Michael Bakunin
Autumn 1868
1. The principles of this organisation are the same as those of the programme of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. They are even more explicitly laid out, with regard to the issues of women, the religious and juridical family and the State, in the programme of Russian socialist democracy.
The central bureau reserves the right to provide a more complete and practical development of these principles soon.
2. The association of international brothers wants a universal revolution, social, philosophical, economic and pollical at the same time, so that the current order of things, based on property, on exploitation, on domination and on the principle of authority, whether religious, or metaphysical and bourgeois doctrinaire, or even revolutionary Jacobin, no longer remains, not a stone upon another, first throughout all of Europe, and then in the rest of the world, to the cry of peace to the workers, freedom to all the oppressed, and death to the dominators, exploiters, and guardians of every kind, we want to destroy all states and all churches, with all their religious, political, judicial, financial, police, academic, economic and social institutions, so that all these millions of poor deceived, enslaved, tormented, exploited human beings, delivered from all their official and unofficial masters and benefactors, may at last breathe with complete freedom, [both] associations and individuals.
3. Convinced that individual and social evil resides far less in individuals than in the organisation of things and in social positions, we will be humane, as much out of a sense of justice as out of a calculation of utility, and we will mercilessly destroy positions and things so that we can spare men without any danger to the Revolution. We deny free will and the supposed right of society to punish. Justice itself, taken in its broadest and most humane sense, is only an idea, so to speak, negative and transitional; it merely indicates the only possible path to human emancipation, that is to say to the humanisation of society by freedom within equality; the positive solution can only be found through the increasingly rational organisation of society. This much-desired solution, our shared ideal... is freedom, morality, intelligence and the well-being of each through the solidarity of all - human fraternity.
Every human individual is the involuntary product of a natural and social environment in which they were born, developed and whose influence they continue to experience. The three main causes of all human immorality are: political, economic and social inequality; ignorance, which is its natural result; and its inevitable consequence - slavery.
The organisation of society being always and everywhere the sole cause of the crimes committed by men, there is obvious hypocrisy or absurdity for society to punish criminals, as all punishment presupposes guilt, and criminals are never guilty. The theory of guilt and punishment stems from theology, that is to say from the marriage of absurdity with religious hypocrisy.
The only right that can be recognised in society in its current state of transition is the natural right to murder the criminals it has produced in the interest of its own defence; and not the right to right to judge and condemn them. This right will not even be one in the strict sense of the word; it will rather be a natural, distressing but inevitable fact, a sign and product of the impotence and stupidity of current society; and the more society learns to avoid using it, the closer it will be to its true emancipation. All revolutionaries, the oppressed, the suffering victims of the current organisation of society, whose hearts are naturally filled with vengeance and hatred, must remember that kings, oppressors, exploiters of all kinds are just as guilty as criminals drawn from the masses: they are wrongdoers but not guilty, since they too, like ordinary criminals, are involuntary products of the current organisation of society. It should come as no surprise if, at first, the insurgent people kill many of them - this will be an inevitable misfortune perhaps, as meaningless as the devastation caused by a storm.
But this natural fact will be neither moral nor even useful. History is full of lessons in this respect: - the terrible guillotine of 1793, which cannot be accused of either laziness or slowness, did not succeed in destroying the nobility in France. The aristocracy was, if not completely destroyed, at least profoundly shaken, not by the guillotine, but by the confiscation and sale of its property. And in general we can say that political carnage has never killed parties; it has proven powerless against the privileged classes, since power resides much less in men than in the positions that the organisation of things grants to privileged men, that is to say the institution of the State and its consequence as well as its natural basis, individual property.
To make a radical revolution, it is therefore necessary to attack positions and things, to destroy property and the State, then there will be no need to destroy men, and to condemn oneself to the unfailing and inevitable reaction that has never failed and will never fail to produce in every society the massacre of men.
But to have the right to be humane for men, without endangering the revolution, it will be necessary to be ruthless towards positions and things; everything must be destroyed, and above all, [the institution of] property, and its inevitable corollary - the State.[1] That is the whole secret of the revolution.
It should not be surprising if the Jacobins and the Blanquists, who became socialists more out of necessity than conviction, and for whom socialism is a means, not the goal of the Revolution, since they want dictatorship, that is to say the centralisation of the State and the State will lead them by a logical and inevitable necessity to the reconstitution of property - it is quite natural, we say, that not wanting to make a radical revolution against things, they dream of a bloody revolution against men. - But this bloody revolution, founded upon the construction of a powerfully centralised revolutionary State, would inevitably result, as we will further prove later, in a military dictatorship under a new master. Therefore, the triumph of the Jacobins or the Blanquists would be the death of the Revolution.
4. We are the natural enemies of these revolutionaries - future dictators, regulators and guardians of the revolution - who, even before the current monarchical, aristocratic and bourgeois States are destroyed, are already dreaming of the creation of new revolutionary States just as centralised and more despotic than the State that exist today, who are so accustomed to the order created by some authority from above and have such a great horror of what appears to them to be disorder and which is nothing other than the frank and natural expression of popular life, that even before a good and salutary disorder has occurred by revolution, they are already dreaming of its end and its muzzling by the action of some authority that will have nothing revolutionary about it other than the name, but which in fact will be nothing but a new reaction since it will in fact be a new condemnation of the popular masses, governed by decrees, to obedience, to immobility, to death, that is to say to slavery and exploitation by a new quasi-revolutionary aristocracy.
5. We understand revolution in the sense of the unleashing of what is today called the evil passions, and the destruction of what in the same language is called “public order”.
We do not fear anarchy, we invoke it, convinced that from this anarchy, that is to say from the full manifestation of unleashed popular life, will emerge freedom, equality, justice, the new order, and the very strength of the Revolution against the Reaction. This new life - the people’s revolution - will without doubt soon organise itself, but it will create its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the circumference to the centre - according to the principle of freedom, and not from the top down, nor from the centre to the circumference as is the method of all authority - for it matters little to us whether this authority is called Church, Monarchy, Constitutional State, Bourgeois Republic, or even revolutionary dictatorship. We detest and reject them all equally - as infallible sources of exploitation and despotism.
6. The revolution as we understand it must, from its very first day, radically and completely destroy the State and all the institutions of the State. The natural and necessary consequences of this destruction will be: a) the bankruptcy of the State; b) the cessation of payment of private debts by the intervention of the State, leaving each debtor the right to pay their own if they wish; c) the cessation of all tax payments and the collection of all taxes, whether direct or indirect; d) the dissolution of the army, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the police and the priesthood; e) the abolition of official justice, the suspension of everything legally called right, and of the exercise of those rights. Consequently, the abolition and burning of all property titles, deeds of inheritance, of sale, of endowment, of all court cases - all legal and civil paperwork in short. Everywhere and in everything, the revolutionary fact takes precedence over the law created and guaranteed by the State; f) the confiscation of all productive capital and instruments of labour for the benefit of workers’ associations, which will have to work them collectively; g) the confiscation of all Church and State property as well as precious metals from individuals for the benefits of the federative Alliance of all the workers’ association - an Alliance which will constitute the Commune.
In return for the confiscated goods, the Commune will provide the bare necessities to all individuals thus dispossessed, who may later earn more through their own labour if they can and if they wish. h) For the organisation of the Commune, the permanent federation of the barricades and the office of a Revolutionary Commune Council by the delegation of one or two deputies from each barricade, one per street, or per neighbourhood [quartier], deputies invested with binding mandates [mandats impératifs], always accountable and always revocable.[2] The Commune Council thus organised may choose from amongst its members executive committees - distinct for each branch of the revolutionary administration of the Commune.[3] i) Declaration of the insurgent capital organised as a commune that after having destroyed the authoritarian and tutelary State, which it was within its right to do since it was its slave like all other localities, it renounced its right, or rather any claim to govern, to impose on the provinces. k) Appeal to all provinces, communes, and associations, urging all of them to follow the example set by the capital to first reorganise themselves a revolutionary manner, and then to delegate, at an agreed meeting place, their deputies, all equally invested with binding, responsible and revocable mandates to establish the federation of associations, communes, and insurgent provinces in the name of the same principles, and to organise a revolutionary force capable of triumphing over reaction. Sending not official revolutionary commissioners with any kind of insignia [écharpes], but revolutionary propagators into all provinces and communes -especially amongst the peasants who cannot be revolutionised either by the principles or by the decrees of any dictatorship, but only by the revolutionary fact itself, that is to say by the consequences which will infallibly be produced in all communes by the complete cessation of the legal, official life of the State. Abolition of the nation State also in the sense that any foreign country, province, commune, association or even an isolated individual, which had risen up in the name of the same principles, will be received into the revolutionary federation without regard for the current borders of States and although belonging to different political or national systems, and that its own provinces, communes, associations, individuals which take the side of Reaction will be excluded. It is therefore through the very act of the outpouring and organisation of the revolution for the mutual defence of the insurgent countries that the universality of the revolution founded upon the abolition of borders and the ruin of States will triumph.
7. There can no longer be a triumphant political or national revolution unless the political revolution transforms itself into a social revolution, and the national revolution, precisely by virtue of its radically socialist character and its destruction of the State, becomes the universal revolution.
8. The revolution must be made everywhere by the people, and supreme direction must and always remain with the people organised in a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations - the revolutionary and new State, organised from the bottom up by way of revolutionary delegation and encompassing all insurgent countries in the name of the same principles, without regard for old borders or differences in nationality, will have its object the administration of public services and not the government of people. It will constitute the new homeland, the Alliance of Universal Revolution against the alliance of all reactions.
9. This organisation excludes any idea of dictatorship or tutelary ruling power. But for the establishment of this revolutionary alliance and for the triumph of the revolution over reaction, it is necessary that, amidst the popular anarchy which will constitute the very life and all the energy of the revolution, the unity of revolutionary thought and action find an organ. This organ must be the secret and universal Association of International Brothers.
10. This association is based on the conviction that revolutions are never made by individuals, nor even by secret societies. They happen as if by themselves, produced by the force of circumstances, by the movement of events and facts. They are long prepared in the depths of the instinctive consciousness of the masses - then they erupt, often seemingly provoked by trivial causes. All that a well-organised secret society can do is first help the birth of a revolution by spreading amongst the masses ideas corresponding to the instincts of the masses and to organise, not the army of revolution - the army must always be the people - but a kind of revolutionary general staff made up of devoted, energetic, intelligent individuals, and above all sincere, and not ambitious or vain, friends of the people - capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and popular instincts.
11. The number of these individuals therefore need not be immense. For the international organisation in all of Europe, one hundred strongly and seriously allied revolutionaries are sufficient. Two or three hundred revolutionaries will suffice for the organisation of the largest country.
[1] Given that Bakunin later indicates that workers’ associations would seize “productive capital and the instruments of labour”, he clearly is not literally calling for the destruction of property in the sense of things but rather the abolition of private property and the authoritarian social relationships it generates by turning it into collective property. His earlier comments on destroying the current system should be understood in this sense, namely destroying institutions rather than literal destruction. (Translator)
[2] Compare to Proudhon: “The choice of talents, the imperative mandate, and permanent revocability are the most immediate and incontestable consequences of the electoral principle. It is the inevitable program of all democracy.” (“Solution to the Social Problem”, Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology [Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011], 273). (Translator)
[3] Compare to Proudhon: “It is not enough to say that one is opposed to the presidency unless one also does away with ministries, the eternal focus of political ambition. It is up to the National Assembly, through organisation of its committees, to exercise executive power, just the way it exercises legislative power through its joint deliberations and votes.” (“Election Manifesto of Le Peuple”, Property is Theft!, 378). (Translator)