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Updated: May 31, 2025
Week by week, previous to the congress, l'Egalité, the organ of the Swiss federation, had published articles by Bakounin which, while professedly explaining the principles of the International, were in reality attacking them; and most insidiously Bakounin's own program was presented as the traditional position of the organization.
When one has once obtained this conception of Bakounin's fundamental views, there is little necessity for dealing with the infinite number of minor points upon which he was forced to attack the men and movements of his time.
"Propagate the gospel by a deed!" urges Kropotkin, and throughout Bakounin's writings there appears again and again the plea for "terrible, total, inexorable, and universal destruction." Both socialists and anarchists preach their gospel to the weary and heavy-laden, to the despondent and the outraged, who may readily be led to commit acts of despair.
As I have made clear enough, I think, in my first chapter, there are in Bakounin's writings two main ideas put forward again and again, dressed in innumerable forms and supported by an inexhaustible variety of arguments. These ideas are based upon his antagonism to religion and to government.
Hasselmann had several years before launched the Red Flag, which advocated much that was not in harmony with socialism, and eventually the German socialist congress requested him to cease the publication of his paper. A few individuals without great influence had endeavored at various times to import Bakounin's philosophy and methods into Germany, but their propaganda bore no fruit whatever.
Without Bakounin's intending it, doubtless, the International Brothers resembled the circle of gods in mythology; the National Brothers, the circle of heroes; while the third order resembled the mortals who were to bear the burden of the fighting.
It had always troubled more or less the earlier organizations of labor, and now, aided by Bakounin's eloquence and fiery revolutionism, it became the great bone of contention throughout Europe.
However, if Bakounin's idea of the social revolution never altered, the methods by which it was to be carried out suffered a change as a result of his experience in the International. In 1871 he no longer advocated, openly at any rate, secret conspiracies, the "loosening of evil passions," or some vague "unchaining of the hydra."
Bakounin's answer is "first, by the organization and the federation of strike funds and the international solidarity of strikes; secondly, by the organization and international federation of trade unions; and, lastly, by the spontaneous and direct development of philosophical and sociological ideas in the International....
These were the means, and this was the end that Bakounin had in mind all the days of his life from the time he convinced himself as a young man that "the desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire." Even so brief a glimpse into Bakounin's mind is likely to startle the reader. But there is no fiction here; he is what Carlyle would have called "a terrible God's Fact."
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