War & Peace Quote by Johann Most

There’s a chilly paternalism hiding inside Most’s revolutionary thunder: the anarchists will “show” the proletariat what it “will have to” do. It’s a line that pretends to empower workers while quietly reserving the role of teacher, strategist, and moral vanguard for the militants. Most isn’t describing an awakening so much as announcing a curriculum, with violence and sacrifice as the required coursework.

The phrase “on behalf of the proletariat” is doing heavy political work. It’s a claim of legitimacy that sidesteps the messier question of consent. Who authorized the anarchists to speak for the working class, and what happens when workers don’t want the same methods, timing, or costs? Most answers by framing struggle as inevitable: the proletariat “will have to win a gigantic battle.” The determinism turns a political choice into a law of history, a rhetorical move that reduces hesitation to ignorance and dissent to false consciousness.

Context matters: Most operated in the late 19th-century world of grinding industrial labor, shattered unions, police repression, and a rising ecosystem of socialist and anarchist factions competing to define “the worker’s cause.” His notoriety as a propagandist for “propaganda of the deed” lurks behind the sentence. “Gigantic battle” isn’t metaphorical uplift; it’s a normalization of confrontation as the price of admission to liberation.

It works because it fuses promise and threat. The goals are real, but they’re held hostage to a coming trial by fire - and the anarchists position themselves as the ones who will light the match and call it instruction.