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Updated: September 23, 2025
He clashed again with Marx on very similar grounds when the latter insisted that only in the more advanced countries is there a possibility of a social revolution. Modern capitalist production, according to Marx, must attain a certain degree of development before it is possible for the working class to hope to carry out any really revolutionary project. Bakounin takes issue with him here.
Nechayeff was, however, in fear that Iwanof might betray the secrets of the society, and he went one night with two fellow conspirators and shot Iwanof and threw the corpse into a pond. The police, in following up the murder, sought out Nechayeff, who had already fled from Russia and was hurrying back to Bakounin in Switzerland.
"I have always felt and thought," he wrote in the Mémoire justificatif, "that the most desirable end for me would be to fall in the midst of a great revolutionary storm." Consequently, in the summer of the year 1873, when the uprising gave promise of victory to the insurgents, Bakounin decided that he must go and, to do so, that he must have money.
On the one hand, he was assailing Mazzini, whose every move in life was actuated by his intense religious and political faith, while, on the other hand, he was attacking Marx as the modern Moses handing down to the enslaved multitudes his table of infamous laws as the foundation for a new tyranny, that of State socialism. In 1871 Bakounin ceased all maneuvering.
But the congress of 1868 dashed their hopes to the ground, and the revolutionists separated from the league and founded the same day, September 25th, a new association, called L'Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie Socialiste. The program now adopted by the Alliance, although written by Bakounin, expressed quite different views from those of the International Brothers.
When Bakounin wrote his startling and now famous decree abolishing the State, he created no end of hilarity among the Marxists, but had Bakounin been Napoleon with his mighty army, or Morgan and Rockefeller with their great wealth, he could no doubt in some measure have carried out his wish.
At times there seemed a chance of reconciliation, but they no more touched each other than immediately there flared forth the old animosity. When Bakounin left Russia in 1843, he met Proudhon and Marx in Paris. At that period the doctrines of all three were germinating. Bakounin had already written, "The desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire."
On the evening of September 27 a meeting of the Central Committee of Safety of France took place, and there a definite plan of action for the next day was decided upon. Velay, a tulle maker and municipal councillor, Bakounin, and others advised an armed manifestation, but the majority expressed itself in favor of a peaceful one.
After this he no longer attempted to conceal his anarchist sympathies, and in the Freiheit, on the platform, and on every possible occasion he preached principles almost identical with those of Nechayeff and Bakounin. His pamphlet also contains a dictionary of poisons which may be usefully employed against politicians, traitors, and spies.
"It proclaims anarchy in the working-class ranks as the surest means of destroying the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. And, as strange as it may seem, this was in fact what Bakounin was actually striving for.
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