Mikhail Bakunin

On 30 May [O.S. 18 May] 1814, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin was born into Russian nobility on his family's estate in Priamukhino, Tver, in the country's northwest. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin, was a Russian diplomat who had served in Italy. Upon returning to Priamukhino and marrying the much younger Varvara Aleksandrovna Murav'eva, the elder Bakunin raised his ten children in the model of Rousseauan pedagogy. Mikhail Bakunin, their oldest son, read the languages, literature, and philosophy of the period and described his youth as idyllic and sheltered from the realities of Russian life. As an early teenager, he began training for a military career at the St. Petersburg Artillery School, which he rejected. He left the school, despite his father's protests, in 1835 to study philosophy.[7]

Bakunin lived a bohemian, intellectual life in Moscow, where German Romantic literature and idealist philosophy were influential in the 1830s.[7] The metaphysics of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel influenced Bakunin in particular.[7] He befriended Russian intellectuals including the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the poet Nikolay Ogarev, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the writer Alexander Herzen as youth prior to their careers.[8] Bakunin was also in the intellectual circle of Nikolai Stankevich. During this time, Bakunin published Russian translations of works by Fichte and Hegel.[8]

He enrolled in the University of Berlin and immigrated in 1840. He was drawn towards the Young Hegelians, an intellectual group with radical interpretations of Hegel's philosophy. In this tradition Bakunin pseudonymously wrote his first original publication in 1842, German: Die Reaktion in Deutschland ("The Reaction in Germany"), which proposes a continuation of the French Revolution to the rest of Europe and Russia.[8]

Bakunin, 1843

In the 1840s, he moved from philosophical studies to revolutionary agitation.[8] Learning of Bakunin's radicalism, the Russian government told Bakunin to return to Russia. When he did not, Russia stripped him of his rights as a nobleman and sentenced him in absentia to penal labor in Siberia. Without steady financial support, Bakunin became an itinerant, traveling Europe meeting the people who had influenced him, such as proto-communist Wilhelm Weitling, philosopher Karl Marx, anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He was deported at the Russian government's request.[8]

When the French King Louis Philippe I abdicated during the February 1848 Revolution, Bakunin returned to Paris and basked in the revolutionary milieu.[8] With the French government's support, he headed to Prussian Poland to agitate for revolt against Russia but never arrived.[9] He attended the 1848 Prague Slavic Congress to defend Slavic rights against German and Hungarian nationalism, and participated in its impromptu insurrection against the Austrian Habsburgs. Uncaptured, he wrote Aufruf an die Slaven ("Appeal to the Slavs") at the end of the year, advocating for a Slavic federation and revolt against the Austrian, Prussian, Turkish, and Russia governments. It was widely read and translated.[10]

After participating in the 1848 Prague uprising and the 1849 Dresden uprising, Bakunin was imprisoned, tried, sentenced to death, extradited multiple times, and ultimately placed in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersberg, Russia, in 1851. Three years later, he transferred to Shlisselburg Fortress near St. Petersberg for another three years. Prison weathered but did not break Bakunin, who retained his revolutionary zeal through his release. He did, however, write an autobiographical, genuflecting Confession to the Russian emperor, which proved to be a controversial document upon its public discovery some 70 years later. The letter did not improve his prison conditions. In 1857, Bakunin was permitted to transfer to permanent exile in Siberia. He married Antonia Kwiatkowska there[10] before escaping in 1861, first to Japan, then to San Francisco, across the country to New York, and arrived in London by the end of the year.[11] In London, Bakunin reunited with Herzen and Ogarev. Bakunin collaborated with them on their Russian-language newspaper but his revolutionary fervor exceeded their moderate reform agenda. Bakunin's 1862 pamphlet The People's Cause: Romanov, Pugachev, or Pestel? criticized the Russian tsar for not using his position to facilitate a bloodless revolution and forgo another Pugachev's Rebellion. In 1863, Bakunin joined in an unsuccessful effort to supply armed men for the Polish January Uprising against Russia. Bakunin, reunited with his wife, moved to Italy the next year, where they stayed for three years.[11]

Bakunin, in his early 50s, developed his core anarchist thoughts in Italy. He continued to refine these ideas in his remaining 12 years. Among this ideology was the first of many conspiratorial revolutionary societies, though none of these participated in revolutionary actions, chiefly the revolutionary toppling of the state, to be replaced by free federation between voluntarily associated economic producers.[11]

He moved to Switzerland in 1867, a more permissive environment for revolutionary literature. Bakunin's anarchist writings were fragmentary and prolific.[11] With France's collapse in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Bakunin traveled to Lyon and participated in the fruitless Lyon Commune in which the citizens briefly occupied the city hall. Bakunin retreated to Switzerland.[12]

In Switzerland, the Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev sought out Bakunin for a collaboration. Not knowing Nechayev's past betrayals, Bakunin warmed to Nechayev's revolutionary zeal and they together produced the 1869 Catechism of the Revolutionary, a tract that endorsed an ascetic life for revolutionaries without societal or moral bonds. Bakunin's connection with Nechayev hurt the former's reputation. More recent scholarship, however, challenges the catechism's authorship, crediting Nechayev as the primary or sole author. Bakunin ultimately disavowed their connection.[13]

While Bakunin encountered Karl Marx in Paris (1844) and London (1864), he came to know him through the First International (International Working Men's Association), which Marx and Friedrich Engels formed in the 1860s. Bakunin's relationship with Marx became strained in the early 1870s for both interpersonal and ideological differences. Bakunin respected Marx's erudition and passion for socialism but found his personality to be authoritarian and arrogant. In turn, Marx was skeptical towards Russian reactionism and Bakunin's unruliness.[13] As Bakunin developed his anarchist ideas in this period, he came to see federative social organization, led by the peasantry and poorest workers, as the primary post-revolution goal, whereas Marx believed in a dictatorship of the proletariat, led by organized workers in industrially advanced countries, in which the workers use state infrastructure until the state withers away. Bakunists abhorred the political organization for which Marx advocated.[14]

Marx had Bakunin and Bakunist anarchists ejected from the First International's 1872 Hague Congress. This breaking point split the Marxist socialist movement from the anarchist movement and led to the undoing of the International. Bakunin's ideas continued to spread nevertheless to the labor movement in Spain and the watchmakers of the Swiss Jura Federation.[15]

Bakunin wrote his last major work, Statism and Anarchy (1873), anonymously in Russian to stir underground revolution in Russia. It restates his anarchist position, establishes the German Empire as the foremost centralized state in opposition to European anarchism, likens Marx to German authoritarianism, and warns of Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat being led by autocrats for their own gain in the name of the proletariat. This premonition furthered the gulf between the Marxists and Bakunist anarchists.[15]

In one final revolutionary act, Bakunin planned the unsuccessful 1874 Bologna insurrection with his Italian followers. Its failure was a major setback to the Italian anarchist movement. Bakunin retreated to Switzerland,[16] where he retired, dying in Bern on 1 July 1876.[17]

In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote:

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.[20]

According to Bakunin,

Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination. This same reason forbids me, then, to recognise a fixed, constant and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life".[20]

According to political philosopher Carl Schmitt, a prominent member of the Nazi Party, "in comparison with later anarchists, Proudhon was a moralistic petit bourgeois who continued to subscribe to the authority of the father and the principle of the monogamous family. Bakunin was the first to give the struggle against theology the complete consistency of an absolute naturalism. [...] For him, therefore, there was nothing negative and evil except the theological doctrine of God and sin, which stamps man as a villain in order to provide a pretext for domination and the hunger for power."[21]

Bakunin believed that religion originated from the human ability for abstract thought and fantasy.[22][23] According to Bakunin, religion is sustained by indoctrination and conformism. Other factors in the survival of religion are poverty, suffering and exploitation, from which religion promises salvation in the afterlife. Oppressors take advantage of religion because many religious people reconcile themselves with injustice on earth by the promise of happiness in heaven.[18]

Bakunin argued that oppressors receive authority from religion. Religious people are in many cases obedient to the priests, because they believe that the statements of priests are based on direct divine revelation or scripture. Obedience to divine revelation or scripture is considered the ethical criterion by many religious people because God is considered as the omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being. Therefore, each statement considered derived from an infallible God cannot be criticized by humans. According to this religious way of thinking, humans cannot know by themselves what is just, but that only God decides what is good or evil. People who disobey the "messengers of God" are threatened with punishment in hell.[18] According to Bakunin, the alternative for a religious power monopoly is the acknowledgement that all humans are equally inspired by God, but that means that multiple contradictory teachings are assigned to an infallible God which is logically impossible. Therefore, Bakunin considers religion as necessarily authoritarian.[18]

Bakunin argued in his book God and the State that "the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, in theory and practice". Consequently, Bakunin reversed Voltaire's famous aphorism that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him, writing instead that "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him".[18] Political theology is a branch of both political philosophy and theology that investigates the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking underlie political, social, economic and cultural discourses. Bakunin was an early proponent of the term political theology in his 1871 text "The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International",[24] to which Schmitt's eponymous book responded.[25][26]

Bakunin's methods of realizing his revolutionary program were consistent with his principles. The working class and peasantry were to organize from below through local structures federated with each other, "creating not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself."[27] Their movements would prefigure the future in their ideas and practices, creating the building blocks of the new society. This approach was exemplified by syndicalism, an anarchist strategy championed by Bakunin, according to which trade unions would provide both the means to defend and improve workers' conditions, rights and incomes in the present, and the basis for a social revolution based upon workplace occupations. The syndicalist unions would organize the occupations as well as provide the radically democratic structures through which workplaces would be self-managed, and the larger economy coordinated. Thus, for Bakunin, the workers' unions would "take possession of all the tools of production as well as buildings and capital."[28]

Nevertheless, Bakunin did not reduce the revolution to syndicalist unions, stressing the need to organize working-class neighborhoods as well as the unemployed. Meanwhile, the peasants were to "take the land and throw out those landlords who live by the labor of others".[29] Bakunin did not dismiss the skilled workers as is sometimes claimed and the watchmakers of the Jura region were central to the St. Imier International's creation and operations. However, at a time when unions largely ignored the unskilled, Bakunin placed great emphasis on the need to organize as well among "the rabble" and "the great masses of the poor and exploited, the so-called "lumpenproletariat" to "inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution."[30]

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Bakunin's socialism was known as "collectivist anarchism", where "socially: it seeks the confirmation of political equality by economic equality. This is not the removal of natural individual differences, but equality in the social rights of every individual from birth; in particular, equal means of subsistence, support, education, and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity, and equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create his own well-being by his own labor."[31]

Collectivist anarchism advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production. Instead, it envisions the means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves. For the collectivization of the means of production, it was originally envisaged that workers would revolt and forcibly collectivize the means of production.[32] Once collectivization takes place, money would be abolished to be replaced with labour notes and workers' salaries would be determined in democratic organizations based on job difficulty and the amount of time they contributed to production. These salaries would be used to buy goods in a communal market.[33]

The dispute between Bakunin and Karl Marx highlighted the differences between anarchism and Marxism. He strongly rejected Marx's concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the new state would be unopposed and would, theoretically, represent the workers.[34] He argued that the state should be immediately abolished because all forms of government eventually lead to oppression.[34] He also vehemently opposed vanguardism, in which a political elite of revolutionaries guide the workers. Bakunin insisted that revolutions must be led by the people directly while any "enlightened elite" must exert influence only by remaining "invisible [...] not imposed on anyone [...] [and] deprived of all official rights and significance".[35] Bakunin claimed that Marxists "maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up".[36] Bakunin further stated that "we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".[37]

While both anarchists and Marxists share the same final goal, the creation of a free, egalitarian society without social classes and repressive/bureaucratic government, they strongly disagree on how to achieve this goal. Anarchists believe that the classless, stateless society should be established by the direct action of the masses, culminating in social revolution and refuse any intermediate stage such as the dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis that such a dictatorship will become a self-perpetuating fundament. For Bakunin, the fundamental contradiction is that for the Marxists "anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved."[35] However, Bakunin also wrote of meeting Marx in 1844: "As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations. [...] He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right".[38] Bakunin found Marx's economic analysis very useful and began the job of translating Das Kapital into Russian. In turn, Marx wrote of the rebels in the Dresden insurrection of 1848 that "they found a capable and cool headed leader" in the "Russian refugee Michael Bakunin."[39] Marx wrote to Engels of meeting Bakunin in 1864 after his escape to Siberia, stating: "On the whole he is one of the few people whom I find not to have retrogressed after 16 years, but to have developed further."[40]

Bakunin has sometimes been called the first theorist of the "new class", meaning a class of intellectuals and bureaucrats running the state in the name of the people or the proletariat, but in reality in their own interests alone. Bakunin argued that "[t]he State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And finally, when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class and then falls—or, if you will, rises—to the position of a machine."[30]

By federalism, Bakunin meant the organization of society "from the base to the summit—from the circumference to the center—according to the principles of free association and federation."[31] Consequently, society would be organized "on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes", with "every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation" having "the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish."[31]

By liberty, Bakunin did not mean an abstract ideal but a concrete reality based on the equal liberty of others. In a positive sense, liberty consists of "the fullest development of all the faculties and powers of every human being, by education, by scientific training, and by material prosperity." Such a conception of liberty is "eminently social, because it can only be realized in society", not in isolation. In a negative sense, liberty is "the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority."[41]

Bakunin denied religious concepts of a supernatural sphere and advocated a materialist explanation of natural phenomena, for "the manifestations of organic life, chemical properties and reactions, electricity, light, warmth and the natural attraction of physical bodies, constitute in our view so many different but no less closely interdependent variants of that totality of real beings which we call matter." For Bakunin, The "mission of science is, by observation of the general relations of passing and real facts, to establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena of the physical and social world."[41]

Bakunin differed from Marx's on the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat, for "[b]oth agreed that the proletariat would play a key role, but for Marx the proletariat was the exclusive, leading revolutionary agent while Bakunin entertained the possibility that the peasants and even the lumpenproletariat (the unemployed, common criminals, etc.) could rise to the occasion."[42] According to Nicholas Thoburn, "Bakunin considers workers' integration in capital as destructive of more primary revolutionary forces. For Bakunin, the revolutionary archetype is found in a peasant milieu (which is presented as having longstanding insurrectionary traditions, as well as a communist archetype in its current social form—the peasant commune) and amongst educated unemployed youth, assorted marginals from all classes, brigands, robbers, the impoverished masses, and those on the margins of society who have escaped, been excluded from, or not yet subsumed in the discipline of emerging industrial work—in short, all those whom Marx sought to include in the category of the lumpenproletariat."[43]

Beginning in Italy with the International Brotherhood, Bakunin attempted to create secret revolutionary societies towards the end of his life, a concept at odds with his professed caution against the autocratic tendencies of the revolutionary elite. These organizations did not participate in revolutionary action.[11]

The idea of the "invisible dictatorship" was central to Bakunin's politics. In combination with Bakunin's opposition to parliamentary politics, historian Peter Marshall wrote that such a secret party, its existence unknown and its policies beholden to none, had the potential for greater tyranny than a Blanquist or Marxist party and was hard to envision as presaging an open, democratic society.[44]

• God and the State, ISBN 048622483X

• Stateless Socialism: Anarchism (1953)
• Marxism, Freedom and the State,[53] (translated by Kenneth Kenafick in 1950)
• The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871)
• The Immorality of the State (1953)
• Statism and Anarchy (1990), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521361826
• Revolutionary Catechism (1866)
• The Commune, the Church, and the State (1947)
• Founding of the First International (1953)
• On Rousseau (1972)
• No Gods No Masters (1998) by Daniel Guérin, Edinburgh: AK Press, ISBN 1873176643

• "Power Corrupts the Best" (1867)
• "The Class War" (1870)
• "What is Authority?" (1870)
• "Recollections on Marx and Engels" (1869)
• "The Red Association" (1870)
• "Solidarity in Liberty" (1867)
• "The German Crisis" (1870)
• "God or Labor" (1947)
• "Where I Stand" (1947)
• "Appeal to my Russian Brothers" (1896)
• "The Social Upheaval" (1947)
• "Integral Education, Part I" (1869)
• "Integral Education, Part II" (1869)
• "The Organization of the International" (1869)
• "Polish Declaration" (1896)
• "Politics and the State" (1871)
• "Workers and the Sphinx" (1867)
• "The Policy of the Council" (1869)
• "The Two Camps" (1869)

• Bakunin on Anarchism (1971). Edited, translated and with an introduction by Sam Dolgoff. Preface by Paul Avrich. New York: Knopf Originally published as Bakunin on Anarchy, it includes James Guillaume's Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch. ISBN 0043210120.
• Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (1974). A. Lehning (ed.). New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0802100201.
• Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE – 1939) (2005). Robert Graham (ed.). Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books. ISBN 1551642514.
• The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (1953). G. P. Maximoff (ed.). It includes Mikhail Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch by Max Nettlau.
• The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871 (1992). Robert M. Cutler (ed.). New York: Prometheus Books, 1992. ISBN 0879757450.