and strengthening
of the State at all costs; on the Socialist-revolutionary banner" (read
Bakounist banner) "is inscribed in characters of blood, in letters of
fire: the abolition of all States, the destruction of bourgeois
civilisation; free organisation from the bottom to the top, by the help
of free associations; the organisation of the working populace (_sic!_)
freed from all trammels, the organisation of the whole of emancipated
humanity, the creation of a new human world."

It is with these words that Bakounine concludes his principal work
"Statism and Anarchy" (Russian). We leave our readers to appreciate the
rhetorical beauties of this passage. For our own part we shall be
content with saying that it contains absolutely no human meaning
whatsoever.

The absurd, pure and simple--that is what is inscribed upon the
Bakounist "banner." There is no need of letters of fire and of blood to
make this evident to any one who is not hypnotised by a phraseology
more or less sonorous, but always void of sense.

The Anarchism of Stirner and of Proudhon was completely individualist.
Bakounine did not want individualism, or to speak more correctly, one
particular phase of individualism. He was the inventor of
"Collectivist-Anarchism." And the invention cost him little. He
completed the "liberty" Utopia, by the "equality" Utopia. As these two
Utopias would not agree, as they cried out at being yoked together, he
threw both into the furnace of the "permanent revolution" where they
were both at last forced to hold their tongues, for the simple reason
that they both evaporated, the one as completely as the other.

Bakounine is the _decadent_ of Utopism.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] "Statism and Anarchy," Appendix A. But for Russia the "science" of
Bakounine was quite equal to divining the future forms of social life;
there is to be the Commune, whose ulterior development will start from
the actual rural commune. It was especially the Bakounists who in Russia
spread the notion about the marvellous virtues of the Russian rural
commune.

[42] See Bakounine's articles on the "Politics of the International" in
the _Egalite_ of Geneva, August, 1869.

[43] The anathemas pronounced by Bakounine against political liberty for
a time had a very deplorable influence upon the revolutionary movement
in Russia.

[44] Communist Manifesto, p. 30.

[45] _Egalite_, 28th August, 1869.

[46] On the action of Bakounine in the International, see the