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THE FIGHT FOR EXISTENCE 195
discuss it from this point of view. It was only when
Bakounin counseled anarchy as a method of workingclass
organization that
both Marx and Engels protested,
on the ground that such tactics could lead only to selfdestruction.
Neither Bakounin nor his followers were
convinced, however, and they set out bravely after 1872
to put into practice their ideas. Their revolt against authority
was carried to its ultimate extreme. How far the
anarchists were prepared to go in their revolt is indicated
by a letter which Bakounin wrote to La Liberie of
Brussels a few days after his expulsion from the International.
Although not finished, and consequently not
sent to that journal,
it is especially interesting because
he attacks the
General Council as a new incarnation of
the State. Here his lively imagination pictures the International
as the germ of a new despotic social order,
already fallen under the domination of a group of dictators,
and he exclaims : "A State, a government, a universal
dictatorship! The dream of Gregory VIL, of
Boniface VIII., of Charles V., and of Napoleon is reproduced
in new forms, but ever with the same pretensions,
in the camp of social democracy." (2) This is an
altogether new point of view as
to the character of the
State. We now learn that it means any form of centralized
organization a committee, a chairman, an execu-
;
tive body of any sort is a State. The General Council
in London was a State. Marx and Engels were a State.
Any authority— no matter what its form, nor how controlled,
appointed, or elected is a — State.
I am not sure that this marks the birth of the repugnance
of the anarchists to even so innocent a form of
authority as that of a chairman. Nor am I certain that
this was the origin of those ideas of organization that
make of an anarchist meeting a modern Babel, wherein