cial 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." He begins then to
oppose to political action what he calls economic action.[43] In the
fragment--not published during Bakounin's life--the _Protestation de
l'Alliance_, he covers for the hundredth time his arguments against the
_Volksstaat_, which is a "ridiculous contradiction, a fiction, a
lie."[44] "The State ... will always be an institution of domination and
of exploitation ... a permanent source of slavery and of misery."[45]
How, then, shall the State be destroyed? 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....

"Let us now consider these three ways in their special action, differing
one from another, but, as I have just said, inseparable, and let us
commence with the organization of strike funds and strikes.

"Strike funds have for their sole object to provide the necessary money
in order to make possible the costly organization and maintenance of
strikes. And the strike is the beginning of the social war of the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie, while still within the limits of
legality.[T] Strikes are a valuable weapon in this twofold connection;
first, because they electrify the masses, give fresh impetus to their
moral energy, and awaken in their hearts the profound antagonism which
exists between their interests and those of the bourgeoisie, by showing
them ever clearer the abyss which from this time irrevocably separates
them from that class; and, second, because they contribute in large
measure to provoke and to constitute among the workers of all trades, of
all localities, and of all countries the consciousness and the fact
itself of solidarity: a double action, the one negative and the other
positive, which tends to constitute directly the new world of the
proletariat by opposing it, almost absolutely, to the bourgeois
world."[46]

In another place he says: "Once this solidarity is seriously accepted
and firmly established, it brings fo