Mikhail Bakunin was born in Premukhino, Russia on the 30th of May, 1814.
He died July 1st, 1886.
In Bern, Switzerland.
You may be wondering why I think that is important to you, dear reader.
Well, it's really not all that important.
Who cares about men and their lives when it is their ideas that are with us even after their departure.
The ideas of Mikhail are very important to you.
(If you love freedom.)
The work, that I will excerpt below for you to get a taste of why this man's ideas have been left out of your 'finest education in the world', intentionally, will show to you that in 1872 the world was much as it is today.
The same problems, the same ruling class, the same people living in poverty so that others can live in splendor.
This has not changed for most of recorded history.
Despite anarchists giving their lives to see it changed.
Men with sticks still rule the run in our open air prison.
source
We have been ruled by force this long because those using the force don't let you read things that might give you funny ideas.
Well, I am here to rectifiy that glaring deficiency in your education.
Michail Bakunin
On the International Workingmen’s Association and Karl Marx
Critique of Economic Determinism and Historical Materialism
This selection was written when the decisive struggle in the International Workingmen’s International had reached its climax with the expulsion of Bakunin from the International by the Hague Congress in 1872.
For those of you that don't know, unions used to be really big.
They regulated the working man at work, and often at home.
The International Working Men's Association was the first attempt at Big Bill's One Big Union.
This union, the IWW, still exists today.
You can join it, too.
Dues are only 11usd a month.
Unless you supervise somebody at work, then you are management and disqualified.
No exploiters need apply.
Anyways, back to Mikhail,....
When it comes to exploitation the bourgeoisie practice solidarity.
In combating them the exploited must do likewise; and the organization of this solidarity is the sole aim of the International.
This aim, so simple and so clearly expressed in our original statutes, is the only legitimate obligation that all the members, sections, and federations of the International must accept.
That they have done so willingly is shown by the fact that in barely eight years more than a million workers have joined and united their forces under the banner of this organization, which has in fact become a real power, a power with which the mightiest monarchs are now forced to reckon.
But all power entices the ambitious, and Mr. Marx and company, it seems, having never taken into account the nature and source of this prodigious power of the International, imagine that they can make it a stepping-stone or an instrument for the realization of their own political pretensions.
Mr. Marx, who was one of the principal initiators of the International (a title to glory that no one will contest) and who for the last eight years has practically monopolized the whole General Council, should have understood better than anyone two things which are self-evident and which only those blinded by vanity and ambition could ignore:
- that the marvelous growth of the International is due to the elimination from its official program and rules of all political and philosophic questions, and
- that basing itself on the principle of the autonomy and freedom of all its sections and federations the International has happily been spared the ministrations of a centralizer or director who would naturally impede and paralyze its growth.
Before 1870, precisely in the period of the International’s greatest expansion, the General Council of the International did not interfere with the freedom and autonomy of the sections and federations — not because it lacked the will to dominate, but only because it did not have the power to do so and no one would have obeyed it.
The General Council was an appendage trailing behind the spontaneous movement of the workers of France, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy.
Read it in its entirety for yourself.
The legitimacy of this conference has been contested. Mr. Marx, a very able political conniver, doubtless anxious to prove to the world that though he lacked firearms and cannons the masses could still be governed by lies, by libels, and by intrigues, organized his Congress of the Hague in September 1872.
Barely two months have passed since this congress and already in all of Europe (with the exception of Germany where the workers are brainwashed by the lies of their leaders and their press) and its free federations — Belgian, Dutch, English, American, French, Spanish, Italian — without forgetting our excellent Jura Federation [Switzerland] — there has arisen a cry of indignation and contempt against this cynical burlesque which dares to call itself a true Congress of the International.
Thanks to a rigged, fictitious majority, composed almost exclusively of members of the General Council, cleverly used by Mr. Marx, all has been travestied, falsified, brutalized.
Justice, good sense, honesty, and the honor of the International brazenly rejected, its very existence endangered — all this the better to establish the dictatorship of Mr. Marx.
It is not only criminal — it is sheer madness.
Yet Mr. Marx who thinks of himself as the father of the International (he was unquestionably one of its founders) cares not a whit, and permits all this to be done!
This is what personal vanity, the lust for power, and above all, political ambition can lead to.
For all these deplorable acts Marx is personally responsible. Marx, in spite of all his mis-deeds, has unconsciously rendered a great service to the International by demonstrating in the most dramatic and evident manner that if anything can kill the International, it is the introduction of politics into its program.
Continues
This was his mistake.
The masses, regardless of their degree of culture, religious beliefs, country, or native tongue, understood the language of the International when it spoke to them of their poverty, their sufferings, and their slavery under the yoke of capitalism.
They responded when the necessity to unite in a great common struggle was explained to them.
But here they were being told about a political program — most learned and above all quite authoritarian — which for the sake of their own salvation was attempting — in the very International by means of which they were to organize their own emancipation — to impose on them a dictatorial government (only temporarily, of course! ) directed by an extraordinarily brainy man.
Continues
The State is the 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 occupations they follow, the interests and aspirations directing them — the State is the government of all these by one or another 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 omniscience, omnipresence, and the omnipotence which the theologians attribute to God, could not possibly know and foresee the needs of its people, or satisfy with an even justice those interests which are most legitimate and pressing.
There will always he discontented people because there will always be some who are sacrificed.
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 also from the economic point of view.
At least this is what is promised, though I very much doubt whether that promise could ever be kept.
There will therefore no longer be any privileged class, but there will be a government and, note this well, an extremely complex government.
This government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today.
It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and 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 elitist of all regimes.
There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!
Continues
You can see quite well that behind all the democratic and socialistic phrases and promises in Marx’s program for the State lies all that constitutes the true despotic and brutal nature of all states, regardless of their form of government.
Moreover, in the final reckoning, the People’s State of Marx and the aristocratic-monarchic state of Bismarck are completely identical in terms of their primary domestic and foreign objectives.
In foreign affairs there is the same deployment of military force, that is to say, conquest.
And in home affairs the same employment of armed force, the last argument of all threatened political leaders against the masses who, tired of always believing, hoping, submitting, and obeying, rise in revolt.
I hope you take the time to expand that 'greatest education in the world' that you got from those that will kill you to control you.
Your doorway out of your slavery lies in the books that you read, and the thoughts that you think in your mind.
Let's not forget the immortal words of a great guy taken too young,....
