FORERUNNERS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
equally free from blame, for they are the natural product of one and the same society. In order to be able to punish criminals, society relies on the necessity for individual responsibility. But this theory originates in theology, that blend of absurdity and hypocrisy. The individual is neither punishable nor responsible.
The objection that even according to this theory, not only the criminal, but also the judge and the executioner are the “natural” product of the same society, does not occur to Bakunin. Nor has he worried himself as to why only kings, as the supreme heads, should be removed, if they are the innocent victims of their society.
Bakunin derives all immorality from political, social and economic inequality; but this inequality prevails only in the transition period, and will disappear as a result of Universal Revolution, that is, of simultaneous social, philosophical, economic and political revolution. In this transition period only Society has the right, out of self-preservation, to kill the criminals whom it itself produces; but the right to judge and to condemn it does not possess. Naturally by this right to kill, Bakunin is thinking of the assassinations and mass executions of the Revolution; hence, this right to kill and assassinate is really no right at all, but a “natural fact,” sad but unavoidable. He states plainly that this “natural fact” will not be in any way moral, but simply natural; the idea of justice only holds good in the transition period, and is a negative idea, according to which the social problem and ideal will be posed though only brotherhood and real equality will ever positively solve it. He further admits that “natural” murders will not even be useful, so long as existing oppressors are replaced by new ones. He condemns the Jacobins and the Blanquists, because they dream of a bloody revolution against men, whereas the final Universal Revolution must be directed against the “organisation of things” and of “social positions.” This radical revolution must destroy private property and the State, and might spare men, in so far as that does not injure itself. Bakunin is not afraid to call this radical revolution Anarchy—“the complete expression of the life of the people”—out of which Equality will grow; but for that very reason every form of authority must be destroyed, whether it be called Church, Monarchy, Constitutional State, bourgeois Republic or revolutionary Dictatorship. This entirely new revolutionary state (so there has to be a state after all!)
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