The true revolutionists of our days have a very different idea of Socialist tactics. They "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things;"[44] which does not prevent them (but quite the contrary) from forming the proletariat into a party separate from all the exploiter parties, opposed to the whole "reactionary mass."
Proudhon, who we know had not any overwhelming sympathy for "politics," nevertheless advised the French workers to vote for the candidates who pledged themselves to "constitute value." Bakounine would not have politics at any price. The worker cannot make use of political liberty: "in order to do so he needs two little things—leisure and material means." So it is all only a bourgeois lie. Those who speak of working-class candidates are but mocking the proletariat. "Working-class candidates, transferred to bourgeois conditions of life, and into an atmosphere of completely bourgeois political ideas, ceasing to be actually workers in order to become statesmen, will become bourgeois, and possibly will become even more bourgeois than the bourgeois themselves. For it is not the men who make positions, but, on the contrary, positions which make the men."[45]
This last argument is about all Bakounine was able to assimilate of the materialist conception of history. It is unquestionably true that man is the product of his social environment. But to apply this incontestable truth with advantage it is necessary to get rid of the old, metaphysical method of thought which considers things one after the other, and independently one of the other. Now Bakounine, like his master, Proudhon, in spite of his flirtation with the Hegelian philosophy, all his life remained a metaphysician. He does not understand that the environment which makes man may change, thus changing man its own product. The environment he has in his mind's eye when speaking of the political action of the proletariat, is the bourgeois parliamentary environment, that environment which must necessarily fatally corrupt labour representatives. But the environment of the electors, the environment of a working-class party, conscious of its aim and well organised, would this have no influence upon the elected of the proletariat? No! Economically enslaved, the working class must always remain in political servitude; in this domain it will always be the weakest; to free itself it must begin by an economic revolution. Bakounine does not see that by this process of reasoning he inevitably arrives at the conclusion that a victory of the proletariat is absolutely impossible, unless the owners of the means of production voluntarily relinquish their possessions to them. In effect the subjection of the worker to capital is the source not only of political but of moral servitude. And how can the workers, morally enslaved, rise against the bourgeoisie? For the working class movement to become possible, according to Bakounine, it must therefore first make an economic revolution. But the economic revolution is only possible as the work of the workers themselves. So we find ourselves in a vicious circle, out of which modern Socialism can easily break, but in which Bakounine and the Bakounists are for ever turning with no other hope of deliverance than a logical salto mortale.
The corrupting influence of the Parliamentary environment on working-class representatives is what the Anarchists have up to the present considered the strongest argument in their criticism of the political activity of Social-Democracy. We have seen what its theoretical value amounts to. And even a slight knowledge of the history of the German Socialist party will sufficiently show how in practical life the Anarchist apprehensions are answered.
In repudiating all "politics" Bakounine was forced to adopt the tactics of the old English Trade Unions. But even he felt that these tactics were not very revolutionary. He tried to get out of the difficulty by the help of his "Alliance," a kind of international secret society, organised on a basis of frenetic centralisation and grotesque fancifulness. Subjected to the dictatorial rule of the sovereign pontiff of Anarchy, the "international" and the "national" brethren were bound to accelerate and direct the "essentially economic" revolutionary movement. At the same time Bakounine approved of "riots," of isolated risings of workers and peasants which, although they must inevitably be crushed out, would, he declared, always have a good influence upon the development of the revolutionary spirit among the oppressed. It goes without saying that with such a "programme" he was able to do much harm to the working class movement, but he was not able to draw nearer, even by a single step, to that "immediate" economic revolution of which he "dreamed."[46] We shall presently see the result of the Bakounist theory of "riots." For the present let us sum up what we have said of Bakounine. And here, he shall help us himself.
"Upon the Pangermanic banner" [i.e., also upon the banner of German Social-Democracy, and consequently upon the Socialist banner of the whole civilised world] "is inscribed: The conservation and strengthening of the State at all costs; on the Socialist-revolutionary banner" (read Bakounist banner) "is inscribed in characters of blood, in letters of fire: the abolition of all States, the destruction of bourgeois civilisation; free organisation from the bottom to the top, by the help of free associations; the organisation of the working populace (sic!) freed from all trammels, the organisation of the whole of emancipated humanity, the creation of a new human world."
It is with these words that Bakounine concludes his principal work "Statism and Anarchy" (Russian). We leave our readers to appreciate the rhetorical beauties of this passage. For our own part we shall be content with saying that it contains absolutely no human meaning whatsoever.
The absurd, pure and simple—that is what is inscribed upon the Bakounist "banner." There is no need of letters of fire and of blood to make this evident to any one who is not hypnotised by a phraseology more or less sonorous, but always void of sense.
The Anarchism of Stirner and of Proudhon was completely individualist. Bakounine did not want individualism, or to speak more correctly, one particular phase of individualism. He was the inventor of "Collectivist-Anarchism." And the invention cost him little. He completed the "liberty" Utopia, by the "equality" Utopia. As these two Utopias would not agree, as they cried out at being yoked together, he threw both into the furnace of the "permanent revolution" where they were both at last forced to hold their tongues, for the simple reason that they both evaporated, the one as completely as the other.
Bakounine is the décadent of Utopism.