GOD AND THE STATE

Bakunin's classic and highly influential atheist text setting out the anarchist critique of religion as bound up in legitimising the state.

The keynote of God and the State is Bakunin’s repudiation of authority and coercion in every form. In a withering passage he vents his fury, on “all the tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity — priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats.” But the leading institutions of man’s enslavement — “my two bêtes noires,” he calls them — are the church and the state. Every state has been an instrument by which a privileged few have wielded power over the immense majority. And every church has been a loyal ally of the state in the subjugation of mankind. Governments throughout history have used religion both as a means of keeping men in ignorance and as a “safety-valve” for human misery and frustration. More than that, the very essence of religion is the disparagement of humanity for the greater glory of God. “God being everything,” Bakunin writes, “the real world and men are nothing; God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, inequity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave.” No less than the state, then, religion is the negation of freedom and equality. Thus if God really exists, Bakunin concludes, inverting a famous dictum of Voltaire’s, “it would be necessary to abolish him.”

Bakunin proclaimed an all-out war against the church and the state. If men are to be free, they must throw off the double yoke of spiritual and temporal authority. To accomplish this they must bring in bear the two “most precious qualities” with which they are endowed: the power to think with an act of thought and rebellion. If Adam and Eve had obeyed the Almighty when he forbade them to touch the tree of knowledge, humanity would have been condemned to perpetual bondage. But Satan — “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds”—persuaded them to taste the fruit of knowledge and liberty. These same weapons—reason and rebellion—must now be turned against the church and the state. And once they are overthrown there will dawn a new Eden for mankind, a new era of freedom and happiness.

But the task of liberation, warns Bakunin, will not be easy. For already a new class has emerged that aims to keep the masses in ignorance in order to rule over them. These would-be oppressors are the intellectual, above all Marx and his followers, “priests of science,” ordained in a new privileged church of superior education. The rule of the intellectuals, according to Bakunin, would be no less oppressive than the rule of kings or priests or holders of property. The government of an educated elite, like the worst religious and political despotisms of the past, “cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent.”