb Bakounin. He has one answer, Revolution! As he said in the beginning, so he repeats: ”To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church, ... the third is the social revolution.”[40] ”A cure is possible only through the social revolution,”[41] that is, through ”the destruction of all inst.i.tutions of inequality, and the establishment of economic and social equality.”[42]

However, if Bakounin's idea of the social revolution never altered, the methods by which it was to be carried out suffered a change as a result of his experience in the International. In 1871 he no longer advocated, openly at any rate, secret conspiracies, the ”loosening of evil pa.s.sions,” or some vague ”unchaining of the hydra.” He begins then to oppose to political action what he calls economic action.[43] In the fragment--not published during Bakounin's life--the _Protestation de l'Alliance_, he covers for the hundredth time his arguments against the _Volksstaat_, which is a ”ridiculous contradiction, a fiction, a lie.”[44] ”The State ... will always be an inst.i.tution of domination and of exploitation ... a permanent source of slavery and of misery.”[45]

How, then, shall the State be destroyed? Bakounin's answer is ”first, by the organization and the federation of strike funds and the international solidarity of strikes; secondly, by the organization and international federation of trade unions; and, lastly, by the spontaneous and direct development of philosophical and sociological ideas in the International....

”Let us now consider these three ways in their special action, differing one from another, but, as I have just said, inseparable, and let us commence with the organization of strike funds and strikes.

”Strike funds have for their sole object to provide the necessary money in order to make possible the costly organization and maintenance of strikes. And the strike is the beginning of the social war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, while still within the limits of legality.[T] Strikes are a valuable weapon in this twofold connection; first, because they electrify the ma.s.ses, give fresh impetus to their moral energy, and awaken in their hearts the profound antagonism which exists between their interests and those of the bourgeoisie, by showing them ever clearer the abyss which from this time irrevocably separates them from that cla.s.s; and, second, because they contribute in large measure to provoke and to const.i.tute among the workers of all trades, of all localities, and of all countries the consciousness and the fact itself of solidarity: a double action, the one negative and the other positive, which tends to const.i.tute directly the new world of the proletariat by opposing it, almost absolutely, to the bourgeois world.”[46]