s,
like Jules Guesde and his friends. The most prominent champion of
"Collectivism" was at this time Michel Bakounine.

In speaking of this man we shall pass over in silence his propaganda in
favour of the Hegelian philosophy, as far as he understood it, the part
he played in the revolutionary movement of 1848, his Panslavist writings
in the beginning of the sixties, and his pamphlet, "Roumanow, Pougatchew
or Pestel"[33] (London, 1862), in which he proposed to go over to
Alexander II., if the latter would become the "Tzar of the Moujiks."
Here we are exclusively concerned with his theory of Anarchist
Collectivism.

A member of the "League of Peace and Liberty," Bakounine, at the
Congress of this Association at Berne in 1869, called upon the
League--an entirely bourgeois body--to declare in favour of "the
economical and social equalisation of classes and of individuals." Other
delegates, among whom was Chaudey, reproached him with advocating
Communism. He indignantly protested against the accusation.

"Because I demand the economic and social equalisation of classes and
individuals, because, with the Workers' Congress of Brussels, I have
declared myself in favour of collective property, I have been reproached
with being a Communist. What difference, I have been asked, is there
between Communism and Collectivism. I am really astounded that M.
Chaudey does not understand this difference, he who is the testamentary
executor of Proudhon! I detest Communism, because it is the negation of
liberty, and I cannot conceive anything human without liberty. I am not
a Communist, because Communism concentrates and causes all the forces of
society to be absorbed by the State, because it necessarily ends in the
centralisation of property in the hands of the State, while I desire the
abolition of the State--the radical extirpation of this principle of the
authority and the tutelage of the State, which, under the pretext of
moralising and civilising men, has until now enslaved, oppressed,
exploited, and depraved them. I desire the organisation of society and
of collective or social property from below upwards, by means of free
association, and not from above downwards by means of some authority of
some sort. Desiring the abolition of the State, I desire the abolition
of property individually hereditary, which is nothing but an institution
of the State, nothing but a result of the principle of the State. This
is the sense, gentlemen, in