Whom Am I?
By Mikail Bakunin
I am neither a scientist, nor a
philosopher nor even a professional writer. I have written very little in my life-time,
and have only ever done so in self-defense, so to speak, and then only when
heartfelt conviction obliged me to overcome my instinctive repugnance towards
any public display of the inner me.
Who am I then, and what it is that
now impels me to publish this work? I am a zealous quester after truth and a no
less passionate foe of the malignant fictions which the party of order, that
official, privileged representative of interest in every past and present
religious, metaphysical, political, juridical, economic and social turpitude,
seeks to utilize to this day in the brutalization and enslavement of the world.
I am a fanatical lover of liberty,
regarding it as the only setting amid which men’s intellect, dignity and happiness
can increase and grow: not the quite formal liberty doled out, measured and
regulated by the State, that ageless lie that in reality never stands for
anything other than the privilege of the few, based upon the enslavement of the
whole world: not the individualistic, selfish, petty and fictitious liberty
peddled by J.-J. Rousseau, as well by all those other schools of bourgeois
liberalism, which look upon so-called universal rights, as represented by the
State, as a limit upon the rights of the individual being whittled away to
nothing.
No, I mean the only liberty truly deserving
of the name, the liberty that comprises of the unrestricted expansion of all of
the material, intellectual and moral potentialities existing in every person in
latent form: the liberty that acknowledges no other restrictions than those
laid out for us by the laws of our own natures: so that, strictly speaking,
there are no restrictions, because those laws are not foisted upon us by any
external law-maker living either alongside or above us: they are, rather,
immanent, and inherent within us, representing the very foundation of our
being, material, intellectual, and moral alike: instead of finding them
curtailments, we should look upon them as the actual conditions and effective
grounding for liberty.
I mean that liberty of every
individual which, far from stopping in front of the liberty of one’s neighbor
as in front of a boundary-marker, instead discovers in it an endorsement of
itself and its extension into infinity: the freedom of the individual
uncircumscribed by the freedom of all, freedom in solidarity, freedom in
equality: freedom triumphant over brute force and the authority principle which
was never anything other than the idealized expression of that force: liberty
which, having once toppled all heavenly and earthly idols, will lay the
groundwork for and organize a new world, the world of solidary humanity, upon
the ruins of all Churches and all States.
I am a staunch advocate of economic
and social equality, because I know that, outside of such equality, liberty,
justice, human dignity, morality and the welfare of individuals as well as the
prosperity of nations will never be anything other than so many lies. But,
while I am a supporter of liberty, that primary condition of humanity, my
reckoning is that equality should be established in the world by means of
spontaneous organization of labor and of collective ownership of producers’
associations freely organized and federated into communes, and, through the
equality spontaneous federation of those communes – but not by means of State
supervision from above.
This is the point which is the main
bone of contention between the revolutionary socialists or collectivists and
the authoritarian communists who argue in favor of absolute initiative on the
part of the State. Their goals are the same: both parties wish to see the
creation of a new social order rooted exclusively in the organization of
collective endeavor, inescapably incumbent upon each and every body in
consequence of the force of things, in equal economic circumstances for all and
in collective appropriation of the instruments of labor.
Except that communists imagine that
they can bring this through development and organization of the political power
of the working classes and principally of the urban proletariat, abetted by
bourgeois radicalism, whereas revolutionary socialists, enemies to any and all
equivocal connivance and alliance, take the contrary view that they can only
achieve that goal through the building-up and organization, not of the
political, but rather of the social and thus anti-political power of the
laboring masses of town and country alike, including all men of goodwill from
the upper classes who, breaking with their entire past, would frankly be
willing to join hands with them and embrace their program in its entirety.
From this derive two different
methods. The communists believe they have a duty to organize the work force in
order to take over the political power of States. The revolutionary socialists
organize with an eye to the destruction, or, if one would prefer a more polite
expression, the liquidation of States. The communists are supporters of the
principle and practice of authority, whereas revolutionary socialists place
their trust exclusively on liberty. One and all are equally supporters of
science which is bound to kill off superstition and supplant faith, but the
former would like to impose it: the others will strive to disseminate it, so
that human groups, once won over, may organize themselves and federate
spontaneously and freely from the bottom up, on their own initiative and in
accordance with their real interests, but never according to some pre-ordained
plan foisted upon the ignorant masses by the handful of superior intellects.
The revolutionary socialists reckon
that there is a lot more practicality and wit in the instinctive aspirations
and actual needs of the popular masses than in the profound intelligence of all
these doctors and teachers of humanity who still seek to put their shoulders to
the wheel of so many failed attempts to bring them happiness. Revolutionary
socialists, on the other hand, think humanity has let itself be governed for a
long time, indeed, far too long time, and that the source of its afflictions
resides, not in this or that form of government, but in the principle and in
the very practice of any government whatever.
There at last is the contradiction,
now become historic, that exists between the communism scientifically developed
by the German school and in part embraced y the American and English
socialists, on one hand, and Proudhonism, extensively expanded upon and taken
to its logical consequences, on the other, as embraced by the proletariat ot
Latin countries.
