Michael Bakunin
13-27 March 1872
La Société nouvelle, Year 12, Volume 1, 1896
My dear friend.
At the same time your letter arrived, I received the huge, the sad news: Mazzini is dead.
Italy has just lost one of its most illustrious sons. For none of us can doubt that Mazzini, along with Garibaldi, was one of the greatest Italian figures, the second hero of the century. An eminent intelligence, a fervent heart, an indomitable will, an unwavering, sublime devotion, these are certainly qualities that no one will dare to dispute and which make great men.
And yet, at the end of his long and magnificent career, he encountered in us convinced and irreconcilable adversaries. We fought him, not with a light heart, but with sadness in our souls, and because our duty, our religion, the religion of humanity, opposed to that of divinity, had commanded us to fight.
Mazzini’s theological ideas, imbued with that liberty-crushing power inherent in all divine abstractions, having finally triumphed over his revolutionary temperament and his fundamentally liberal Italian nature, transformed him, in his last days, into an implacable adversary of the revolution. He cursed it in all its greatest contemporary manifestations: in the Paris Commune, whose destructive programme of the political centralisation of States, and whose uprising as well as heroic martyrdom inaugurated a new era in history; in the International, a magnificent organisation, which emerged from the very depths of the life of the proletariat of Europe, and which has unquestionably become today the most powerful if not the only instrument of its imminent liberation; in free thought, this alter ego, this ideal expression, inseparable from the material emancipation of humankind; and in positive science, the human sun that rises today to replace with its certain day the equivocal light of divine suns; finally in the generous and fruitful alliance that the most vibrant and intelligent part of your youth has concluded with the Italian proletariat, on the sole basis of human justice and solidarity. Mazzini attacked us in everything we hold dear and sacred, and sought to impose upon us ideas and institutions that we detest with all our hearts and with the full force of our convictions. We would have been cowards and traitors if we had not fought him to the bitter end. The deep feeling of sympathetic respect, of piety which we have never ceased to feel for the sublime and sincere retrograde, had made this fight very painful, very distressing, but it was impossible for us to evade it without betraying our cause, the great cause of the final triumph of humanity over divinity and brutality united in a single reactionary effort - by the economic and social emancipation of the proletariat.
[...]
Allow a friend to protect you from another danger. All of thinking and feeling Italy, gripped by immense sorrow, is united today in a feeling of adoration for Mazzini. Even if there were no other proof than this, it alone would suffice to show how Italy, amidst the general decline of Europe, has remained a great and vibrant nation. Italy honours and affirms itself in the veneration it pays to one of its greatest, one of its most passionately devoted sons and servants. What could be more natural, in this moment of supreme pain and enthusiasm, than for Mazzinians and Italian Internationalists, bourgeois revolutionaries and revolutionary socialists, forgetting for a moment all their past disagreements, to extend a fraternal hand to one another. But, please, even in the midst of this patriotic fervour, do not forget the chasm that separates your programme from the programme of the Mazzinians. Do not let yourselves to be drawn by them - which they will certainly try to do - into a joint practical undertaking that aligns with their programme, plans and methods of action, not yours. Call upon them to unite with you on your own terrain, but do not follow them onto theirs, which you could not accept without sacrificing and betraying this great cause of the proletariat that has now become yours. Do not forget that between the bourgeois revolution they dream of and the social revolution that now demands your services, there is truly an abyss, not only in terms of the goals, which are fundamentally different, but also in terms of the means, which must necessarily conform to those goals. By accepting their plans of action, not only would you ruin all your socialist work and tear your country away from the revolutionary solidarity that unites it today with all of Europe, but you would condemn yourselves, along with those who follow you down this new and disastrous path, to certain defeat, to a bloody and complete fiasco.
[...]
Our principle is quite the opposite, is that not so[?]; apart from positive science, we recognise no other source of moral truths than the very life of the people, positive science being only the methodical and reasoned summary of the immense historical experimentation of people. Society, taken in the broadest sense of the word, the people, the vile multitude, the mass of workers, not only gives power and life, it also gives the elements of all modern thought, and a thought which is not drawn from its midst and is not the faithful expression of popular instincts is, in my opinion, a stillborn thought. From this I draw the conclusion that the role of devoted and educated youth is not that of revealers, of prophets, of instructors and of teachers, not that of creators, but only of midwives of the thought born from the very life of the people; that is to say, young men who want to serve the people must seek their inspirations not outside of them, but within them, to give them in a clearly expressed form what they carry in a confused way in their aspirations, as unconscious as they are powerful.
Among the people’s thoughts, the one that undeniably holds the foremost place today in the aspirations of the masses of all countries is material or economic emancipation. The Mazzinians, from the height of their extra-popular and transcendent idealism, greatly disdain this tendency, and if they have been forced to make certain concessions to it recently, they do so only with a kind of contemptuous condescension towards the vile brutality of these masses incapable of forgetting their bellies and living solely in contemplation of the ideal. Their contemptuous socialism is a kind of lure for the multitude whom the beauty of this ideal does not touch. Blinded by their own theological and political ideas, ideas which in the end represent so many old and new chains for the people, they saw in this aspiration only the brutal expression of brutal appetites, and they did not understand that, in its unconscious and naïve form, it contains the highest and most emancipatory idea of the century; that which, by destroying all idealities as abstractions, as fictions or as theological, poetic, juridical and political symbols, must transform them into living popular realities: truth, justice, freedom, equality, solidarity, fraternity, humanities, all these magnificent things, as long as they remained in the state of theological, poetic, political and juridical truths, have only served to consecrate and cloak the most brutal and harsh oppression and exploitation in the real life of the people, and expressed only the condemnation of the masses to eternal misery and servitude. Has not the true basis, as well as the ultimate consequence of all these splendid abstractions, always been, since the beginning of history, the exploitation of the forced labour of the masses for the benefit of privileged minorities called classes? Has not the Catholic Church, the most ideal of all in principle, been, since the first years of its official existence, that is to say, since the Emperor Constantine the Great, the most rapacious and avaricious institution? And everything else follows suit. All the splendours of Christian civilisation, Church, State, material prosperity of nations, science, art, poetry, has not all of this rested upon the support of the slavery, the subjugation, the misery of millions of workers who constitute the true people? What, then, is the people doing by asking this terrible economic question? It attacks this entire civilisation, which has enslaved it for too long, at its very foundation. It forces eternal ideals whether theological or political to fall from the heavens to the earth of real life and transform themselves into living and fruitful realities for the people. By demanding their daily bread, the full product of their labour, the people are thus demanding for themselves science, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, and, in a word, humanity. It follows that their materialism, which the Mazzinians so despise, is the highest expression of practical and real idealism.
[...]
What can and must save Italy from the degrading and ruinous state of prostration into which it now finds itself, what you must prepare and organise, it seems to me, is not a ridiculous uprising of heroic but blind youth, but a great popular revolution. For this, it is not enough to rouse a few hundred young people to take up arms, it is not even enough to rouse the urban proletariat; the countryside, your twenty million peasants, must also rise up.
[...]
This is where the greatest danger lies. The entire future of your country depends on the side your peasants will take in the coming revolution. Until now, they have remained passive and have submitted almost without resistance to the fate and forms of government that the cities have been kind enough to impose upon them. But you know better than I that the peasants in your country, as everywhere else, and perhaps in your country more than anywhere else, do not like the cities. Since the cities have been, more or less, politically revolutionary, the peasants were necessarily reactionary, less because of the malevolent influence of priests than because of the entirely natural and, let us say, the entirely legitimate hatred they harboured against the cities, both through historical tradition and as a result of all their more recent experiences. The peasants detest the bourgeoisie.
Now that the urban proletariat is awakening and organising itself in a revolutionary manner in Italy as well as in all other European countries, the countryside, the compact mass of the peasantry, has become the only means of salvation and the only fulcrum for reaction. A fulcrum so formidable that as long as we do not wrest it from reaction, we will never be able to triumph over it; we will always be defeated by it. The entire question of revolutionary triumph thus boils down to this: How to rouse, how to revolutionise the peasantry?
My friends, is it not clear to you as to me that Mazzini’s magical and mystical formulas, which have lost even today the power they once held over Italian youth, are insufficient to rouse not only the peasants, but even the proletariat of your cities? Both the people of the countryside and the people of the cities thirst for emancipation. But what is called political freedom in reality emancipates only the bourgeoisie; and since this sort of freedom is organised in a large centralist State, even if that State were a republic as Mazzini would have liked and as the Mazzinians still want; since [this kind of] freedom is very expensive and since all the expenses of the State ultimately fall upon the working people, it follows that this political freedom heaps a new burden upon the camel of the people, which is overburdened to the point of being unable to carry any more, as General Garibaldi aptly said. This so-called political freedom in the name of which the Mazzinians, despite so many cruel disappointments, still do not despair of rousing the popular masses, without whose powerful cooperation there is no possible revolution, this political freedom therefore means nothing else, for these masses, than new servitude and new misery.
Real emancipation for the people can only be achieved by the social revolution. This revolution will necessarily have, like all living and active things, two sides: the negative side and the positive side. The negative side is the destruction of what is, of all that ruins and oppresses popular life; this will be precisely the act by which the camel of the people will throw to the ground the ever-growing burden that has crushed it for centuries; and this burden itself is of a twofold nature: the purely political and fiscal burden, which hinders the spontaneous development, the free movement of the masses, on the one hand, and on the other, overburdens and ruins them with taxes and duties - this is the burden of the State. The other part of the burden is the economic exploitation of the people’s labour by capital monopolised in the hands of the very lofty and very wealthy bourgeoisie. At bottom, these two parts of the burden are inseparable, because the State, necessarily hostile, conquering and rupturing human solidarity externally, has never had any other mission internally than to consecrate, legitimise and regulate the exploitation of the people’s labour, for the benefit of the privileged classes.
The overthrow of the current State and financial monopoly is therefore the negative objective of the social revolution. What will be the limits of this revolution? In theory, by its very logic, it goes very far. But practice always lags behind theory, because it is subject to a multitude of social conditions, the sum of which constitutes the actual situation of a country, and which necessarily weigh upon every truly popular revolution. The duty of leaders will not be to impose their own fantasies upon the masses, but to go as far as popular instinct and aspirations allow or dictate. The positive objective of the social revolution will be the organisation of a more or less emancipated society.
In this respect too, the ideal is very clearly defined by the theory. As a political organisation, it is the absolutely free spontaneous federation of communes and workers’ associations; as a social organisation, it is the collective appropriation of capital and land by workers’ associations. In practice, this will be what each section, each province, each commune and each workers’ association can and wants to do, provided that it truly reflects the real will of the people and not the arbitrariness, the fancy, or the reluctance of the leaders which decide.
One of the greatest concerns of those who today are at the head of the revolutionary socialist movement in Italy should be, in my opinion, to find and fix, as far as it is possible to do today, at least the principal lines of the plan and especially the programme of the coming revolutionary uprising. Without ever losing sight of the ideal, which must guide us as the North Star once guided sailors - and by this word ideal I mean all justice, all freedom, the most complete economic and social equality, and universal solidarity and human fraternity - in order to form a practical and possible programme, it is necessary to take into account the different situations of each of your provinces, as well as the dispositions of certain classes of your society. Not all of them. For if you tried to please all classes, you would inevitably arrive at nothing; the interests of the governing and upper classes being too opposed to those of the lower classes for any reconciliation between them to be possible. I therefore believe that all classes which, either directly or indirectly, have an interest in maintaining the current State must be sacrificed without mercy: thus the entire nobility and the entire upper bourgeoisie of finance, commerce and industry, all the great owners of land and capital, and to a large part also the middle bourgeoisie: those whose children now fill the army as officers and the bureaucracy as functionaries. This middle bourgeoisie, in Italy as everywhere, is a cowardly and stupid class, the support of all corruption, all injustice, all despotism.
In Italy, there are four social strata that, in my opinion, must be taken into account. And above all, the two principal strata, the most numerous and forming the real basis of the entire nation: the proletariat of the cities and that of the countryside; the workers proper and the peasants. It is they who must set the main tone, the real trend for the next revolution. Do I need to tell you that both are necessarily, eminently, instinctively socialist?
Your urban workers give you new proof of this every day. The eagerness with which they rally under the banner of the International wherever there are even a few individuals of goodwill capable of displaying it is irrefutable proof. The Mazzinians themselves have finally acknowledged this; thus we see them today engaging in a socialism of very poor quality and no doubt with much clumsiness. Idealists, they will never be able to do it seriously. But the socialist spirit that has seized the working masses is too powerful for them to ignore any longer. Within this mass, which I have called the urban proletariat, the entire ideal, as I have just defined it, is already the object of a very marked, very explicit tendency, so that if it were the only factor, we could go very far. The passion that animates it above all is that of absolute equality and justice. It demands that all people work equally under the same economic and social conditions, for the world to be a world of workers, and for there to be no more gentlemen, no more possibility for anyone to fatten themselves on the labour of others. It wants every worker to enjoy the full product of their own labour. Mazzini himself, in his later writings, acknowledged the legitimacy of this demand, which was the first inscribed in the programme of the International. But do you know what this demand means? Nothing less than the appropriation of all capital by workers’ associations, accomplished in one way or another. For as long as capital remains monopolised In the hands of individuals as personal property, and by the same reason workers’ associations, properly representing labour, remain deprived of capital, nothing can prevent capitalists from appropriating for their own benefit a portion, and always the largest portion, of the products of that labour. The interest on capital and all the premiums it earns in various financial, commercial and industrial speculations amount to nothing other than this unjust appropriation. For after all, put together as much capital as you like, it will never produce offspring. The moment workers’ associations are freed from the yoke of capital, which means that by possessing capital themselves they no longer need to pay for the services of outside capital, the latter will yield no more interest, and its current owners will have quickly consumed it. Emancipation of labour can therefore mean nothing other than the expropriation of the capitalists and the transformation of all capital necessary for work into the collective property of the workers’ associations.
As for the political ideal contained within the instincts of the urban proletariat, it seems to me to be divided today between two rather opposed and contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the urban worker, even the least educated, detached by the very nature of his occupations from the local spirit imprinted by the cultivation of the land, readily understands the universal solidarity of workers of all countries, and finds his homeland more in his particular trade than in the land on which he was born. The urban worker is more or less cosmopolitan. On the other hand, undoubtedly under the influence of the bourgeois doctrines he has endured for so long, he is not very opposed to the centralisation of the State. German and English workers today dream of this centralisation of a large State, provided, they say, that this State is truly popular: the workers’ State, which, in my opinion, constitutes a utopia, since every State and centralist government necessarily implies an aristocracy and exploitation, even if only those of the governing class. Let us never forget that the State signifies domination and that human nature is such that all domination inevitably and always results in exploitation.
[...]
Thus, the expropriation of the holders of capital and the transformation of capital into the collective property of the workers’ associations, along with the organisation of universal solidarity - this is the ideal of the urban proletariat.
Complete local freedom and the appropriation of all land by the workers of the land, this is the ideal of the rural proletariat.
These two ideals can be readily reconciled by the principle of the free federation of communes and workers’ associations, boldly proclaimed a year ago by the Paris Commune. And if there were only these two social strata, the programme for the social revolution would be quickly outlined.
But there are two other strata you must take into account; first, because their increasingly unfortunate situation inevitably makes them more revolutionary every day, and second, because, being very numerous, they exert a very real influence upon the people: in the cities, the petit bourgeois; and in the countryside, the class of very small landowners. These two classes have no real programme, both being completely disorientated. By their traditions and social vanity, they are somewhat akin to the privileged classes. Conversely, by their increasingly threatened and sacrificed instincts, and because of the real conditions of their existence, they are, on the other hand, increasingly drawn towards the proletariat. Yet they still retain some interests that would suffer from an overly consistent and logical application of the socialist principle, as it already emerges from the aspirations of the masses: reconciling these interests with these aspirations, without sacrificing the latter, is the task that falls to you today.
Federalism and socialism are the two principal elements of the coming revolution. This is the absolute opposite of Mazzini’s programme. Is it not clear, then, that any reconciliation between these two parties is impossible on the Mazzinian terrain? You cannot participate in their endeavours, firstly because they are inevitably doomed to failure; and secondly and above all because your goals and methods are absolutely different. You want the complete and definitive emancipation of Italian society and its new organisation or reorganisation on the basis of work that is both free and collective, from the bottom up, by means of federation and natural groupings. And they dream, on the contrary, of a new form of enslavement for this society under the yoke of a great unitary State. You want to prepare and organise a formidable popular uprising that will sweep away all opposition, crushing all that dares to resist it and rendering resistance itself impossible. And incapable of organising, or even dreaming of, such an uprising, the Mazzinians will continue to exhaust themselves in ridiculous endeavours.
[...]
I was therefore deeply saddened to see that the general [Garbaldi], troubled by the discord between democratic and socialist opinions in Italy, has essentially abandoned the idea of convening this congress [of the Italian Democracy] or has postponed it indefinitely, until there is more harmony in ideas. I believe that if you want to wait until then, you will wait a long time, forever, and that you will all die without having seen this absolute harmony realised. My dear friend, let me tell you, this harmony is unattainable and not even desirable. This harmony is the absence of struggle, the absence of life; it is death. In politics, it is despotism. Consider all of history and convince yourself that in every era and in every country, whenever there has been development and exuberance of life, thought, and free and creative action, there has been dissension, intellectual and social struggle, struggle of political parties, and that it is precisely in the midst of these struggles and thanks to them that nations have been the happiest and most powerful in the human sense of this word. This struggle did not or hardly existed in the great Asian monarchies: so there was a complete absence of human development. Consider, on the one hand, the Persian monarchy with its countless and disciplined troops, and on the other, free Greece, scarcely federated, continually tormented by the struggles of its peoples, its ideas, its parties. Who triumphed? Greece. What was the most fruitful period in Roman history? That was the struggle of the plebians against the patricians. And who brought greatness and glory to medieval Italy? Certainly, it was neither the papacy nor the empire. It was municipal liberties and the internal struggles of opinions and parties. Napoleon III had finally quelled these internal conflicts in France, and in doing so, he killed it. May the destiny of your beautiful homeland preserve it from a time when all minds are clam and in harmony. That would be the time of its demise.
See how different opinions can be. Many Italian democrats are alarmed by the division that have arisen within the democratic party in the last two years and see them as signs of the party’s decline. I, on the contrary, see them as a sign of its resurrection and a guarantee of its fertile and vital power. The “consortium”[1] is not divided. - Is it any more alive for that? As long as it was divided into certain [illegible] it retained remnants of life. But now that a touching unity has been established within it, and that this concord has also invaded the party of the parliamentary left, which is now separated from it only by personal interests and ambitions, do you not feel that all of this official Italy is truly dead. Well! Just a few years ago, Italian democracy, slumbering in the harmonious uniformity of the same [illegible], was on the verge of death. - Socialism revived it and thereby sparked within it an immense development of diverse thoughts and tendencies, and consequently internal struggle, that great educator of the strength which creates...
I will never tire of repeating it: Uniformity is death. Diversity is life. Disciplinary unity, which can only be established in any social environment at the expense of the creative spontaneity of thought and life, kills nations. The truly powerful, living unity, the one we all desire, is that which freedom creates within the very free and diverse manifestations of life, expressed through struggle: it is the balancing and harmonisation of all living forces. - I understand that a general of a division in a regular army loves the deathly silence that discipline imposes on the crowd. - Your general, our general, the general of the people, does not need this silence of slaves: accustomed to living and commanding in the midst of storms, he is never so great as in the storm. The storm is the unleashing of popular life, the only force capable of sweeping away this world of established iniquities - and we cannot unleash this passion and this life enough.
[...]
[1] The upper bourgeoisie and nobility. (Translator)