I. In the progress of mankind from its bestial existence to a human existence the State will shortly, according to Bakunin, disappear. "The State is a historically temporary arrangement, a transitory form of society."[352]
1. The State belongs to a low stage of evolution.
"Man takes the first step from his bestial existence to a human existence by religion; but so long as he remains religious he will never reach his goal; for every religion condemns him to absurdity, guides him into a wrong course, and makes him seek the divine in place of the human."[353] "All religions, with their gods, demigods, and prophets, their Messiahs and saints, are products of the credulous fancy of men who had not yet come to the full development and entire possession of their intellectual powers."[354] This holds good also, and particularly, of Christianity: it is "the complete inversion of common-sense and reason."[355]
The State is a product of religion. "In all lands it is born of a marriage of violence, robbery, spoliation,—in short, of war and conquest,—with the gods whom the religious enthusiasm of the nations had gradually created."[356] "He who speaks of revelation speaks thereby of revealers enlightened by God, of Messiahs, prophets, priests, and lawgivers; and, if once these are recognized on earth as representatives of the Deity, as sacred teachers of mankind chosen by God himself, then of course they have unlimited authority. All men owe them blind obedience; for no human reason, no human justice, is valid against the divine reason and justice. As slaves of God, men must be also slaves of the Church, and of the State so far as the Church hallows the State."[357]
"No State is without religion, and none can be without religion. Take the freest States in the world,—for instance, the United States of America or the Swiss Confederacy,—and see what an important part divine providence plays in all public utterances there."[358] "It is not without good reason that governments hold the belief in God to be an essential condition of their power."[359] "There is a class of people who, even if they do not believe, must necessarily act as if they believed. This class embraces all mankind's tormentors, oppressors, and exploiters. Priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, financiers, office-holders of all sorts; policemen, gendarmes, jailers, and executioners; capitalists, usurers, heads of business, and house-owners; lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades,—all of them, down to the smallest grocer, will always repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that, if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him; 'for must not the populace have its religion?' It is the very safety-valve."[360]
2. The characteristics of the State correspond to the low stage of evolution to which it belongs.
The State enslaves the governed. "The State is force; nay, it is the silly parading of force. It does not propose to win love or to make converts; if it puts its finger into anything, it does so only in an unfriendly way; for its essence consists not in persuasion, but in command and compulsion. However much pains it may take, it cannot conceal the fact that it is the legal maimer of our will, the constant negation of our liberty. Even when it commands the good, it makes this valueless by commanding it; for every command slaps liberty in the face; as soon as the good is commanded, it is transformed into the evil in the eyes of true (that is, human, by no means divine) morality, of the dignity of man, of liberty; for man's liberty, morality, and dignity consist precisely in doing the good not because he is commanded to but because he recognizes it, wills it, and loves it."[361]
At the same time the State depraves those who govern. "It is characteristic of privilege, and of every privileged position, that they poison the minds and hearts of men. He who is politically or economically privileged has his mind and heart depraved. This is a law of social life, which admits of no exceptions and is applicable to entire nations as well as to classes, corporations, and individuals. It is the law of equality, the foremost of the conditions of liberty and humanity."[362]
"Powerful States can maintain themselves only by crime, little States are virtuous only from weakness."[363] "We abhor monarchy with all our hearts; but at the same time we are convinced that a great republic too, with army, bureaucracy, and political centralization, will make a business of conquest without and oppression within, and will be incapable of guaranteeing happiness and liberty to its subjects even if it calls them citizens."[364] "Even in the purest democracies, such as the United States and Switzerland, a privileged minority faces the vast enslaved majority."[365]
3. But the stage of mankind's evolution to which the State belongs will soon be left behind.
"From the beginning of historic society to this day, there has always been oppression of the nations by the State. Is it to be inferred that this oppression is inseparably connected with the existence of human society?"[366] Certainly not! "The great, true goal of history, the only one for which there is justification, is our humanization and deliverance, the genuine liberty and prosperity of all socially-living men."[367] "In the triumph of humanity is at the same time the goal and the essential meaning of history, and this triumph can be brought about only by liberty."[368] "As in the past the State was historically necessary evil, it must just as necessarily, sooner or later, disappear altogether."[369] Everybody feels already that this moment is approaching,[370] the transformation is at hand,[371] it is to be expected within the nineteenth century.[372]
II. In the next stage of evolution, which mankind must speedily reach, the place of the State will be taken by a social human life on the basis of the legal norm that contracts must be lived up to.
1. Even after the State is done away, men will live together socially. The goal of human evolution, "complete humanity,"[373] can be attained only in a society. "Man becomes man, and his humanity becomes conscious and real, only in society and by the joint activity of society. He frees himself from the yoke of external nature only by joint—that is, societary—labor: it alone is capable of making the surface of the earth fit for the evolution of mankind; but without such external liberation neither intellectual nor moral liberation is possible. Furthermore, man gets free from the yoke of his own nature only by education and instruction: they alone make it possible for him to subordinate the impulses and motions of his body to the guidance of his more and more developed mind; but education and instruction are of an exclusively societary nature. Outside of society man would have remained forever a wild beast, or, what comes to about the same thing, a saint. Finally, in his isolation man cannot have the consciousness of liberty. What liberty means for man is that he is recognized as free, and treated as free, by those who surround him; liberty is not a matter of isolation, therefore, but of mutuality—not of separateness, but of combination; for every man it is only the mirroring of his humanity (that is, of his human rights) in the consciousness of his brothers."[374]
But men will be held together in society no longer by a supreme authority, but by the legally binding force of contract. Complete humanity can be attained only in a free society. "My liberty, or, what means the same, my human dignity, consists in my being entitled, as man, to obey no other man and to act only on my own judgment."[375] "I myself am a free man only so far as I recognize the humanity and liberty of all the men who surround me. In respecting their humanity I respect my own. A cannibal, who treats his prisoner as a wild beast and eats him, is himself not a man, but a beast. A slaveholder is not a man, but a master."[376] "The more free men surround me, and the deeper and broader their freedom is, so much deeper, broader, and more powerful is my freedom too. On the other hand, every enslavement of men is at the same time a limitation of my freedom, or, what is the same thing, a negation of my human existence by its bestial existence."[377] But a free society cannot be held together by authority,[378] but only by contract.[379]
2. How will the future society shape itself in detail?
"Unity is the goal toward which mankind ceaselessly moves."[380] Therefore men will unite with the utmost amplitude. But "the place of the old organization, built from above downward upon force and authority, will be taken by a new one which has no other basis than the natural needs, inclinations, and endeavors of men."[381] Thus we come to a "free union of individuals into communes, of communes into provinces, of provinces into nations, and finally of nations into the United States of Europe and later of the whole world."[382]
"Every nation,—be it great or small, strong or weak,—every province, and every commune has the unlimited right to complete independence, provided that its internal constitution does not threaten the independence and liberty of the adjoining territories."[383]
"All of what are known as the historic rights of nations are totally done away; all questions regarding natural, political, strategic, and economic boundaries are henceforth to be classed as ancient history and resolutely disallowed."[384]
"By the fact that a territory has once belonged to a State, even by a voluntary adhesion, it is in no wise bound to remain always united with this State. Human justice, the only justice that means anything to us, cannot recognize anything as creating an obligation in perpetuity. All rights and duties are founded on liberty. The right of freely uniting and separating is the first and most important of all political rights. Without this right the League would be merely a concealed centralization still."[385]
