Best 3 quotes of Paul Avrich on MyQuotes

Bakunin, on the other hand, considered himself a revolutionist of the deed, "not a philosopher and not an inventor of systems, like Marx." He adamantly refused to recognize the existence of any "a priori ideas or preordained, preconceived laws." Bakunin rejected the view that social change depended on the gradual maturation of "objective" historical conditions. On the contrary, he believed that men shaped their own destinies, that their lives could not be squeezed into a Procrustean bed of abstract sociological formulas. "No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world," Bakunin declared. "I cleave to no system, I am a true seeker." Mankind was not compelled to wait patiently as the fabric of history unfolded in the fullness of time. By teaching the working masses theories, Marx would only succeed in stifling the revolutionary ardor every man already possessed—"the impulse to liberty, the passion for equality, the holy instinct of revolt.

While entrusting the intellectuals with a critical role in the forthcoming revolution, Bakunin at the same time cautioned them against attempting to seize political power on their own, in the manner of the Jacobins or their eager disciple Auguste Blanqui. On this point Bakunin was most emphatic. The very idea that a tiny band of conspirators could execute a coup d'état for the benefit of the people was, in his derisive words, a "heresy against common sense and historical experience." These strictures were aimed as much at Marx as at Blanqui. For both Marx and Bakunin, the ultimate goal of the revolution was a stateless society of men liberated from the bonds of oppression, a new world in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. But where Marx envisioned an intervening proletarian dictatorship that would eliminate the last vestiges of the bourgeois order, Bakunin was bent on abolishing the state outright. The cardinal error committed by all revolutions of the past, in Bakunin's judgment, was that one government was turned out only to be replaced by another. The true revolution, then, would not capture political power; it would be a social revolution, ridding the world of the state itself.

Yet, if they repudiated the social dogmas of their time as artificial, abstract, and far removed from real life, their own approach to building the good society could hardly be called pragmatic or empirical. Visionary utopians, the anarchists paid scant attention to the practical needs of a rapidly changing world; they generally avoided careful analysis of social and economic conditions, nor were they able or even willing to come to terms with the inescapable realities of political power. For the religious and metaphysical gospels of the past, they substituted a vague messianism which satisfied their own chiliastic expectations; in place of complex ideologies, they offered simple action-slogans, catchwords of revolutionary violence, poetic images of the coming Golden Age. By and large, they seemed content to rely on "the revolutionary instincts of the masses" to sweep away the old order and "the creative spirit of the masses" to build the new society upon its ashes. "Through a Social Revolution to the Anarchist Future!" proclaimed a group of exiles in South America; the practical details of agriculture and industry "will be worked out afterwards" by the revolutionary masses. Such an attitude, though it sprang from a healthy skepticism towards the ideological "blueprints" and "scientific laws" of their Marxist adversaries, could be of little help in setting a course of action designed to revolutionize the world.