Mikhail Bakunin
Bakunin's Writings
The Class War (1870)
Except, Proudhon and M. Louis Blanc almost all the historians
of the revolution of 1848 and of the coup d'etat of December,
1851, as well as the greatest writers of bourgeois radicalism,
the Victor Hugos, the Quinots, etc. have commented at great length
on the crime and the criminals of December; but they have never
deigned to touch upon the crime and the criminals of June. And
yet it is so evident that December was nothing but the fatal consequence
of June and its repetition on a large scale.
Why this silence about June? Is it because the criminals of
June are bourgeois republicans of whom the above named writers
have been, morally, more or less accomplices? Accomplices in their
principles and therefore indirectly accomplices to their acts.
This reason is probable, but there is yet another which is contain.
The crime of June struck workers only, revolutionary socialists,
consequently strangers to the class and natural enemies of the
principle that all these honorable writers represent. The crime
of December attacked and deported thousands of bourgeois republicans,
the social brothers of those honorable writers and their political
co-religionists. Besides, they themselves have been its victims.
Hence their extreme sensibilities to the December crimes, and
their indifference to those of June.
A general rule: A bourgeois, however red a republican he be,
will be much more keenly affected, aroused and smitten by a mishap
to another bourgeois wore this bourgeois even a mad imperialist
than by the misfortune of a worker, of a man of the people. There
is undoubtedly a great injustice in this difference, but the injustice
is not premeditated. It is instinctive. It arises onto of the
conditions and habits of life which exercise a much greater influence
over men than their ideas and political convictions. Conditions
and habits, their special manner of existing, developing, thinking
and acting; all their social relationships so manifold and various,
and yet se regularly convergent towards the same aim; all this
diversity of interest expressing common social ambition and constituting
the life of the bourgeois world, establishes between these who
belong to this world a solidarity infinitely more real, deeper,
and unquestionably more sincere than any that might arise between
a section of the bourgeoisie and the workers. No difference of
political opinions is sufficient to overcome the bourgeois community
of interests. No seeming agreement of political opinions is sufficient
to overcome the antagonism of interests that divide the bourgeoisie
from the workers. Community of convictions and ideas are and must
ever be subsidiary to a community of class interests and prejudices
Life dominates thought and determines the will. This is a truth
that should never be lost sight of when we wish to understand
anything about social and political phenomena. If we wish to establish
a sincere and complete community of thought and will between men,
we must found it on similar conditions of life, or on a community
of interests. And as there is, by the very conditions of their
respective existence, an abyss between the bourgeois word and
the world of the worker,--the one being the exploiting world,
the other the world of the victimized and exploited I conclude
that if a man born and brought up in the bourgeois environment
wishes to become sincerely and unreservedly the friend and brother
of the workers he must renounce all the conditions of his past
existence and outgrow all his bourgeois habits He must break off
his relations of sentiment with the bourgeois world, its vanity
and ambition. He must turn his back upon it and become its enemy;
proclaim irreconcilable war; and threw himself wholeheartedly
into the world and cause of the worker.
If his passion for justice is too weak to inspire him to such
resolution and audacity, let him not deceive himself and let him
not deceive the workers. He can never become their friend and
at every crisis must prove their enemy. His abstract thoughts,
his dreams of justice will easily influence him in hours of calm
reflection when nothing stirs in the exploited world. But let
the moment of Struggle come when the armed truce gives place to
the irreconcilable conflict, his interests will compel him to
serve in the camp of the exploiters. This has happened to our
one-time friends in the past. It will happen again to many good
republicans and socialists who have not lost their attachment
to the bourgeois world.
Social hatreds are like religious hatreds. They are intense
and deep. They are not shallow like political hatred. This fact
explains the indulgence shown by the bourgeois democrats for the
Bonapartists. It explains also their excessive severity against
the socialist revolutionaries. They detest the former much less
than the latter because of the pressure of economic interests.
Consequently they unite with the Bonapartists to form a common
reaction against the oppressed masses.
Next: The German Crisis