Sergey Nechayev: The 20th century belonged to him, and so will the 21st century

Sergey Nechayev  (1847 – 1882)  was a terrorist, an anarchist, an essayist and widely the single most reviled figure in all of anarchism. More than Max Stirner, more than Renzo Novatore, even more than the Bonnot gang. In the book Bakunin: The Creative Passion, Mark Leier writes:

"Bakunin’s careful thoughts on the nature of revolution and organization were, however, overshadowed by his relationship with one of the most repellent characters of the nineteenth-century revolutionary movements. His active work with Sergei Nechaev took up only a few months of Bakunin’s life, yet it would have immediate repercussions and would taint Bakunin and anarchism for generations to come."

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism also has some comments on the infamous bizarre Bakunin-Nechayev relationship:

"In his search for likely catalysts, Bakunin became involved at this time with a young revolutionary called Sergei Nechaev. It proved a disastrous relationship and did immense harm to the anarchist movement. Nechaev, who later inspired the character Peter Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, was an extraordinary character: despotic, power-hungry, egoistic, rude and yet strangely seductive. He exemplifies the unscrupulous terrorist who will stop at nothing to realize his aim.

Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev sorely tested Bakunin’s belief that society, not individuals, should be held responsible for crimes and transgressions. Nechaev stole money and reputation from the anarchist, inadvertently aided Marx in purging him from the International Working Men’s Association, and provided ample, if indiscriminate and inaccurate, munitions to the enemies of anarchism that they are still firing off today."

Furthermore, the book comments on his most lasting pamphlet, Catechism Of A Revolutionary:

"Whilst in Geneva with Bakunin, Nechaev wrote between April and August 1869 a Catechism of a Revolutionary which proved to be one of the most repulsive documents in the history of terrorism. The guiding principle of this work is that ‘everything is moral that contributes to the triumph of the revolution; everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.’ It calls upon the would-be revolutionary to break all ties with past society, to feel a ‘single cold passion’ for the revolutionary cause and to adopt the single aim of ‘pitiless destruction’ in order to eradicate the State and its institutions and classes."

There also exists a biography which I have not read because it is no longer available, but I know it considers its subject a psychopath from quotes about it in other articles. So, clearly, anarchists do not think very highly of Nechayev. But let's back up: Who was Sergey Nechayev? 

Nechayev was the son of a serf (somewhat unusual for a revolutionary, who mostly had noble backgrounds, such as Kropotkin or Bakunin) who, while by no means wealthy, were able to give him a decent education. In 1865, he moved to Moscow to study and take the examination to become an elementary school teacher. However, that failed, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There, he was radicalized by Karakozov's attempt to assassinate the Tsar. He found himself working with fellow revolutionaries and developed an highly ascetic theory of the revolutionary and terrorism (which we will touch on later). There, he manipulated students by telling them lies and exaggerations regarding his own background, convincing his comrades that he was arrested by the secret police, and had miraculously escaped the Peter and Paul fortress. Indeed, manipulation will prove to be a recurring theme in Nechayev's life. 

In fact, he was just planning to flee Russia, but this way he had created himself a backstory that would grant him street cred among fellow revolutionaries. This story was very helpful when he met Bakunin in Geneva, in March 1869. Bakunin, the old anarchist, had fell out with "the people" of Russia, and saw in Nechayev a new, youthful revolutionary spirit, "one of those young fanatics who doubt nothing and who fear nothing". The relationship proved extremely disastrous. But this is when Nechayev, with perhaps some help of Bakunin (how much Bakunin had an hand in Nechayev's essays is a source of bitter controversy), wrote several pamphlets. These essays are what got Bakunin an infamous reputation as an apostle of terrorism and nihilistic destruction. On Nechayev's merciless methods, Bakunin told him: 

Nechayev as a young man.

"People’s revolutions are born from the course of events, or from historical currents which, continuously and usually slowly, flow underground and unseen within the popular strata, increasingly embracing, penetrating, and undermining them until they emerge from the ground and their turbulent waters break all barriers and destroy everything that impedes their course. Such a revolution cannot be artificially induced. It is even impossible to hasten it, although I have no doubt that an efficient and intelligent organization can facilitate the explosion. There are historical periods when revolutions are simply impossible; there are other periods when they are inevitable."

Among many other bizarre episodes in his life, he would murder a fellow comrade for questioning whether Nechayev was truly the head of a secret revolutionary society (he wasn't). Another tale comes when Bakunin was paid in advance for translating Marx's Das Kapital into Russian. When Bakunin took the money and lazied up on the translation job, Nechayev sent the man who had paid him threatening him, along with pictures of a revolver and a knife. People thought Bakunin had done this, putting Bakunin in further trouble.

Not only that, but he helped Marx into getting Bakunin out of the First International.

When he was arrested for the murder, so manipulative was he, that he succeeded in manipulating the very guards who guarded him. The Tsar himself seemed to be afraid of him, demanding that his twenty year sentence was turned into a life sentence. So dedicated was he to revolution, as he puts it in his Catechism, that when fellow radicals Narodnaya Volya offered to take him out of jail, he refused, saying that they should use their resourced to assassinate the Tsar. And indeed, the Tsar was eventually murdered.

So, why all this? What made Nechayev so memorable as a character in anarchist history. Well, it is almost entirely due to his essay, Catechism Of A Revolutionary. It is very short, so I would simply link it here rather than try and summarize it.

The essay would prove to be incredibly destructive to the anarchist cause, with people to this very day using it as an example of "proof" that anarchism is inherently nihilistic. While it did influence fellow Russian nihilists as well as some Narodniks, it influenced no important figures in the history of anarchism. Kropotkin, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, criticizes Nechayev for his methods, in fact.

However, and this is a big however, it did influence one very important person: Lenin.

Several Lenin biographies record the following comment regarding Nechayev:

"He [Lenin] once told Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich: ‘People have completely forgotten that Nechayev possessed a special talent as an organiser, an ability to establish particular skills in illegal work…It’s enough to recall his precise reply to the question, who should be killed in the royal family? He said “the whole ektenia” [the entire list of Romanovs read out in a traditional Orthodox service]. So who should be killed? The entire house of Romanov…That was pure genius."

In other sources, he also had called Nechayev "a titan of the revolution", and said that everyone should read him and they should look for Nechayev's essays and have them published. So he was clearly familiar with Nechayev, but it is more fascinating still, to understand just how close Lenin's concept of a "professional revolutionary" that would fill the ranks in a vanguard party is to that of Nechayev's "doomed man".

Lenin argued, as a revolutionary tactician, for a vanguard party filled with professional revolutionaries. All these revolutionaries would have had professional discipline, just like the ascetic conspirators described in The Revolutionary Catechism. The Catechism describes a secret society of revolutionaries that operates with total devotion to the revolution. Since Lenin was aware of Nechayev and his Catechism, it is not at all a stretch to suggest that his model of a "vanguard party" was heavy influenced by this. Likewise, Nechayev's notion that "morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way." echoes several of Lenin's speeches. According to Robert Service's Lenin: A Biography:

They knew that he admired the notorious Pëtr Tkachëv’s journal Alarm and the proclamations of the still more notorious Sergei Nechaev (whose complicity in murder had caused the Swiss authorities to make a legal exception in 1872 and extradite him to St Petersburg). Lenin recommended his associates to read these materials and learn lessons from them.

Further, from Nechayev's essay The Fundamentals Of The Future Social System:

The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone. 

The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers' societies (artels) and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there.

For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers' groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers' society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.

This brutal view of anarchism (which I like to call "authoritarian anarchism"), called by Marx "Barracks Communism", bears an uncanny similarity to Lenin's War Communism, the Policies of the USSR before the NEP.

So, Nechayev's authoritarian anarchism bears a lot of similarities to Lenin's own ideology, and was almost certainly influenced by it. Seeing that the Red October was the single most important event of the 20th century,  this would mean Nechayev had a massive influence on the history of the 20th century. Every Leninist revolutionary, specially the Vietcong who were ideologically trained to never give up, is a "doomed man", whose personal interests, business affairs, emotions, attachments, property and name are second to revolution.

Furthermore, I wrote in a previous essay that the future will have a revolution, and it will be extremely brutal and costly. Nechayev has already had the 20th century, but he shall have the 21st century as well. Who else, if not the "doomed man", could carry out the atrocities, the terrorism, and specially the extermination (a word that Nechayev constantly used, saying at one point "Our task is one of extermination") of all the groups that oppose the revolution? Nechayev's Catechism was reprinted by the Black Panther Party and became a personal bible to some of its members, and in the future it will again become a personal bible to many revolutionaries.

Because of this, I argue, one should study the tactics, the story and the writings of Nechayev, if not just to understand history a little bit better, then to understand what is coming in the future. Likewise, there are several books written on Nechayev, including a biography, but none of these are available online and they are long since out of print. A reprint of these could help us. Perhaps too, it would help us to translate and reprint the essays of Nechayev. I am sure that they are in some Russian archives, somewhere.

He [Nechaev] was, in short, a Bolshevik before the Bolsheviks - Orlando Figes

The Cost of Revolution

There is a lot of talk in Marxist-Leninist circles of revolution, about how we can no longer let capitalist exploitation ravage the planet as it now presents an active existential threat to the safety of the planet and thus all the beings in it. All well and good, but... What would the cost of a worldwide revolution be?

Well, to begin with, we have to understand that, in the future, millions of people are going to be killed in wars, thousands of famines in countries ravaged by battle and thousands of millions more culturally, socially and politically repressed. This is, because, there is no proletariat revolution without an immediate reaction by the Bourgeoisie. The future will make the Soviet Union, Maoist China and Albania seems like utopias.

"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. "

Democracy certainly won't lead us anywhere. One must only look at Chile: A democratically elected socialist (and rather mild socialist at that) government was overthrown by a US supported military coup that went on to murder thousands, torture thousands more with some of the most vicious methods of torture, all for the sake of keeping profits for the ruling class high. One is a fool to believe that the Bourgeoisie will simply let power be wrestled away from them. Pretending that socialism won't require widespread violence and repression is just naive. 

Indeed, even decolonization was extremely violent and in some places war did not stop until one faction was hunted down to their very last soldier and leader.

Furthermore, for a Communist revolution to be possible, as Mao pointed out, it is entirely necessary that the opposition, deemed "reactionaries" must be stamped out. After all, the modern revolutionary is no longer just dealing with the fate of his country, but with the fate of the entire world for ecological reasons. So who are the reactionaries?

Well, for starters, essentially all of Abrahamic religions would have to be demolished. Millenia of history will be destroyed because, quite simply, the Church will always oppose a Communist revolution. Religious Organizations in the past always turn to capitalism and "reactionary politics"(See: the Spanish revolution) and the lack of a strong, repressive party would allow CIA infiltrators to destroy the revolution. The Russian Orthodox Church, per example, is incredibly reactionary, and canonizes the Tsar, which would not be allowed by the Party. Organized Religion favors, above all else, the status quo.

So, if there was to be a revolution, to be blunt, entire cultures made up of billions of people would either need to die or be suppressed into non-existence, which would undeniably lead to millions  of innocents being caught in the crossfire. In all Revolutions, the innocent have vanished. Per example,, during the Russian Civil War, the Green armies were mostly just peasants who wanted to stay out of the war, caught in the crossfire. Many German civilians in WW2 were reduced to skeletal ashes, pounded into dust by Allied bombs in what was a necessary sacrifice to hit valid military targets, such as the bombing of Dresden. This is a sad fact for the revolutionary because Imperialist powers would never let such a thing happen peacefully, the coups in South America on behalf of the US and the repression of the Chinese New Left on the behalf of the Chinese Communist Party being good examples of this. The sad fact for the religious is that the Church and religious individuals have always been associated to Counterrevolution, and will thus be purged, should a revolution happen. 

And that is just for religious sub-cultures, I need to remind you! We have not even began to touch all other subcultures that would fight against the revolution and/or be deemed "reactionary". Islamic treatment of women, the Indian caste system, female genital mutilation, white picket fence bourgeois America worshipers, racism in the Deep South, Hikikomori waifu worship culture (both in Japan and its spread to the West), K-Pop idol worship (the worst the culture industry has to offer) are just some, some elements of culture which would have to be changed under Socialism, and during the hypothetical revolution, anyone who fights to preserve these elements of culture would be killed.

To speak nothing of all the leftists who will be killed for their opposition to the Party! As we can see historically, anarchists have always been opposed and destroyed by Marxist-Leninists countries. Anarchists may be successful in creating anarcho-communist societies without reaching even nearly the repression that ML countries have, as they have in the past (Revolutionary Catalonia, Shimmin Prefecture, Ukranian Free Territory, etc) but they were ultimately completely crushed by a mix of Stalinists and Fascists fighting them. Should a revolution erupt from the barrel of gunpowder that is our modern world, I have no doubt that several anarchist revolutions will happen, and I also have no doubt that they will be crushed after a few years. 

"The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution."

"But that all implies" replies to me a man "that a revolution will happen. What happens if neoliberal capitalism is truly the end of history, as Fukuyama states? Or if revolutions do happen, but fail?"

To that, I am afraid that not much will change. The gears of fascism are already moving with what is essentially concentration camps working on the borders of the US, a supporter of the Brazilian Dictatorship winning the elections, several white nationalists terrorist attacks, and so on. If the Communists don't have a revolution, then as resources run low, as the environment decays resulting in masses of refugees seeking asylum, then either Fascism or Neo-Feudalism will rise. There is no escape from the coming of brutal dictatorships in the future. 

I do not say all this as anti-communist, or as a communist for that matter. But I would like to know to all those who are willing to partake in the revolution in the future: How far would you be willing to go? The coming revolution, if it is to succeed at all, needs revolutionaries to embody Nechayev's "doomed man" to a chilling degree. And the Doomed Man "knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily." and he "hates the existing social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way."

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

The revolutionary is a dedicated man, merciless toward the State and toward the educated classes; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and irreconcilable war to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.

Commentary on a passage by Stirner by Carlo Michelstaedter

'Man, your head is haunted; you have bats in your belfry! You're imagining big things and painting for yourself a whole world of gods that is there for you, a haunted realm to which you are called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am joking or speaking figuratively when I look upon those who cling to something higher, and, since this includes the vast majority, almost the whole human world, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What, then, is called a "fixed idea"?'

Max Stirner, the sad philosopher of anarchy, asks this question, and does not think that those fixed ideas bend man not because he is compelled by something that is outside him, but because he loves them. And if this love is not a necessity, it does not mean that outside of it there is no necessity. It is a part of the unified love, a perpetual reason for life, a perpetual necessity that is expressed in us, in all our desires, as in every beast, as in every plant, as in any part of nature. Our will is nothing but the act of this necessity passed through the "necessary" distance of our soul. And what about freedom? And what about free will then? ... All illusions for those who know no other state but slavery, to which therefore slavery does not exist. Such are the beasts. And so men believe in free will as they have settled into slavery so as to proclaim the only truth, the only love the chain that binds them to the wrists and the jailer - as they are beasts.

Whoever leaves this illusion immediately feels the weight of the yoke, feels the desperate pain of slavery. He could annihilate himself and be free in death. But before annihilating himself he must materially annihilate himself morally, killing the affections that bind him ... but here is the supreme mockery of the inexorable necessity. He cannot dissolve what he did not tie himself to. - I also want freedom, and I will be able to reach it ... or I will succumb. - And if I can no longer buy the illusion of freedom at the price of "enmity", nor can I stretch my back over a mountain peak irradiated by the sun, raise my eyes to the sky and contemplate, I want and can shape my life like a 'work of art, to feel in everything the infinite beauty of nature (in the broadest sense) and of the "first engine", as Leonardo da Vinci says, and to draw from every vision from every happy or sad feeling an exaltation of strength , an increase in my individuality and an increase in my vitality, and escape the necessity of things, idealizing them, ideally mastering them.

But sometimes I feel weak in the face of this ambitious dream, but free from what is commonly called ambition, a dream that does not give joy to me and to those who loved in me not the "man who lives" - that is, the one that only family members love, but the personality that transcends the petty terms of life ... I sometimes feel weak and small, and I see with horror the "animal transport" train that warns me that it should take me to the bourgeois world, triumphantly stupid ...

This short text shows Michelstaedter's own take on anarcho-egoism. Not at all unfamiliar to Stirner, but whereas Stirner is a sort of optimistic nihilist, seeing the world as his playground, a sort of "philosophy of enjoyment", Michelstaedter's egoistic vision is more pessimistic, taking a bit from Schopenhauer as well. 

Courage by Carlo Michelstaedter

Michele Ardan goes to the moon as a joke. The ship that carries the French expedition to the North Pole is baptized "Pourquioi-pas?" For the sake of the beauty of an instant and of a gesture, the French puts into play the highest human values. The beauty of a gesture is a small work of art. And if in this small work the heroic act is a necessary aesthetic element, the Frenchman becomes an hero for the sake of aesthetics, he is not an hero, he is an aesthete. But where is the reason for the beauty of a gesture? Evidently in a stronger ray in which a personality is better revealed. At the bottom of this work of art is the criterion of the value of the personality - the "moral criterion". Whether the point is high or low where the value of this personality culminates, which is to say, whether artistic intuition is vast or restricted, the relationship it has with the individual who feels it is always constant; whenever an individual dreams of moral perfection or senses an artistic harmony, he gives form - as far as his individual personality is worth - to the aspiration that ultimately exists in every man towards truth: his interest is an universal interest: the act that results from this interest in life is an act of development - of improvement,  it is an act of reduction of the cause under the rule of reason (or transformation of the ratio into causa): It's a "good" act.

But one can reply: when analyzing the moral vision of this man we find that it has the form that has become necessary and that is defined by the position that this man occupies in life: it is the result of his particular, more or less selfish interests: of his affections and his temperament. His contemplation does not transcend the elements of his life, so the interest of utilitarian coordination of the various elements of his nature - is an interest that does not go beyond the limits of his individuality: the act that results from them is a selfish act.

Certainly, contemplation does not transcend the elements of his life, but he does not contemplate them in relation to present life. Man as he contemplates has theoretical interest. The criterion of contemplation is no longer the value of the elements for life but its intrinsic reason. The lowest man can consider the moral values he attributes to things, consider it in their mutual relations, etc., and reach a moral vision much higher than he himself - considered sub specie aeterni- offers.

But this low man must then ipso facto become an elevated man, or is it necessary to say that for the translation in act of the achieved moral perfection, the intervention of a new element is necessary?

I believe that in the moment that the man with full persuasion states his thought he is - from the point of view of honesty of the intention - "absolutely good", and on the other hand with respect to a criterion of absolute judgment he has so much more value the more vast and universal it's conception is. This is the case regardless of whether he acts or not. But when his conception becomes obscure and disintegrates from that luminous point of perfect conscience and "persuasion" which he had obtained, he falls into the pettiness of his particular interests: he is "dishonest". Now, if a man has a strong theoretical interest in living a large part of life in that luminous persuasion, this man - whatever his moral baseness may have been due to the strange contingency of cases - this man will not be able not to conform his whole life to that persuasion. - And given a limited potential of conception results in him "mysticism". If the potential rises to its highest degree and we have the persistent and absolute persuasion of the truth, it can only give rise to the abnegation of individuality and death. - The world of the living is therefore exhausted all by the "mystics" and the "dishonest". There is no third party.

Every hero is a mystic - every "good" man (in the sense that was said in the first §) is a hero.

Better the Hatred by Carlo Michelstaedter

With a certain heroic air, men say that objects that do not have any commercial value are dearer to them than objects which do. Indeed, sticking to those is less expensive than sticking to those other ones - as dead Capital.
In fact, it is good prudence to place one's affection in those, which would cost them too much.

Better the hatred than the affection of the family.

TOWARDS PEACE by Carlo Michelstaedter

TOWARDS PEACE

On Rhetoric

It is concluded that rhetoric has no value in the walk towards peace, if it does not coincide with the dialectic. In effect, rhetoric is an instrument of life, and life is the end of rhetoric. Now, what is, oh Socrates, life? I would ask. It should be stressed that I do not say "which is life" but "what is". What does it mean for you and me that we talk? What is the point of life? I know well what you will answer me, arguing in speech: "What is this life, oh my dear Carlo, of which you want me to tell you what it is?". Then I will tell you: "Precisely what you and Plato in the Republic consider superior life: hic Rhodus, hic salta [Prove what you can do, here and now.]". Here, I believe, my dear, you would fall silent - through Hades - the last remedy that truly brings a good end, the one you used then in prison. But I, and with me the divine Hegesias, the Persuader of death, we will act as a benevolent chorus of this last admonition of yours, saying that life has no other purpose than life itself.

Socrates was Michelstaedter's personal idol. He is constantly referenced in his short writings, referenced as a "persuaso [persuaded person]" and Michelstaedter even wrote several dialogues in the Socratic tradition. 

Speech To The People by Carlo Michelstaedter

You beat me and you are in the right to do so! You'll kill me and you'll still be in the right! But my right is that of the free word, and your duty is to listen to me. For if the act was brutal and if it justifies the brutal expression of your surprise, it was not brutal the intentional, it was not your enemy. It is love for you, for the idea that today brings you together that has made me rebel and rebel against an enthusiasm that does not correspond to your will, O brothers, to that will that makes you strong against the tyranny of Spain. If tomorrow you still had to reunite and not with the indeterminate outrage of today, but with fresh indignation, with a fresh wound, with the threat present, if you were to meet here tomorrow and affirm your will to the end, to make success with the facts and in the present life, and for the personal interests in each and every single one of you - against the authority constituted by the law, against the authority constituted by money, against the government and the bourgeoisie - that ideal that moves you now, brothers, that marvelous instrument that you have now applauded would measure strength on you - and shots from above would respond from front, back and center; and at the sides other shots to sow death among your ranks, to drown your anger in blood, to bring down forever your most cherished hopes. As long as these hopes are vague and distant, as long as you suffer your material and social miseries in silence, you are an innocuous bunch of unhappy ones to be exploited; and bourgeois society exploits you, in peace and in silence; and as it holds on to the yoke of your need and your weakness, there is no need to make you feel the deadly force of your weapons.But it prepares its weapon in silence and peace and she knows how to cover them with the luminous appearances of humanity and progress, and you - you applaud them! ... But the day that you acquire full awareness of your rights and your strength, the day you will be gathered around your heroes, around the "Ferrer" [reference to Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, anarchist thinker and agitator] of your revolution, under the banner of liberty for the people, the day you want to affirm the beginning of a new life of justice and faith - that day, brothers, the humanity and the progress of the bourgeoisie will reveal their true face, they will hold you in a circle of iron and fire, without mercy for the slaves who rebel. - You will be slaves forever if you fail to unmask the miserable hypocrisy of the bourgeois power, which covers its defenses with flowers and hides the dagger in its bosom. But the power is yours, brothers, to you belongs the future, because you have "faith", and yours is the right. - Bourgeois society, because it has usurped power that does not belong to it, with the strength that comes only from your current weakness, since it has no other faith than the thirst for profit, no other right than tyranny, needs the science that encapsulates in it the opprobri of its arrogance, the science that gives her the immeasurable weapons of strength and devices of war that dominate the sea, the earth and the sky, needs the government that draws from your own ranks the men necessary to keep you slaves, guards, riflemen , soldiers. Brothers, you have applauded the symbol of the power that crushes you.- But you will shake yourself out of your inertia, you will all join together, you will each bear the contribution of your brotherly love and of your desperate strength, born out of daily suffering - and then you will be invincible, then this vain bourgeois power building that dominates you and that you respect, that dominates you only because you respect it, it will crumble with all its laws, its institutions, its vain science, its hypocritical morality, the armies of the preparers, the armies of the executors of the tyranny will disappear: scientists, clerks, soldiers will be extinct races, in this new world.- And it will be a world where "man" will reign, the man of work, the man who is sane of body and mind, the man who will not have a need for unjust laws, unjust because they're complicated, to be protected by his brother, not by militias and weapons laboriously devised to protect his enemies: but his faith, and the common work, and the close team of fraternal love, will be his government and law and defense in the realm of work and justice. Brothers, this man sleeps in each of you and waits for the day he will awaken-brothers, I may be a dark one, but in me sleeps the voice of that man. As soon as I go out and go back into the darkness, these are my first words and they will be my last. Tomorrow perhaps in the hands of bourgeois justice lurking around us I will suffer the fate that awaits Derrer. But if it can enlighten your conscience, hasten your awakening and approximate the advent of "man" and of the subrum, then I will be pleased with my death. Goodbye brothers - long live work and justice - death to the bourgeoisie

This speech, despite being hair-raising at times (such as briefly dismissing scientists as bourgeois), remains a rousing call for the masses to take up either Marxism or Anarchism (which one it isn't clear).

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