sation whatever, that is not founded upon the most complete liberty of every one. … But I am in favour of collective property, because I am convinced that so long as property, individually hereditary, exists, the equality of the first start, the realisation of equality, economical and social, will be impossible."[1] This is not particularly lucid as a statement of principles. But it is sufficiently significant from the "biographical" point of view.
We do not insist upon the ineptitude of the expression "the economic and social equalisation of classes;" the General Council of the International dealt with that long ago.[2] We would only remark that the above quotations show that Bakounine—
1. Combats the State and "Communism" in the name of "the most complete liberty of everybody;"
2. Combats property, “individually hereditary,” in the name of economic equality;
3. Regards this property as "an institution of the State," as a "consequence of the very principles of the State;"
4. Has no objection to individual property, if it is not hereditary; has no objection to the right of inheritance, if it is not individual.
In other words:
1. Bakounine is quite at one with Proudhon so far as concerns the negation of the State and Communism;
- ↑ See the documents published with the "Mémoire de la Fédération Jurassienne," pp. 28, 29, 37.
- ↑ "The equalisation of classes," wrote the General Council to the "Alliance" of Bakounine, who desired to be admitted into the International Working Men's Association, and had sent the Council its programme in which this famous "equalisation" phrase occurs "literally interpreted comes to the harmony of capital and labour, so pertinaciously advocated by bourgeois Socialists. It is not the equalisation of classes, logically a contradiction, impossible to realise, but on the contrary, the abolition of classes, the real secret of the proletarian movement, which is the great aim of the International Working Men's Association."
