3.

To imagine that the government can be overthrown by a secret society, and that this society can take the government's place, is an error into which have fallen all the revolutionary organizations born in the heart of the republican bourgeoisie of France since 1820. But other facts abound which give added witness to that error. What devotion, what abnegation, what perseverance did not the secret republican societies of Young Italy Young Italy (Giovoni Italia), was founded by the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini in 1831. Its propaganda was successful, but its attempts at insurrection failed. In ⁶² display -- yet all this immense work, all these sacrifices made by young people in Italy, before which even those of Russian revolutionaries seem to pale, all these corpses piled up in the casemates of Austrian fortresses and under the axe and bullets of the executioners -- all of it became the inheritance of the rascals of the bourgeoisie and the hangers-on of royalty.

It is the same with Russia. It is rare to find in history a secret organization that with such scanty means obtained results as immense as those attempts by Russian youth, which proved itself so powerfully in the energy and action of the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee was the activist core of Narondnay Volya, the People's Will, a terrorist group founded in 1879 by militants disillusioned with the failure of gradualist policies. It was the Executive Committee that planned and carried out the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Trans. ⁶³ It has shaken that colossus which seemed invulnerable, Tsarism, and it has made autocratic government henceforward impossible in Russia. Yet only the naive can imagine that the Executive Committee will become the master of power when the crown of Alexander III is trailed in the mud. Others -- those who worked to make a name for themselves while the revolutionaries laid their mines or perished in Siberia, the intriguers, the talkers, the lawyers, the scribblers who from time to time shed a quickly wiped tear on the tombs of the heroes and posed as friends of the people -- these will come forward to take the place made vacant by the disintegration of the government and to shout "Step back!" to the "unknowns" who have prepared the revolution.

This is inevitable, it is a matter of fate, and it cannot be otherwise. For it is not secret societies, or even revolutionary organizations, that give the fatal blow to governments. Their function, their historic mission, is to prepare people's minds for the revolution. And when the peoples' minds are prepared -- with the help of external circumstances, the last push comes, not from the initiating group but from the masses that have remained outside the society. On the 31st of August Paris remained deaf to Blanqui's Blanqui. See note 64. Trans. ⁶⁴ calls. Four days later it proclaimed the downfall of the government; but then it was no longer the Blanquists who were the initiators of the movement: it was the people, the millions, who dethroned the "Citizen King," and acclaimed the comedians whose names had been resounding for a couple of years in their ears. When a revolution is ready to break out, when the impulse can be felt on the air, when success has already become certain, then a thousand new men, over whom the secret organization has never wielded a direct influence, arrive to join the movement, like the birds of prey which appear on a battlefield to take their part in tearing apart the victims. They help in giving the final push, and it is not from the puppets on the seesaw that they will take their leaders, so convinced they are by the idea that a leader is necessary.

The conspirators who sustain the superstition of dictatorship thus work unwittingly at bringing to power their own enemies. But if what we have just said is true in relation to revolutions which are really political disturbances, it is even more true in relation to the revolution which we desire -- the social revolution. To allow any kind of government -- a power that is strong and demands obedience -- to establish itself is to put the brakes on the revolution from the very beginning. The good that this government might do is nil, and the evil immense.

In fact, what is it that we understand by revolution? It is not a simple change of rulers. It is the seizing by the people of all social wealth. It is the abolition of all those powers that have not ceased to hobble the development of humanity. But is it in fact by decrees emanating from a government that such an immense economic revolution can be accomplished? In the last century we saw the Polish dictator Ksciuzko Tadeusz Kosciuzko was a Polish officer who fought with distinction on the side of the rebels in the American War of Independence, and then, returning to Poland, led in 1794 an uprising against Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the powers that had divided his country between them. He lived out his life in France, the United States and Switzerland, where he died. Trans. ⁶⁵ decreeing the abolition of personal servitude, but serfdom continued to exist for eighty years after that decree. We saw the Convention, the omnipotent Convention, the terrible Convention, as its admirers called it -- decreeing the sharing out according to the need of all the communal lands regained from the lords. Like so many others, the decrees remained a dead letter, because, in order to put it into execution, it would have needed a new revolution made by the proletarians of the countryside, and revolutions are not made by decree.

For the repossession of the social wealth by the people to become an accomplished fact, the people itself must feel its elbows free, must shake off the servitude to which it is no longer bound, must use its collective intelligence and march ahead without heeding the orders of anyone. For it is precisely this which will frustrate the dictatorship, even if it is the worst intentioned in the world, incapable of advancing the revolution by a single inch.

But if the government -- however it may strive for the revolutionary ideal -- creates no new force and does not further the work of demolition which we have to accomplish, even less can we count on it for the work of reconstruction that must follow the demolition of the old order. The economic changes that will result from the social revolution will be so immense and so profound, they will so alter all the relations based on property and exchange, that it will be impossible for one or even a number of individuals to elaborate the social forms to which a further society must give birth. This elaboration of new social forms can only be the collective work of the masses. To satisfy the immense variety of conditions and needs that will emerge on the day when property is swept away, we shall need the flexibility of the collective spirit of the community. Any kind of external authority will be merely an obstacle, a hindrance to the organic work that has to be accomplished; it will be no better than a source of discord and of hatreds.

But it is surely time to abandon that illusion, so often dismissed -- and also so often paid for dearly -- of a revolutionary government. It is time to say once and for all -- and adopt it as a political axiom -- that a government cannot be revolutionary. People talk about the Convention, After an insurrection in August 1792, a National Convention was elected, which abolished the kingdom of France and established the First Republic. Trans. ⁶⁶ but we must not forget that the few measures of even a slightly revolutionary character taken by the Convention were the confirmation of acts accomplished by the people who at that moment advanced over the heads of all governments. As Victor Hugo said in his flamboyant manner, Danton pushed Robespierre, Marat watched and pushed Danton, and Marat himself was pushed by Cimourdain, that personification of the clubs, of the rebels and enrages. Like all the governments preceding and following it, the Convention was no better than a ball-and-chain on the feet of the people.

The facts that history has to teach us are so conclusive in this direction; the impossibility of a revolutionary government and the harmfulness of what is proposed under this name are so evident, that it would seem difficult to explain the stubbornness which a certain school of self-styled socialists puts into maintaining the idea of a government. But the explanation is very simple. However much they may call themselves socialists, the adepts of that school have a quite different conception from ours of the revolution which it is incumbent on us to accomplish. For them -- as for all the bourgeois radicals -- the social revolution is a matter not to be thought of today. What they dream of in the depths of their hearts without daring to admit it, is something quite different. It is the institution of a government similar to that of Switzerland or the United States, making a few attempts at State appropriation of what they ingeniously call "public services." It has something in it of the ideas of Bismarck and of the tailor who became president of the United States. "The tailor who became president of the United States" was Andrew Johnson (18081875) who succeeded on Lincoln's assassination in 1865. His reconstruction programmes, attempting to repair the damage of the Civil War, were mostly failures, and he was actually impeached by his opponents, though he continued in office to 1869, the end of his term. Trans. ⁶⁷ It is a compromise, reached in advance, between the socialist aspirations of the masses and the appetites of the bourgeoisie. They would like a complete expropriation, but they do not feel in themselves the courage to attempt it, so they put it off for the next century, and before the battle takes place they have already entered into negotiations with the enemy.

For us, who realize that the moment is getting near to strike a mortal blow at the bourgeoisie; that the time is not far away when the people will be able to put their hands on the whole of social wealth and reduce the exploiting class to impotence; for us, I say, there can be no hesitation. We will throw ourselves body and soul into the Social revolution; once that path has been taken any government, no matter what headgear it wears, will be an obstacle, and we shall reduce to powerlessness and sweep away whoever is ambitious enough to try and impose himself on us to control our destinies.

Enough with governments! Make way for the people! Make way for anarchy!