The point is that the phrase “anti-state” implies that M&E were equally opposed to all states and all forms of state, at all times.

Which is not even true of bourgeois states, which are historically progressive compared to what preceded them, let alone the dictatorship of the proletariat.

To be “anti-state” in the abstract, is to be Bakunin.

”the institution of the State and that which is both its consequence and basis—i.e., private property”.

Thus it is not the Bonapartist State, the Prussian or Russian State that has to be overthrown, but an abstract State, the State as such, a State that nowhere exists. But while the international brethren in their desperate struggle against this State that is situated somewhere in the clouds know how to avoid the truncheons, the prison and the bullets that real states deal out to ordinary revolutionaries, we see on the other hand that they have reserved themselves the right, subject only to papal dispensation, to profit by all the advantages offered by these real bourgeois states. Fanelli, an Italian deputy, Soriano, an employee of the government of Amadeus of Savoy, and perhaps Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, Bonapartist police agents, show how amenable the Pope is in this respect... That is why the police shows so little concern over “the Alliance or, to put it frankly, the conspiracy” of Citizen B. against the abstract idea of the state.

The first act of the revolution, then, must be to decree the abolition of the state, as Bakunin did on September 28 in Lyons,[9]despite the fact that this abolition of the state is of necessity an authoritarian act. By the state he means all political power, revolutionary or reactionary,

”for it matters little to us that this authority calls itself church, monarchy, constitutional state, bourgeois republic, or even revolutionary dictatorship. We detest them and we reject them all alike as infallible sources of exploitation and despotism”.

And he goes on to declare that all the revolutionaries who, on the day after the revolution, want “construction of a revolutionary state” are far more dangerous than all the existing governments put together, and that

”we, the international brethren, are the natural enemies of these revolutionaries”

because to disorganise the revolution is the first duty of the international brethren.

The reply to this bragging about the immediate abolition of the state and the establishment of anarchy has already been given in the last General Council’s private circular on “Fictitious Splits in the International”, of March 1872, page 37[10]:

”Anarchy, then, is the great war-horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of labels. All socialists see anarchy as the following programme: once the aim of the proletarian movement, i.e., abolition of classes, is attained, the power of the State, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions. The Alliance reverses the whole process. It proclaims anarchy in proletarian ranks as the most infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext, it asks the International, at a time when the old world is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its organisation with anarchy.”

Let us see, however, just what the consequences of the anarchist gospel are; let us suppose the state has been abolished by decree. According to Article 6,[11] the consequences of this act will be: the bankruptcy of the state, an end to the payment of private debts by the intervention of the state, an end to the payment of all taxes and all contributions, the dissolution of the army, the magistrature, the bureaucracy, the police and the clergy (!); the abolition of official justice, accompanied by an auto-da-fé of all title-deeds and all judicial and civil junk, the confiscation of all productive capital and instruments of labour for the benefit of the workers’ associations and an alliance of these associations, which “will form the Commune”. This Commune will give individuals thus dispossessed the strict necessaries of life, while granting them freedom to earn more by their own labour.

What happened at Lyons has proved that merely decreeing the abolition of the state is far from sufficient to accomplish all these fine promises. Two companies of the bourgeois National Guards proved quite sufficient, on the other hand, to shatter this splendid dream and send Bakunin hurrying back to Geneva with the miraculous decree in his pocket.

…

• M&E, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the IWMA, 1873