. Their
sufferings are innumerable, and they bear these, not with patience, but
with a profound and passionate despair, that twice already in our
history has manifested itself in terrible outbursts: in the revolt of
Stephan Razine, and in that of Pougatschew."[38] And that is what
Bakounine understood by the material conditions of a Socialist
revolution! Is it necessary to point out that this "Marxism" is a little
too _sui generis_?

While combating Mazzini from the standpoint of the materialist
conception of history, Bakounine himself is so far from understanding
the true import of this conception, that in the same work in which he
refutes the Mazzinian theology, he speaks, like the thorough-faced
Proudhonian that he is, of "absolute" human morality, and he bolsters up
the idea of this morality--the morality of "solidarity,"--with such
arguments as these:

"Every actual being, so long as he exists, exists only by virtue of a
principle which is inherent in himself, and which determines his
particular nature; a principle that is not imposed upon him by a divine
law-giver of any sort" (this is the "materialism" of our author!), "but
is the protracted and constant result of combinations of natural causes
and effects; that is not, according to the ludicrous idea of the
idealists, shut up in him like a soul within its body, but is, in fact,
only the inevitable and constant form of his real existence. The human,
like all other species, has inherent principles quite special to itself,
and all these principles are summed up in, or are reducible to, a single
principle, which we call _solidarity_. This principle may be formulated
thus: No human individual can recognise his own humanity, nor,
therefore, realise it in his life except by recognising it in others,
and by helping to realise it for others. No man can emancipate himself,
except by emancipating with him all the men around him. My liberty is
the liberty of everyone, for I am not truly free, free not only in
thought but in deed, except when my liberty and my rights find their
confirmation, their sanction, in the liberty and the rights of all men,
my equals."[39]

As a moral precept, solidarity, as interpreted by Bakounine, is a very
excellent thing. But to set up this a morality, which by the way is not
at all "absolute," as principle "inherent" in humanity and determining
human nature, is playing with words, and completely ignoring what
materialism is. Humanity only e