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historical importance during their lives and even a name in history after their
death. " These anonymous revolutionary leaders would be , as Bakunin wrote
on another occasion, "like the waves of the sea , forever returning to the
salutary level of equality, " the product, it would seem, of some spontaneous
natural process which would not require any prior planning or organization.
There are moments when the reader finds it hard to see what difference
there is between Bakunin' s "collective dictatorship" by an anonymous secret
society and the kind of despotism which Bakunin criticises Marx for
advocating, "the despotism of a governing minority, all the more dangerous
because it appears as a sham expression of the people's will." Bakunin
thought that the difference lay in that his dictatorship would not be exercised
within the framework of the State, whereas the Marxist system demanded, at
least as a temporary measure, the reinforcement of state power, with
disastrous results: "In Herr Marx's People's State, so we are told," Bakunin
wrote in 1872 after his final breach with Marx, "there will be no privileged
class . . . so there will be no more class, but a government and, please note, an
extremely complicated government which, not content with governing and
administering the masses politically .. . will also administer them econom–
ically.... There will be a new class , a new hierarchy of real or bogus learning,
and the world will be divided into a dominant, science-based minority and a
vast ignorant majority . And then let the masses beware! "
Bakunin was stronger as a critic than as a constructive thinker and, while
his attacks on Marx remain valid today , it is never quite clear how he himself
envisaged that society would function after the revolution. In one of the most
interesting documents in this selection, a draft, written in 1866, of the
Pn'nciples and Organisation of the International Brotherhood
(one of
Bakunin 's shortlived revolutionary societies), Bakunin raised the fundamen–
tal problems of anarchist political theory, but also revealed some of the
contradictions in his own thought. The future society must be based on
"absolute rejection of any principle of authority and of raison d' etat." This
will be achieved by the abolition of the centralized state machinery of
government as well as of centralized educational, judicial and economic
institutions. Each region will be organized on the basis of "the absolute
freedom of individual, productive association and Commune. " Freedom is to
be unconditional, and the liberty of association even includes "those whose
aim is the corruption and destruction of individual and public liberty ."
How then is this new society to be protected against what, in the
twentieth century, we would call a fascist counter-revolution? It is here that, as
with earlier anarchists such as William Godwin and later ones such as
Kropotkin, an essential naive optimism deriving directly from the 18th
century Enlightenment takes over. " Psychology , statistics and the entire
