Bakunin for kix


Bakunin:

""""Between these two tendencies there exist the same conflicting conceptions and the same abyss that separate the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Is it surprising, therefore, that these irreconcilable adversaries clashed in the International, that the struggle between them, in all forms and on all possible occasions, is still going on? The Alliance, true to the program of the International, disdainfully rejected all collaboration with bourgeois politics, in however radical and socialist a disguise. They advised the proletariat that the only real emancipation, the only policy truly beneficial for them, is the exclusively negative policy of demolishing political institutions, political power, government in general, and the State, and that to do this it is necessary to unify the scattered forces of the proletariat into an International organization, a revolutionary power directed against the entrenched ]power of the bourgeoisie."""""




Your daddy

""""The German Social Democrats advocated a completely opposite policy. They told these workers, who unfortunately heeded them, that the first and most pressing task of their organization must be to win political rights by legal agitation. They thus subordinated the movement for economic emancipation to an exclusively political movement, and by this obvious reversal of the whole program of the International they filled in at a single stroke the abyss that the International had opened between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. They have done more. They have tied the proletariat to the bourgeois towline. For it is evident that this whole political movement so enthusiastically extolled by the German Socialists, since it must precede the economic revolution, can only be directed by the bourgeoisie, or what is still worse, by workers transformed into bourgeois by their vanity and ambition. And, in fact, this movement, like all its predecessors, will once more supersede the proletariat and condemn them to be the blind instruments, the victims. to be used and then sacrificed in the struggle between the rival bourgeois parties for the power and right to dominate and exploit the masses. To anyone who doubts this we have only to show what is happening now in Germany, where the organs of social democracy sing hymns of joy on seeing a congress of professors of bourgeois political economy entrusting the proletariat to the paternal protection of states, and it has occurred in parts of Switzerland where the Marxian program prevails – at Geneva, Zurich, Basel, where the International has declined to the point of being only an electoral ballot box for the profit of the radical bourgeois. These incontestable facts seem to me to be more eloquent than any words.

These facts are real and they are a natural effect of the triumph of Marxian propaganda. And it is for this reason that we fight the Marxian theories to the death, convinced that if they should triumph throughout the International, they would at the least kill its spirit, as they have already in great part done in the places I have referred to.""""

To reiterate: "it has occurred in parts of Switzerland where the Marxian program.... has declined to the point of being only an electoral ballot box for the profit of the radical bourgeois." MB could have been speaking about the American democrats, those delusional consumers who take Al Gore to be a "radical".

More MB: "We fight the Marxian theories to the death." Whoa. What's that entail in contemporary terms? Authentic anarchists--a rather sparse crowd, to be sure, tho' Chomsky admired MB, supposedly, as did Edward Abbey--support neither statist-welfare socialism and bureaucracy ala ObamaCo, nor the theocrats and monarchical-capitalism of the right (as Obama's support of the Bushco-Paulson-Pelosia sponsored Bailout indicates, Obama has no problem--in traditional marxist-hypocrite style--working alongside the rightists and financiers when needed).

It might also be recalled that during the spanish civil war, the republicanos drew inspiration from Bakunin, and opposed the soviet apparatchiks as well as the royalists and "phalange" nationalists; when stalinist atrocities mounted, many a republicano abandoned leftist ideology altogether (some going as far as joining the phalange...). In historical and Dialectical terms ala GWF Hegel, the battles between Being of the right (mind/human thinking), and Not-Being of left (nature, if you will), reveal themselves in Becomingness, in process, in temporality. The intelligent anarchist, aware that he's both a Dr. Jekyll AND Mr. Hyde, eros and thanatos (as are ALL humans), thrives in that Becomingness.