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Updated: September 23, 2025
The next few years were spent mostly in Italy, and it was here that he conceived his plan of a secret international organization of revolutionists. Little is known of how extensive this secret organization actually became, but Bakounin said in 1864 that it included a number of Italian, French, Scandinavian, and Slavic revolutionists. As a scheme this secret organization is remarkable.
The future organization will, without doubt, proceed from the movement and life of the people; but that is the business of future generations. Our task is terrible, total, inexorable, and universal destruction." These are in brief the tactics and principles of terrorism, as understood by Bakounin and Nechayeff.
Neither money, nor organization, nor literature was any longer absolutely necessary. One human being in revolt with torch or dynamite was able to instruct the world. Bakounin and Nechayeff had written their principles, and had, in fact, in some measure, endeavored to carry them into effect.
Taking their stand on this careful analysis of historic progress and of economic evolution, they viewed with contempt the older fighting methods of the revolutionists, and turned their vials of satire and wrath upon Herwegh, Willich, Schapper, Kinkel, Ledru-Rollin, Bakounin, and all kinds and species of revolution-makers.
If one starts with the assumption that nothing can be done through the State as Owen, Bakounin, and the syndicalists have done one is, of course, led irretrievably to oppose parliamentary and other political methods of action. When the syndicalists throw over democracy and foreswear political action, they are fatally driven to the point where they must abandon the working class.
Bakounin, the dreamer, the sentimentalist, and the revolution-maker, wants the whole world free. Whether or not Marx wants the same thing is not the question. He rigidly confines himself to what he believes is possible. He says certain conditions must exist before a people can be free and independent. Among them are included historical, geographical, political, and industrial conditions.
And, while it may be said for Bakounin that he nowhere else advocates all the varied criminal methods advised in these publications, there is hardly an argument for their use that is not based upon his well-known views.
But Bakounin neglects to mention that it was these very elements that eagerly became the mercenaries of any prince who could feed them. They were lawless, "without phrase, without rhetoric," and, if anyone were willing to pay them, they would gladly pillage, burn, and murder in his interest. They would have served anybody or anything the State, society, a prince, or a tyrant.
That the State is only an agency for representing in certain fields the power of a dominant economic class this is something the anarchist will not admit. In fact, Bakounin seems to have been utterly mystified when Eccarius answered him at Basel in these words: "The State can be reformed by the coming of the working class into power."
And every socialist will admit that of all the attempts to misrepresent socialism and to make it abhorrent to most people the idea expressed in these words of Bakounin has been the most effective. To state thus the ideal of socialism is sufficient in most cases to end all argument.
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