Michael Bakunin
5 October 1872
Dear Editors,
Having published the sentence of excommunication that the Marxist Congress in The Hague has just pronounced against me, you will find it just, will you not, to publish my response. Here it is.
The triumph of M. Marx and his followers was complete. Certain of a majority which they had long prepared and organised with great skill and care, if not with great respect for those principles of Morality, of Truth and of Justice which are so often found in their speeches and so rarely in their actions, the Marxists lifted the mask, and, as befits men in love with power, always in the name of that sovereignty of the people which, henceforth, will serve as a stepping stone for all pretenders to the government of the masses, they have boldly decreed the enslavement of the people of the International.
If the International were less vibrant, if it were founded, as they imagine, solely on the organisation of directing centres, and not on the real solidarity of the interests and the actual aspirations of the proletariat in all countries of the civilised world, on the spontaneous and free federation of the workers’ sections and federations, independently of any governmental tutelage, the decrees of that harmful Congress of The Hague, an all too complacent and faithful embodiment of Marxist theories and practices, would have been enough to kill it. They would have rendered this magnificence association, in whose foundation, I am pleased to note, M. Marx had played such an intelligent and energetic part, both ridiculous and odious.
A State, a government, a universal dictatorship! The dream of Gregory VII, Boniface VIII, Charles V, and Napoleon, reproduced in new forms, but always with the same pretensions, in the camp of socialist democracy! Can you imagine anything more ludicrous, but also more appalling?
To claim that a group of individuals, even the most intelligent and well-intentioned, will be capable of becoming the thought, the soul, the directing and unifying will of the revolutionary movement and the economic organisation of the proletariat of all countries, is such a heresy against common sense and against historical experience that you wonder with astonishment how a man as intelligent as M. Marx could have conceived it?
The popes at least had the excuse of absolute truth, which they claimed to hold in their hands by the Grace of the Holy Spirit and in which they were expected to believe. M. Marx does not have this excuse, and I will not insult him by suggesting that he imagines he has scientifically invented something approaching absolute truth. But since the absolute does not exist, there can be no infallible dogma for the International, nor consequently any official political or economic theory, and our congresses must never claim the role of ecumenical councils proclaiming principles binding upon all adherents and believers.
There is only one law that is truly binding for all members, individuals, sections and federations of the International, and this law constitutes its true, only basis. It is, in its entirety, in all its consequences and applications, THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY OF WORKERS OF ALL TRADES AND ALL COUNTRIES IN THEIR ECONOMIC STRUGGLE AGAINST THE EXPLOITERS OF LABOUR. It is in the actual organisation of this solidarity, by the spontaneous action of the working masses and by absolutely free federation, which will be all the more powerful as it is free, of the working masses of all languages and all nations, not in their unification by decrees and under the rod of any government, that the real and living unity of the international solely resides.
Who can doubt that the political struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie must indeed emerge from this ever-expanding organisation of the militant solidarity of the proletariat against bourgeois exploitation? The Marxists and us are unanimous on this point. But immediately the question arises that separates us so deeply from the Marxists.
We think that the necessarily revolutionary politics of the proletariat must have as its immediate and sole objective the destruction of States. We do not understand how you can speak of international solidarity when you want to preserve States - unless you dream of the universal State, that is to say universal slavery, like the great emperors and popes - the State by it very nature being a rupture of this solidarity and consequently a permanent cause of war. Nor do we conceive of speaking of the freedom of the proletariat or of the real liberation of the masses in and by the State. State means domination, and all domination presupposes the subjugation of the masses and consequently their exploitation for the benefit of some ruling minority.
We do not accept, even as a revolutionary transition, National Conventions, Constituent Assemblies, provisional governments, or so-called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is sincere, honest and real only among the masses, and that when it is concentrated in the hands of a few governing individuals, it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction. This is our belief; this is not the time to elaborate upon it.
The Marxists profess completely contrary ideas. As befits good Germans, they are worshippers of the power of the State, and necessarily also prophets of political and social discipline, champions of order established from top to bottom, always in the name of universal suffrage and the sovereignty of the masses, to whom is reserved the happiness and honour of obeying their leaders, elected masters. The Marxists admit no emancipation other than that which they expect from their so-called People’s State (Volksstaat). They are so little enemies of patriotism that their own International too often bears the colours of Pan-Germanism. There is undoubtedly a very significant difference between Bismarckian and Marxist politics, but there is an abyss between the Marxists and us. They are governmentalists, we are anarchists regardless.
These are the two main tendencies that today divide the International into two camps. On the one side, there is strictly speaking only Germany; on the other, there are, to varying degrees, Italy, Spain, the Swiss Jura, a large part of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and, in the very near future, the Slavic peoples. These two tendencies clashed at the Congress of The Hague, and, thanks to the great skill of M. Marx, thanks to the entirely artificial organisation of its last Congress, the Germanic tendency prevailed.
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But what to do today? Since the solution and reconciliation on the political field are impossible today, we must tolerate each other and allow each country the undeniable right to follow the political trends that it prefers or that seem best suited to its particular situation. Consequently rejecting all political issues from the obligatory programme of the International, the unity of this great association must be sought solely on the terrain of economic solidarity. This solidarity unites us, while political questions inevitably divide us.
It is certain that neither the Italians, nor the Spanish, nor the Jurassians, nor the French, nor the Belgians, nor the Dutch, nor the Slavic peoples, these historical enemies of Pan-Germanism, nor even the proletariat of England and America, will ever submit to the political tendencies that the ambition of its leaders is imposing upon the proletariat of Germany today. But even supposing that, as a result of this disobedience, the new General Council imposes a ban on all these countries and that a new ecumenical council of Marxists excommunicates them and declares them rejected from the midst of the International, will the economic solidarity which necessarily, naturally and actually exists between the proletariat of all these countries and that of Germany be diminished? Whether the workers of Germany go on strike, whether they revolt against the economic tyranny of their bosses, or whether they revolt against the political tyranny of a government that is the natural protector of capitalists and other exploiters of the people’s labour, will the proletariat of all these countries excommunicated by the Marxists remain with its arms folded, an indifferent spectator of that struggle? No, it will give them all its meagre money and, what is more, it will give all its blood to its brothers in Germany, without first asking them what political system they believe it should seek its deliverance from.
This, then, is where the true unity of the International lies: in the common aspirations and spontaneous movement of the popular masses in all countries, and not in any government whatsoever, nor in a uniform political theory imposed on these masses by a General Congress. It is so obvious that you would have to be truly blinded by the passion for power not to understand it.
I can conceive, at a stretch, that crowned or uncrowned despots might have dreamt of world domination; but what to say of a friend of the proletariat, a revolutionary who claims to seriously want the emancipation of the masses and who, by posing as supreme director and arbiter of all revolutionary movements that may erupt in different countries, dares to dream of the subjugation of the proletariat of all these countries to a single thought, hatched in his own brain!
I think that M. Marx is a very serious revolutionary, if not always very sincere, that he really wants the uprising of the masses; and I wonder how he fails to see that the establishment of a universal dictatorship, collective or individual, a dictatorship that would somehow do the work of a chief engineer of the world revolution, regulating and directing the insurrectionary movement of the masses of all countries as one operates a machine - that the establishment of such a dictatorship would by itself be enough to destroy the revolution, to paralyse and distort all popular movements? What man, what group of individuals, however great their genius, would dare to flatter themselves that they could even grasp and understand the infinite multitude of interests, tendencies and activities so diverse in each country, in each province, in each locality, in each trade, and whose immense whole, united but not uniformised by a great common aspiration and by a few fundamental principles which have now passed into the consciousness of the masses, will constitute the future social revolution?
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This Marxist thought is explicitly developed in the famous Manifesto of the German Communists, written and published in 1848 by Marx and Engels. It is the theory of the emancipation of the proletariat and the organisation of labour by the State. It seems that at The Hague Congress, Engels, alarmed by the deplorable impression made by reading a few pages of this Manifesto, hastened to declare that it was an outdated document, a theory abandoned by them. If he said that, he was being disingenuous; for on the very eve of this Congress, the Marxists had tried to disseminate this document in all countries. Moreover, it is literally reproduced, with all its main features, in the programme of the German Social Democratic Workers Party. The principal point, which is also found in the manifesto drafted in 1864 on behalf of the provisional General Council, and which was removed from the programme of the International by the Geneva Congress of 1866, is the CONQUEST OF POLITICAL POWER BY THE WORKING CLASS.
It is understandable that men as indispensable as Messrs. Marx and Engels would support a programme which, by enshrining and advocating political power, opens the door to all ambitions. Since there will be political power, there will necessarily be subjects, disguised as citizens in a republican manner, it is true, but who will nonetheless be subjects, and who as such will be forced to obey, because without obedience there is no power possible. It will be objected that they will not be obeying men, but laws that they themselves have made. To this I will reply that everyone knows how, in the most democratic, the most free, but politically governed countries, the people make the laws, and what their obedience to these laws means. Anyone who is not inclined to mistake fictions for realities will have to recognise that, even in these countries, the people obey not laws that they actually make themselves, but laws that are made in their name, and that obeying these laws never has any other meaning for them than to submit to the arbitrary rule of some tutelary and governing minority, or, which means the same thing, to be freely enslaved.
There is another expression in this programme that is deeply repugnant to us revolutionary anarchists who frankly want the complete emancipation of the people: it is the proletariat, the world of workers presented as a class, not as a mass. Do you know what this means? No more and no less than a new aristocracy, that of the factory and city workers, to the exclusion of the millions who constitute the rural proletariat and who, according to the predictions of the Social Democrats of Germany, will entirely become subjects in their grand so-called People’s State. Class, power, State are three inseparable terms, each of which presupposed the other two, and which together are definitively summed up by these words: The political subjugation and economic exploitation of the masses.
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It is always the same German temperament and the same logic that leads them directly, inevitably, into what we call bourgeois socialism, and to the conclusion of a new political pact between the radical bourgeoisie or those forced to become such, and the intelligent, respectable minority, that is to say duly embourgeoisified, of the urban proletariat, to the exclusion and to the detriment of the mass of the proletariat, not only in the countryside, but in the cities.
This is the true meaning of the workers’ candidacies for the parliaments of existing States, and of the conquest of political power by the working class. For even from the point of view of the urban proletariat alone, for whose exclusive benefit political power is to be seized, is it not clear that the popular nature of this power will never be anything but a fiction? It will obviously be impossible for a few hundred, or even a few tens of thousands, should I say, just a few thousands of men, to actually wield this power. They will necessarily have to exercise it by proxy, that is to say entrust it to a group of men elected by themselves to represent them and govern them, which will inevitably lead them back into all the lies and all the servitudes of the representative or bourgeois regime. After a brief moment of freedom or revolutionary frenzy, citizens of a new State, they will awaken to be slaves, playthings and victims of new ambitious men.
You can understand how and why skilled politicians become passionately attached to a programme that opens such a wide horizon to their ambition; but that serious workers, who carry in their hearts like a living flame the feeling of solidarity with their comrades in slavery and misery across the world, and who want to emancipate themselves not at the expense of all, but by the emancipation of all, so that they themselves may be free with all and not become tyrants in their turn; that workers of good faith could become enamoured with such a programme, that is what is much more difficult to understand.
So I firmly believe that in a few years the workers of Germany themselves, recognising the fatal consequences of a theory that can only favour the ambition of their bourgeois leaders, or of the few rare workers who seek to climb onto their shoulders to become in their turn domineering and exploitative bourgeois, will reject it with disdain and anger, and that they will embrace with as much passion as the workers of the great southern countries, France, Spain, Italy, as well as the Dutch and Belgian workers, do today, the true programme of workers’ emancipation, that of the destruction of States.
In the meantime, we fully recognise their right to follow the path they deem best, provided they grant us the same freedom. We even acknowledge that it is quite possible that, given their history, their particular nature, the state of their civilisation and their current situation, they may be forced to follow this path. Let German, American and English workers strive to seize political power, since that pleases them. But let them allow workers in other countries to march with the same energy toward the destruction of all political powers. Freedom for all and mutual respect for that freedom, I have said, are the essential conditions of international solidarity.
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The social revolution, as envisioned, desired and hoped for by Latin and Slavic workers, is infinitely broader than that promised by the German or Marxist programme. For them, it is not a question of the sparingly measured emancipation of the working class, achievable only in the very long term, but of the complete and real emancipation of the entire proletariat, not just of some countries, but of all nations, civilised and uncivilised, the new civilisation, frankly popular, having to begin with this act of universal emancipation. And the first word of this emancipation can only be freedom, not that political, bourgeois freedom, so much advocated and recommended as an object of a preliminary conquest by M. Marx and his followers, but the great human freedom which, destroying all the dogmatic, metaphysical, political and legal chains with which everyone is burdened today, will restore to everyone, collectives as much as individuals, full autonomy in their activities and development, freed once and for all from all inspectors, directors and guardians.
The second word of this emancipation is solidarity; not the Marxist solidarity, organised from the top down by some government and imposed either by cunning or by force on the masses; not that solidarity of all which is the negation of the freedom on each, and which thereby becomes a lie, a fiction, having slavery as its actual counterpart; but solidarity, which is on the contrary the confirmation and realisation of every freedom, taking its source not in any political law, but in the very collective nature of man, by virtue of which no man is free if all the men who surround him and who exert the slightest influence whether direct or indirect on his life are not equally free. This truth is beautifully expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man drafted by Robespierre, which proclaims that the slavery of the least of men is the slavery of all.
The solidarity we seek, far from being the result of any artificial or authoritarian organisation, can only be the spontaneous product of social life, both economic and moral; the result of the free federation of common interests, aspirations and tendencies. It has for its essential foundations equality, collective work, becoming obligatory for each person not by the force of laws, but by the force of circumstances, and collective property; its guiding light is experience, that is to say the practice of collective life, and science; and its final goal is the constitution of humanity, and consequently the ruin of all States.
This is the ideal, not divine, not metaphysical, but human and practical that alone corresponds to the modern aspirations of the Latin and Slavic peoples. They want complete freedom, complete solidarity, complete equality; in short, they want nothing less than humanity, and they will not be satisfied, even provisionally and temporarily, with anything less. The Marxists will condemn their aspirations as folly; it has not deterred them from their goal, and they will never exchange the magnificence of this goal for the utterly bourgeois poverty of Marxist socialism.
The communalist uprising of Paris has inaugurated the social revolution. The significance of this revolution lies not so much in the rather weak experiments it had the opportunity and time to make, but in the ideas it stirred, the bright light it case on the true nature and purpose of the revolution, the hopes it awakened everywhere, and thereby the powerful upheaval it produced amongst the popular masses of all countries, but especially in Italy, where the popular awakening dates from this insurrection, the main feature of which was the revolt of the Commune and workers’ associations against the State. By this insurrection France suddenly rose to its former standing, and the capital of the world revolution, Paris, regained its glorious initiative right under the very noses and cannon of the Bismarckianised Germans.
The effect was so universally impressive that even the Marxists themselves, whose ideas had been completely overturned by this insurrection, felt themselves obliged to take their hats off to it. They went further: contrary to the simplest logic and their true feelings, they proclaimed that its programme and its goal were theirs. It was a truly farcical, but forced, disguise. They had to do it, under pain of being surpassed and abandoned by all, so powerful had been the passion that this revolution had provoked in everyone.
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