Selected writings 

by Michael Bakunin


Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of 
decisively interfering in the life of someone else....

The worse it is for those who are so ignorant of the natural and 
social law of human solidarity that they deem possible or even 
desirable the absolute independence of individuals in regard to one 
another. To will it is to will the disappearance of society.... All men, 
even the most intelligent and strongest are at every instant of their 
lives the producers and the product. Freedom itself, the freedom of 
every man, is the ever-renewed effect of the great mass of physical. 
intellectual, and moral influonces to which this man is subjected by 
the people surrounding him and the environment in which he was 
born and in which he passed his whole life.

To wish to escape this influence in the name of some . . . self-
sufficient and absolutely egoistical freedom. is to aim toward non-
being.

To do away with this reciprocal influence is tantamount to 
death. And in demanding the freedom of the masses we do not intend 
to do away with natural influences to which man is subjected by 
individuals and groups. All we want is to do away with is factitious. 
legitimized influences. to do away with the privileges in exerting 
influence. 
        
		- * -        

Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the 
serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person ant his 
liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf 
because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his 
head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions 
imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, 
the employer.... The worker always has the right to leave his 
employer, but has he the means to do so?  No, he does it in order to 
sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same 
hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.

The worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom. 
lacking any means for its possible realization. ant consequently it is 
only a fictitious liberty. an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole 
life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of 
terms of serfdom--"voluntary from the juridical point of view but 
compulsory from an economic sense--broken up by momentarily brief 
interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is 
real slavery.

		- * -        

We see that the richest property owners . . . are precisely those who work 
the least or who do not work at all.
        
It is evident to anyone who is not blind about this matter that 
productive labor creates wealth and yields the producers only misery, 
and it is only non-productive, exploiting labor that yields property.... 
What is property, what is capital in their present form? For 
the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the 
right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since 
neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by 
labor--that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the 
work of someone else. The right to exploit the work of those who 
possess neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell 
their productive power to the lucky owners of both.

		- * -        
        
The only thing that the State can and must do . . . is gradually 
to modify the right of inheritance so as to achieve its complete 
abolition as soon as possible. . . . We claim that this right will 
necessarily have to be abolished because as long as inheritance lasts, 
there will be hereditary economic inequality--not the natural 
inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes--which 
will necessarily continue to be expressed in hereditary inequality of 
the development and cultivation of intelligence and will remain the 
source and sanction of all political and social inequality.
        
		- * -        

Will this abolition be just?

A man, we are told, has acquired through his labor several tens 
or hundreds of thousands of francs, 8 million, and he will not have 
the right to leave them as an inheritance to his children Is this not an 
attack on natural right, is this not unjust plunder?

It has been proven 8 thousand times that an isolated worker 
cannot produce much more than what he consumes. We challenge any 
real worker, any worker who does not enjoy a single privilege, to 
amass tens or hundreds of thousands of francs, or millions That 
would be quite impossible. Therefore, if some individuals in present-
day society do acquire such great sums, it is not by their labor that 
they do so but by their privilege, that is, by a juridically legalized 
injustice. And since a person inevitably takes from others whatever he 
does not gain from his own, we have the right to say that all such 
profits are thefts of collective labor, committed by a few privileged 
individuals with the sanction of the State and under its protection." 
        

Maximoff, G. P. (Ed.); The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: 
Scientific Anarchism, N.Y: Free Press, l953.

Cutler, Robert M. (Ed.); From Out of the Dustbin 
Bakunin's Basic Writing's 1869-1871, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. 


