m the
earth could there arise, thought Bakounin, a free society, peopled with
happy and emancipated human souls. When one has once obtained this
conception of Bakounin's fundamental views, there is little necessity
for dealing with the infinite number of minor points upon which he was
forced to attack the men and movements of his time. On the one hand, he
was assailing Mazzini, whose every move in life was actuated by his
intense religious and political faith, while, on the other hand, he was
attacking Marx as the modern Moses handing down to the enslaved
multitudes his table of infamous laws as the foundation for a new
tyranny, that of State socialism. In 1871 Bakounin ceased all
maneuvering. Bringing out his great guns, he began to bombard both
Mazzini and Marx. Never has polemic literature seen such another battle.
With a weapon in each hand, turning from the one to the other of his
antagonists, he battled, as no man ever before battled, to crush "these
enemies of the entire human race."

There is, of course, no possibility of adequately summarizing, in such
limited space as I have allotted to it, the thought of one who traversed
the history of the entire world of thought and action in pursuit of some
crushing argument against the socialism of Marx. This perverted form of
socialism, Bakounin maintained, contemplated the establishment of a
_communisme autoritaire_, or State socialism. "The State," he says,
"having become the sole owner--at the end of a certain period of
transition which will be necessary in order to transform society,
without too great economic and political shocks, from the present
organization of bourgeois privilege to the future organization of
official equality for all--the State will also be the sole capitalist,
the banker, the money lender, the organizer, the director of all the
national work, and the distributor of its products. Such is the ideal,
the fundamental principle of modern communism."[24] This is, of all
Bakounin's criticisms of socialism, the one that has had the greatest
vitality. It has gone the round of the world as a crushing blow to
socialist ideals. The same thought has been repeated by every
politician, newspaper, and capitalist who has undertaken to refute
socialism. And every socialist will admit that of all the attempts to
misrepresent socialism and to make it abhorrent to most people the idea
expressed in these words of Bakounin has been the most effective. To
state thus