by Mikhail Bakunin
From: Chapter 3 of "Marxism, Freedom, and the State"
The State, for its own preservation, must necessarily be powerful as regards
foreign affairs; but if it is so as regards foreign affairs, it will
infallibly be so as regards home affairs. Every State, having to let itself
be inspired and directed by some particular morality, conformable to the
particular conditions of its existence, by a morality which is a restriction
and consequently a negation of human and universal morality, must keep watch
that all its subjects, in their thoughts and above all in their acts, are
inspired also only by the principles of this patriotic or particular morality,
and that they remain deaf to the teachings of pure or universally human
morality. From that there results the necessity for a State censorship...
The State is government from above downwards of an immense number of men, very
different from the point of view of the degree of their culture, the nature of
the countries or localities that they inhabit, the occupation they follow, the
interests and the aspirations directing them--the State is the government of
all these by some or other minority; this minority, even if it were a thousand
times elected by universal suffrage and controlled in its acts by popular
institutions, unless it were endowed with the omniscience, omnipresence and
the omnipotence which the theologians attribute to God, it is impossible that
it could know and foresee the needs, or satisfy with an even justice the most
legitimate and pressing interests in the world. There will always be
discontented people because there will always be some who are sacrificed.
Besides, the State, like the Church, by its very nature is a great sacrificer
of living beings. It is an arbitrary being, in whose heart all the positive,
living, individual, and local interests of the population meet, clash, destroy
each other, become absorbed in that abstraction called the common interest,
the public good, the public safety, and where all real wills cancel each other
in that other abstraction which hears the name of the will of the people. It
results from this, that this so-called will of the people is never anything
else than the sacrifice and the negation of all the real wills of the
population; just as this so-called public good is nothing else than the
sacrifice of their interests. But so that this omnivorous abstraction could
impose itself on millions of men, it must be represented and supported by some
real being, by living force or other. Well, this being, this force, has always
existed. In the Church it is called the clergy, and in the State--the ruling
or governing class.
And, in fact, what do we find throughout history? The State has always been
the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an
aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class,
when, all the other classes having become exhausted, the State falls or rises,
as you will, to the condition of a machine; but it is absolutely necessary for
the salvation of the State that there should be some privileged class or other
which is interested in its existence. And it is precisely the united interest
of this privileged class which is called Patriotism.
...
It is true that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the
most enlightened monarchy, for at least in the republic there are moments when,
though always exploited, the people are not oppressed, while in monarchies they
are never anything else. And then the democratic regime trains the masses
little by little in public life, which the monarchy never does. But whilst
giving the preference to the republic we are nevertheless forced to recognise
and proclaim that whatever may be the form of government, whilst human society
remains divided into different classes because of the hereditary inequality of
occupations, wealth, education, and privileges, there will always be minority
government and the inevitable exploitation of the majority by that minority.
The State is nothing else but this domination and exploitation regularised and
systematised. We shall attempt to demonstrate it by examining the consequence
of the government of the masses of the people by a minority, at first as
intelligent and as devoted as you like, in an ideal State, founded on a free
contract.
Suppose the government to be confined only to the best citizens. At first
these citizens are privileged not by right, but by fact. They have been
elected by the people because they are the most intelligent, clever, wise, and
courageous and devoted. Taken from the mass of the citizens, who are regarded
as all equal, they do not yet form a class apart, but a group of men
privileged only by nature and for that very reason singled out for election
by the people. Their number is necessarily very limited, for in all times and
countries the number of men endowed with qualities so remarkable that they
automatically command the unanimous respect of a nation is, as experience
teaches us, very small. Therefore, under pain of making a bad choice, the
people will be always forced to choose its rulers from amongst them.
Here, then, is society divided into two categories, if not yet to say two
classes, of which one, composed of the immense majority of the citizens,
submits freely to the government of its elected leaders, the other, formed of
a small number of privileged natures, recognised and accepted as such by the
people, and charged by them to govern them. Dependent on popular election,
they are at first distinguished from the mass of the citizens only by the very
qualities which recommended them to their choice and are naturally, the most
devoted and useful of all. They do not yet assume to themselves any privilege,
any particular right, except that of exercising, insofar as the people wish
it, the special functions with which they have been charged. For the rest, by
their manner of life, by the conditions and means of their existence, they do
not separate themselves in any way from all the others, so that a perfect
equality continues to reign among all. Can this equality be long maintained?
We claim that it cannot and nothing is easier to prove it.
Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of
command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure,
will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent
in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for
the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits.
"The masses," a man says to himself, "recognising their incapacity to govern
on their own account, have elected me their chief. By that act they have
publicly proclaimed their inferiority and my superiority. Among this crowd of
men, recognising hardly any equals of myself, I am alone capable of directing
public affairs. The people have need of me; they cannot do without my
services, while I, on the contrary, can get along all right by myself: they,
therefore, must obey me for their own security, and in condescending to
command them, I am doing them a good turn."
Is not there something in all that to make a man lose his head and his heart
as well, and become mad with pride? It is thus that power and the habit of
command become for even the most intelligent and virtuous men, a source of
aberration, both intellectual and moral.
But in the People's State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged
class at all. All will be equal, not only from the juridical and political
point of view, but from the economic point of view. At least that is what is
promised, though I doubt very much, considering the manner in which it is
being tackled and the course it is desired to follow, whether that promise
could ever be kept. There will therefore be no longer any privileged class,
but there will be a government and, note this well, an extremely complex
government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the
masses politically, as all governments do to-day, but which will also
administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production
and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment
and development of factories, the organisation and direction of commerce,
finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the
State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many "heads overflowing
with brains" in this government. It will be the reign of scientific
intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of
all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended
scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling
in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority.[14] And then, woe
betide the mass of ignorant ones!
Such a regime will not fail to arouse very considerable discontent in this
mass and in order to keep it in check the enlightenment and liberating
government of Marx will have need of a not less considerable armed force. For
the government must be strong, says Engels, to maintain order among these
millions of illiterates whose brutal uprising would be capable of destroying
and overthrowing everything, even a government directed by heads overflowing
with brains.
You can see quite well that behind all the democratic and socialistic phrases
and promises of Marx's programme, there is to be found in his State all that
constitutes the true despotic and brutal nature of all States, whatever may be
the form of their government and that in the final reckoning, the People's
State so strongly commended by Marx, and the aristocratic-monarchic State,
maintained with as much cleverness as power by Bismarck, are completely
identical by the nature of their objective at home as well as in foreign
affairs. In foreign affairs it is the same deployment of military force, that
is to say, conquest; and in home affairs it is the same employment of this
armed force, the last argument of all threatened political powers against
the masses, who, tired of believing, hoping, submitting and obeying always,
rise in revolt.