Violence and the Labor Movement

by Robert Hunter

"To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the new oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism." [(29)]

Engels declares that the State, such as we have known it in the past, will die out "as soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not 'abolished.' It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free State,' both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand." [(30)]

This conception of the rôle of the State is one that no anarchist can comprehend. He is unwilling to admit that social evolution necessarily leads through State socialism to industrial democracy, or even that such an evolution is possible. To him the State seems to have a corporeal, material existence of its own. It is a tyrannical machine that exists above all classes and wields a legal, military, and judicial power all its own. That the State is only an agency for representing in certain fields the power of a dominant economic class—this is something the anarchist will not admit. In fact, Bakounin seems to have been utterly mystified when Eccarius answered him at Basel in these words: "The State can be reformed by the coming of the working class into power." [(31)] That the State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the capitalist class can neither be granted nor understood by the anarchists. Nor can it be comprehended that, when the capitalist class has no affairs of its own to manage, the coercive character of the State will gradually disappear. State ownership undermines and destroys the economic power of private capitalists. When the railroads, the mines, the forests, and other great monopolies are taken out of their hands, their control over the State is by this much diminished. The only power they possess to control the State resides in their economic power, and anything that weakens that tends to destroy the class character of the State itself. The inherent weakness of Bakounin's entire philosophy lay in this fact, that it begins with the necessity of abolishing God and the State, and that it can never get beyond that or away from that. And, as a necessary consequence, Bakounin had to oppose every measure that looked toward any compromise with the State, or that might enable the working class to exercise any influence in or through the State.

When, therefore, the German party at its congress at Eisenach demanded the suffrage and direct legislation, when it declared that political liberty is the most urgent preliminary condition for the economic emancipation of the working class, Bakounin could see nothing revolutionary in such a program. When, furthermore, the party declared that the social question is inseparable from the political question and that the problems of our economic life could be solved only in a democratic State, Bakounin, of course, was forced to oppose such heresies with all his power. And these were indeed the really vital questions, upon which the anarchists and the socialists could not be reconciled. It is in his Lettres à un Français, written just after the failure of his own "practical" efforts at Lyons, that Bakounin undertakes his criticism of the program of the German socialists. Preparatory to this task, he first terrifies his French readers with the warning that if the German army, then at their doors, should conquer France, it would result in the destruction of French socialism (by which he means anarchism), in the utter degradation and complete slavery of the French people, and make it possible for the Knout of Germany and Russia to fall upon the back of all Europe. "If, in this terrible moment, ... [France] does not prefer the death of all her children and the destruction of all her goods, the burning of her villages, her cities, and of all her houses to slavery under the yoke of the Prussians, if she does not destroy, by means of a popular and revolutionary uprising, the power of the innumerable German armies which, victorious on all sides up to the present, threaten her dignity, her liberty, and even her existence, if she does not become a grave for all those six hundred thousand soldiers of German despotism, if she does not oppose them with the one means capable of conquering and destroying them under the present circumstances, if she does not reply to this insolent invasion by the social revolution no less ruthless and a thousand times more menacing—it is certain, I maintain, that then France is lost, her masses of working people will be slaves, and French socialism will have lived its life." [(32)]

Approaching his subject in this dramatic manner, Bakounin turns to examine the degenerate state of socialism in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to see "what will be the chances of working-class emancipation in all the rest of Europe." [(33)] In the first country socialism is only in its infancy. The Italians are wholly ignorant of the true causes of their misery. They are crushed, maltreated, and dying of hunger. They are "led blindly by the liberal and radical bourgeois." [(34)] Altogether, there is no immediate hope of socialism there. In Switzerland the people are asleep. "If the human world were on the point of dying, the Swiss would not resuscitate it." [(35)] Only in Germany is socialism making headway, and Bakounin undertakes to examine this socialism and to put it forward as a horrible example. To be sure, the German workers are awakening, but they are under the leadership of certain cunning politicians, who have abandoned all revolutionary ideas, and are now undertaking to reform the State, hoping that that could be done as a result of "a great peaceful and legal agitation of the working class." [(36)] The very name Liebknecht had taken for his paper, the Volksstaat, was infamous in Bakounin's eyes, while all the leaders of the labor party had become merely appendages to "their friends of the bourgeois Volkspartei." [(37)] He then passes in review the program of the German socialists, and points to their aim of establishing a democratic State by the "direct and secret suffrage for all men" and its guidance by direct legislation, as the utter abandonment of every revolutionary idea. He dwells upon the folly of the suffrage and of every effort to remodel, recast, and change the State, as "purely political and bourgeois." [(38)]

Democracies and republics are no less tyrannical than monarchies. The suffrage cannot alter them. In England, Switzerland, and America, he declares, the masses now have political power, yet they remain in the deepest depths of misery. Universal suffrage is only a new superstition, while the referendum, already existing in Switzerland, has failed utterly to improve the condition of the people. The working-class slaves, even in the most democratic countries, "have neither the instruction; nor the leisure, nor the independence necessary to exercise freely and with full knowledge of the case their rights as citizens. They have, in the most democratic countries, which are governed by representatives elected by all the people, a ruling day or rather a day of Saturnalian celebration: that is election day. Then the bourgeois, their oppressors, their every-day exploiters, and their masters, come to them, with hats off, talk to them of equality and of fraternity, and call them the ruling people, of whom they (the bourgeois) are only very humble servants, the representatives of their will. This day over, fraternity and equality evaporate in smoke, the bourgeois become bourgeois once more, and the proletariat, the sovereign people, remain slaves.

"Such is the real truth about the system of representative democracy, so much praised by the radical bourgeois, even when it is amended, completed, and developed, with a popular intention, by the referendum or by that 'direct legislation of the people' which is extolled by a German school that wrongly calls itself socialist. For very nearly two years, the referendum has been a part of the constitution of the canton of Zurich, and up to this time it has given absolutely no results. The people there are called upon to vote, by yes or by no, on all the important laws which are presented to them by the representative bodies. They could even grant them the initiative without real liberty winning the least advantage." [(39)]

It is a discouraging picture that Bakounin draws here of the ignorance and stupidity of the people as they are led in every election to vote their enemies into power. What, then, is to be done? What shall these hordes of the illiterate and miserable do? If by direct legislation they cannot even vote laws in their own interest, how, then, will it be possible for them ever to improve their condition? Such questions do not in the least disturb Bakounin. He has one answer, Revolution! As he said in the beginning, so he repeats: "To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church, ... the third is the social revolution." [(40)] "A cure is possible only through the social revolution," [(41)] that is, through "the destruction of all institutions of inequality, and the establishment of economic and social equality." [(42)]

However, if Bakounin's idea of the social revolution never altered, the methods by which it was to be carried out suffered a change as a result of his experience in the International. In 1871 he no longer advocated, openly at any rate, secret conspiracies, the "loosening of evil passions," or some vague "unchaining of the hydra." He begins then to oppose to political action what he calls economic action. [(43)] In the fragment—not published during Bakounin's life—the Protestation de l'Alliance, he covers for the hundredth time his arguments against the Volksstaat, which is a "ridiculous contradiction, a fiction, a lie." [(44)] "The State ... will always be an institution of domination and of exploitation ... a permanent source of slavery and of misery." [(45)] How, then, shall the State be destroyed? Bakounin's answer is "first, by the organization and the federation of strike funds and the international solidarity of strikes; secondly, by the organization and international federation of trade unions; and, lastly, by the spontaneous and direct development of philosophical and sociological ideas in the International....

"Let us now consider these three ways in their special action, differing one from another, but, as I have just said, inseparable, and let us commence with the organization of strike funds and strikes.