A-Infos (en) Italy, FdCA, IL CANTIERE #40 - Materialism and Anti-Statism - Our Roots - edited by Paolo Papini (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In this short text, taken from State and Anarchy (1873), Mikhail Bakunin 
defines his conception of materialism, asserting that life and social 
reality neither descend nor depend on the abstract ideas of any 
scientist or philosopher, but rather that the ideas themselves arise 
from the dynamics of physical reality and social life. ---- Based on 
this fundamental assumption, Bakunin declares that the working class, 
creator of social wealth, can and must govern itself once it has 
emancipated itself from the rule of the bourgeoisie, without the need 
for an elite of leaders and theorists to impose their "science" from 
above, much less in the form of a new state-led and authoritarian 
organization of society that would be revolutionary only in name.
Here, Bakunin's polemic with Marx and statist socialism, then in full 
swing, emerges forcefully. In it, he exposes the idealist and thus 
authoritarian roots of Marxism, demonstrating its theoretical and 
dialectical qualities. Bakunin, who was a consistent revolutionary 
militant even before becoming a theoretician, was soon called upon to 
fight new battles, and the following year (1874) he was in Italy to take 
part in a new insurrectionary attempt.
---------------------
We, anarchist revolutionaries, advocates of the general education of the 
people, of emancipation and of the broadest development of social life, 
and consequently enemies of the state and all nationalization, affirm, 
in opposition to all metaphysicians, positivists, and all worshippers of 
deified science, whether scientific or otherwise, that natural life 
always precedes thought, which is only one of its functions, but will 
never be the result of thought; that it develops from its own 
unfathomable depths through a succession of diverse facts and never 
through a series of abstract reflections, and that to these latter, 
always produced by life, which in turn is never produced by it, they 
merely indicate as milestones its direction and the various phases of 
its own and independent evolution.
In accordance with these convictions, we not only have no intention or 
even the slightest ambition to impose on our people, or on any other 
people, any ideal of social organization drawn from books or invented by 
ourselves, but, convinced that the popular masses carry within 
themselves, in the instincts more or less developed by their history, in 
their daily needs and in their conscious or unconscious aspirations, all 
the elements of their future natural organization, we seek this ideal in 
the people themselves; and since every state power, every government, by 
its very essence and by its position outside the people or above it, 
must necessarily aim to subordinate them to an organization and to 
purposes that are foreign to it, we declare ourselves enemies of every 
government, of every state power, enemies of state organization in 
general, and we are convinced that the people can be happy and free only 
when, organizing themselves from the bottom up through independent and 
absolutely free associations and outside of any official tutelage, but 
not outside of the diverse and equally free influences of men and 
parties, they create their own life.
These are the beliefs of revolutionary socialists, and that's why they 
call us anarchists. We don't protest this definition because we are 
truly enemies of all authority, because we know that power corrupts both 
those invested with it and those who must submit to it. Under its 
baleful influence, some transform themselves into ambitious and greedy 
despots, exploiters of society for their own benefit or their own caste, 
others into slaves.
Idealists of every stripe, metaphysicians, positivists who advocate the 
supremacy of science over life, and doctrinaire revolutionaries, all 
together with the same ardor, albeit with different arguments, defend 
the idea of the State and State power, recognizing in this, quite 
logically, the only salvation, in their view, of society. Quite 
logically, because once they have adopted the fundamental principle, 
which in our opinion is completely false, that thought precedes life and 
abstract theory precedes social practice, and that therefore social 
science must be the starting point for social reorganizations and 
revolutions, they are necessarily forced to conclude that, given that 
thought, theory, and science, at least for now, constitute the heritage 
of a minority, this minority must therefore direct social life not only 
by promoting but also by directing all national movements, and that the 
day after the revolution the new organization of society must be 
achieved not through the free union from the bottom up of associations, 
municipalities, cantons, and regions, in harmony with the needs and 
instincts of the people, but solely through the dictatorial authority of 
that minority of scientists who claim to represent the collective will.
It is on the fiction of this supposed representation of the people and 
the concrete fact of the government of the popular masses by an 
insignificant handful of privileged individuals, elected or not by the 
multitudes forced into elections and who do not even know why or for 
whom they vote; it is on this abstract and fictitious conception of what 
is imagined to be the thought and will of all the people, and of which 
the real, living people have not the slightest idea, that both the 
theory of the state and the theory of the so-called revolutionary 
dictatorship are equally based.
The only difference between revolutionary dictatorship and statism lies 
only in their external form. In fact, both fundamentally represent the 
same principle of majority rule by the minority in the name of the 
former's alleged stupidity and the latter's alleged intelligence. 
Therefore, they are equally reactionary because both result in the 
direct and infallible affirmation of the political and economic 
privileges of the ruling minority and the economic and political slavery 
of the masses of the people.
It is clear, then, why the doctrinaire revolutionaries who have 
undertaken the mission of destroying the existing powers and orders to 
establish their own dictatorship on their ruins have never been and 
never will be enemies, but, on the contrary, have always been and will 
always be the most ardent defenders of the state. They are enemies of 
the existing powers only because they want to seize them; enemies of the 
existing political institutions only because they exclude the 
possibility of their dictatorship; but they are nevertheless the most 
ardent friends of the state power that must be maintained, without which 
the revolution, after having truly liberated the popular masses, would 
deprive this pseudo-revolutionary minority of any hope of successfully 
harnessing them to a new chariot and rewarding them with its 
governmental measures.

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