The Nomadic Alternative – Page 223

past. He scatters its blocks and starts to rebuild society on fresh foundations.

But the revolutionary usually believes in his revolution, not that of his predecessors or successors, and the 'revolution en permanance' denies this continuity. Events impose on him the repressive solution, and he reuses the admirable pile of building stone lying in heaps about him. "And if", wrote Engels, "the victorious party does not wish to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries."

Unfortunately the restless revolutionary tends to degenerate in the exercise of power, since its responsibilities restrict his freedom and he may react with the ferocity of a caged animal.

Marxist theology proposes that the numbed workers of the world will shake off their fetters and enjoy a revived Golden Age, once the pyramid of property owners collapses. Furthermore the proletariat will enjoy all the achievements of the bourgeois, who were as essential to the evolution of the perfect society as dinosaurs to man. But the Marxist State is a sterile hybrid, pulling in two directions at once. If, according to Proudhon's dictum, "Property is Theft", State Property robs the individual of all he has the right to expect of his individuality.

Bakunin, with his colleagues the Anarchist watchmakers of the Jura, feared an "economic despotism more ferocious than any repressive force before". His prophecy of a hundred years that Communism would be a "monstrous lie" is born out by events. The whole of that ideology is morally bankrupt. "I detest communism", Bakunin said, "because it is the negation of liberty, and because I can conceive nothing human without liberty. I am not a communist because communism absorbs all the powers of society with the state, while I want the abolition of the state." Marxism has attracted attention by the measure of its apparent success, but this is the success of any bureaucratic machine and without relevance to human society. The Industrial State, Marxist or Capitalist, had built a pyramid higher than any before, but the height of a pyramid increases only in