BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL (1814–76)

BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL (1814–76)

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, revolutionary anarchist, is now best known as an opponent of Karl Marx (1818–83) (see MARX AND MARXISM). He was born into the Russian nobility, and, although the family was not wealthy, he led an idyllic life on the family estate outside Moscow until, in 1828 at age 14, he was sent to the Artillery School in St Petersburg. Expected to follow family tradition and have a military career, Bakunin chafed under military discipline and was dismissed from the school in 1834, and, after brief service, he retired from the military in 1835. From then on Bakunin led a peripatetic existence moving to Moscow and then to Germany, ostensibly for an education that would allow him to teach Philosophy. Bakunin rejected the discipline of education almost as much as he had that of the military, and instead began a life-long commitment to the European radical and reform movements. He moved to Zurich, then to Paris, then to Belgium, in each case having to leave the country because of his political activities. He was sentenced to death in Saxony, which commuted the sentence and sent him to Austria, where he was again sentenced to death. The sentence was again commuted, and he was sent to Russia, which had earlier stripped him of his titles of nobility, and was imprisoned in St Petersburg. Family influence combined with illnesses brought on by 6 years in prison allowed him to be exiled to Siberia. Four years later, he escaped from Siberia and travelled to Europe via Japan and the USA. In Europe he travelled from revolt to revolt, country to country, living off friends and publishers’ advances for books he never completed. Bakunin was, for much of his life, a professional revolutionary. Bakunin began to formulate his anarchist theories in about 1864–5 and wrote most of the works he is remembered for between 1867 and 1874. In 1874, near the end of his life, Bakunin concluded that statist forces had temporarily won the battle, and that, while they could be resisted, they would dominate for 10 to 15 years.

Bakunin is notorious for the last sentence in his first published article, ‘The Reaction in Germany’ (1847), that ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too’ (Bakunin 1973:58) and his involvement with Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev (1847–82) in writing the notorious ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’ (1869), now known to have been almost entirely the work of Nechaev. Bakunin was a revolutionary, and believed that the state and Church must be destroyed in the process of creating a free society, but he did not believe in violence for its own sake. His frequent references to destruction related to his belief that revolution would be based on the mass uprising of those with nothing to lose. They would be a truly destructive force, but such destruction would be creative in that it would sweep away all the institutions of oppression and make way for the new way of life of the future society.

Much of Bakunin’s current reputation comes from his opposition to Marx, but his writings are full of remarkable insights, rarely fully developed, that place him among the foremost theorists of anarchism. While he wrote vast amounts, he finished almost nothing, and the text of his that is best known, God and the State, was a part of a massive and massively disorganized final work, The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, which was partially published in French in 1871. Élisée Réclus (1830–1905) published God and the State separately in 1882.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 44 Bakunin’s thought is notoriously unsystematic. It can be best understood under the

headings of anarchism, or anarchy as he called it, as a theory of political action, his insistence that equality and liberty must go together, and his analysis of the structure of society after the revolution. Much of his thought was developed through his critique of Marx and his critiques of religion and politics, capitalism and state socialism, and intellectuals.

For Bakunin action is more important than thought and analysis. While Marx argued that the real point was to change society not analyse it, Bakunin embodied the position. Partially this was simply a reflection of his personality; his childlike enthusiasm made him in person an immensely effective propagandist. But it was also a response to his romantic belief that all that was needed was to somehow inspire the masses, and they would overthrow their oppressors. As a result, he helped inspired ‘propaganda by the deed’, which produced the stereotype of the anarchist as bomber. In Bakunin’s case, this is not necessarily a false image.

Bakunin’s argument that equality and liberty belong together is at the basis of his critiques of other thinkers and social institutions. For Bakunin, equality must come first and liberty next, but they belong together because equality without liberty is likely to produce despotism. While anarchists like MAX STIRNER (1806–50) argued for liberty alone, Bakunin argued that any liberty without equality creates a privilege that limits the liberties of others. Bakunin insisted that women should be equal to men, and that they should have the same liberties as men.

The structure of the future would be from the bottom up rather than the top down. This would become possible with the abolition of the state, private property and the legal system. They would be replaced with individuals coming together into communes. These communes would form a federation that would allow co-operation on issues that affected

a larger area. PIETR KROPOTKIN (1842–1921) made a similar argument in his development of anarchist theory.

In the future anarchist society, everyone would work. Bakunin explicitly rejected the idea that distribution would be based on need; it would be based on contribution. At birth every person, both men and women, would have the means of fulfilling their full humanity using their different skills and talents. Society must be structured so that exploitation is impossible.

Historically, the most important part of Bakunin’s life was his conflict with Marx over the leadership of the First International. While they actually agreed on many things, they disagreed fundamentally on the way the International should be organized, over what was at the basis of the current system of oppression, and how to bring about the desired revolution. Marx was a much more effective fighter within such organizations, and Bakunin was expelled.

Bakunin’s differences from Marx were both theoretical and tactical. He rejected the economic inevitability of Marx’s theory and believed that there were no preordained historical laws. He argued that a dictatorship of the proletariat would be like any other dictatorship and thought it foolish to assume that the proletariat, or their leaders, would

be any more likely to give up power than the leaders of any other dictatorship. Bakunin also rejected Marx’s idea of a revolutionary party as the primary tactic of the revolution. He utterly rejected involvement in the contemporary political system as a tool of the revolution. Bakunin argued that only libertarian means could ever produce

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libertarian socialism, and he can be read as having predicted what was called Eurocommunism and the recent metamorphosis of Communist parties into Social Democratic parties. For Bakunin, such parties would have meant the failure of the revolution.

Bakunin also rejected Marx’s plan to centralize authority in the International. He argued that a federation of local, autonomous groups was the right model. Such groups would be the basis of the future society and were the appropriate means of bringing it about. He believed that the revolution would come about through an uprising of the masses, particularly the peasantry and urban mobs, the lumpenproletariat, the very people who Marx saw as unlikely to be revolutionary. Bakunin believed that these groups retained the vigor that would make an uprising possible. Revolution, for Bakunin, would come from those with nothing to lose. The proletariat he saw as having achieved enough that they had an investment, however small, in the current system. They would be part of the revolution, but they were unlikely to start it.

According to Bakunin, the central institutions oppressing people are religion and the state. Authority was the problem, whether spiritual or temporal. In God and the State, Bakunin argued that the entire social apparatus that oppressed the masses was based on their believing in God. Such belief acted as a safety valve that allowed the oppressors to direct attention away from their oppression by both convincing people that God had established the existing hierarchy and promising them their reward after death. He argued that if God exists, then humans are slaves, and since humans must be free, God cannot exist. Humanity must choose between freedom and God.

For Bakunin, the revolution had to begin with the elimination of the state and its various appendages, such as the police, the military and the courts, and the transfer of all social capital to the workers’ organizations. This aspect of Bakunin’s thought gave rise to anarcho-syndicalism, which was particularly important in France and Spain.

Bakunin was certain that a state in the hands of communists would be no different from a state in the hands of capitalists. Bakunin was particularly concerned about the danger emerging from the left and well before there was an absolutist socialism to point to, he warned against it. He contended that a state that was truly in the hands of the people would not need to be abolished, and if a state must be abolished, it could never have been other than an oppressor of the people.

Bakunin also contended that the authority of scientists, or more broadly intellectuals, was dangerous. He believed that science was incapable of recognizing individuality and was prone to dictatorship. He pointed particularly to the followers of AUGUSTE COMTE (1798–1857) and Marx as wanting to force variety into uniformity. At the same time, he recognized the authority of science in its own sphere and believed that everyone should be educated in science so that they could not be oppressed in their ignorance by an educated elite. The authority of knowledge was acceptable to Bakunin, but it should not

be allowed to dictate to others. Bakunin’s critique of Marx, particularly his prediction of the dual possibilities of an absolutist socialism and a Communism that is merely another political party competing within the system of oppression, reveal him as a prescient thinker. Also, Bakunin, rather than Marx, was right about where the revolutionary classes would originate. The twentieth-century revolutions in Russia and China were not proletarian revolutions; they came from the masses that Marx disparaged.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 46 Finally, Bakunin’s argument for the essential combination of equality and liberty

would also reject not only the individualism of Stirner but also equally the anarcho- capitalist and libertarian writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, like Ayn Rand (1905–82) and Robert Nozick (1938–2002), who see equality among humans as not merely unnecessary but dangerous. Bakunin saw such thinking as simply another tool used by the oppressors to stay in power.