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 “will be the new fatherland, the alliance of the Universal Revolution against the Alliance of all reactions.”

Such is in its principles Bakunin’s justly notorious “Philosophy of the Deed,” built up on the old confusion of determinism with fatalism, which denies ethical responsibility. On the one hand Bakunin would save individual freedom, on the other it is irksome to him. He hides himself behind the positivist Spanish wall of “natural facts.” In his apostrophes to the Russian youth he defends in the same way the “attentats” of Karakozov, representing them as the “natural” and “epidemic” passion of youth; but because he feels the awkwardness of this apology he demands that “these individual deeds” should grow more frequent, until they become “deeds of the collective masses.” The work will get steadily easier, in proportion as the panic spreads in that section of society which is doomed to destruction. The unspoilt youth must realise, so Bakunin harangues, that it is far more humane to stab and strangle dozens, even hundreds of hateful beings, than to share with them in systematic legal murder. Hence he preaches the sacred war of annihilation against all evil by all possible means: “poison, dagger, &c.—the revolution sanctifies everything in this struggle.” The true revolutionary knows neither scruples nor doubts, he has nothing to repent. “Repentance is good enough if it can alter and improve something: but if that is not the case, then it is not only useless but actually harmful.” Bakunin energetically attacks those who demand of “the men of to-day” a precise plan of future construction: it suffices to have a cloudy idea of the opposite of the loathsome machinery of present-day civilisation. The aim is only tearing down, “pandestruction”: “in the case of adherents of the cause of practical revolution we regard all speculations about this nebulous future as criminal, since they only serve as obstacles to the cause of destruction as such.” Bakunin attacks contemporary literature, which consists merely of denunciators and flatterers, hired by despotism to defend the old order in literature and science, and inventing the lie of a positive plan for the future. Certainly, he adds, there are honest, even Socialist dreamers, who spin plans for a better life, but that, too, is only the same loathsome stuff, because they build their pictures of the future out of the material of existing detestable conditions. “We desire that now the Deed should lead the Word”

How absurd, scholastic, sophistical, nay positively Jesuitic, this Humanism of Anarchy is, is obvious enough to any