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Letter to The Red Menace #4 What Bakunin said Red Menace: Your issue discussing the Marx-Bakunin
dispute complains that anarchists merely talk around
Marxism, rather than getting down to Marx's actual words and intent.
But you then violate this stricture yourselves by not actually facing
what Bakunin himself said. I am hoping that you'll print these following
quotes, so as to provide your readers with at least a slice of Bakunin's
critique and social vision. “The leaders of the Communist Party, namely Mr. Marx and his
followers, will concentrate the reins of government in a strong
hand. They will centralize all commercial, industrial, agricultural,
and even scientific production, and then divide the masses into
two armies — industrial and agricultural — under the direct
command of state engineers, who will constitute a new privileged
scientific and political class.” 1873. “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat... In reality it would
be for the proletariat a barrack regime where the standardized mass
of men and women workers would wake, sleep, work and live to the
beat of a drum; for the clever and learned a privilege, of governing:
and for the mercenary minded, attracted by the State Bank, a vast
field of lucrative jobbery.” 1869. “The programe of the International is very happily explicit:
the emancipation of the workers can only be gained by the workers
themselves. Is it not astonishing that Marx has believed it
possible to graft on this never-the-less so precise declaration,
which he publically drafted himself, his scientific socialism?
That is to say, the organization of the government of the new society
by socialistic scientists and professors - the worst of all, despotic
governments! 1872. “No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation
and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom
can be created only by freedom.” 1872. “We who are Materialists and Determinists, just as much as
Marx himself, we also recognize the inevitable linking of economic
and political facts in history. We recognize, indeed, the necessity,
the inevitable character of all events, but we do not bow before
them indifferently and above all we are careful about praising them
when, by their nature, they show themselves in flagrant opposition
to the supreme end of history... the triumph of humanity... by the
absolute free and spontaneous organization of economic and social
solidarity as completely as possible between all human beings living
on earth. ... The Marxists do not reject our program absolutely. They only
reproach us with wanting to hasten, to outstrip, the slow march
of history and to ignore the scientific law of successive evolutions.
Having had the thoroughly German nerve to proclaim in their works
consecrated to the philisophical analysis of the past that the bloody
defeat of the insurgent peasants of Germany and the triumph of the
despotic states in the sixteenth century constituted a great revolutionary
progress, they today have the nerve to satisfy themselves with establishing
a new despotism to the so-called profit of the urban workers and
to the detriment of the toilers of the countryside... ... Mr. Engels, driver on by the same logic, in a letter addressed
to one of our friends, Carlo Cafiera, was able to say, without the
least irony, but on the contrary, very seriously, that Bismark as
well as King Victor Emmanuel II had rendered immense services to
the revolution, both of them having created political centralization
in their respective countries. I urge the French allies and sympathizers
of Mr. Marx to carefully examine how this Marxist concept is being
applied in the International.” 1872. “To support his programme of the conquest of political power,
Marx has a very special theory which is, moreover, only a logical
consequence of his whole system. The poitical condition of each
country, says he, is always the faithful expression of its economic
situation; to change the former it is only necessary to transform
the latter. According to Marx, all the secret of historic evolution
is there. He takes no account of other elements of history, such
as the quite obvious reaction of political., juridicial and religious
institutions on the economic situation. He says: 'Poverty produces
political slavery, the State.' But he does not allow this expression
to be turned around to say, 'Political slavery, the State, reproduces
in its turn, and maintains poverty as a condition of its own existence,
so that, in order to destroy poverty, it is necessary to destroy
the State!'” 1872. “Either one destroys the State or one must accept the vilest
and most fearful lie of our century: the red bureaucracy.” “Freedom without socialism is privilege and justice, and socialism
without freedom is slavery and brutality.” In a subsequent letter I'd like to go into Bakunin's actual words
on his programme for federative communalism and a world-wide federation
and industrial parliament based on revolutionary industrial unions. Gary Jewell
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