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Title: Bakunin
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: May 12, 2017
Language: en
Topics: Mikhail Bakunin, biography
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/bakunin-miguel-amor-s
Notes: Published in Editorial Imperdible. Translated in September 2017 from a copy of the Spanish language text provided by the author.

Miguel Amorós

Bakunin

Bakunin is strikingly relevant for our time, as contemporary society is

becoming visibly totalitarian and acquiring features that are distinctly

hostile to freedom. The real Bakunin was the product of the impact of

German idealist philosophy and the French Revolution on the enlightened

generations of the first half of the 19^(th) century. Just like many of

his contemporaries, after reading Hegel and Feuerbach, Bakunin’s state

of mind was one of constant unrest and relentless protest against all

the ideological, religious and metaphysical fetishes of the established

powers. That is what the realization of philosophy comes to when the

bourgeoisie helps abort its own revolution. In his own way, Bakunin

inverted Hegelian idealism: reason, the “idea”, full realization, and

therefore, freedom, are not embodied in the State, but in people without

States. They possess objectivity, truth and ethical existence; the State

is nothing but a moment in their development. Consciousness and will

merge and turn against the State and politics. Bakunin’s writings would

be incomprehensible in isolation from his life, of which they form a

part, a life in constant conflict against all authority, secular or

divine, liberal or absolutist. All his works are marked by the imprint

of action, almost the sole motive and principle of his existence, which

was soon associated with a revolutionary exaltation founded on two

pillars: the passion for freedom and hatred for all forms of oppression.

Every one of his letters, articles, programs and manuscripts pertain to

an activist project that renders them intelligible; they are reflections

of the struggles in which he engaged and they were conceived in specific

situations, with precise objectives in mind. They had nothing in common

with the tranquil state of mind of the scholar who, in the silence of a

library, attempts to understand reality in the light of scientific

research. In the beginning was the deed, as we read in Faust. The

determinations of reality never stand still.

Bakunin declared that he was “a passionate seeker of the truth”, which

is incomprehensible in our postmodern age, and also that he was a no

less passionate enemy of all political, juridical, economic and social

lies that are used by those in power to assure their privileges and to

rule the world. Although his thought was based on solid materialist

philosophical foundations, in Bakunin we do not find a social theory

properly speaking whose scope goes beyond the exigencies posed by the

struggle, nor do we find any intention to construct a system with a

closed worldview, a pre-packaged system fully equipped with its

principles, first causes and ultimate goals. Having read Comte, Bakunin

detested metaphysics, and the conceptual tools that he developed, taken

from observation and knowledge, had no other purpose than to more

accurately understand reality in order to reinforce the capacity for

action.

He only wrote when a passionate conviction impelled him to do so. In

Bakunin, we are not confronted by a theoretician, a professional writer

or a scholar, although he had an abundance of imagination for creation

and talent for writing, and more than enough erudition: he was above all

a revolutionary, an agitator, a soldier of freedom, a constant

conspirator against despotism, both in its old forms, based on

traditional submission to the established order, and its more modern

forms, disguised in the garb of liberty and the revolution. The most

complete freedom and equality were for him the foundations of the only

regime in which human beings can fully develop, conduct themselves with

dignity and experience happiness. And this regime was incompatible with

the State form. Political power and communal society are irreconcilable.

Human beings are not only rational and logical, but also passionate and

prone to dream. His nature as a man of action conferred upon Bakunin’s

writings the lucidity of strategy, which obliges clear discernment due

to the imperatives of the struggle; but they were also affected by the

visionary profundity of the dream, which is so necessary for ennobling

the aspirations for human emancipation. Both factors, the fruit of a

dual intellectual and personal adventure, gave his ideas a power that is

still felt today, since we must not forget that today’s oppression is

far more extensive and sophisticated than it was in his time; at the

same time, however, his ideas are resistant to being adapted by epigones

or enemies in order to convert them into a system, an ideology, or a

recipe book of perennial truths for the decoration of execrable

practices. Bakunin’s romantic activism was always accompanied by an

almost exhaustive knowledge of history and the most advanced thought of

his time; this is why it is not easy to imitate him, either in practice

or in theory. This is not to say that there have not been many attempts

to misrepresent him, since recuperation and looting are the

characteristics of an irrational present with abundant and pretentious

ignorance. Once he had been decontextualized and purged of

contradictions, or, more accurately, mummified and canonized, Bakunin

was wielded as an authority, which he would have definitely found

repugnant, to justify all-embracing doctrines of every type and to

confer legitimacy on the libertarian ghetto, whether in its official or

alternative version. He has even been cited as an authority by

syndicalist and nationalist variants, by the founders of “specificist”

parties and by the most irrational varieties of extremism. When

revolutionary action goes into decline, truth also goes into decline and

ideology advances. Ideology, however, is false consciousness, not

anarchism. Anarchism is either revolutionary practice or it is nothing.

Although Bakunin has become synonymous with anarchy, his definitive

anarchist activity took place only during the last period of his life,

between 1863, the year of the defeat of the Polish insurrection in which

he participated, and 1873, the year of his retirement and the expansion

of Prussian imperialism. In 1864 he broke with democratic pan-Slavism

and renounced any intention to transform, by way of a democratic and

social revolution, the cause of the peoples without history, such as the

Slavs, into a universal cause. The realization of freedom in history

would then have other protagonists for him, that is, humble and

downtrodden peoples without distinction, beginning with the Italians,

who were then engaged in open revolt against the Church and the

aristocracy. The transformation of universal society would be effected

“on the basis of freedom, reason, justice and labor”, as we read in the

program of the “International Brotherhood”, the first practical

formulation of revolutionary anarchism. Empires were tottering like

idols with feet of clay; any proposed course of action had to take into

account the possibility of the imminence of a popular revolution that

would dissolve the States and reorganize society “from the bottom-up and

from the circumference to the center”. Bakunin proclaimed that he was a

socialist democrat and a federalist, at least up until 1868, when he

broke with the radical and progressive republican bourgeoisie. Then he

flirted, like Proudhon, with the double meaning of the word “anarchist”,

but even so, his supporters were becoming more and more likely to lay

claim to the adjectives “anti-state” or “anti-authoritarian”. Following

his break with the League of Peace and Freedom, the “people” in the

abstract sense of the word would, for him, cease to be the subject that

realizes freedom and equality in history, a mission that he would from

then on attribute to the working classes.

Bakunin had a peculiar idea of class. The revolutionary subject was

constituted by separating itself as much as possible from the

established power and its norms. The proletarians were capable of

revolution only if they were not corrupted by material and political

interests. By keeping themselves morally intact, they would conserve all

their energy and potential for revolt; they would never allow themselves

to be deceived by charismatic leaders or programs alien to the logic of

the world of labor, their world. The more indifferent they were towards

bourgeois values, and the more they turned their backs on bourgeois

civilization, the greater would be the harvest of the seeds of socialism

that lie dormant within them. Evidently, the sectors of the working

class that were not corrupted by politics and authority, the most

disinherited and the most impoverished, constituted the “flower of the

proletariat”, the absolute negation of class society, those who bore in

their instincts and their aspirations the resplendent future of freedom.

The interests of the most favored or integrated layers of the working

class could not be universal interests, and therefore could not serve as

motive forces for a process of radical transformation. In the hands of

bourgeoisified workers, the idea of class played the same mystifying

function as the fatherland, the nation or the race. It had to be used

with caution. Furthermore, his absolute refusal to consider the

sufficient development of the productive forces as the obligatory

precondition for revolution brought Bakunin into conflict with the

Marxist socialists. Bakunin thought that there could be a revolution in

countries where the proletariat was not highly developed and capitalism

was weak; in such a revolution the principal role of protagonist would

fall to the peasantry, the natural class, alongside of whom the

artisanal proletariat and the déclassé urban youth were mere auxiliary

forces. Moreover, a revolution was much more likely in such countries

than in those where the revolution would have to be based exclusively on

the factories. In retrospect, the Mexican, Russo-Ukrainian and Spanish

Revolutions corroborate the accuracy of his assessment.

His application for membership in the International Workingmen’s

Association was the culmination of the process that had begun when he

renounced democratic nationalism. At this point, for Bakunin the

political emancipation of the working people, that is, the abolition of

the State and of the political class, had to be absorbed in their

economic emancipation, that is, the liberation of labor from the yoke of

capital. History would reach its end when freedom is complete. The

organization of the productive forces and public services would have to

be carried out collectively and horizontally, without either coercion or

the imposition of any authority whatsoever; and therefore on the ruins

of the State. This is why such a regime is defined as collectivism. For

Bakunin, the word “communism”, which he associated with the doctrines of

Cabet, Weitling and Marx, had the connotation of a barracks-style form

of organization mediated by authority. Capitalist society was based more

on the principle of authority than on that of property. The development

of capitalism required an increasingly more centralized State where all

its subjects were citizens. Citizenship is the modern form of servitude.

The condition of political dependence of the masses went hand in hand

with their economic dependence; they mutually reinforced one another.

The accuracy of his analyses would be revealed by the Paris Commune.

With the outbreak of war between France and Prussia, the first serious

opportunity for proletarian revolution arose. Bakunin saw the defeat of

Napoleon III as opening up the possibility of transforming a war between

States into a revolutionary war. Only a popular revolution that

represented the communes could save Europe from the reactionary forces

represented by Prussia and the Russian Empire, but the provisional

government of the French bourgeoisie drowned all such attempts in blood.

The end of the Commune marked the victory of the European

counterrevolution.

For Bakunin, a free and egalitarian society could not be born from a

directory that unilaterally dictates laws. Freedom could only arise from

freedom, not from submission to an authority, even if this authority

proclaims that it is revolutionary. As a result, Bakunin would never

even consider the possibility of emancipation guided by the State,

whether a people’s State or a proletarian State, since the suppression

of the State was the starting point, the precondition without which the

revolution would be nothing but an ephemeral fiction. He rejected the

establishment of an authoritarian center that, on the pretext of

organizing the revolution, would enthrone a red bureaucracy, the new

ruling class. Such centralist plans could only function in a country

like Germany with a servile population and a disciplined factory

proletariat. Not in Spain, for example, a country with hardly any

factories, where Fanelli carried out his famous mission to found the

first sections of the International in Spain, with well-known

repercussions. It is obvious that such views would sooner or later have

to result in an open clash with Marx’s Jacobinism and with the reformism

of his followers, who were convinced believers in the peaceful or

violent conquest of political power in the name of the working class.

Marx did not spare any efforts in his attempt to expel Bakunin from the

IWA. We are not at all interested here in describing the dishonest

procedures used by Marx, or Bakunin’s secret organizations, however. The

victory of the reactionary forces in France, Austria, Germany, Italy and

Spain inaugurated a long period of reaction. Revolutionary passion was

nowhere to be found among the masses, the general movement went into

decline and no flanking maneuvers could create a force to be reckoned

with. Bakunin, at the end of his life, confirmed the fact that the

revolution “had gone to sleep” and that it would be no easy matter to

wake it up again.

The International split into two parts, and both fractions soon

dissolved. The subsequent development of the workers movement proceeded

in two opposite directions that would never converge, which is why the

Marx-Bakunin debate has persisted for so many years. In fact, however,

history has rendered all forms of anarchism and Marxism obsolete; there

have been so many capitalist innovations, so many debatable affairs,

that becoming embroiled in that particular debate would be sterile. The

differences of opinion, the particular problems of the time, and the

antipathies that separated Marx and Bakunin in 1872 do not obviate the

critical contributions of either, some of which are still relevant

today, in the midst of full-blown global turbo-capitalism. The dead part

is what has been used to manufacture ideological monstrosities baptized

with the names of “Marxism” and “Bakuninism”. However, while Bakunin has

hardly anything to do with the milieu that lays claim to his heritage,

Marx has even less to do with his spurious heirs. Marx’s disciples

shaved off his beard during the Russian Revolution, where his teachings

were transformed into the cruel religion of a totalitarian State; as for

the Bakunin, his followers turned his teachings into a gradualist,

federalist and democratic statism in the Spanish Revolution. A new

bourgeoisie of ideologues, delegates and functionaries is always born

from the ashes of a betrayed and annihilated revolution, adapting their

masters’ words to their own pharisaical prose.

After Bakunin’s death on July 1, 1876, the dissolution of the IWA, and

the resurgence of reaction, the workers movement entered a defensive,

underground phase, characterized by constant organizational work and

propaganda. For anarchism, this was the time of its ideological

stabilization, which led to diverse tactics and orientations. The

passage of anarchism from being a doctrine of action, of facts,

intertwined with the workers movement, so characteristic of Bakunin, to

the anarchism of propaganda, of ideas, external to the movement,

typical, for example, of Kropotkin, Grave, Reclus and Malatesta,

entailed the separation of doctrinal activity from the class struggle.

The libertarian conception of the world suffered irreparable damage.

Bakuninist materialism, based on the dialectical relation between

thought and action, individual and society, revolutionary subject and

objective reality, yielded to a vulgar, ahistorical, eclectic,

determinist and scientistic materialism. A petrified opposition to

rationalist optimism based on study and science engendered an

individualist anarchism based either on will and love, or else on

egoism, by introducing Stirner into the anarchist pantheon. In this

manner, revolution and insurrection, communist ideal and pragmatic

resistance, constructive effort and destructive passion, individual

interest and collective interest, were separated. Anarchism became an

ideology, or, more accurately, a doctrinal ensemble for three or four

factions, the exclusive purview of doctrinaires of proven faith, and no

longer the conscious expression of the revolutionary workers movement.

Libertarian thought and class struggle were no longer two aspects of a

single reality that was manifested in the movement of history, and were

divided into the preserve of thinkers and moralists on the one side, and

neutral or inert nature on the other, dominated by the principle of

causality. This deviation, which also affected the Marxist camp, was the

mother of every kind of confusion, giving rise to an array of

individualist, naturist, economistic, syndicalist and communist beliefs,

destined to multiply, increasingly undermining the possibilities that

anarchists might be able to influence the social process.

It cannot be said that all the accumulated labors of agitation were in

vain, nor that the revolt that inspired those labors was insincere, and

to the extent that it was based on reality anarchism was still capable

of contributing brilliant pages to history. The forces of order,

however, have registered one victory after another, and therefore

humanity is constantly declining. It is clear that humanity will not be

able to get out of the sewer in which it finds itself except by way of a

profound revolution, but is such a revolution really desired? Does

humanity even possess the means by which it can formulate its desires?

We hope that the time will come when the answer to these questions will

be an unequivocal yes. In the meantime, the only thing that is driving

the state apparatus and the market towards disaster is their own

contradictions. Building spaces for freedom, solidarity and equality in

the present chaos would seem to be the most reasonable outlook, but as

Bakunin himself might say: what an outlook!