had an immoderate hatred of Bismarck, regarding Bismarckism as nothing but "militarism, police economics, and financial monopoly, united into a system." In agreement with Bismarck, Bakunin considered the Germans to be a state-loving race. In 1874 he declared that his hope was in the Slavs and the Latins, who were to react against pangermanism, not by the establishment of a great Slav state, but by the social revolution, which would bring into being a new, lawless, and therefore free world. Bakunin has no approval of petty reforms, desiring "revolution from the prime foundation." He aims at total disorganisation, entorganisation, political amorphism, and chaos, in the hope that the future society will spontaneously upbuild itself from below.
The Marx-Engels view of the state is therefore more dispassionate, for Marx and Engels, as historical materialists, recognise the socio-political primacy of economic organisation. Bakunin also admits the importance of economic foundations, entertains plans of a general strike, but invariably returns in the end to the expedient of political revolution. Nevertheless, as has been shown, attentive criticism of the utterances made by Bakunin at different epochs discloses a marked vacillation between the idea of economic primacy and that of political and religious primacy. It was impossible that Bakunin should remain uninfluenced by his contact with Marx, a contact which became closer for the very reason that he was engaged in a struggle with Marx.
Like Bakunin, Marx gave the name of "anarchy" to a condition in which there would be no state; in the confidential circular directed against Bakunin, he defined anarchy as the disappearance of state and government. It is true that he here had in view, as he himself formulates it, the transformation of the government into a mere administration. But in Bakunin's writings, also, we can find passages wherein he interprets the annihilation of the state as nothing more than a radical transformation and reorganisation.[1]
It is possible, moreover, to quote from Bakunin passages in which he utters warnings against ill-considered fights and revolts. Apropos of the discussion concerning Karakozov's attempt on the life of Alexander II, he expressed doubts as to the utility of assassinating the tsar, but this scepticism is
- ↑ See, for example, Œuvres, i. p. 155. in Fédéralisme, Socialisme et Antithéologisme (1867).
