Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/478

452 new oppressors. He condemns the jacobins and the Blanquists for dreaming of bloody revolutions directed against individual human beings, whereas the ultimate and universal revolution must be directed against the "organisation of things" and against "social positions." This radical revolution must destroy private property and the state, and may endeavour to protect individuals in so far as this will not injure the revolutionary cause. Bakunin does not shrink from speaking of this radical revolution as anarchy (anarchy; he says, is the "complete manifestation of the folk-life"), out of which equality will develop; but for this very reason every authority must be annihilated, whether it be known by the name of church, monarchy, constitutionalist state, bourgeois republic, or revolutionary dictatorship. This entirely new revolutionary state [so we cannot get on without the state after all!] "will be the new fatherland, the alliance of the universal revolution against the alliance of all the reactions."

Such in broad outline is Bakunin's justly renowned philosophy of "deed," built up upon the old confusion between determinism and fatalism, which repudiates moral responsibility. For some reasons Bakunin would like to save individual freedom, but for other reasons this would be inconvenient. Bakunin shelters behind the positivist screen of "natural" facts. In his address to the Russian youth he defends on similar lines Karakozov's attempt on Alexander II. representing it as "natural" and "epidemic" passion of youth; but, being aware of the precarious character of this exculpatory suggestion, he demands that "individual deeds" shall become more and more frequent, until they take the form of "deeds of the collective masses." The work will grow continually easier in proportion as panic gains ground in the stratum of society devoted to destruction. The uncorrupted minds of youth, argues Bakunin, cannot fail to grasp that it is far more humane to poniard or to strangle the objects of hatred by dozens or even by hundreds than in alliance with these same hated ones to participate in systematised legal murders. Bakunin therefore preaches the holy war of destruction; evil is to be fought by all possible means, "with poison, the knife, or the noose-for the revolution sanctifies all equally." The true revolutionist knows nothing of scruples or doubts, and has nothing to rue. "Repentance is excellent if it can alter things or lead to improvement. Otherwise, it is not merely useless but injurious."