The quoting urge

I promised some quotes from Bakunin on his social theory:

"The co-operative workers' associations are a new fact in history. It is possible and even likely that they will someday transcend the limits of towns, provinces, and even States. They may entirely reconstitute society, dividing it not into nations but into different industrial groups, organized not according to the needs of politics but those of production ... when the free productive associations voluntarily organize according to their needs and special skills, they will transcend all national boundaries and form an immense world-wide economic federation. This will include an industrial parliament supplied by the associations with precise and detailed global scale statistics; by harmonizing supply and demand the parliament will distribute and allocate world industrial production to the various nations. Commercial and industrial crises, stagnation, waste of capital, etc., will no longer plague mankind; the emancipation of human labour will regenerate the world."
- 1866 Revolutionary Catechism

."...it is absolutely necessary for any country wishing to join the free federations of peoples to replace its centralized, bureaucratic, and military organizations by a federalist organization based only on the absolute liberty and autonomy of regions; provinces, communes, associations, and individuals. This federation will operate with elected functionaries directly responsible to the people; it will not be a nation organized from the top down, or from the centre to the circumference. Rejecting the principle of imposed and regimented unity, it will be directed from the bottom up, from the circumference to the centre, according to the principles of free federation. Its free individuals will form voluntary associations, its associations will form autonomous communes, its communes will form autonomous provinces, its provinces will form regions, and the regions will freely federate into countries, which, in turn, will sooner or later create the universal world federation."
- 1866 National Catechism

"Our aim is the creation of a powerful but always invisible revolutionary association which will prepare and direct the revolution. But never, even during open revolution, will the association as a whole, or any of its members, take any kind of public office, for it has no aim other than to destroy all government and make government impossible everywhere...It will keep watch so that authorities, government, and States can never be built again…"
- 1869

You published some anti-Jewish remarks by Bakmin in his critique of Marx and Rothschild. Bakunin made some introductory remarks is his related "Study on the German Jews" (1869):

"I begin by begging you to believe that I am in no way the enemy nor the slanderer of the Jews. Although I may be considered a cannibal, I do not carry savagery to that point, and I assure you that in my eyes all nations have their worth. Each moreover, is an ethnographically historic product, and is consequently responsible neither for its faults nor its merits. It is this that we may observe in connection with the modern Jews that their nature lends itself little to frank Socialism. Their history, long before the Christian era, implanted in them an essentially mercantile and bourgeois tendency..."

G. Jewell

Published in The Red Menace, Number 5, Summer 1980.

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