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74
VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
ing with the infinite number of minor points upon which
he was forced to attack the men and movements of his
time. On the one hand, he was assailing Mazzini, whose
every move in life was actuated by his intense religious
and political faith, while, on the other hand, he
was attacking Marx as the modern Moses handing down
to the enslaved multitudes his table of infamous laws as
the foundation for a new tyranny, that of State socialism.
In 1
87 1 Bakounin ceased all maneuvering. Bringing
out his great guns, he began to bombard both Mazzini
and Marx. Never has polemic literature seen such
another battle. With a weapon in each hand, turning
from the one to the other of his antagonists, he battled,
as no man ever before battled, to crush "these enemies
of the entire human race."
There is,
of course, no possibility of adequately summarizing,
in such limited space as I have allotted to it,
the thought of one who traversed the history of the entire
world of thought and action in pursuit of some
crushing argument against the socialism of Marx. This
perverted form of socialism, Bakounin maintained, contemplated
the establishment of a communisme autoritaire,
or State socialism. "The State," he says, "having become
the sole owner— at the end of a certain period of
transition which will be necessary in
order to transform
society, without too great economic and political shocks,
from the present organization of bourgeois privilege to
the future organization of official equality for all — the
State will also be the sole capitalist, the banker, the
money lender, the organizer, the director of all the national
work, and the distributor of its products. Such
is the ideal, the fundamental principle of modern communism."
(24) This is, of all Bakounin's criticisms of
socialism, the one that has had the greatest vitality.
It