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Title: Bakunin Author: Guy A. Aldred Date: 1940 Language: en Topics: Mikhail Bakunin, biography Source: Retrieved on 12th September 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/bakunin-guy-aldred
Until I commenced to publish translations of Bakunin’s writings, and
accounts of incidents in his career, in the Herald of Revolt (1910–14),
The Spur (1914–21), The Commune (1923–29), and The Council (1923–33),
little of the great Russian Nihilist’s life or thought was to be found
in English except his “God and the State” — itself but an indigestible
fragment. I published an abridged edition of his work in August, 1920,
and issued, shortly afterwards, my “life” of Bakunin. In the present
book, that life has been revised and re-written completely. All the
essays from Bakunin’s pen published by me have been collected and will
be published as a separate and complete work.
From the foreword to the 1920 biography, dated from “Bakunin House,
Glasgow, N.W., November, 1920,” I select the following passage,
explanatory of my reason for publishing a study of Bakunin : —
“How far persons may be deemed the embodiment of epochs is a debatable
question. It is, at least, certain that history gains in fascination
from being treated as a constant succession of biographies. Assuredly,
more than Luther and his circle were necessary to effect the
Reformation. But who will deny that to glean the characters of Luther,
Melanethon, and Zwingi gives charm to our knowledge of the period? And
do not the boldness of men and certain notable sayings remain with us as
matters of consequence to be remembered in song and story, whilst the
abstract principles for which they stood bore us not a little? Who of us
will care to follow all the technical work accomplished by Wieklif when
he pioneered the public reading of the Bible in English or turned aside
from his scholarly Latin to bold writings in our native tongue? We
remember only that he did these things. Forgetting his errors, in so far
as he inclined towards orthodoxy, we linger with admiration over his
brave declaration when he stood alone against interest and prejudice: ‘I
believe that the Truth will prevail.’ And so, when we speak of Free
Press, we think of one man, Richard Carlile, as typifying and embodying
the struggle though assuredly his work was made possible only by the
devoted band of men and women who rallied round in historic battle for
the free press.
“In like fashion, when we speak of the Russian Revolution and Communism
our thoughts turn to Michel Bakunin and Alexander Herzen. The latter was
the father of revolutionary Nihilism. But he repented of his offspring.
Bakunin never repented.
“I have endeavoured to give a true portrait of Bakunin in relation to
the revolution and his epoch. My aim has been to picture the man as he
was — a mighty elemental force, often at fault, always in earnest,
strenuous and inspiring.”
This revised biography is a record of Bakunin’s life and struggle, and
the evolution of his thought; the story of the working-class movement
from 1814 to 1876; and of the thought and attitude of Bakunin’s parents
and their influence on his mental growth and reaction to oppression. The
story merits telling well: but it is so interesting in itself, that it
will survive being told badly, until an abler pen relates it with the
power equal to its thrilling importance.
GLASGOW, September, 1933.
---
A few chapters of this revised MS. were printed by a French comrade in
1934, who published also a French edition. There were innumerable errors
and the comrade invented his own chapter headings, which sometimes made
amazing reading. Thus: Bakunin Has The Time Of His Life.” This was one
heading which struck me as being both funny and startling in a sober
biography.
Since this MS. was prepared, the Spanish struggle against Fascism, and
the World War, has made the study of Bakunin’s life a matter of urgent
importance. He is the great world pioneer of resistance to Fascism.
GLASGOW, August 2, 1940.
GUY A. ALDRED
---
Michel Alexandrovitch Bakunin was born on May 8^(th), 1814, at the
family seat of his father, at Pryamuchina, situated between Moscow and
St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd a century later, and now called
Leningrad. What a cycle of history these changes indicate!
Bakunin was born two years after his friend, Alexander Herzen, first saw
the light by the fires of Moscow. Those fires were lit by the order of
Prince Rostopchin, as intelligent as reactionary a man, in order to
drive Napoleon and his Grand Army out of the Russian Capital.
Rostopschin considered that Russia faced a graver enemy in her
idealistic nobility than in any foreign invaders. He observed that, in
other countries, aristocrats planned insurrection in order to secure
power for themselves: and democracy rose against the aristocracy in
order to broaden the basis of privilege, to widen the opportunity and
illusion of power: but in Russia the privileged and the aristocrats
plotted revolution, and risked terrible oppression and persecution, with
no other object than the abolition of their own privileges. Not only
Bakunin’s career, but the story of his father, timid sceptic though he
was, and of his relatives, bear out the truth of Rostopschin’s
observation.
The future apostle of Nihilism was the son of a wealthy landed
proprietor, who boasted a line of aristocratic ancestors. He was very
rich and was what was then called the owner of a thousand slaves. Only
the men were counted. Women did not count. Even as slaves, they were
without consequence. They were out of the bill entirely. Thus he was the
unrestricted ruler of 2,000 slaves, men and women. He had the right to
sell them, to banish them to Siberia, or to give them to the State as
soldiers. To speak plainly, he could rob them and enjoy himself at their
expense.
As a child of nine years of age, he been sent to Italy, to the Russian
Embassy in Florence. There, in the house of the Russian Minister, who
was related to the family, he was brought up and educated. At the age of
thirty-five he returned to Russia. One can say, therefore, that he spent
his youth and received his education abroad. He returned to Russia a man
of intellect and culture, a true philanthropist, possessed of a broad
mind and generous sympathies. He was a Freethinker but not an Atheist.
He had owed his sojourn abroad to the fact that his uncle, also a
Bakunin, had been Minister of the Interior, under Catherine II.
Peter the Great had introduced European Civilization into Russia. In his
ruthless way, he forced the aristocratic proprietors to shave off their
beards, smoke tobacco, and accompany their wives and daughters into
society. He tore young men, literally, from their families, and sent
them abroad to study. This changed the life of the Russian aristocracy
superficially. Beneath the acquired artificialities, they remained
barbarians, slaves of Czarism, debased rulers, and outragers of their
own serfs. But in its train, this pretence of civilization brought
philosophy and literature. One cannot play at culture without being
affected by culture in consequence. It is dangerous even for Czarism to
play with fire. The fingers of authority are bound to be burnt, a
little.
Catherine II., whom Bakunin’s grand-uncle served, played more daringly
with the fire than Peter the Great and so burnt the fingers of the
autocracy more seriously than did the mighty crushing workman Czar, the
huge animal autocrat. Catherine, who died in 1786, when European
Revolution and thought was at its height, had personal need of
literature and philosophy, and of companionship in thought. She forced
the study of the great works of the period upon her nobles. She was the
friend of Voltaire and Diderot, and corresponded with Encyclopedists.
She commanded their works to be read. She worshipped civilization and
deified abstract humanity- very abstract-yet very dangerous to
despotism. Naturally, involuntarily, her nobles became philosophers as
they might have become hangmen, had she commanded them to do so. The
effect on their manners was to the good, however, and their intellect
suffered no harm. Out of this compulsory reading of literature, love of
philosophy grew, and small pioneer groups of aristocrats were formed,
for whom the shining idea of the epoch, the idea of humanity, which
should supersede entirely that of the deity, was the great revelation.
It unfolded itself in their lives, became at once the foundation and the
ideal of their existence, a new religion. They became its Apostles, its
propagandists, and the real founders of Russian thought and literature.
Catherine had builded better than she intended; and although, from fear,
she suppressed the movement, and cruelly persecuted its leaders, the
stone of the temple had been laid and the building of the temple could
not be stopped. The building proceeded steadily, though secretly, during
the reigns of Paul I. (1796–1801) and Alexander I. (1801–1825), until it
startled the world of “Nicholas with the Big Stick” by its proportions
and extent. There can be no doubt that Bakunin’s father owed his liberal
education to the philosophic ambition of Catherine II. To her fears, and
those of her successors, was due the condition of Russia to which he
returned.
He returned to Russia, at the age of thirty-five, a member of the
Russian diplomatic service, with no immediate intention of quitting it.
But the aristocratic world of St. Petersburg made such a repulsive
impression on him, that he tendered his resignation voluntarily and
immediately, and retired to his family seat, which he never left even
for a day. Here his doors were never closed, so to speak, so large was
the number of visitors and friends who called upon him. His sympathies
were with the advanced circles of aristocratic thought-legacy of
Catherine’s foolish trifling with philosophy, which then spread their
ideas in Russia: and he ventured, not without caution, yet quite
definitely, to associate himself with them. From 1815 to 1825, he took
part in the Secret Society of North Russia. More than once he was asked
to become President. But he was too great a sceptic and too cautious to
accept.
Deism was the limit of his thought, the Deism that his son in later
years castigated so effectively. Though Deism was the extent of his
philosophy, he was inspired by the spirit of scientific and philosophic
enquiry, which was then finding a home in Europe. It was the Age of
Reason and of the Right of Man, if not yet of woman. And Bakunin’s
father rejoiced in the spirit of the age. He was a keen student of
nature and possessed a burning desire to understand the working of
natural phenomena. Nature he loved, and next to nature, thought. The
Liberalism of his mind revolted against the terrible and degrading
position of slave-dealer.
Several times he gave his slaves the opportunity to demand their
emancipation and to become free. But he took always the wrong measures
and did not succeed in his wish and circumstance and longstanding habit
conquered, and he remained quietly an owner, just like many of his
neighbours, who all looked, with complacent unconcern, upon the hundred
of human beings who lived in bondage, and on whose labour they fattened.
Slavery cannot be abolished piece-meal. A prevailing social disorder,
entrenched in the ruling interests of the day, and so having a hundred
or more economic manifestations, a complete nervous system of corruption
and degradation has to be abolished entirely throughout the area that it
covers: it has to be rooted up. One cannot destroy the evil by lopping
off its branches. The axe must be laid to the roots.
One of the main reasons which caused a change in Bakunin’s father’s life
was his marriage. Already over forty, he fell in love with a girl of
eighteen, likewise of aristocratic birth, beautiful but poor. He married
this young thing; and in order to quieten his conscience for this
egoistic act, he endeavoured for the rest of his life, not to raise her
to his level but to reduce himself to her’s.
Bakunin’s mother came from the family Muraview. She was a niece of the
hangman Muraview and of a hanged Muraview. She was a very common woman,
vulgar and selfish. None of her children loved her. But they loved her
father so much the more; for, during their childhood, he was always kind
and affectionate towards them.
Although there were eleven children, of whom two sisters and five
brothers were alive when Bakunin was at the height of his revolutionary
career. Thanks to the influence of their father they were brought up
more in a European than in a Russian style. They lived, so to speak,
outside the Russian reality. The world immediately about them was
decorated with feeling and imagination, and was far removed from all
realistic influence. Their education was, at first, very liberal. But
after the unhappy end of the conspiracy of December, 1825, the father
got frightened and changed his plan. From now on he tried, with all his
might, to make his children true servants and subjects of the Czar. For
this reason he sent Bakunin as a boy of fourteen, to St. Petersburg, in
order to join the Artillery School. There he spent three years; and when
he was a few months over the age of seventeen years, became an officer.
At home he had acquired much learning. Besides Russian, he already spoke
French and understood a little German and English. His father had given
his children lessons in ancient history, and one of his uncles taught
him arithmetic. Religious instruction was entirely overlooked. The
priest-a dear man whom Bakunin learned to love because he brought him
all kinds of sweets-came into the house often but exercised no influence
regarding religion. Bakunin was always more of an unbeliever than a
believer. Or rather, he was absolutely indifferent to religion.
His ideas and opinions on morals, right, and duty, were vague. He
possessed instinct, but no principle. He loved the good and despised the
bad, without being able to give reasons when he considered the one good
and the other bad. Every injustice and injury was repulsive to him.
Revolt against and hatred of all injustice, were developed more strongly
within him than all others. His moral education suffered through the
fact that his material and intellectual existence was founded on a
gigantic injustice and on an entirely immoral foundation, the slavery of
the peasants, whose sweat kept the “better class” in wealth.
Bakunin’s father felt this. He knew it quite well. But he was one of the
practical men, and therefore never spoke to his children about this. He
preferred to leave them in ignorance.
Bakunin’s passionate desire for adventure was a conspicuous feature of
his early youth. His father used to relate his travelling recollections.
To listen to them was his children’s greatest joy. His tales were very
interesting. He planted the same love of nature in his children. But he
never took the trouble to satisfy their wishes and give them scientific
explanation. To travel, to visit different countries and new worlds-that
was the wish and ideal of his children.
Bakunin’s imagination developed very much under the influence of such
desires. He dreamt of nothing but travels. His brain pictured vividly
how he escaped from home and found himself far, far away; far away from
his father, his sisters and brothers, whom he, nevertheless, loved and
honoured.
So he dreamed and thought when he entered the Artillery School. This was
his first meeting with real Russian life.
Bakunin did not escape Liberalism at the Artillery School. Economic
conditions had decided that his natural destiny was the army. Political
circumstance selected him for a revolutionist. He discovered Liberalism,
if not among the majority, at least among a large minority of the
students. Here was a menacing undercurrent of radical thought and
sympathy which was only outwardly loyal and obedient to the behests of
the Governmental despotism. Amongst themselves, the rebel students
cherished the memories of the Decemberists of 1825, and handed round the
poems — that some of the martyred insurrectyionists had written — as
sacred literature to be preserved and handed on from generation to
generation. Anecdotage of the martyrs themselves — most of whom had
belonged to the First Cadet Corps and the Artillery Institute — was
retailed eagerly also and recited jealously. The students felt that
Decembrism expressed and maintained “the hounour of the school.” Those
of the Decembrists who had been sentyenced to Siberia were pitied, not
on account of their exile, but because they had not been permitted to
share the more honourable and direct fate of those who had died on the
gibbet or had been executed otherwise. t was impossible for milityary
despotism to efface memories of heroic revolt or to silence entirely the
genius of knowledge. So the rebvolutionary enthusiasm continued top
existy and to grow apace. That it influenced Bakunin is certain. His
subsequent career is an evidence of its effect as a ppwerful
undercurrent, directing all his energies towards the mighty purpose of
social revolution. By temperament, Bakunin was passionate and elemental.
This characteristyic linked the conservatism of his youth with the
radicalism of his maturity and his old age. It finds expression in all
the writings and explains his strange concentyrated style. In all the
stahes of his evolution he was volcanic and he writes history and
philosophy as though he had a commission from the fates to reduce the
record of time to a study in precis-witing. Bakunin was very human. It
was easy for him to pass from the conservative worship of slaves to
authority to the idealistic admioration of the martyrs of liberty. There
came a time when he recalled the school legends of the Decembrists as
sources of vision and inspiration. At first he suspected them of being
enemies of the fatherland and was dead to the grand motif of their
lives. He was very much the schoolboy, conscious mainly of the discord
existing between himself and his environment. And he had the grand
manner of youth indulged by wealth. Alas, for the egoism of too early
introspection!
Writing to his parents in the autumn of 1829, Bakunin expressed the
reaction of fifteen with the solemnity of seventy. He speaks disgustedly
of “the new era in my life.” This meant that he was suffering from
homesickness. He complains that his imagination is pure and innocent no
longer; whereas his imagination has not discovered itself as yet. The
artillery school has “acquainted” him, not with Decembrism, but with
“the black, foul, low side of life.” He “got used to lying” because the
art of lying was approved unanimously. He felt his spirituality go to
sleep, for “there reigned among the students a cold indifference to
every thing noble, great, or holy.” By these virtuous superlatives, the
youthful Bakunin meant loyalty to the Czar.
Three years later, Bakunin passed his examination with great eclat. He
was now an officer, eighteen years old and as orthodox and priggish as a
state curriculum could make him. He writes home of this event. The
undergraduate saw “a new era in my life.” Bu the graduate declares that
there has begun “truly a new epoch in my life.” There is the same
flamboyant egotism noticeable but there is a subtle improvement in the
expensive arrogance of expression. Slavish military discipline has given
place to personal freedom. Bakunin feels spiritually awake. He goes
where he likes and meets his fellow officers only in lesson hours. He
has severed all other relations with them because their presence
reminded him of the meanness and infamy of his school life. Here we see
the passion of the man surging almost into revolt against the idea of
external discipline. The writer seems to anticipate his latter
anti-authoritarianism. Yet his letters betray extreme conservatism of
opinion. His ideas are static to all appearance. Of course, the devil
was born in heaven and in the beginning of his rebel career was God’s
second in command. George Washington was jealous of English prestige
against the French in the American colonies when the British governor
and the Home Government were indifferent. Washington was compelled by
the very logic of his English and a new flag. Bakunin’s Nihilism was
foreshadowed by the extravaganism of his Czarism. His life-long French
bias was predicted in his first contemptuous dismissal of the French
revolutionary outlook.
“The Russians are not French,” he wrote to his parents, “they love their
country and adore their monarch. To them his will is law. One could not
find a single Russian who could not sacrifice all his interests for the
welfare of the sovereign and the prosperity of the fatherland.”
Bakunin should have become an officer of the Guards as a matter of
course. This would have meant participating in the splendour of the
Court. Bakunin would have come into direct contact with his beloved
Czar. Fortunately, he had contrived to hanger his father and to arouse
the jealousy of the Director of Artillery. Adoration of his monarch had
not saved him from rebelling against both parent and superior officer.
As a punishment for his dual office of petty treason he was given a
commission in the line. He was doomed to spend his days in a miserable
peasant village far away from any centre of civilization. A hut was
assigned to him for his new quarters. Here he took up his abode. He
declined to accept the implied disgrace as a discipline. His military
duties spent whole days in complete isolation. At last, his commanding
officer ordered him to resign his appointment. He sent in his papers and
returned to Moscow, a civilian. He had “worked” his discharge and was
free of the military atmosphere.
In the great Russian capital, reduced by Peter the Great as Rome was by
Constantine, only to become even more eternal, Bakunin was received into
a circle of young savants. Its members were situated similarly to
himself. Owing to the wisdom of the Russian statesmen and police
authorities, this circle was engrossed in German philosophy. It was
keen, especially on Hegel, who had been for several years the recognised
leader of philosophy in German. His recent death at the age of sixty
one, had given fresh life to his thought among these Moscow students.
Entire nights were spent discussing, paragraph by paragraph, the volume
of his “Logic,” “Ethics,” ““Encyclopedia,” etc. The most insignificant
pamphlets which appeared in Berlin were obtained and read eagerly. In a
few days they were torn and tattered and preserved in honoured pieces.
Members of the circle would have nothing to do with one another for
weeks after a disagreement respecting the definition of “the
intercepting mind” or “the absolute personality” and its autonomous
existence.
The system of Hegel was both the negation and the culmination of the
philosophy of Kant, who flourished from 1724 to 1804. Hegel’s youth had
been contemporary with Kant’s old age, and the period during which Kant
developed his own critical philosophy of his life. In Hegel, the Kantian
dualisms of phenomena and nuomena or nuomenon disappear. Hegel
identifies the rational with the real and the real with the rational. He
made idealism imminent in the experience and logic imminent in history.
After his death his disciples split into two schools; a right and a left
wing who were bitterly opposed to each other. The leaders of the left
wing, the positive, original, vigorous, and ultimately only important
group were Strauss and Feuerbach.
Feuerbach was born the year Kant died. He lived till after the Paris
Commune and the triumph of Thiers. Bakunin survived him only four years.
George Eliot translated into English his famous work in which he
classified the ideas of God, the future life, and holiness, as the
extravagant desires of a fugitive race dwelling upon an inconsiderable
planet. Feuerbach developed the Hedonistic ethical theory and declared,
somewhat crudely and, to my minid, inaccurately: “Man is only what he
eats.” Man is not what he eats, but what he assimilates, remoulds, and
creates. Even more, man is what he is, and what he expresses in the
simple fact of being.
Strauss, who was contemporary with Feuerbach, being cradled a few years
after him and outliving him a few years also by way of equity, had a
disastrous career as a theologian. His “life” of Jesus, which cost him
theological chairs in Germany, was translated by George Eliot. Strauss
viewed Jesus as a Socrates misconceived by Christian tradition as a
magician; which is a very happy conception and one that time will
endorse.
At the time Bakunin returned to Moscow as an ex-officer, Feuerbach had
not employed his sardonic humour to contrast the actual and ideal
worlds. Nor had he produced his works on the philosophy of historoy. But
he had explained belief in immorality as an illusion. Strauss was still
a teacher and was planning his “life” of Jesus. Hegel, with murmurings
of Feuerbach, were the themes of the Moscow circle. Its founder was
Stankevitch, who had sat under Professor Pawlov at Moscow University.
Pawlov was a pedant who preferred learning to knowledge, and routine to
wisdom. He introduced German philosophy into the university curriculum
in 1821, because it seemed to him to be so eminently safe and dull. It
was his alternative to the French, which he deemed nervous, doubtful,
and dynamic. French philosophy in struck him as being something
shattering and devastating. The German school was his choice between the
quick and the dead.
Pawlov confined the students’ attention to Schelling and Oken.
Schelling, who flourished from 1775 to 1854, had not developed at that
time his theosophical gnosticism. He opposed nature to spirit but
conceived both as common equal expressions of one underlying absolute
principle. Actually, Monism; thoughtful and even brilliant, but not
revolutionary. Oken-shortened from Ochenfuss-lived from 1779 till 1851.
He attempted to construct an a priori system of knowledge and originated
the idea of annual meetings of German scientists. It is said that the
British Association was modelled on his plan. This fact alone is
sufficient to prove that Oken was an essentially fake savant.
Having been introduced to the German philosophy, Stankevitch did not
find it possible to stop at Schelling and Oken. He blundered on to Hegel
and became fascinated, Hegel seemed to him all important. Consequently,
Stankevitch introduced the study of Hegel to a select circle of his
friends. Among these were Herzen and Bakunin. The latter had found his
“new era” or “epoch.” Hegel and the Hegelians were to inspire all
Bakunin’s future thought.
Years afterwards, Bakunin explained the mental atmosphere of Russia at
the time that he studied at the Artillery School. He also outlined the
aims and objects of the Decembrist conspiracy. It was the beginning of a
new epoch.
No one who was born in America or one of the Western European countries,
not even a Frenchman who received his political education under the
reign of Napoleon III., or a German who went to school with Bismarck in
order to learn how to become a free citizen, or an Italian who suffered
under the Austrian yoke, could imagine what a terrible condition Russia
was in under the regime of Nicholas. Perhaps, to-day, someone living
under Hitlerism, or in Italy, under Mussolini, can imagine the Russia of
“Nicholas with the Big Stick.”
The accession of Nicholas erected a memorial stone, i.e. the suffocation
of the military uprising which had been prepared silently through a
great aristocratic conspiracy. This is the movement which we call the
conspiracy of December, not because it was started but because it was
killed in that month. And when I call that movement an aristocratic one
I do not mean to insinuate that their programme was aristocratic. On the
contrary, their goal was democratic; in many directions, even
socialistic. It was called an aristocratic movement from the fact that
nearly all who took part in it belonged to the noble-class, and formed,
so to speak, the intelligence of the time.
This was the main object of the Decabrist conspiracy, to end privilege.
There were two societies, one in the North and the other in South
Russia. The first embraced St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as the
military and official element. It was much more aristocratic and
political in the sense of state power than the second one. In it were
the Muraviews. The members seriously considered the liberation of the
serfs, and laboured to this end. They were, at the same time, great
believers in a great and united Russia, with a liberal constitution. As
their goal was a united Russia, they were opposed, naturally, to the
independence of Poland.
The second, the South Russian society, whose seat was Kiev, was more
revolutionary and democratic in the full sense of the word. This society
also consisted mostly of officers and officials who hailed from Central
Russia. The cause of the more revolutionary character of the
organization is to be found in the fact that it was directed by the more
thoughtful personalities, such as Colonel Muraview-Apostol,
Dotozeff-Rumen, and the genial colonel of the general staff, Pestel.
In a certain sense, Pestel was a federalist and socialist. He was not
satisfied with the wish to liberate peasants from their bondage, and
give them their personal liberty. He demanded that they should be
declared owners of the land on which they worked. His political ideal
was a federative republic similar to the United States of America,
instead of Russian Czardom. Pestel and his friends were not opposed to
the independence of Poland. They even attempted to fraternise intimately
with the Polish revolutionaries. For that they were criticised severely
by their northern sister organization.
The above-mentioned men were conspicuous not only through their
intelligence. They were great and noble characters. In the year 1820,
all three died on the scaffold in St. Petersburg. A few hours before his
execution, Pestel received a visit from his father, the Governor-General
of Siberia. The old man was an indescribably corrupt creature, a
monster, a thief, a murderer. In a word, all that usually is meant by a
servant of the Czar. He came with the pretext of taking leave of his
son, but really, he wanted only to rub salt into the latter’s wounds.
Pestel did not want to receive him, but he had no choice.
Amongst other things, he asked him in his impudence: “Now tell me, my
son, how high do you think you would have risen if you had succeeded in
overthrowing Czardom?” “First of all,” said Pestel unhesitatingly, “we
would have liberated Russia of devils incarnate of your type.”
As the punishment of strangulation was not then in use, the gruesome
procedure went off clumsily. They were true martyrs of liberty,
forerunners of the world liberated, as one day it will be, who were
executed. The rope slipped over Pestel’s face, and he fell heavily to
the ground where he remained, badly injured. During the moments in which
the hangman re-adjusted the rope, the dying man exclaimed, “They cannot
even hang you properly in Russia.”
It was the birth of a new era. Hitherto, the Russian aristocracy had
been the voluntary slaves of the Czar, and the brutal, terrible
proprietors of serfs who had to till their land. Until then, the
aristocracy had been nothing more than a brutal beast, shut off from
every ideal and saturated by the most nonsensical prejudices.
The Western European civilization, which had been introduced by Peter
the Great, and developed by Catherine, was no longer a dead thing.
Although the historian, Karamatin, sent as a young man to Europe to
study, returned to Russia to betray his patrons, civilization and
knowledge advanced by his reaction. He created official Russian
patriotism and rhetoric. Even art leads to morality. And the students,
in their secret circles, developed knowledge from his writing.
Napoleon’s invasion, in 1812, turned Russia upside down. Czarism,
instead of defending itself was forced to beg the aristocracy, the
clergy, the bourgeoisie, and the serfs for their help. Each category
felt its strength and was joyful and active, like a new-born babe, in a
consciousness of its power. This was the first breeze of liberty which
swept over this slave-empire. After 1812, the peasants never ceased to
clamour for bread and liberty. The aristocratic youth came back from
abroad strangely changed. They had become liberal and revolutionary. A
gigantic propaganda sprung up in all towns and garrisons, in all
aristocratic palaces. Even the women took part at last, and fought with
glorious enthusiasm. Thus changed the Russian aristocracy, the hitherto
despicable slave of a barbaric despot, almost miraculously into
fanatical propagandist of humanity and liberty.
This then, was the new world-full of progress and healthy, vigorous
strength-which Czar Nicholas fought from the first day of his accession.
The reaction, which broke out after the downfall of the December
conspiracy, was terrible. Everything humane, everything intelligent, and
everything true and good that existed in Russia, was destroyed and
crushed. Everything brutal and debased ascended the throne with
Nicholas! It was a systematic and entire destruction of humanity in
favour of brutality and all corruption.
In the middle of these conditions, this gruesome time, Bakunin had
entered, as boy of fourteen years, the Artillery School at St.
Petersburg.
Herzen was the love child of a German mother and a Russian noble. His
father recognised and cared for him from birth. In 1827 he was sent to
the University at Moscow to complete the studies he had commenced at
home. Reaction was striding triumphant through Russia. The Czar and his
Court were conspiring to close the universities and to replace them with
organised military schools. Living a century later, we are familiar with
the arguments of military despotism and entrenched bureaucracy at the
war with democracy and public right. Lord Trenchard gives an excellent
impersonation of the Czar’s Statesmen militarising the universities
during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when he urged to-day
the military reconstruction of the London Metropolitan Police Force. The
unoriginal medieval Hitler apologises for the militarising of the German
Universities in phrases that have been plagarised without any alteration
from these pioneer Czarist despots inspired with the so-called German
philosophy.
Moscow was made the centre of attack. The reaction suspected the
educational foundation of being a hotbed of liberal thought and
intrigue. The university was ancient and possessed a real tradition for
learning. Traditions are not true, necessarily. Only, they grow hoary
with legend, and stubborn believers sometimes try to make such
traditions come true. In this way, falsehoods have a knack of growing
into truth. Respect the pretence of knowledge long enough and you will
wake up one fine morning alive to genuine love of culture. Hypocrisy is
the forerunner of sincerity. It is the masquerade that proceeds the
reality.
Moscow had boasted its pride of study so much that it had come to demand
an independent life for its students. Their thought was to be
untrammelled. Its professors were actually free spirits, inspired by the
dignity of their calling. They sensed its earnestness and declined to
flatter, servilely, autocracy. They were not panderers, like the
old-time Greeks, willing to wait in the ante-room of authority. They
were men, actual living human beings, and not schoolmasters. Their
function was to develop in the students’ personality and understanding
responsibility. The students, on their part, responded gladly to the
liberal and radical teachings of the professors. Here, in the very heart
of Moscovy, Czarist barbarism notwithstanding, flourished the
cameraderie of knowledge. Youth and age belonged equally to the great
Commune of learning. It was the period of the Russian Renaissance.
Czarism, and its police agents, through the desolating pestilence of
their authority made increasing warfare on these professors. Their
devotion to education was rewarded with secret denunciation and exile
without trial. Sometimes the penalty was unrecorded translation to
eternity, the pet Muscovite method of governmental assassination. A
teacher became suspect naturally. His book lore placed him at the mercy
of ignorant inspectors and innumerable auxiliaries of the police
department. Wisdom was outlawed. Learning died. Weak men bowed before
the ruling system. Their genius declined. Personality extinguished, they
became mere police shadows, nervous creatures of routine. Even talent
disappeared into the abyss that had been prepared for genius. Lectures
were merely recitals of the Czar’s standing orders. Incapable masters
were kept in office for their proved incapacity by cynical police
considerations. The seminary became a cemetery. And yet, where the grave
is, there is always the resurrection. Knowledge banned was love barred.
It was revered. The students, in their devoted quest, proved the truth
of Moncure Conway’s words; “They who menace our freedom of thought and
speech are tampering with something more powerful than gunpowder.” Our
day has witnessed the explosion.
The French were forbidden. Voltaire, whose name is at once romance,
legend, history and satire! Rousseau! There is more than one Rousseau in
the book of fame as there was more than one Jesus at the time of the
wanderer of Nazererth. But there is only one Rousseau who lives in the
memory of mankind. The others are recorder in the very dulltone, whose
pages one sometimes idly turns. This is the parish register of the dead
great: great they were were but they are dead. Jean Jacques, who lived
from 1712 to 1778 is the only member of the Rousseau family who, being
dead, lives. He pioneered a revolution in social relations with his
imaginary contract social; wrought a revolution in French prose; and
releasted literature, what sedition, from the fetid atmosphere of the
salon. Rousseau’s influence finally raised the saloon above the salon in
the stormy days of revolution that he inspired but never lived to
witness. Moliere, who lived from 1622 to 1673, who knew human nature so
well, had employed his wide understanding and great gifts so usefully to
expose hypocrisy in all its professional hideousness and habiliments!
Malby, 1709–1785, who retired from statemanship to plead for simplicity
and equality in society! Diderot, the Encyclopedie, giant and pioneer of
revolution who shook the thrones of Europe as a terrier might shake a
rat. He approached the monarchy with less charm of address than did
either Voltaire or Rousseau, but he moved with a force and vigour that
they might well have envied. All were denied their place in the
University Library at Moscow. The pantheon of power has no place for the
figure of genius.
Did truth despair? Not at all. So much did the authorities dread the
great French thinkers, their wit, their mordant humour, their keen
irony, their knowledge, that they imagined Paris to be the centre of all
thought. Panic made imbeciles of the Russian statesmen. It never
occurred to their dull police understanding that their might be German
thinkers. They assumed that Germans, like Russians, never thought.
Certainly the triumph of Hitlerism after years of social democratic and
communist agitation in the fatherland lends colour to this assumption.
Gladly did the Russian government permit German classics to enter the
university from which all French thought had been banned. Hegel, being
German, was deemed no thinker, and was so permitted- Hegel, whose
methods had inspired more revolutionar thinking than even the satires of
Voltaire. Feuerbach was allowed also- Feuerbach, who denied the
existence of the soul, and repeated the Communist war-cry, heard in the
streets of Paris in those days of revolution: “Property is Robbery.”
The French philosophers were neglected with enthusiasm, once the Germans
had usurped their place in the affections of the students. It is
proverbial that love laughs at locksmiths. Thought is no less romantic
and efficient. It treats authority with the smiling disdain Venus
reserves for the lock-and-key maker and penetrates bars and bolts with
the most effecient ease. Thought rejoices in its address and enjoys the
pompous blundering of power. Voltaire was deposed and the revolution
proceeded apace. The message triumphed though the messenger was changed.
Is not the word greater than its bearer?
To Herzen, the German philosophy was wonderful. It was a revelation that
excited his imagination and fired his ambition. He sought to understand
and to assimilate its theories. The joy of discovery possessed him and
he put his thoughts into writing. His manuscripts were seized. A years
imprisonment followed. On his release he attended a dinner organised by
the students, who toasted Hegel and sung revolutionary songs. He was
arrested again and exiled to Perm, on the very borders of Siberia. In
solitude he determined to fathom Hegel. A master who had cost his
disciple so much freedom ought to be understood.
Herzen was permitted to return to civilized life and to live at
Vladimir. He fled from here to Moscow and carried off from one of the
Imperial Ladies’ Academies, a young cousin to whom he had been engaged.
The authorities smiled at his romance where they frown at his thought.
He was forgiven for his escapade and even allowed to live in Moscow.
Ungrateful and unrepentant he joined a study circle at which he met
Bakunin.
At first, Bakunin and Herzen were in opposite camps. The circle was
divided into two facitons. One was Bakunin-Bielinsky-Stankevitch group.
This was frankly German, authoritarian and purely speculative. It
confined philosophy to the sky. The other was the group of Herzen and
Ogariov. It was avowedly French, libertarian and revolutionary. It
insisted that philosophy belonged to the earth. Herzen denounced Bakunin
as a sentimentalist and Bakunin ridiculed Herzen as the “Russian
Voltaire”. To Bakunin, throughout his career, Germany was the fatherland
of authority and France the motherland of liberty. He divorced the one
and espoused the other. He never varied his conception of their
respective roles.
Bakunin denounced the French for being turbulent. He condemned “the
furious and sanguinary scenes of” their revolution. He described the
revolution itself as “this abstract and illimitable whirlwind.” It
“shook France and all but destroyed her.” The French writers assumed the
gaudy and unmerited title of philosophers. In their “philosophications”
they made revelation an object of mockery and religion a subject for
contempt. The Revolution negated the State and legal order. It
sacrificed loyalty and all that was most holy and truly great in life to
passing fashion. Herzen and his colleagues were suffering from this
“French Malady.” They filled themselves with French phrases. Their
speeches were vanities of sound, empty of meaning. Their “babbling”
killed the soul in the germ. With their speeches they deprived life of
the essence of beauty. Russian society in defence of “our beautiful
Russian reality,” must ally itself with “the German world” and “its
disciplined conscience.”
“Reconciliation with reality in all its relations and under all
conditions is the great problem of our day,” he added. Real education
was “that which makes a true and powerful Russian man devoted to the
Czar.” Like the more modern Hitler, Bakunin, at this stage of his
thought, omitted women as an individual from his scheme of things. The
Russian man was to be “devoted to the Czar” of his own will. In the case
of women, obedience was her natural lot. She had no initiative in the
matter. Her loyalty was but the docility of the cowed domestic animal.
Many Socialists and even Communists indulge this Early Church Father
failing that Luther perpetuated into German life and thought. Even
Free-thought has not cured the most radical manhood of the folly of
striking sex out from the definition of the male human and omitting
“human” from the definition of woman. In our text books, is not woman
still referred to as “the sex?” Does not man regard sex as his spare
time enjoyment? Consider then the actual insult to at least half the
human race conveyed by the prevailing male conception.
Hegel and Goethe were, according to Bakunin, “the leaders of this
movement of reconciliation, this return from death to life.” “Yes,” he
added, “suffering is good; it is that purifying flame which transforms
the spirit and makes it steadfast.”
Of course suffering is good, provided it serves some definite useful
purpose. Otherwise suffering is merely senseless barbarism. To accept
injunction of Jesus, to take up the burden or cross of the everyday
useful struggle of life, to witness for Truth against Mammon and Moloch
and the Kings of the Earth, is wisdom. Unhappily, Bakunin did not mean
this kind of sacrifice. He meant repression and subjection. It was
“sacrifice” to don a uniform and proceed to murder in the name of Glory;
to enlist under the banners of Czar and Kaiser; indeed to follow any
licensed murderer who termed himself a King or a General or a Statesman.
Bakunin’s “sacrifice” was the quintessence of human folly. Sacrifice is
without purpose unless it leads to a fuller life for the individual and
for all members of the great human family. Hegel had reconciled Bakunin
to Germany and the narrow circumscribed life of oppression. He wrote and
spoke as the apostle of Czarism and Prussianism. He was still the
homesick schoolboy who despised the students at the Artillery School.
Bakunin plunged to the very depths of the German metaphysical idealism.
He hesitated before none of its logical consequences. He rejoiced that
“the profound religious feeling of the German people” saved it from such
experiences as those endured by France during its immortal Revolution.
No wonder, when he had passed through the violent change which
transformed him into an Anarchist and enemy of Czarism, Bakunin hated
everything German and adored everything French. No wonder the
Germanophile became the Francophile and the Francophote became the
Germanophote. Bakunin had passed through his transition before the
Stankevitch circle dissolved in 1839. He embraced Herzen’s viewpoint and
supported the latter’s contention with boldness and irresistible
dialectic. The dawn of the hungry forties found him the champion of
France and Revolution. To him, France was now the classic land of
struggle and revolution.
It had enjoyed 800 years of revolution from A.D. 987 to 1789. It was
home of Freedom, whereas Germany was the home of authority and reaction.
Hegel had converted Bakunin to France and Liberty. Voltaire was not
merely avenged. He was excelled.
The completion of Bakunin’s mental change is a matter for serious study
by the apologists of power. Life is amusing as well as sad. It is never
more entertaining and instructive than in its moments of great crisis,
when old worlds give place to new. Then we witness the renowned struggle
between Little Jack and the Mighty Giant. The Biblical variant is David
and Goliath. History has many variants. Jesus against Caesarism, a
struggle not yet ended. Luther against Rome. Erasmus against the Dark
Ages. Voltaire against the feudal nobility of France. Servetus against
Calvin. In terms of struggle and tragedy they relate and illustrate the
same magnificent paradox of progress. In the battle between Power and
Thought, it is Power and not Thought that is handicapped unmercifully.
Yet whenever the contest is renewed sides are taken because men believe
that Power is supreme and Thought a hopelessly outclassed challenger. It
is as though mankind regularly at the dawn of each new epoch shuts out
all knowledge of the past. Were it otherwise there would be no battle,
and, perhaps, no true progress. The Apostle intended not error but truth
when he defined Faith as the evidence of things unseen. Actually, Faith
is the vision of things clearly seen from the beginning of time.
Power moves along the ages heavily, weighed down with its own authority,
and armed always with its unwieldy bludgeon. It has no elan. It was
wealth and pomp and numbers; perfect machinery, much surrounding
circumstances, but withal, no life. Thought is without numbers. Thinkers
rarely command a majority. The grave can boast a more compact majority.
Thought has no machinery of action. Like Shakespeare’s conspirators,
thought is lean and dangerous. But it is destiny and ever survives. It
dies only when it has ascended from the gutter to the palace and has
assumed the rank of fashion. It then returns to the gutter and makes war
on its shadow. Hans Andersen has told the story of the man and his
shadow in one of his immortal fairy tales. In his story, the shadow,
which is Power, triumphs. In our record the man, being Thought, lasts
the distance.
Power lumbers awkwardly to its doom, whilst Thought moves gracefully and
bravely through suffering, from the gibbet to the throne. This is the
great message of Christianity as yet unrevealed to theologians but
obvious to the poor. The sword must perish and the world must triumph.
This fact explains why Achilles and Hector, old-time deities, are now
forgotten. Hector, of course, is remembered in the word “hectoring.” It
means that humanity reveres him no longer as a god but recalls his
memory as that of a braggard and bully. The growth of this idea
registered the distance that separates Shakespeare’s story of the gods
in his little appreciated
“Troilus and Cressida” from the same theme as developed at an earlier
epoch of English literature by Chaucer. Jesus based his entire ethic on
the simple truth that the gods of power and violence must pass away.
Every martyr since has expressed the same conception. Holy Synods and
Czarist police knew nothing about such subtleties. By destroying bodies
and burning books they expected to perish thought. To the contrary, by
destroying mere messengers, they gave body to thought itself. Men die
only that that thought may be resurrected in a new body unto triumph and
glory. In Russia, Bakunin became that new body. He was the word
incarnate, a most brilliant member of a brilliant group of thinkers and
disputants.
Herzen”s contention, at first challenged and then accepted by Bakunin,
was that Hegel’s system was nothing less than the algebra of the
Revolution. It set men free in a sense that no other philosophy had done
or could do. It liberated the world from obsolete restrictions. It left
no authority secure in Christendom. It proclaimed the idea that nothing
was immutable and asserted that every social condition contained the
germ of its own destruction. This idea, a platitude of all modern
socialist argument, belongs, not to De Leon or even Marx, but to Hegel.
The idea led Herzen to the study of the French Revolution. He went
further back. The revolution led to the philosophers who had foreseen
and inspired it. They became the divinities of his thought like so many
stars in the firmament. Hegel had proven Herzen’s direct path to the
study of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and d’Alembert. In his turn,
Herzen had brought Bakunin to worship at the same altar.
Bakunin’s changed attitude made his writings radical and his outlook on
theology very clear. From this time on he was not merely an Atheist but
an anti-theist. Voltaire needed God to explain the universe and to
restrain the wildness of democracy in riotous mood. Freethinkers have
complained that Bakunin was not too much concerned with disputing the
validity of Voltaire’s deistic explanation. That is true. Bakunin’s
concern was to remove once and for all, the authority of the idea of god
in order that man might breathe freely. Bakunin assumed what most
freethinkers were not prepared to accept: not only did god not exist,
but even if he could or did man had rights against god. In a word,
Bakunin set his cause on liberty.
Herzen was impressed with Bakunin’s incomparable “revolutionary tact.”
At least he was awake. He personified tireless energy. Days of reaction
had made him thoroughly at home with the German language and the German
philosophy. He employed its forceful concentration to express French
libertarian ideas. Proudhon noted the effect of his German studies on
his thought and style. The great French Anarchist regarded Bakunin as a
monstrocity in his terse dialectic and his luminous perception of ideas
in their essence.
Monstrosity! Perhaps that word will serve as well as any other to
explain the shadow that Bakunin cast across the field of the nineteenth
century European politics. It is a worthy portrait of, and a fitting
epitaph for, the man who was, throughout his life, the victim of his own
thoroughness.
Tourgenieff once invented a Nihilist hero named Bazaroff. This character
lives in Socialist literature because of his propagandist reply to the
usual skeptical question: Do you imagine that you influence the masses?
Bazaroff answered: “A half-penny tallow dip sufficed to set all Moscow
in a blaze.” Herzen’s nativity associates his name with the immortal
flames thus humbly originated. He is the lighted tallow dip which began
the mighty Russian conflagration which yet threatens to consume the
whole of Capitalist Society. Even as the flames spread, Herzen
spluttered and went out. Before succumbing to reaction, he set fire to a
rare torch in Bakunin. His great disciple was destined to light the
beacon fires of revolution throughout the world. For many years
Bakunin’s activities may have seemed to have been so much smoke. To-day
we know they were smouldering fires. The last has not been heard of his
world influence. Bakunin began his mission in 1841. He proceeded to
Berlin to continue the studies commenced at Moscow. He was now a Red
among Reds. Philosopher, Socialist, Rebel, he left Russia for the first
time. The following ear he removed from Berlin to Dresden in order to
gain a nearer acquaintance with Arnold Rouge, the foremost Hegelian of
the lft. Bakunin was anxious to proclaim his sympathy with Rouge, and
his definite rupture with conservatism. To this end, he published his
first revolutionary essay, entitled “The Reaction in Germany,” in
Rouge’s Jahrbucher for 1842, Nos. 247–51. He used the nom-de-plume of
Jules Elizard and had Rouge pretend it was a “Fragment by a Frenchman.”
From this time on, French prejudices were to mar his work, as formerly,
his German ones had confined his understanding. The hindrance of radical
idealism was fatal to the genius of the nineteenth century. It limited
Marx as well as Bakunin.
“Jules Elizard” entered an uncompromising plea for revolution and
Nihilism. The principle of revolution, he declared is the principle of
negation, the everlasting spirit of destruction and annihilation that is
the fathomless and ever-creating fountain of all life. It is the spirit
of intelligence, the ever young, the ever new born, that is not to be
looked for among the ruins of the past. The champions of this principle
are something more than the mere negative party, the uncompromising
enemies of the positive; for the latter exists only as the contrary of
the negative, whilst that which sustains and elevates the party of
revolt is the all-embracing principle of absolute freedom. The French
Revolution erected the Temple of Liberty, on which it wrote the
mysterious words: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” It was impossible
not to know and feel that these words meant the total annihilation of
the existing world of politics and society. It was impossible, also, not
to experience a thrill of pleasure at the bare suggestion of this
annihilation. That was because the “joy of destruction is also the joy
of creation.”
It was fitting that the year after the publication of “Jules Elizard”
essay, Bakunin should quit Dresden for Paris. He believed he had learned
all there was to be learned in Germany. In the French capital he
identified himself with all who were noted for their revolutionary
opinion. A certain community of thought attracted him to Proudhon. The
latter answer answered the question, “What is Property?” with Brissot’s
revolutionary reply: “Property is Theft.” Proudhon, who paid great
tribute to Jesus as a prophet, adopted the early Christian motto: “I
will rebuild.” Proudhon possessed an intense admiration for Hegel and
believed that the process of destruction was a necessary part of
construction. With Thomas Paine, he also believed that the social
constitution of society was opposed to the political constitution of the
state. This is the essence of Anarchist philosophy. Despised during the
years that parliamentary social democracy was fooling and betraying the
workers of Europe, it is now seen to embody the wisdom of the social
struggle.This idea subsequently led Proudhon to develop his
“Revolutionary Idea” in which he foresees the liquidation of political
or military society-he identifies the two-in industrial or useful
society. Proudhons anarchist theory that reaction is the forerunner of
revolution is seen to-day to be historically correct as opposed to the
parliamentary theory of gradualism, which has collapsed. On all these
points Bakunin finds himself at one with Proudhon. Marx describes
Proudhon as a Utopian and a Reformist. Bakunin described him as a social
revolutionist of the first water. There is truth in both conceptions. In
later years Bakunin came to share Marx’s view of Proudhon. In “Statism
and Anarchy,” issued somewhere in Russia, in 1873, Bakunin wrote:-
“Proudhon, in spite of all his efforts to get a foothold upon the firm
ground of reality, remained an idealist and a metaphysician. His
starting point is the abstract side of law; it is from this that he
starts in order to arrive at economic facts, while Marx, on the
contrary, has enunciated and proved the truth, demonstrated by the whole
of the ancient and modern history of human societies, of people and of
states, that economic facts preceded and precede the facts of political
and civil law. The discovery and demonstration of this truth is one of
the greatest merits of M. Marx.”
Two years before, writing at the time of the disaster to the Commune and
at the beginning of the parliamentary debacle, Bakunin, in his Political
Theology of Mazzini and the International, published at Neuchatel, gives
Marx the credit of having discovered the materialistic conception of
history. Bakunin defines this conception as follows:-
“All the religions, and all the systems of morals that govern a given
society are always the ideal expression of its real, material condition,
that is, especially of its economic organisation, but also of its
political organisation, the latter, indeed, being never anything but the
juridical and violent consecration of the former.”
In this same year of tragedy, Bakunin records his first impressions of
Marx when he met him in Paris:-
“Marx was much more advanced that I was as he remains to-day, not more
advanced but incomparably more learned than I am. I knew then nothing of
political economy. I had not yet rid myself of metaphysical
abstractions, and my Socialism was only instinctive. He, though younger
than I, was already an Atheist, an instructed materialist, a
well-considered Socialist. It was just at this time (1847) that he
elaborated the first foundations of present system. We saw each other
fairly often, for I respected him much for his learning and his
passionate and serious devotion-always mixed, however, with personal
vanity-to the cause of the proletariat. I sought eagerly his
conversation, which was always instructive and clever, when it was not
inspired by a paltry hate, which, alas! happened only too often. But
there was never any frank intimacy between us. Our temperaments would
not suffer it. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I
called him a vain man, perfidious, and crafty; and I, also, was right.”
This takes us back to the forties and Bakunin’s adventures in France. A
few months after their meeting, Proudhon was obliged to leave Paris for
Lyons. Bakunin was induced by his Polish to leave Paris for Lyons.
Bakunin was induced by his Polish friends to go to Switzerland. He was
involved in the trial of the Swiss Socialists and deprived of his rank
as a Russian officer and his rights of nobility. He whittled away five
years in the Swiss villages. Proceeding to Paris, he threw himself
wholeheartedly into the struggle for freedom. His activity brought him
into contact with Marx. His impression of Marx has been recorded.
November 29^(th), 1847, was the anniversary of the insurrection of
Warsaw. On this date Paris celebrated Bakunin’s speech to the Poles. For
the first time a Russian offered the hand of brotherhood to the rebel
nationalists of this much persecuted people, and renounced publicly the
government of St. Petersburg. His oration promised that the future
Russian Revolution would make amends for the grievous injustice suffered
by the Polish nation under the Czar. It would remove all differences
between the two leading Slav families and unite them into a federative
Social Republic. It must not be concluded that Bakunin was anticipating
the post-war Poland of the counter revolutionary financiers. He was not
anticipating even Stalinist Soviet Russia, where revolutionists are
exiled and imprisoned for their adherence to the permanent revolution
and their opposition to the counter-revolutionary fallacy that an
agrarian country can build a socialist state surrounded by capitalist
nations. He visioned a Soviet Poland and a Soviet Russia, two allied
proletarian lands in which all power would be vested in the direct hands
of the producers themselves. Bakunin wanted a real social reorganisation
of society. His new Russia was merely an introduction to a new Europe
and a new world. Its full import was not appreciated at the time. ALl
that the Czar’s government realised was that it had made a sensation and
was thoroughly seditious. It placed a reward of 10,000 roubles on the
venturesome orator’s head, and demanded his expulsion from Paris. His
every move was watched by Russian police agents. The idea was to kidnap
him once the French government had sacrificed his political immunity to
the Czar’s request.
Guizot has some reputation in literature for radicalism. As a statesman,
he was a reactionary of the worst description and always ready to play
lackey to the Czar. A few years before had been too polite to refuse the
Russian government’s request for Marx’s expulsion. The latter was
actually expelled from Paris not even to please the Kaiser but to
placate the Czar. Bakunin was expelled, and like Marx, went to Brussels.
He had scarcely reached here when Paris rose in revolt and expelled
Guizot and Louis Phillippe from France. The new provisional government
now invited the “brave and loyal Marx” to return. It extended a similar
invitation to Bakunin and described France as being “the country whence
tyranny had banished” them and where “all fighting in the sacred cause
of the fraternity of the peoples” were welcome. Bakunin returned to
Paris and became active in the new political life of that city.
Marx and Bakunin were an annoyance to the Lamartine and Marast
government. They took the republican ideal seriously and realised the
material revolution must proceed its realisation. The government did not
expel Bakunin but his departure was a relief to it. He went to the
Slavo-Polish Congress at Breslau, and afterwards attended the Prague
Congress of June 1^(st), 1848. Here his famous Slavonic programme was
written. To avoid arrest, he travelled on the passport of an English
merchant, and cut off his long hair and beard. Up till the time that
Windisgraetz dispersed this congress with Austrian cannon, Bakunin
worked with the Slavonians. These events inspired Marx’s famous chapters
on “Revolution and Counter-Revolution.” Credit for this work is now
given to Engels. It is admitted, however, that if Marx did not write it,
he inspired it. Engels seems to have been, on occasion, the most
efficient secretary and if necessary, the complete literary ghost.
Treating of this political storm period, Marx sings the praises of the
generous bravery and the noble far-sightedness of the spontaneous revolt
of the Viennese populace in the cause of Hungarian freedom. He contrasts
their action against the “cautious circumspection” of Hungarian
statesmanship. He dismisses Parliamentarians as poor, weak-minded men so
little accustomed to anything like success during their generally very
obscure lives that they actually believed their parliamentary amendments
more important than external events. Marx proves that at this crisis
Parliament did not control the army nor even the executive authority. He
quotes with approval Radetzky’s sneer at the imbecile responsible
ministers at Vienna, that they were not Austria, but that he and his
army were. Marx adds: “The army was a decisive power in the State, and
the army belonged, not to the middle classes, but to themselves.” It
“had only to be kept in pretty constant conflicts with the people and
the decisive moment once at hand, it could with one great blow, crush
the revolutionists, and set aside the presumptions of the middle class
parliamentarians.”
Although Marx flirted with the universal suffrage in Britain, he neither
answered nor recalled his trenchant contrast of the superiority of a
confident army to a babbling parliament. His words sound the call of
battle and revoltuionary anti-parliamentarism. He identifies his work
with the ideal and endeavour of Bakunin.
The year 1848 was an era in the history of EUropean Socialism. It will
probably prove to be a turning point in the history of human progress.
Not only did it witness the so-called French Revolution., with its
marvellous February days, but it found the whole of Europe in a ferment.
Radicalism now became Socialism. The political revolution now gave place
to the social revolution. Although agitators and advanced thinkers
quibbled as to whether the Social Revolution was a political revolution
or not, and although their theories of action proved a chaos of
blundering, they agreed definitely on the necessity for a social
revolution as distinct from a mere political revolution. Socialism now
turned its back on its Utopian pioneers and aspired to be scientific. It
regarded itself as inevitable. It made its appearance in Russia. Twenty
years after Herzen had been introduced by the scared police authorities
of Russia to Hegel at Moscow, the theories of St. Simon, relieved of
their Utopian trimming appreance s became the gospel of the Russian
radicals. In its origin, Russian Socialism was closely connected with
the Anarchism of Proudhon. It will be found that the Slav connection of
the proletarian revolution never lost completely Proudhon’s influence.
Since the war, the world socialist movement has plunged into chaos.
Marxism is making its last authoritarian stand through
the medium of the utterly bankrupt Stalinist International. True in its
wonderful analysis of history, Marxism has floundered terribly in its
political play-acting. Its words are the words of the working-class
struggle but its political practice belongs to the bureaucracy of the
middle-class. Out of this chaos, the workers are turning to the policy
outlined by Proudhon. We are returning to the Russian Socialism of 1848.
The Paris upheaval of 1848 was the last attempt of the French workers to
entrust completely their cause to the care of middle-class politicians.
Since then the workers of the world have been deceived completely and
repeatedly by politicians. These worthies have usually lived and died in
comfort. Their origins were plebeian enough and they entered politics as
proletarian champions. The function of their career has been to repeat
the lesson of 1848; the workers have nothing in common with politicians.
In a word, political radicalism cannot be trusted by the masses. Is not
that the lesson of MaxDonalds career? Of Snowden’s? Of Ebert’s? Of
Millerand’s? And Briand’s? It was the starting point of Russian
Socialism. The diplomatic record of the present Soviet bureaucracy will
establish its truth. Proudhon’s anarchy was a consistent influence from
his excellent object lesson.
He argued that the 1848 movement failed because it was a political
revolution and not a social one. He did not blame the middle class
politicians. He explained them and satirised them. He asserted that
every political revolution must end in debacle because it changes
nothing except the holder of power; and power, whether exorcised by a
democrat or a republican, must be conservative and oppressive. Power
cannot challenge but must accept the prevailing economic order. Power is
not a radical but a panderer. It lacks initiative, the essential feature
of social change. The economic order could be abolished only when power
was destroyed and the adjustments of economic interests relegated to the
direct mutual consent of the producers themselves individually assembled
in their various Communes. Revolution would abolish the existing
economic order naturally and spontaneously. Such revolution did not need
violence for its achievement; for it would be brought about first in
human minds. Said Proudhon: “The means that were taken from society by
an economic arrangement will be given back to society by dint of another
economic arrangement.”
There is a Utopian flavour about this statement yet it helped to
differentiate the economic interests of the working class from the
political interests of the middle class. It did draw a definite line of
demarcation between the political struggle for power and the social
overthrow of usury. Herzen and Bakunin embraced this distinction with
enthusiasm. In close touch with Proudhon they applauded his conclusions
and enlarged its application. For a time after his association with
Bakunin, Herzen returned to the service of the Russian State. His work
was purely technical and he spent his spare time in writing novels,
romances, and studies of manners. The meanness of his occupation, both
official and spare time, outraged his self-respect. He exploded and once
more took up the struggle against Czarism. Again his pen denounced
despotism. He wrote boldly and bitterly and encountered persecution as a
matter of course. He was compelled to abandon his office as a barrister
and go into exile. In 1848, Herzen left Russia never to return. In exile
he proclaimed his gospel of universal negation. His goal was the social
republic.
Herzen explained why he went beyond Proudhon:
“A thinking Russian is the most independent being in world. What, indeed
could stop him? Consideration for the past? But what is the starting
point of modern Russian history other than the entire negation of
nationalism and tradition?...On the other hand the past of the western
nations may well serve us a lesson — but that is all; we do not think
ourselves to be executives of their historic will. We share in your
hatred, but we do not understand your attachments to the legacies of
your ancestors. You are constrained by scruples, held back by laternal
considerations. We have none...We are independent, because we start a
new life... because we do not possess anything — nothing to be loves.
All our recollections are full of rancour and bitterness...We wear too
many fetters already to be willing to put on new chains... What matter
for us, disinherited juniors that are, your inherited duties? Can we, in
conscience, be satisfied with your worn-out morality, which is
non-Christian and non-human, and is evoked only in the rhetorical
exercises and judicial sentences? What respect can we cherish for your
Roman-Gothic law: that huge building, lacking light and fresh air, a
building repaired in the Middle Ages and painted over by a manumitted
bourgeoisie?... Do not accuse us of immorality on the ground that we do
not respect what is respected by you. Maybe we ask too much — and we
shall not get anything... Maybe so, but still we do not despair of
attaining what we are striving for.”
This is the statement of Nihilism. It is the Russian application of St.
Simon and Feuerbach. The new order is to be brought into existence by
burying existing society under its own ruins. Once abolished, the old
society can never reconstitute itself. Another society must emerge
inevitably, because man must live in society whatever states and
political orders he destroyed. The new society will be a better and
truer society without doubt. Certainly, it would be no likeness to
bourgeois republicanism, no matter what means were employed to
substitute such a republic era of feudalism. Herzen could not see beyond
the first principles of the new society. He did not know what was to
develop under it, not yet what was to follow it. He knew it could not be
the end. The old society was a regime of death. The new must be the
beginning of life. Change must follow even that change. Without
persecuting the future with his doubts Herzen saluted the coming
revolution with the words: “Death to the old world! Long live chaos and
destruction! Long live death! Place for the future! Out of the chaos,
Socialism was to be born.
Herzen’s Socialism embodied the current European doctrines of his time.
He grafted these on to his early Moscow studies. The result was that he
confused nationalist ideals with radical universal ones. Down to the
storm period of 1848, these two Russian movements were inspired with the
same idea: the glorious destiny of the people. They separated and became
irreconcilably opposed because the one movement conceived of the
greatness of Russia and the other desired the greatness of the people
themselves within and without Russia. This conflict finds an echo in the
struggle that exists to-day between Trotskyism and Stalinism. The
permanent revolution is European and cosmic. Socialism in one country is
nationalistic and reactionary. Herzen states the difference very well in
his “Memoirs.”
“We and the Slavophils represented a kind of two faced Janus; only they
looked backward and we look forward. At heart we were one; and our heart
throbbed equally for our minor brother, the peasant — with whom our
mother-country was pregnant. But what for them was the recollection of
the past was taken by us as the prophecy of the future.”
Herzen is here explaining that he and his Slavophils were agreed that
the foundations of the Russian peoples’ emancipation was the Mir or
rural Commune. The Slavophils considered the Commune the historic
national expression of Christian living — the economic organisation of
love and humility. Herzen had not time for Christianity and theology. He
wanted man, not god. To him, the Russian Commune was prophetic. It
symbolised in germ the socialist society of the future. His Slavophile
prejudices have been justified in two directions. The industrial
expression of the Mir is the Soviet or Council. Without question, the
Council is the unit of organisation and of franchise in industrial
society as opposed to the territorial constituency of useless political
or consuming society. Consumption has no right to be enfranchised.
Production must be enfranchised if society is not to degenerate into
chaos. Believing this, Herzen maintained that European civilisation must
die a natural death of exhaustion.This world revolution would begin in
Moscow and not in Paris or Berlin or even London. Herzen loved to
compare the arrogant civilisation of the eternal city and the triumph of
Christianity with the arrogant civilisation of Western Europe and the
dawn of Socialism. He saw Russia playing the part of Saviour. He wanted
a New Russia even as we want a New Britain.
Herzen developed his theories in a series of articles written during the
first two years after he left Russia. He had approached them at the
beginning of his exile in his famous work, published in Rome, “Before
the Storm.” The storm of 1848 left power in the hands of the heated
bourgoisie whose politicians Herzen call “the prize beasts.” He develops
his theory with greater force in “After the Storm.”
“We are not called upon to gather the fruits of the past, but to be its
torturers and persecutors. We must Judge it, and learn to recognise it
under every disguise, and immolate it for the sake of the future.”
Herzen thus challenged the theory now known as the inevitability of
gradualism. He denied the constitutional social democratic idea that the
proletariat should conquer political power under Capitalism. Radically
at one with Marx in his analysis of capitalism and his theory of the
class struggle. He was opposed to both Marx and Engels wherever they
diluted the revolutionary theory with a suggestion of parliamentary
programmes. Herzen denied that the possible triumph of social democratic
politicians was a triumph of socialism. He denied that Jesus had
conquered Caesar when Constantine established the Church of the Capitol.
He saw throughout the ages the original plan of tyranny being developed
and improved in detail, re-named, and re-decorated from time to time,
but never abandoned nor destroyed so long as leaders pursued personal
power and the masses remained in subjection. The Reformation, headed by
Luther, did not emancipate the people. It averted revolution and saved
clericalism. Did not Luther compromise his opposition to the
superstition of the physical real presence in disgust at the peasants’
rebellion and to express his opposition to the communism of the
Annabaptists? The French Revolution, Herzen argued, finally did not
destroy authority. It conserved authority, but the coming social
revolution would uproot and destroy. It would put an end to the ages of
cant. It would not widen the power of States but destroy their entire
political structure.
As one follows Herzen in the development of this theory, one may not
endorse all the details of his approach. The present writer, for
example, considers that the French Revolution did not destroy authority,
but that it was arrested in its expression. There can be no doubt,
however, that, fundamentally, the message of Herzen is the message of
working-class emancipation. It defines the chaos and points the way out.
It is a revolutionary negation of parliamentarism. Would that the
workers of Europe had hearkened to it. It spells the establishment of
Soviet responsibility. In the last analysis, that is the social
revolution and the sole foundation of proletarian freedom.
Bakunin was compelled to quit Prague. He fled to Germany and was
received with open arms by the Radical element. Everywhere pursued and
expelled whenever the police discovered his place of concealment, he
wandered from town to town till the end of April, 1849. In this fashion
he lived first at Berlin, then at Dessau, Cothen, and various towns in
Saxony. At last, under an assumed name, he found employment at the
university of Leipsig. He organised a revolutionary circle of Bohemian
students, and formed a revolutionary alliance of Slavonian democrats,
Hungarian rebels and German revolutionists.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner, the great composer, lived in Paris from 1839 to
1842. He returned to Dresden that year. In Paris, he made the
acquaintance of Bakunin. The friendship was renewed when Bakunin came to
Saxony. When Bakunin took command at the defence of Dresden, Wagner was
his close associate. When Bakunin was arrested in 1849 the great
composer fled from Germany. He remained in exile in Zurich, in
Switzerland, till 1862. That was the very year that Bakunin returned to
his life and propaganda after weary years of imprisonment and exile
under the Czar. Wagner has given us a picture of Bakunin in exile and
action during the Saxony period. He writes: —
“With Bakunin everything was colossal, and of a primitive negative
power. He liked to discuss; and lying on the not too comfortable sofa of
his friend, Rockel, in whose house he was hiding, he was pleased always
to talk with others over various revolutionary problems. In those
discussions, Bakunin was usually the victor. It was impossible to refute
his logical arguments and radical conclusions. From every word he
uttered one could feel the depth of his innermost convictions...
“His many startling remarks naturally made an extraordinary impression
on me. On the other hand, I saw that this all-destroyer was the
love-worthiest, tender-hearted man one could possibly imagine. Noticing
once that my eyes could not endue the bright light of the lamp, he
shaded for me with his broad hand for about an hour, although I begged
him not to trouble. All the while, he calmly developed his most
dangerous theories.
“He knew my most secret troubles, about the ever present danger to my
ideal desires for art. Nothing was incomprehensible to him; yet he did
not wish me to affront him with my art projects. I wanted to explain to
him, my nibelung work, but he refused to listen... As regards the music,
he always advised me to repeat the same text in various melodies:
Struggle and Destruction. The tenor was to urge the need from strife to
chaos. The soprano was to do so, and the baritone also.
“I remember, even yet, with pleasure, that I once persuaded him to
listen to the first act of my ‘Flying Dutchman.’ He listened most
attentively to the music and when I stopped for a moment, exclaimed
‘that is wonderfully beautiful.’ He loved music and wanted to hear more
and more.
“Beethoven’s ‘Ninth Symphony,’ was played at a general repetition before
a concert of the Saxon Court-Orchestra. When the music was finished,
Bakunin came running over and declared: ‘If music should perish in the
coming world upheaval, we must risk our lives to save the ‘Ninth
Symphony.’
“More than once Bakunin remained with us to supper. On one of these
occasions he exclaimed to my wife: ‘A real man must not think beyond the
satisfaction of his first needs. The only true worthy passion for man is
love.’
“Bakunin longed after the highest ideals of humanity. His nature
reflected a strangeness to all the conventionalities of civilisation.
That is why the impression of my association with him is so mixed. I was
repelled by an instinctive fear of him; yet he drew me like a magnet.”
Wagner tells many stories of Bakunin’s activities in exile. In his
hiding corner, he received men from all sections of the revolutionary
movement. The Slavonian revolutionists were his favourites. For the
French, as individuals, he had no particular sympathy in spite of his
eulogy of the French spirit and his endorsement of Proudhon’s socialism.
Of the Germans he never spoke. He despised them beyond words. He was not
interested in democracy or the republic because he deemed them the
political shadows of class-society. He wanted economic democracy; a
producers’ and not a joint stock republic. He hated every scheme for the
reconstruction of the social order because it meant the prolonging of
slavery. He saw that, one day, the very pretence of reformism would have
to break down. His sole aim was the complete overthrow of the existing
regime, and the evolution was a completely new social order.
Once a Pole, who was afraid of such ideas, remarked that some State
organisation was necessary, in order that the individual might be
assured of the full results of his labour. Bakunin replied: “You mean
that you would fence in your piece of land to afford a living for the
police. Is that getting the full results of our labours? Organisations
for the new social order will rise in any case. Our task is to destroy
parasitism.”
This was Bakunin’s actual attitude towards life. It summarises all his
thought and work. He hated the petty bourgeoisie, the men and women of
the suburbs, with their back-gardens and train time tables. With them,
everything was a narrow mean routine. Bakunin knew that these small
people were the great drawback to the revolutionary change. He hated
their smug politeness and called them Philistines. He found their true
embodiment in the Protestant clergymen and declared that it was
impossible to make a man of this contemptible creature. He wrote: “Of
the tyrants we need have no fear; the real menace consists of the
Philistines. Kings would often abdicate but for the lackeys who prey
through them.”
Bakunin acquired a glory at the Dresden uprising which his enemies have
not denied. From the 6^(th) to the 9^(th) May he was the very life and
soul of its defence against the Prussian he had found few there whom he
could count on in a rebel emergency. At first he was an indifferent
spectator of the Dresden uprising. On the third day he was fighting on
the barricades. The Provisional Government consisted of three members.
Two of these lost their heads completely when they learned that the
Prussian troops were advancing. The third member was the courageous and
energetic Hybner. He appeared in the most dangerous places to encourage
the fighters. The Dresden movement had made a comic impression on
Bakunin by its folly. But the noble endurance and example of Hybner
resolved him to fight by the latter’s side. Bakunin thereupon took
command of the principal barricade and repulsed one of the worst
attacks. The Prussians were forced to retreat. Bakunin became the hero
of the uprising. He was active day and night, and hardly ever closed his
eyes. He showed less fatigue than any of the other defenders. For
strategical purposes he ordered the “lovely tress” along the promenade
to be cut down. The good citizens of Dresden protested. Bakunin
remarked: “The tears of the Philistines make no wine for the gods.” When
Bakunin saw that it was impossible to defend Dresden any longer, he
suggested that the revolutionaries should retreat to the hills, and
carry the battle over to the provinces. The uprising would assume then
the character of a real national movement.
Through the negotiation of the Chemnitz town guard, the Provisional
Government settled there. On the way to Chemnitz, they stopped for a
while in Freiburg, Hybner’s home. Hybner, who very much admired
Bakunin’s courage, at the same time entertained a certain fear of his
ideas. He asked Bakunin if it would not be more practical to dissolve
the small revolutionary army, instead of continuing the battle, which
had no more prospects of victory. Bakunin was against it. “If the people
have been brought so far,” he said, “that they revolt, we must go with
them to the end. If we meet with death, honour at least is saved. If
this is not the case, then no person will, in future, have any faith in
such undertakings.” The conversation ended with Bakuin’s suggestion
being accepted.
In Chemnitz, something happened that nobody expected. Hybner, Bakunin,
and Martin stopped in a hotel. As they were dead-tired, they soon went
to sleep. Through the night, the were arrested in the name of the Saxony
Government. The whole invitation to come Chemnitz was only a disgraceful
deception. From the date of this seizure, May 10^(th), 1849, Bakunin’s
long martyrdom commenced.
Bakunin’s proud and courageous demeanour did not desert him, although he
must have known that he was facing either death or else a long and
terrible imprisonment. Twenty-seven years afterwards, one of the
Prussian officers who had guarded the prisoner on the way through
Altenburg, still remembered the calmness and intrepidity with which the
tall man in fetters replied to a lieutenant who interpolated him, “that
in politics the issue alone can decide which is a great action and what
is a crime.”
From August, 1849, to May, 1850, Bakunin was kept a prisoner in the
fortress of Konistein. He was then tried and sentenced to death by the
Saxon tribunal. In pursuance of a resolution passed by the old Diet of
the Bund in 1836, he was delivered up to the Austrian Government and
sent (chained) to Prague instead of being executed.
The Austrian Government attempted in vain to extort from him the secrets
of the Slavonian movement. A year later, it sentenced him to death, but
immediately commuted the death sentence to one of perpetual
imprisonment. In the interval he had been removed from the fortress at
Gratz to that of Almutz, as the government was terrified by the report
of a design to liberate him. Here he passed six months chained to the
wall. After this, the Austrian government surrendered him to the
Russian. The Austrian chains were replaced by native irons of twice the
weight. This was in the autumn of 1851, when Bakunin was taken through
Warsaw and Vilna to St. Petersburg, to pass three wear years in the
fortress of Alexis. At Vilna, in spite of the threats of the Russian
Government, the Poles gathered in the streets to pay the last tribute of
silent respect to the heroic Russian orator of four years before. As
Bakunin drove past them in the sledge, they bowed their heads with an
affection never assumed in the presence of Emperors. Bakunin maintained
his fortitude during years of confinement in Russian dungeons, until the
torture of his imprisonment produced the tragedy of his confessions, and
showed that he was not unworthy of their devotion.
In Russia he was never tried; the Czar Nicholas I. considered him his
property, like all his other subjects, and simply sent him to the
fortress of Peter and Paul, at Petrograd, to moulder there to the end of
his life. There were no charges, no fellow conspirators; he was a
passive object in the hands of the Czar. The Czar, no doubt, felt proud
to have this rebel at his mercy; he felt curious also about the secrets
of the European revolution, which Bakunin, if anybody, was believed to
possess; and, with the contempt of men that an autocrat, before whom all
cringe, must feel, he may have expected to tame Bakunin, to win him
over, perhaps to make him one of his tools.
So his henchman, Count Orloff, was sent to tell Bakunin that the Czar
wished to receive a statement on his revolutionary doings, and that he
might talk to the Czar with the same confidence which a penitent would
exercise towards the priest in the confessional.
Bakunin demanded a month’s time for reflection, and then wrote a
statement which was given to the Czar in the summer of 1851. He
addressed himself in terms of crushing humility. The reign of Nicholas
has been described as a blank sheet in the history of Russian progress.
He made no pretence at reforms and glorified in reaction. The last ten
years of his reign saw the reduction of even ordinary newspapers to a
level of almost zero. Only six newspapers and nineteen monthlies were
permitted to be published throughout the whole of Russia. It was a
period of absolute sterility.
The reception of Bakunin’s petition by the Czar symbolised the attitude
of power towards genius. He had a god in chains and the cowardly
suppression of titanic energy merely served to tickle the vanity of this
Lilliputian braggart in uniform. He chuckled at the idea of forgiving
and releasing Bakunin, and then intensified the persecution. When
Nicholas II. was executed or assassinated by the Bolsheviks, it may have
been an unnecessary and unjustifiable murder in the violence of reaction
and struggle against the crimes Czarism; but when the Romanoff, Nicholas
I., was sowing he might have remembered that some day another Romanoff,
even a Nicholas, so as to point the moral, might reap. Those called to
authority should always remember that one sows a storm only to reap a
whirlwind.
Truth is more sacred than all the gods. Its utility is greater than the
strife of heroes. Knowing this to be a fact it is the author’s duty, in
this chapter, to put before his readers the saddest and most regrettable
discoveries of the Russian Revolution. These are the documents
containing Bakunin’s “avowal of sins,” found in the archives of the
Czar’s secret police. Four Czars, rejected the “secret of the
confessional” and did not use the document against the living Bakunin,
their open enemy, nor against his memory. It was left to the Soviet
regime to use them against his memory. One suspects that it was more
from a desire to damn his fame than from zeal for truth. It must be
remembered that the Soviet press, under the domination of Stalinism,
slandered Trotsky and recalled, with exaggeration and falsification, his
quarrels with Lenin. Stalin’s hired apologists endeavoured to write
Trotsky’s name out of the revolution and to write Stalin’s name in its
place. Clumsy forgery, true: but none the less, an established forgery
that all the world may see. Before Trotsky, Bakunin was the most
slandered revolutionist in the world, enjoying the especial hatred of
the Marxists.
In the history of Socialism, with the exception of Trotsky, there is no
historical personality which has been so much slandered by a handful of
would-be revolutionists and pseudo-Socialists. Just so was the hatred
and slander against Bakunin, the work of Marx, and hist doctrinaire
disciples, as the slander of Trotsky is the work of Stalin and his
disciples. Bakunin, the true incarnation of revolutionary spirit,
fearless fighter for the social and political emancipation of the
working class, was the direct antithesis to the Social Democratic and
petty bourgeoisie cowardice in the political life of the day. In the
midst of the revolutionary struggle of 1848, Marx published, in his New
Rhenish Gazette, articles accusing Bakunin of being a secret agent of
Czar Nicholas and the Panslavists. Marx and his friends were then forced
to stammer their apology. Whilst Bakunin, at Olmnitz and other Austrian
jails, suffered imprisonment, forged to the walls in chains, Herzen and
Mazzini forced Marx to take back his unworthy lies. But Marx was not the
man to forgive them this humiliation.
When Bakunin reappeared in the midst of his revolutionary friends, after
his escape from Siberia, Marx and his satellites recommenced their
slanderous attack. Marx especially merits the workers’ regard for his
great services to the revolutionary cause, rendered under conditions
often of appalling poverty. But this personal vanity and domination
detract seriously from his claim to our love as a man and a comrade. His
private spleen and hatred towards Bakunin, although occasionally
softened, is unforgiveable and a serious blemish on a great character.
On Bakunin’s return, he inspired anonymous denunciations in Social
Democratic Papers, which were under the editorship of W. Liebknecht, M.
Hess, and others. Again at the congress of the International at Basle,
1869, the slanderers lost the game, and were forced to compromise
themselves, and declare the entire baselessness of their charges. Marx
resolved to kill Bakunin and Herzen, morally, at one stroke. In his
position as secretary of a Russian section, and as a member of the
General Council of the International, Marx sent, on March 28^(th), 1870,
“a private and confidential circular to his German friends.” This bore,
at the bottom, the official seal of the International. The fact of it
being issued secretly was an offence against the rules and spirit of the
International. The slanders which it contains cover eight printed pages,
and had been conveyed to Marx. The organisers of these slanders, and
confidential correspondents of Marx, were two men who begged the Czar’s
pardon, received it, and loyally returned to Russia. Their names were
Utin and Trussow. In our day, Trotsky has been slandered by similar
types.
Amongst innumerable treacherous stupidities, the circular went on: —
“Soon after Herzen died, Bakunin, who, since the time he tried to
proclaim himself leader of the European labour movement, and disowned
his old friend and patron. Herzen, lost no time, soon after his death,
to sing his praise. Why? Herzen, in spite of his great personal wealth,
accepted 25,000 francs annually, for propaganda Through his flattering
voice. Bakunin attracted this money, and with is, the heritage of Herzen
— malgre so haine de l’heritage — pecuniarily and morally a beneficio
inventaril resumed.”
Never in the whole political and revolutionary movement was a worse
slander issued. Herzen, who issued at his own cost a complete
revolutionary library, and who was one of the most intellectually
brilliant and uncompromising destroyers of political and intellectual
reaction is slandered equally with Bakunin.
These slanders against Bakunin must be borne in mind when we recall that
his alleged confessions have been published by the school of ‘his
traditional enemies, who are jealous of their own reputation, and have
silenced all opposition by medieval methods. Yet the facts having been
given to the revolutionary and labour world, their import must be
considered.
The documents are summarised by L. Deitch, an old Russian revolutionist
and a disciple of Bakunin, in the columns off the Yiddish monthly, The
Future, of New York, for February, 1924. Deitch writes, that in the
spring of 1876, when he was living in Odessa, Anna
Rosenstein-Makerevitch returned to the comrades there from a visit to
Bakunin, whom they regarded as their rebel idol and guide. She reported
that Bakunin had not long to live. Her visit was undertaken in order to
consult him about a plan that rising among the peasants of the district
of Tchigirin by issuing a forged manifesto purporting to come from the
Czar. Bakunin replied that falsehood is sewn always with white thread,
and sooner or later the thread will show. This is a wise reply and does
Bakunin credit. Yet history proves that oft-times falsehood achieves its
purpose, unfortunately. Indeed it is safe to say that if truth triumphed
naturally and spontaneously, as it should do, there would be no history.
Politics and governments would cease to masquerade and society would
become a harmony. The remarkable thing about Bakunin’s utterance is that
he must have known that his confessions were lying in the archives of
the Russian third division. Time woul dpublish them; and no one was
working harder for the dawn of that time than Bakunin himself. The
future will place his confessions in the same category as that of
Galileo. History recalls that even Giordano Bruno sought to evade trial
and death. Had it been known, however, during Bakunin’s life, that he
had addressed himself to the Czars in the fashion that he did, not even
his great personality, nor yet his logical concentrated diction, would
have earned him that standing in the International Working-Class
Movement that he came to enjoy so deservedly. It must be recalled,
against the merit of Bakunin’s revolutionary activity and writing that
many of his colleagues suffered torture in the Czar’s prisons and never
wavered. The pioneer is never the perfect hero. As a thinker he is the
wordincarnate. As a messenger he is often a very frail man. His life is
usually a tragic and heroic stumbling between his two functions. He
seems to be a dual personality. His career ever reminds us that there
are no gods to order progress; only pioneers, very, very human beings,
to blaze the trail, as they stumble along. Their names pass into legend,
grow into a great tradition, and earn a brave respect. Then someone
discovers the essential humanity, some temporary weakening under
torture, and the hero is gone. All is destroyed. Even the mighty worth
that challenged persecution and rose so bravely for the benefit of
mankind from its yieldings to temptation is denied. Time, the great
healer, rights that also. Finally, posterity sees neither god nor the
weakling but the man as he was in the actual setting of his time and
circumstance. Remembering this let us consider Bakunin’s confessions
from prison and all that happened to them and him.
To Nicholas I. Bakunin wrote:
“In Eastern Europe, wherever we look, we see senility, weakness, lack of
faith, all are charlatanising. Learning has become the same as
powerlessness.”
Nicholas wrote in his own hand in the margin: “A wonderful truth.”
Certainly the statement was true. It depicts class society in all its
drab futility. As a truth the Czar could not be expected to appreciate
its force. He toyed with it as an empty platitude. Its sound pleased
him. It argued, apparently, against learning. He commended it because it
gave him a picture of his victim squirming. We must read it in
association with its contents. Bakunin describes himself as “a penitent”
and defines his revolutionary activities as “criminal Don Quixotic-like
nonsense.” He styles his Socialist plans “as having been, in the highest
sense, ludicrous, nonsensical, insolent, and criminal. Criminal against
you, my Emperor, my Czar. Criminal against my Fatherland. Criminal
against all spiritual, divine, and human laws.”
As has been remarked already, Bakunin was nothing if not thorough.
Whether he was promoting the revolution or abasing himself before the
Czar, he enjoyed expressing himself to the very limit of his mood. The
revolution was his earnest thought. The abasement must be considered a
pose, assumed for some tactical objective. It ranks with the
parliamentary oath of allegiance. The extremism of expression was
Bakunin himself.
The petition continues: —
“It is hard for me, Czar of mine, an erring, estranged, misled son, to
tell you he has had the insolence to think of the tendency and the
spirit of your rule. It is hard for me because I stand before you like a
condemned criminal. It is painful to my self-love. It is ringing in my
ears as if you, my Czar, said: ‘The boy babbles of things he does not
understand’.”
Bakunin repeats the phrase, that he is a criminal, over and over again.
The Czar adds a note: “A sword does not fall on a bowed neck. Let God
pardon him.” The pardon was to be quite metaphysical. For his own part,
the Czar intended to keep Bakunin jailed.
Nicholas was succeeded by Alexander II. Bakunin’s mother petitioned to
the new Emperor. The latter replied with affability: “As long as your
son lives, Madam, he will never be free.” To this Czar, Bakunin
addressed a petition, dated February 4^(th), 1857.
It was signed: “The mercy-imploring criminal, Michel Bakunin.” Deitch
quotes a few passages to show how the great revolutionist degraded
himself before the Czar.
“My Lord King, by what name shall I call my past life? I have squandered
my life in fantastic and fruitless strivings and it has ended in crime.
A false beginning, a false situation, and a sinful egotism have brought
me to criminal errors. I have done noting in my life except to commit
crimes. I have dared to raise my powerless arm against my great
Fatherland. I have renounced and cursed my errors and faults. If I could
rectify my past by an act, I would ask mercy and the opportunity to do
this. I should be glad to wipe out with blood my crimes against you, my
Czar. To you, my Czar, I am not ashamed to confess my weakness. Openly,
I confess that the thought of dying in loneliness, in the dark prison
cell, terrifies me more than death itself, and from the depths of my
heart and soul I pray your Majesty to be released, if it is only
possible, from this last punishment, the heaviest that can be. No matter
what sentence may await me, I surrender to it in advance and accept it
as just. And I permit myself to hope that this last time I may be
allowed to express the feeling of profound gratitude to your
unforgettable father, and to Your Majesty, for all the benefits that you
have shown me.”
There are other documents of a similar character addressed to high
officials.
In 1854, at the beginning of the Crimean War, Bakunin was transferred to
the casemates of the dreaded fortress of Schlusselburg, which actually
lie beneath the level of the Neva. When Alexander II. ascended the
throne in August, 1856, he half-pardoned many political refugees and
conspirators. With grim satire he included the surviving Decembrists of
1825. A royal pardon after thirty years of torture! Bakunin was not
amongst the pardoned.
In 1857, Bakunin was released from prison and removed to Western Siberia
as a penal colonist. Three years later Bakunin asked to return to
Russia. The emperor refused this request as he saw in him “no signs of
remorse.” After eight years imprisonment and four years in exile, he had
to look forward still to a series of dreary years spent in Siberia. Two
of these had gone when, in 1859, the Russian Government annexed the
territory of the Amur. Bakunin was given permission to settle here and
to move about as he pleased. This was not enough. A new flame had been
kindled throughout Russia. Garibaldi had unfurled the Italian flag of
seeming freedom. Bakunin, at forty-seven years of age and with his pulse
full of vigour, could not remain tame and distant spectator of these
revolutionary events. His confessions were forgotten. The titan was
himself again. He determined to escape. His excursions were extended
gradually as far as Novo-Nikolaievsk. Here at last, he secretly boarded
an American clipper and reached Japan. He was the first political
refugee to seek shelter in the land of the cherry blossom. From there he
proceeded to the Devil’s Kitchen, San Fransisco. He crossed the Isthmus
of Panama and reached New York. On the 26^(th) December, 1861, he landed
at Liverpool. The next day he was with his comrades in London. They knew
nothing about the amazing documents Bakunin had left behind him in the
Russian archives. Sixty years were to elapse before they were to come to
light. In the interval, his revolutionary influence was to win the
Russian youth to the cause of social revolution by the simplicity,
clearness and consistency of his teachings. Immediately, the organised
workers of London were inspired by his wonderful record of martyrdom.
They regarded both him and his doctrine with respectful awe. Behind his
phrases they beheld the figure of a legendary being who had given up the
safety of his home and thrown himself into the fight for working-class
freedom. They did not know all the truth. It was as well because they
would not have appreciated its exact significance. They would have made
no allowance for the agony that reduced Bakunin’s spirits to the state
of humble petition. They would have forgotten that every martyr has
wished that the cup might pass from his lips. They would have attached
undue importance to promises and abasements made under duress. Bakunin
would have been unable to have given to the world his later magnificent
Anarchist manifestos. As it was, they rejoiced. Their rejoicing more
nearly expressed what the truth merited than their silence would have
done.
“Bakunin is in London! Buried in dungeons, lost in Siberia, he reappears
in the midst of us full of life and energy! He returns more hopeful than
ever, with redoubled love for freedom’s holy cause. He is invigorated by
the sharp but healthy air of Siberia. With his resurrection, images and
shadows rise from the dead! Ghosts walk abroad! Visions of 1848
reappear! That revolutionary epoch belongs no longer to the past! It has
changed its place in the order of time. The revolution must be
completed.”
Such were the greetings with which all lovers of freedom and members of
the revolutionary working-class committees throughout Britain welcomed
the approach of the year, 1862.
To justify these expectations, Bakunin settled down to the part
editorship of Herzen’s Kolokol or Bell. Never did revolutionists produce
greater or more valuable writings than Bakunin did during the ten years
that followed. Mentally and physically, he attained his prime.
“The slightest concession, the smallest grace and compassion will bring
us back to the past again, and leave our fetters untouched. Of two
things we must choose one. Either we must justify ourselves and go on,
or we must falter and beg for mercy when we have arrived half-way.”
In these terms, written in a mood of uncompromising Nihilism, Herzen
condemned his later career. The condemnation applies to the world
socialist movement. It is safe to say that the careerist labour leaders
of European politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
flourished in retreat. The organisation of the Labour Movement has been
a long story of calculated anti-socialist conspiracy and intrigue.
Should a future generation ever pause to tell the story it will be found
that the workers never organised from the time of the Tolpuddle Martyrs
to the triumph of Fascism and the outlawry of Marxism in Germany. They
were organised steadily towards the arrestment and finally, the
destruction of their power of resistance. Herzen’s career symbolised
this organised surrender to capitalism. Only, he retreated reluctantly.
Unlike the labour politician he succumbed without enthusiasm and had the
decency to acknowledge disaster. He did retreat. As he retreated,
Bakunin advanced.
In 1848, it did not seem possible that the world would have to wait long
for the inevitable conflageration. Although we must be nearer the
revolution than our forebears of that time, the fact that they expected
it should check our own absolute certitude of its realisation in the
immediate future. Belief that Caesarism must collapse misled the
apostles and the first Christians. Karl Marx expected John Most to see
it. There have been tremendous changes in the world since death of Most.
The revolution, however, is still on its way. It will arrive, but no one
can say when. As Jesus so wisely remarked, it is due to come like a
thief in the night. The delay saddened Herzen. The downfall of all
existing institutions had seemed imminent. Socialism was the gospel of
youth, the hope of humanity, the goal to be attained. The youth of the
world of time revelled in the thought that the spring-time was at hand.
With joy and vigour he prophesied:--
“When the spring comes, a young and fresh life will show itself over the
whitened sepulchres of the feeble generations which will have
disappeared in the explosion. For the age of senile barbarity, there
will be substituted a juvenile barbarity, full of disconnected forces. A
savage and fresh vigour will invade the young breasts of new peoples.
Then will commence a new cycle of events and a new volume of universal
history. The future belongs to Socialist ideas.”
The 1848 upheaval failed. The crushing of the French Labour Movement
angered and disheartened Herzen. Sorrow at the general check received by
the revolution throughout Europe disturbed his outlook. He repented, as
an illusion, his temporary affection for Western culture. He returned to
Russia in thought but not in body. He felt weary and aged. “We were
young two years ago; to-day we are old,” he wrote in 1850. He poured out
his sense of hopelessness and despair in his work, “From The Other
Shore.”
He could not give up his faith in revolution. The West had failed--but
there was Russia. Why should not Russia become a Socialist Republic
without passing through capitalism? Why should not Russia emancipate the
world? Herzen saw no reason and so, in 1851, he penned the prophetic
words: “The man of the future in Russia is the Moujik, just as in France
he is the artisan.” Herzen foresaw the workers’ and peasants’ republic.
He continued in this faith down to the renewal of his association with
Bakunin in London. He developed his ideas in “The Old World and Russia.”
The coming revolution, starting from Russia, would destroy the basis of
all the States--the Roman, Christian, and feudal institutions, the
parliamentary, monarchial, and republican centres. All would perish but
the people of Europe would live. Faith in Russia renewed Herzen’s
optimism. He opposed himself against reformism anew in the following
words:--
“We can do more plastering and repairing. It has become impossible to
move in the ancient forms without breaking them. Our revolutionary idea
is incompatible entirely with the existing state of things.”
“A constitution is only a treaty between master and slave.” This
declaration was made by Herzen also. It at once became the motto of the
minority of the Russian extremists. Herzen’s desire now became the
speeding up of the Russian Revolution. Disheartened by failure he turned
opportunist. Intrigue replaced insurrection and finally he repudiated
revolutionary measures for liberalism. He identified himself with the
constitutionalists and left his colleague Bakunin to spread the flame of
universal destruction. He declared that Bakunin mistook the passion for
destruction for the passion for creation. For himself, he no longer
wished to march ahead of the bulk of mankind. He would not remain behind
but would keep in step with the needs of constitutional progress.
There was nothing wrong with Herzen’s revolutionary programme. It was
his impatience that drove him to reaction. The fire did not blaze
quickly enough and so he denounced the dampness of the wood and declared
that the burning must end in smoke. The vapour was Herzen’s impatience
turned to pessimism and not his work nor yet his ideal.
Herzen retreated from Nihilism to the reform of Russian officialdom. He
urged this in the Kolokol. Bakunin opposed him. He identified the
Kolokol more and more with the applause of the negative principle and
the denunciation of all positive institutions. This dual policy
continued down to 1865. The Kolokol was transferred then from London to
Geneva. In this cemetery of many hopes and many peace conferences, the
paper died.
Kropotkin has asserted that we must measure Bakunin’s influence not by
his literary legacy, which was small contrasted against that of Marx,
but by the thought and action he inspired in his immediate disciples.
The influence has descended through them to our time. It is legendary
and oral rather than written and direct. It is purely spiritual but none
the less real. Blanqui used to assert that one should never measure the
influence of events by their seeming direct results. These were always
unreal and unimportant. The accurate measurement was to judge the
indirect consequences. This is how Bakunin must be judged. From his life
and work has flown a steady stream of revolutionary thought, passion,
and work throughout the world.It has not merely contributed towards the
triumph of the Russian Revolution but it will pass on to destroy utterly
the present Stalinist counter-revolution and the menacing Fascism now
triumphant in Europe. His three books and his many pamphlets all
originated in the same way. They were written to answer questions of the
day. They were addressed as letters to friends, but reached the length
of pamphlets owing to their author’s discursive style of writing.
In Paris, in 1847, and in Germany, in 1848, his influence on all men of
thought was tremendous. He exerted a great power over Wagner, who was
his personal friend; George Sand, Ogaroff, and the comrades who composed
the socialist circles, the Young Germany, Italy and Sweden movements.
All were infected by his revolutionary spirit.
Bakunin’s real literary career began after his break with Herzen. To
this period belongs the essays “The Paris Commune and the State Idea,”
“The Historical Development of the International Workers’ Association,”
God and the State,” “The Knouto-German Empire,” “Report of a Frenchman
on the Present Crisis,” “The Political Theology of Mazzini and the
International,” and “The Bears of Berne.”
Bakunin’s speeches at the Congress of the Peace and Liberty League were
so many challenges to the radicals of Europe. They declared that the
Radicalism of 1848 had had its day, that the new era, the epoch of
Socialism and Labour, had dawned. The question of economic independence
had raised its head and would become the dominating factor in European
history. This idea inspires his pamphlet to Mazzini. Here he announces
the end of the conspiracy for the purpose of waging wars of national
independence.
In “The Bears of Berne” he says good-bye to the Phillistine Swiss
democratism. His “Letters to a Frenchman” were a litany to Gambetta’s
Radicalism. They anticipated and proclaimed the epoch of the Paris
Commune.
His “Knouto-German Empire and the Social Revolution” was the prophetic
vision of an old revolutionist. Bakunin foresaw Fascism. He prophesied
that, resulting from the triumph of Bismarck’s military state, a fifty
years’ reaction would descend on Europe. Bakunin declares that the rise
of German State Socialism, to which Bismarck stood sponsor, was the
prelude to this counter-revolution. This summary shows that in spite of
their fighting tendency, attributed to the fact that they were written
on the spur of the moment, Bakunin’s writings are replete with profound
political thought and a clear philosophic conception of history.
Inspired by Proudhon’s revolutionary idea, they trace more accurately
than Marx’s writings, the political developments of the class struggle
to out time.
Bakunin’s works include no ready-made recipe for a political cook-shop.
He has no creed to order. Those who expect to find an answer to all
their questions in his books, without having to use their own
thinking-caps will get no satisfaction. The writer defines and expressed
life as one would do in conversation. He invites you to reflect for
yourself. His brilliant generalisations awaken your intellect. His ideas
pour forth unarranged, in a spontaneous flow. It may be said that his
works have done more for the revolutionary education of the proletariat
than all the heavy scholastic treatises of the doctrinaire socialists
put together. The man lived. He continues to live in his writings. He
makes his readers live. Through life the revolution will come.
In 1869, Bakunin delivered his famous speech to the League of Peace and
Liberty Congress at Berne. Plechanoff has described this organisation as
an entirely bourgeoisie body. The history of social democratic movement
that George Plechanoff defended so laboriously, has proven to be so
completely counter-revolutionary that his censures of Bakunin may pass
as mere words of abuse. Bakunin’s speech impeached modern civilisation
as having been “founded from time immemorial on the forced labour of the
enormous majority, condemned to lead the lives of brutes and slaves, in
order that a small minority might be enabled to live as human creatures.
This monstrous inequality,” he discovered, rested “upon the absolute
separation between head-work and hand-labour. But this abomination
cannot last: for in the future the working-classes are resolved to make
their own politics. They insist that instead of two classes, there shall
be in future only one, which shall offer to all men alike, without grade
or distinction, the same starting point, the same maintenance, the same
opportunities of education and culture, the same means of industry: not,
indeed, by virtue of laws, but by the nature of the organisation of this
class which shall oblige everyone to work with his head as with his
hands.”
Bakunin concluded his speech by a declaration in favour of “the
economical and social equalisation of classes and of individuals.” A
delegate named Chaudey reproached him with advocating Communism. Bakunin
repudiated the charge in a passage that has often been misinterpreted by
the alleged followers of Marx, headed by Plechanoff whom these petty
parliamentarians have discipled faithfully in this matter of slander.
Bakunin urged that he was an upholder of collectivism as opposed to
communism. As his magnificent comments on the Paris Commune show, he was
never opposed to communism but only to the authoritarian conception of
communism for which the ultra-Marxians stood. He used the word
collectivism in a sense that after became obsolete. Indeed, collectivism
came to mean exactly the same as the communism Bakunin repudiated.
Bakunin did not oppose the idea of equity or economic equality for which
communism stands. He opposed the idea of a central statism with which
the Marxians had identified the idea of communism. It is typical of the
unfair attacks made on Bakunin that Eleanor Marx Aveling complained that
Bakunin’s use of the word “statism” was an invented barbarism for which
she had to make a special apology. The word has passed since into
regular use and even the pedants of the universities employ it to define
the invasions of individual liberty by the agents of bureaucracy.
Chaudey was a testamentary executor of Proudhon. His attack annoyed
Bakunin, who declared:
“Because I demand the economic and social equalisation of classes and
individuals, because, with the Workers’ Congress of Brussels, I have
declared myself in favour of collective property, I have been reproached
with being a Communist. What difference, I have been asked, is there
between Communism and Collectivism... Communism I abhor, because it s
the negation of liberty, and without liberty I cannot imagine anything
truly human. I detest Communism because it concentrates all the strength
of Society in the State, and squanders that strength in its service:
because it places all property in the hands of the State, whereas my
principle is the abolition of the State itself, the radical extirpation
of the principle of authority and tutelage, which has enslaved,
oppressed, exploited, and depraved mankind under the pretexts of
moralising and civilising men. I want the organisation of society and
the distribution of property to proceed from below, by the free voice of
society itself: not downwards from above, by the dictate of authority. I
desire the abolition of personal hereditary property, which is merely
and institution of the State, and a consequence of State principles. In
this sense I am a Collectivist not a Communist.”
It may be that Bakunin seems to propound the fallacy that the State
creates property, instead of espousing the sound doctrine that property
necessitates and decides the State. He may mistake the shadow for the
substance. But his error is one of theory and not of fact. It has always
seemed strange to me that the Marxists, whose economic explanation of
politics or the State is correct, should have become, in practice,
parliamentarians and pretend to believe that parliament controls
industry. Proudhon, Bakunin, and Most, being Anarchists, might be
forgiven did they deduce from their hatred of authority, some idea of
warring against the State instead of economic conditions. In practice
they adopt the correct attitude of wanting to liquidate the State in
economic society, of substituting use-value for property conditions.
Hence they conclude their propaganda as sound Marxians. This is
especially true of Most, who reconciled the teaching of Bakunin and Marx
in his classic robust proletarian propaganda. Bakunin’s aspiration as to
social organisation all Communists share. When he repudiates Communism
for Collectivism, it is clear, without the explanation already given,
that he is giving a different meaning to these terms from that which we
give to them. He is expressing his fear of dictatorship. He believes in
the upsurge of violence but wants it the end in a free society. That is
the revolution triumphant. He does not want violence to conserve itself
into a dictatorship. To his mind this is the negation of the revolution
and the triumph of reaction. The men who would exercise a
dictatorship,once the revolutionary upheaval has seemed to succeed,
would most likely be the very persons who has opposed the struggle.
Dictatorship, in Bakunin’s eyes meant that the class struggle still
continued; that bourgeois society had not been liquidated; that a
conflict of interests still prevailed. Dictatorship would no end that
conflict. It would sacrifice the revolutionary toilers to the interests
of counter-revolutionary bureaucracy and nepmen, as we term these
creatures since the time of Lenin. Bakunin did not accept the theory
that a revolutionary state could be created, only that it might wither
away. To him, there was no withering-away state. The state meant a
permanent authoritarian society.
Bakunin did not deny that there must be a transitional period between
Capitalism-destroyed and Communism-achieved. During this period the
workers must defend and develop the revolution and crush the
counter-revolutions. Every action of the working-class would have to be
class-power-action, in order to liquidate the operations of the beast of
property, to destroy power the workers must build and express power. But
it must be the living power of action of life in revolt; not the dead
power of decrees and a new state authority. Bakunin did not object to
the dictatorship of action. He objected to the power of action being
lost to the workers in their industrial solidarity and a dictatorship
established on the basis of their surrender to an external central
bureaucracy, Stalinism is said to express the dictatorship of the
proletariat in Russia. It has abolished the factory Soviet, established
wage differences and variations of status among the workers, and
introduced economic differences that properly belong to the world of
capitalist political economy. It has sneered at freedom of speech and of
thought as bourgeoise superstitions and has exiled Trotsky and Rakovsky
as enemies of the revolution. Considering these facts I ask; was Bakunin
right or wrong in his opposition to the state and political
dictatorship?
His speech turned to the question of religion. It was very happy,
because Bakunin always wrote and spoke well on God and the idealists.
His hatred of the shadow-world was his one great consistency. There is
no need to cite his reflections since they are repeated in his immortal
work “God and the State.”
It has been said that Bakunin was a double Utopian. He added to
Proudhon’s Utopia of Liberty, his own Utopia of Equality. He was
Proudhon adulterated by Marx and Marx expounded by Proudhon. Some folks
may consider this a justifiable complaint. To my mind, it means that
Bakunin is and excellent guide, philosopher and friend to the cause of
Communism.
Herzen, as has been stated, was that the natural son of a rich nobleman
named Iakovlev and a Stuttgardt lady, Louise Haaag. Herzen’s name was a
fancy one and signified a love token. “Herzen’s kind” means “child of
the heart.” His father spared no expense in the matter of his education.
The result was that Herzen not merely spoke correctly but brilliantly in
Russian, French, English, and German. Despite these advantages he
appealed to a Russian audience only. In 1865 he met Garibaldi in London.
The effect of this meeting was to convince Herzen that, as Garibaldi was
the Italian patriot, he must prove himself a Russian one. Unlike Herzen,
Bakunin demanded the European stage. He remained the Slav at heart and
before the audience of International Labour paraded his hatred of the
Teuton. The Germans, he declared, were authoritarians. Their socialism
was a menace. Despite phrases of equality and justice, they would bring
the workers of the world to disaster. At heart the Teuton was a
counter-revolutionist. He would change; but it would require
half-a-century of falsehood and illusion ending in debacle before he
would be converted to real communism and realise the need of
revolutionary struggle.
Bakunin’s pan-Slavism was the fatal contradiction that paralyses his
revolutionary endeavour. This will be seen from his pamphlet, “Romanoff,
Pugatscheff, or Pestal,” published in 1862. In this, he announced his
willingness to make peace with absolutism provided that the son of the
Emperor Nicholas would consent to be “a good and loyal Czar,” a
democratic ruler, and would put himself
at the head of a popular assembly in order to constitute a new Russian,
and play the part of the saviour of the Slav people.
“Does this Romanoff mean to be the Czar of the peasants, or the
Petersburgian emperor of the house of Holstein-Gottorp? This question
will have to be decided soon, and then we shall know what we are and
what we have to do.”
Perhaps Alexander II. objected to being classified with Pugatscheff, the
Cossack who had pretended to be Peter III. and had placed himself at the
head of the peasant rising of 1773; and Pestal, the republican
conspirator, who was hanged in 1826 by Nicholas. Perhaps the Czar merely
scorned a revolutionary suggestion. Rulers usually treat revolutionists
with contempt until it is too late to treat with them. Deposed, they
have to plead for mercy at the feet of the men the formerly kicked.
However the Czar’s silence be explained, the fact of it angered Bakunin.
He repented his temporary notion of compromise and returned again to
Nihilism. His Pan-Slavism might have remained in abeyance but for the
outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war and the German invasion of France.
His Russian enmity on the Germanic race revived. Like his disciple,
Kropotkin in 1914. Bakunin declared the Germans to be the enemies of
mankind. He addressed an appeal to the peasantry of all countries, “to
come to drive out the Prussians.” The cause of France, he said, was the
cause of humanity. The offical Muscovite Press agreed with him. Bakunin
was at one with ruling class Russia. He was acting as became a Russian
and a patriot. The company in which he found himself was neither
anarchist nor internationalist. It is true that he uttered some thought
they did not appreciate. Fundamentally, he allied himself with their
cause.
Bakunin outlined the case against Germany, and enunciated his theory of
the historic mission of the French, in his “Letters to a Frenchman About
the Present Crisis” and his pamphlet on “The Knouto-Germanic Empire.” He
disowned nationalist and declared that patriotism was a very mean,
narrow, and interested passion. It was fundamentally inhuman and
conserved exploitations and privileges. It was fostered by the
Napoleons, Bismarks, and Czars in order to destroy the freedom of
nations. By a strange turn of thought and twist of the pen Bakunin
proceeded from this reasoning to deduce an argument for French
patriotism as opposed to German. He said: —
“When the masses become patriotic they are stupid, as are to-day a part
of the masses of Germany, who let themselves be slaughtered in tens of
thousands, with a silly enthusiasm, for the triumph of that great unity,
and for the organisation of that German Empire, which, if founded on the
ruins of usurped France, will become the tomb of all hopes of the
future.”
It may be that Bakunin was visioning the future correctly. Much of his
prophecy about the period of reaction that must follow
in the wake of parliamentary socialism has been justified. The
subjection of the French proletariat to demands of Napoleon III. was not
the correct revolutionary answer to Prussian militarism. It was the
continuation of militarism and the surrender of socialism to reaction.
The problem may have been difficult. It was Bakunin’s business to find a
correct revolutionary answer or else to keep silent. Instead, he shaved
history shamefully so as to oppose the France of 1793 to the Germany of
Bismarck. The France of Napoleon, of Bourbon royalism and of bourgeoisie
republicanism was dismissed from view. He pictured the world as waiting
on the initiation of France for its advance towards liberty, equality
and fraternity. France was to drive back Germany, exile her traitor
officials and inaugurate socialism. Said Bakunin: —
“What I would consider a great misfortune for the whole of humanity
would be the defeat and death of France as a great national
manifestation: the death of its great national character, the French
spirit; of the courageous, heroic instincts, of the revolutionary
daring, which took with storm, in order to destroy, all authorities that
had been made holy by history, all power of heaven and earth. If that
great historical nature called France should be missed at this hour, if
it should disappear from the world scene; or—what would be much worse—if
the spirited and developed nature should fall suddenly from the honoured
height which she has attained, thanks to the work of heroic genius of
past generations — into the abyss, and continue her existence as
Bismarck’s slave: a terrible emptiness will engulf the whole world. It
would be more than a national catastrophe. It would be a world- wide
misfortune, a universal defeat.”
It is only necessary to add that Bakunin had to attack the great “French
spirit” that murdered in cold blood the Communards in the May-June days
of 1871. On the other side, Marx, who also eulogised the Communards, had
declared for the German spirit of order and saw in the French disaster
not so much the defeat of Napoleon III. or the triumph of the Prussian
Kaiser but the defeat on the international field of thought of Proudhon
and the triumph of Marx. These Gods! How they nod!
Bakunin believed in the Russian nationalism, bound on the east by the
Tartars, and on the west by the Germans. This meant believing in the
German nation, bounded on the west by France, and on the est by Russia.
It meant the status quo. He was upholding the States of Europe. Yet he
wrote: —
“Usurpation is not only the outcome, but the highest aim of all states,
large or small, powerful or weak, despotic or liberal, monarchic,
aristocratic, or democratic ... It follows that the war of one State
upon another is a necessity and common fact, and every pence is only a
provisional truce.”
This idea was not worked out at some other time, under different
circumstances, but in these “Letters to a Frenchman” eulogising the
national spirit. He asserted that all States were bad, and there could
be no virtuous State: —
“Who says State, says power, oppression, exploitation, injustice — all
these established as the prevailing system and as the fundamental
conditions of the existing society. The State never had a morality, and
can never have one. Its only morality and justice is its own advantage,
its own existence, and its own omnipotence at any price. Before these
interest, all interests of mankind must disappear. The State is the
negation of mankind.”
“So long as there is a State, war will never cease. Each State must
overcome or be overcome. Each State must found its power on the
weakness, and, if it can, without danger to itself, on the abrogation of
other States. To strive for an International justice and freedom and
lasting peace, and therewith seek the maintenance of the State, is a
ridiculous naivete.”
Bakunin had to escape this very charge of ridiculous naivete.
Bakunin closed his stormy career at Berne, on the 1^(st) July 1876. He
had founded the social democratic alliance and been expelled from the
Marxist International. It was decided at his funeral to reconcile the
social democrats and the anarchists in one association. Fraternal
greetings were exchanged between the Jura federation, assembled at
Chaux-de Fonds, and the German social democratic congress at Gotha. At
the eighth international congress, at Berne, in October, the social
democrats and the anarchists met and expressed the desire that all
socialists should treat each other with mutual consideration and
complete common understanding. A banquets conclude this congress.
Caferio, the disciple of Bakunin, drank to Marxism and the German
socialists. De Paepe, the Marxist, toasted the memory of Bakunin. All
Bakunin’s fiery words against the State, his talk of the revolution, his
hurrying across Europe to boost first one then another insurrection had
ended seemingly in vapour, smoke! All Marx”s insurrectional politics,
his opposition to the parliamentary joint stock republic, his faith in
the Commune and not the empire, seemed vanities. Marx was not reconciled
with Bakunin at these conferences. The fundamental revolutionary
inspiration of both were made subsidiary to the parliamentary ideas of
Lassalle, from whom the social democrats drew the fatal inspiration.
Since the days of the Commune the slogan of Lassalle, “Through universal
suffrage to victory,” has been substituted for Marx’s magnificent:
“Workers of all lands, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
You have a world to gain!”
“To set about to make a revolution,” said Lassalle, “is the folly of
immature minds, which have no notion of the laws of history.” Thus he
interpreted the events of 1848 as an argument for direct universal
suffrage. Thus his disciples interpreted the events of 1871. Believing
that it understood the laws of history the European social democracy
buried socialism and attempted to
murder outright the European proletariat in the world was of 1914 to
1918. The war ended, it had given birth to Fascism. With this hopeless
movement of middle-class suffrage, the anarchists seriously thought of
identifying themselves. They imagined such as alliance to be an honour
to Bakunin, just as the Marxists thought they were honouring Marx by
repudiating his revolutionary principles.
“And so you think that Marx and Bakunin were at one,” said my friend.
“Yes,” I replied, “I think that they were at one. I believe that they
were one in purpose and in aspiration. But they accomplished distinct
tasks and served different functions. It would not do for us all to act
the same part. Fitted by temperament to enact a peculiar role, each man
felt his work to be a special call, the one aim of life. This developed
strong personality. And when the two strong personalities came into
conflict through the nature of their respective tasks, the natural
antagonisms of their temperament displayed themselves. Then came fools,
who called themselves disciples of the wise men, and magnified their
accidental collisions into vital discords of purpose. Do we not know the
friend who persuades us to quarrel? And do we not know the ‘disciples’
who are actually street brawlers of a refined order? Marx and Bakunin
have suffered at the hands of these mental numskulls.
“But how would you define the difference between the two men,” pursued
my friend.
“Very easily,” I answered, “Marx DEFINED the Social Revolution, whilst
Bakunin EXPRESSED it. The first stood for the invincible logic of the
cause. The second concentrated in his own person its unquenchable
spirit. Marx was an impregnable rock of first principles, remorselessly
composed of facts. He dwarfed the intelligence of Capitalist society and
witnessed to the indestructability of Socialism. He incarnated the
proletarian upheaval. He was the immovable mountain of the revolution.
Bakunin, on the other hand, was the tempest. He symbolised the coming
flood. Both were great brave men; and together they gave completeness to
the certitude of revolution. They promised success by land and by water.
They symbolised inexhaustible patience, unwearying stability, inevitable
growth, and tireless, resistless attack. Who can conceive of a world not
made up of land and water? Who can conceive of the Social Revolution
without the work of Mars and Bakunin?
But my friend was not convinced, so we turned to other subjects.
Many comrades have found it hard to understand the difference between
Marx and Bakunin. The story is very simple and can be told clearly.
During his imprisonment and exile, Bakunin was attacked by Marx and the
latter’s friends. Bakun summarised the attack: —
“While I was having a far from amusing time in German and Russian
fortresses, and in Siberia, Marx and Co. were peddling, clamouring from
the housetops, publishing in English and German newspapers, the most
abominable rumours about me. They said that it was untrue to declare
that I had been imprisoned in a fortress, that, on the contrary, Czar
Nicholas had received me with open arms, had provided me with all
possible conveniences and enjoyments, that I was able to amuse myself
with light women, and had a abundance of champagne to drink. This was
infamous, but it was also stupid.”
After Bakunin arrived in London, in 1861, and settled down to his work
on Herzen’s Kolokol , an English newspaper published a statement by a
man named Urquhart, declaring that Bakunin challenged his calumniator
and heard no more of the matter. In November, 1864, Bakunin had an
interview with Marx in London. Bakunin described the interview in the
following terms: —
“At that time I had a little note from Marx, in which he asked me
whether he could come to see me the next day. I answered in the
affirmative, and he came. We had an explanation. He said that he had
never said or done anything against me; that, on the contrary, he had
always been my true friend, and had retained great respect for me. I
knew that he was lying, but I really no longer bore any grudge against
him. The renewal of the acquaintanceship interested me moreover, in
another connection. I knew that he had taken a great part in the
foundation of the International. I had read the manifesto written by him
in the name of the provisional General Council, a manifesto which was
weighty, earnest, and profound, like everything that came from his pen
when he was not engaged in personal polemic. In a word, we parted,
outwardly, on the best of terms, although I did not return his visit.”
Writing to Engels, under date, November 4, 1864, Marx says: —
“Bakunin wishes to be remembered to you. He has left for Italy to-day. I
saw him yesterday evening once more, for the first time after sixteen
years. He said that after the failure in Poland he should in future,
confine himself to participation in the Socialist Movement. On the whole
he is one of the few persons whom I find not to have retrogressed after
sixteen years, but to have developed further. I had a talk with him also
about Urquhart’s denunciations.”
Bakunin wanted to be on good terms with Marx, for the sake of building
up the International. He desired to devote himself henceforward
exclusively to the Socialist Movement. This was difficult because of
Marx’s injustice. Bakunin tells the story thus: —
“In the year 1848, Marx and I had a difference of opinion, and I must
say that he was far more in the right of it than I. In Paris and
Brussels had had founded a section of German Communists, and had, in
alliance with the French and a few English Communists, supported by his
friend and inseparable comrade, Engels, founded in London the first
international association of Communists of various lands... I , myself,
the fumes of the revolutionary movement in Europe having gone to my
head, had been much more interested in the negative than in the positive
side of this revolution, had been, that is to say, much more concerned
with the overthrow of the extant than with the question of the
upbuilding and organisation of what was to follow. But there was one
point in which I was right and he was wrong. As a Slav, I wanted the
liberation of the Slav race from the German yoke. I wanted this
liberation to be brought about by the revolution, that is to say by the
destruction of the regime of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Turkey, and
by the re-organisation of the peoples from below upwards through their
own freedom, upon the foundation of complete economic and social
equality, and not through the power of any authority, however
revolutionary it might call itself, and however intelligent it might in
fact be.
“Already, at this date, the difference between our respective systems (a
difference which now severs us in a way that, on my side, has been very
carefully thought out) was well marked. My ideals and aspirations could
not fail to be very displeasing to Marx. First of all, because they were
not his own; secondly, because they ran counter to the convictions of
the authoritarian Communists; and finally, because, being a German
patriot, he would not admit then, any more than he does to-day, the
right of the Slavs to free themselves from the German yoke- for still,
as of old, he thinks that the Germans have a mission to civilise the
Slavs, this meaning to Germanise them whether by kindness or force.
“To punish me for being so bold as to aim a realising an idea different
from and indeed actually opposed to his, Marx then revenged himself
after his own fashion. He was editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
published in Cologne. In one of the issues of that paper I read in the
Paris correspondence that Madame George Sand, with whom I had formerly
been acquainted, was said to have told some one it was necessary to be
cautious in dealing with Bakunin, for it was quite possible that he was
some sort of Russian agent.”
The Morning Advertiser, for September 1, 1853, published the statement
by Marx that, on July 5, 1848, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung received two
letters from Paris, declaring that George Sand possessed letters
compromising Bakunin, “showing that he had recently been in
communication with the Russian government.” One was from Havas Bureau,
and the other from Dr. Ewerbeck, sometime leader of the Federation of
the Just.
Bakunin described the effect of this accusation and his reaction to it:-
“The accusation was like a tile falling from a roof upon my head, at the
very time when I was fully immersed in revolutionary organisation, and
it completely paralysed my activities for several weeks. All my German
and Slav friends fought shy of me. I was the first Russian to concern
himself actively with revolutionary work, and it is needless for me to
tell you what feelings of traditional mistrust were accustomed to arise
in western minds when the words Russian revolutionist were mentioned. In
the first instance, therefore, I wrote to Madame Sand.”
Bakunin’s life as an agitator, his insecurity of existence, his entire
manner of living rendered it easy to undermind his prestige by sowing
suspicion. This was also the policy of the Russian Embassy. In order to
reply to Marx and the Czarist traducers, Bakunin wrote to George Sand.
The text of George Sand’s letter to the Zeitung, dated August 3, 1948,
is reproduced in my Pioneers of Anti-Parliamentarism (”Word” Library,
1^(st) Series, No.7). Her declaration rehabilitated Bakunin as a
revolutionary and a victim of slanderous conspiracy.
Slander never dies. In 1863, when he was about to enter Switzerland, a
Basle paper declared that he has involved Polish refugees in disaster
whilst remaining immune. German Socialist (sic) periodicals constantly
slandered him. Marx never missed a chance of speaking against him.
Otto Ruhle has described how Marx wrote to a young Russian seeking
information regarding Bakunin. For reasons of conspiracy, Marx referred
to Bakunin as “my old friend, Bakunin-I don’t know if he is still my
friend .” Marx persuaded too well: for his correspondent forwarded the
letter to Bakunin. Marx complained of the result: “Bakunin availed
himself of the circumstances to excuse a sentimental entree.”
Ruble comments:-
“This sentimental entree not only redounded to Bakunin’s credit, not
only showed his good feeling and his insight, but deserved a better
reception from Marx than the biting cynicism and the derogatory
insolence which it was encountered (cynicism and insolence which were
only masks for embarrassment).”
Bakunin wrote:-
“you ask whether I am still your friend. Yes, more than ever, my dear
Marx, for I understand better than ever how right you were to walk along
the broad road of the economic revolution, to invite us all to follow
you, and to denounce all those who wandered off into the byways of
nationalist or exclusively political enterprise. I am now doing what you
began to do more than twenty years ago. Since I formally and publicly
said good-bye to the bourgeois of the Berne congress, I know no other
society, no other milieu than the world of the workers. My fatherland is
now the International, whose chief founder you have been. You see, then,
dear friend, that I am your pupil— and I am proud to be this. I think I
have said enough to make my personal position and feelings clear to
you.”
Bakunin met Marx with simplicity and friendship.
Ruhle points out that Bakunin endeavoured honestly to be on good terms
with Marx and to avoid friction. He adds that Bakunin loved the peasants
and detested intellectualism and abstract systems, with their dogmatism
and intolerance. He hated the modern State, industrialism, and
centralisation. He had the most intense dislike for Judaism, which he
considered loquacious, intriguing, and exploitative. All that authority
and theorising for which he had an instinctive abhorrence were, for him,
incorporated in Marx. He found Marx’s self-esteem intolerable. Yet he
mastered his spiritual repugnance and antagonism for the sake of
building the movement of struggle towards Freedom, from loyalty to the
workers, and from a sense of justice to Marx’s worth as a master in the
struggle. Bakunin’s loyalty and aspiration after friendship were
magnificent. It lent him a stature that dwarfs the envious and
contemptible Marx into a mere pigmy. With justice, Bakunin says of Marx
and his political circle:-
“Marx loved his own person much more than he loved his friends and
apostles, and no friendship could hold water against the slightest wound
to his vanity. He would far more readily forgive infidelity to his
philosophical and socialist system...Marx will never forgive a slight to
his person. You must worship him, make an idol of him, if he is to love
you in return; you must at least fear him, if he is to tolerate you. He
likes to surround himself with pygmies, with lackeys and flatterers. All
the same, there are some remarkable men around his intimates.
“In general, however, one may say that in the circle of Marx’s intimates
there is very little brotherly frankness, but a great deal of
machination and diplomacy. There is a sort of tacit struggle, and a
compromise between the self-loves of the various persons concerned; and
where vanity is at work, there is no longer place for brotherly feeling.
Every one is on his guard, is afraid of being sacrificed, of being
annihilated. Marx’s circle is a sort of mutual admiration society. Marx
is the chief distributor of honours, but is also invariably perfidious
and malicious, the never frank and open, inciter to the persecution of
those whom he suspects, or who gave had the misfortune of falling to
show all the veneration he expects.
“As soon as he has ordered a persecution, there is no limit to the
baseness and infamy of the method. Himself a Jew, he has round him in
London and in France, and above all in Germany, a number of petty, more
of less able, intriguing, mobile, speculative Jews (the sort of Jews you
can find all over the place), commercial employees, bank clerks, men of
letters, politicians, the correspondents of newspapers of the most
various shades of opinion. In a word, literary go-betweens, just as they
are financial go-betweens, one foot in the bank, the other in the
Socialist Movement, while their rump is in German periodical
literature... These Jewish men of letters are adepts in the art of
cowardly, odious, and perfidious insinuations. They seldom make open
accusation, but they insinuate, saying they ‘have heard- it is said- it
may not be true, but,’ and then they hurl the most abominable calumnies
in your face.”
Bakunin had a profound respect for Marx’s intellectual abilities and
scientific efficiency. When he read Marx’s Capital he was amazed, and
promptly set to work upon translating it into Russian. He translated The
Communist Manifest into Russian in 1862.
Writing to Herzen, Bakunin said:—
“For five and twenty years Marx has served the cause of Socialism ably,
energetically, and loyally, taking the lead of every one in this matter.
I should never forgive myself if, out of personal motives, I were to
destroy or diminish Marx’s beneficial influence. Still I may be involved
in a struggle against him, not because he has wounded me personally, but
because of the State Socialism he advocates.”
Bakunin describes how simple and personal was the cause of the struggle
being renewed. He writes:-
“At the peace Congress in Geneva, the veteran Communist, Becker, gave me
the first, and as of yet only, volume of the extremely important,
learned, profound, although very abstract work, Capital. Then I made a
terrible mistake: I forgot to write Marx in order to thank you...I did
not hasten to thank him and to pay him a compliment upon his really
outstanding book. Old Phillip Becker, who had known Marx for a very long
time, said to me, when he heard of this forgetfulness: ‘What, you
haven’t written to him yet? Marx will never forgive you!’”
Bakunin thought that his forgetfulness could be ranked as a personal
slight and an unpardonable discourtesy. But he did not believe that it
could lead to a resumption of hostilities. It did. Frau Marx wrote to
Becker as follows:-
“Have you seen or heard anything of Bakunin? My husband sent him, as an
old Hegelian, his book- not a word or a sign. There must be something
underneath this? One cannot trust any of these Russians; if they are not
in the service of the Little Father in Russia, then they are in Herzen’s
service here, which amounts to much the same thing.”
Bakunin was unable to persuade the Berne Congress of the League of Peace
and Freedom to adopt a revolutionary programme and to affiliate to the
International. He resigned an in conjunction with Becker, founded the
International Alliance of Social Revolutionaries. His aim was to
affiliate the Alliance to the International. At this time, Bakunin’s
programme was somewhere between that of Marx and Proudhon.
Mehring describes Bakunin’s place in relation to Marx as follows:-
“Bakunin had advanced far beyond Proudhon, having absorbed a larger
measure of European culture; and he understood Marx much better than
Proudhon had done. But he was not so intimately acquainted with German
philosophy as Marx, nor had he made so thorough a study of the class
struggles of Western European nations. Above all, his ignorance of
political economy was much more disastrous to him than ignorance of
natural science had been to Proudhon. Yet he was revolutionary through
and through; and, like Marx and Lassalle, he had the gift of making
people listen to him.
“Marx favoured centralism, as manifested in the contemporary
organisation of economic life and of the State; Bakunin favoured
federalism, which had been the organisational principle of the
precapitalist era. That was why Bakunin found most of this adherents in
Italy, Spain, and Russia, in countries where capitalist development was
backward. Marx’s supporters, on the other hand, were recruited from
lands of advanced capitalist development, those with an industrial
proletariat. The two men represented two successive phases of social
revolution. Furthermore, Bakunin looked upon man rather as the subject
of history who, ‘having the devil in his body,” spontaneously ripens for
the revolution, and merely needs to have his chains broken; but Marx
regarded man rather as the object, who much slowly be trained for
action, in order that, marshaled for class activity, he may play his
part as a factor of history. The two outlooks might have been combined,
for in combination they supply the actual picture of man in history. But
in the case of both of these champions, the necessary compromise was
rendered impossible by the orthodox rigidity of intellectual dogmatism,
by deficient elasticity of the will, and by the narrow circumstances of
space and time, so that in actual fact they became adversaries. Then,
owing to their respective temperaments, owing to the divergences in
mental structure which found expression in behaviour, their opposition
in concrete matters developed into personal enmity.”
Mehring defends Marx too eloquently. When we gaze at the world to-day,
and the condition of the Labour Movement, we must feel that there was
much more to be said for Bakunin’s approach than for that of Marx.
Inspired by Marx, the General Council of the International refused to
accept the affiliation of the Alliance. The affiliation was proposed by
the Genevese section which was led by Bakunin.
Marx now denounced the Bakuninst programme as: “an olla podrida of
worn-out commonplaces, thoughtless chatter; a rose-garland of empty
motions, and insipid improvisation.”
Marx feared the influence of Bakunin among the homeworkers in the
watchmaking industry of the Neuchatel and Bernese Jura. In 1865, Dr.
Coullery had founded, in La Chaux des Fonds, a section of the
International. Its principal leader was James Guillaume, a teacher at
the Industrial School in Le Locle. The Jura section was federalistically
inclined and soon became ardent supports of Bakunin. He amalgamated
their groups into a federal council; founded a weekly, Egalite, and
started a vigorous revolutionary movement. In London this aroused the
impression that Bakunin was trying to capture the International. At the
Basle Congress of the International, on September 5 and 6, 1869, Bakunin
was no longer, as he had been in Brussels, alone against the Marxian
front, but was backed up by a resolute phalanx of supporters. It was
obvious that Bakunin’s influence was on the increase. This became
especially plain during the discussion on the question of direct
legislation by the people (initiative and referendum).
At this Congress, Bakunin once more brought to a head the slanders that
the Marxists had circulated concerning him. His opponents had tried to
check his influence by a flood of suspicions and invectives.
In 1865, the Demokratisches Wokhenblatt, published in Leipzig, under
Wilhelm Liebknecht’s editorship, attacked Bakunin’s personal honour
severely. At the same time, Bebel wrote to Becker that Bakunin was
“probably an agent of the Russian Government.” Liebknecht declared that
Bakunin was in the Czar’s pay.
Bakunin secured the appointment of a court of arbitration to investigate
the charges. Liebknecht had no proofs to adduce, and declared that his
words had been misunderstood. The jury unanimously agreed that
Liebknecht had behaved with “criminal levity,” and made him give Bakunin
a written apology. The adversaries shook hands before the Congress.
Bakunin made a spill out of the apology, and lighted a cigarette with
it.
Bakunin never tried to pay back Marx in the same coin. Mehring says of
Bakunin’s writings, that “we shall look in them in vain for any trace of
venom towards the General Council of towards Marx.” Bakunin preserved so
keen a sense of justice and so splendid a magnanimity, that on January
28, 1872, writing to the internationalists of the Romagna about Marx and
the Marxists, he said: —
“Fortunately for the International, there existed in London a group of
men who were extremely devoted to the great association, and who were,
in the true sense of the words, the real founders and initiators of that
body. I speak of the small group of Germans whose leader is Karl Marx.
These estimable persons regard as an enemy, and maltreat me as such
whenever and wherever they can. They are greatly mistaken. I am in no
respect their enemy, and it gives me, on the contrary, lively
satisfaction when I am able to do them justice. I often have an
opportunity of doing so, for I regard them as genuinely important and
worthy persons, in respect both of intelligence and knowledge, and also
in respect of their passionate devotion to the cause of the proletariat
and of a loyalty to the cause which has withstood every possible test —
a devotion and a loyalty which have been proved by the achievements of
twenty years. Marx is the supreme economic and socialist genius of our
day. In the course of my life, I have come into contact with a great
many learned men, but I know no one else who is so profoundly learned as
he. Engels, who is now secretary for Italy and Spain, Marx’s friend and
pupil, is also a man of outstanding intelligence. As long ago as 1846
and 1848, working together, they founded the Party of the German
Communists, and their activities in this direction have continued every
since. Marx edited the profound and admirable Preamble to the
Provisional Rules of the International, and gave a body to the
instinctively unanimous aspirations of the proletariat of nearly all
countries of Europe, in that, during the years 1863–1864, he conceived
the idea of the International and effected its establishment. These are
great and splendid services, and it would be very ungrateful of us if we
were reluctant to acknowledge their importance.”
Bakunin explains the break between Marx and himself:
“Marx is an authoritarian and centralizing communist. He wants what we
want, the complete triumph of economic and social equality, but he wants
it in the State and through the State power, through the dictatorship of
a very strong and, so to say, despotic provisional government, that is,
by the negation of liberty. His economic ideal is the State as sole
owner of the land and of all kinds of capital, cultivating the land
through well-paid agricultural associations under the management of
State engineers, and controlling all industrial and commercial
associations with State capital.
“We want the same triumph of economic and social equality through the
abolition of the State, and of all that pass by the name of our law
(which, in our view, is the permanent negation of human rights). We want
the reconstruction of society, and the unification of mankind, to be
achieved, not from above downwards, by any sort of authority, or by
socialist officials, engineers, and other accredited men of learning —
but from below upwards, by the free federation of all kinds of workers’
associations liberated from the yoke of the State.
“You see that two theories could hardly be more sharply opposed to one
another than are ours. But there is another difference between us, a
purely personal one.
“Marx has two odious faults: he is vain and jealous. He detested
Proudhon, simply because Proudhon’s great name and well-deserved
reputation were prejudicial to him. There is no term of abuse that Marx
has failed to apply to Proudhon. Marx is egotistical to the pitch of
insanity. He talks of ‘my ideas,’ and cannot understand that ideas
belong to no one in particular, but that, if we look carefully, we shall
always find that the best and greatest ideas are the product of the
instinctive labour of all...Marx, who was already constitutionally
inclined towards self-glorification, was definitely corrupted by the
idolization of his disciples, who have made a sort of doctrinaire pope
out of him. Nothing can be more disastrous to the mental and moral
health of a man, even though he be extremely intelligent, than to be
idolized and regarded as infallible. All this has made Marx even more
egotistical, so that he is beginning to loathe every one who will not
bow the neck before him.”
Ruhle had dealt very exhaustively with the steps taken by Marx to get
rid of his hated adversary. Marx organized irregular conferences at
London and the Hague. Bakunin, Guillaume, and Schuizgulbed were expelled
by methods since employed by the Third International to expel
Trotskyists and other opponents of present-day Stalinism. The Purge was
always a characteristic of Marxism. A victory was won that secured no
fruit. Marx had to admit that the last Congress of the International,
held at Geneva, in September, 1873, was a complete fiasco. Becker wrote
a letter to Serge describing Marx’s hopeless intrigues in connection
with this Congress.
Marx decided to throw a last handful of mud at Bakunin. With Engels and
Lafargue, he undertook to publish a report of the charges made against
Bakunin, under the title “Die Allianz Der Sozialistisch en Demokratie
Und Die International Arbeitassoziation” (The Alliance of the Socialist
Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association). Every line
of this report is a distortion, every allegation an injustice, every
argument a falsification and every word an untruth. As Ruble says, even
Mehring although so indulgent to Marx, places this work “at the lowest
rank” among all those published by Marx and Engels.
Bakunin met the attack with resignation. He described the pamphlet as a
“gendarme denunciation.” He declared that Marx, urged onwards by furious
hatred, had undertaken to expose himself before the public in the role
of a sneaking and calumniatory police agent.
Bakunin added: —
“That is his own affair; and, since he likes the job, let him have it...
This has given me an intense loathing of public life. I have had enough
of it. I therefore withdraw from the arena, and ask only one thing from
my dear contemporaries — oblivion.”
When Bakunin died, on July 1, 1878, no trace of the Marxian
International remained.
Marxism degenerated into the 2^(nd) International, parliamentary
opportunism and careerism, and the Nationalistic support of the First
Great War. After that war, it gave us the machinations of the 3^(rd)
International, the assassination of Socialists and Socialism, in Soviet
Russia; the debacle in Germany, the betrayal in Spain leading to the
triumph of Fascism; and, finally, the dictatorship diplomacy which
released the Second Great War by signing a pact with Germany; the great
Stalin-Hitler alliance, the Soviet-Nazi pact. Marxism is dead; and the
world of libertarian struggle recalls the wisdom and the defiance of
Bakunin. Marx is dead and Bakunin strides on, leading the workers of the
world on to the conquest of break and freedom — and roses too. Today,
the name of Bakunin is linked historically and traditionally with the
emancipation of the human race. In death, he is symbol of anti-Fascism.
He is legend, power, and reality.
The braggart, Franco, at the beginning of his mountebank career of
Fascist adventurism, boasted that Catalonia would fall before his alien
arms without a struggle. Such chatter was worthy of the tool of Hitler
and Mussolini! It defined the extent of the man’s ignorance with a
superbness of irony that no other persons could have achieved. It
stamped as grotesque the knowledge, the approach, the attitude of
Franco. It showed the man in action and in repose to be the one
character: a clown turned butcher n order that he might clown at tragedy
as well as at comedy; clown as wantonly with human misery as he had
clowned hopelessly at politics.
The Capitalist and Fascist powers treated this comedian seriously merely
because his comedy grew into crime and his fool’s
costume dripped with proletarian blood. His mirthless braggadocio
regarded the conquest of Catalonia as something to be attained without
struggle: a maidenly surrendered to be obtained for the mere medieval
gesture of request and command. Self-styled patriot, of the history of
his country he had no knowledge. Of the destiny of his country he knew
even less. For Spain was choosing. It was choosing between Franco and
Bakunin. That there should be such a choice possible, pays too much
honour to the merit of Franco: but the choice was historical and
signifies the passing of Capitalism. Once so great and majestic,
Capitalism was degraded to mediocrity, and from out of its ruins rose
the menacing, colossal shadow of Bakunin, the chained Titan, the
veritable Siegfried of the class struggle.
Many moons had passed since Bakunin landed, after countless hardships, a
free man on the coast of California, in 1859. Italy was at that time
grinding under the yoke of Austria and the star of Garibaldi was but
threatening to rise, only that a renegade Socialist in years to come
might turn the poetic nationalism of Mazzini and Garibaldi to darkness
and despair. Well did Bakunin attack Mazzini’s idealism. Spain was a
land of ‘pronounciamientos,” ending, till 1868, in the sovereignty of
Isabella II., a reign of hopeless tyranny. No shadow of Bakunin over
Europe then!
In 1868 the rebellion of Prim and Serrano drove Isabella to exile in
France. Then followed Republics and Constitutional Monarchy and the
restoration of the Bourbons, with Isabella’s son, Alfonso XII., in 1875.
No need to continue the Bourbon history, which ended in a Republic, a
Republic of Fascism, challenged by Catalonia and sustained only by the
alien butchery of Mussolini and Hitler, with the cowardly
non-interventionist aid of the capitalist democracies. Franco finally
destroyed Catalonia, and knew not that Catalonia will free the world.
That emancipation comes in direct line from the times of Bakunin.
Catalonia vindicated Labour; it vindicated Socialism; and against Social
Democracy and Parliamentarism it vindicated Anarchism and Bakunin. It
challenged Fascism, proclaimed the dawn of social revolution.
Federalist uprisings occurred during the year 1873, in Seville, Cadiz,
Granada, Malaga, Alicante, and Cartagena. Each centre proclaimed itself
an independent canton. From the South of France, Fanelli, disciple of
Bakunin, carried the doctrine of Anarchism across the Pyrenees into
Catalonia. And so, hardly was Bakunin’s body resting beneath its uncouth
stone when adherents of his doctrines were founding his principle and
building their libertarian groups at Barcelona and Tarrapona. Meanwhile,
Cafiero and Malatesta were pioneering Anarchism in Italy, where it will
yet conquer; and John Most, regretting his election to the Reichstag,
was proclaiming the counter-revolutionary character of the suffrage in
Germany and entering upon that career which does his memory
more credit than all the parliamentary compromises did that of Wilhelm
Liebknecht, Engels, and Bebel.
The years pass; and we witness the growing power of Anarchism in Spain.
In 1882 great progress has been made in Catalonia and Andalusia. A
distinct Anarchist element, co-operating with other schools of Socialist
thought, but maintaining the principle of revolutionary Socialism, makes
itself felt at a working-class congress held in Seville, when 254
delegates assembled, representing 10 provincial unions, 632 local
sections, with 59,000 adherents. In December of this year a personal
quarrel between two workers, resulting in the death of one of them,
named Bartolome Gago Campos, illustrates the fear with which Anarchism
now inspires the ruling class. Marx wrote well of the spectre of
Communism. Let us consider Spain haunted by the spectre of Anarchism.
The very ignorant commander of the Civil Guard at Jerez had one hundred
Anarchists arrested, and invented, in his imagination a secret
organization, known as “La Mano Negro” or “The Black Hand.” Although it
was proved that no such Anarchist organization existed, that the entire
thing was a myth of a maddened militarist’s brain. Capitalist journalism
has persisted in using, with increasing dishonour, this “Black Hand”
hobgoblin. It is fantastic enough to appeal to the jaded sense of
romance which afflicts the bourgeois student of literature!
Nor was the lie all romance. The myth was grounded well in interest. The
Capitalist conscience measures all things in the terms of profit. Its
taste belongs to the Stock Exchange; its beauty is purchased and tainted
and embellished; its love studies percentage and has a prostitute price;
and it drags the Golden Calf to Church that it may preside, a more
definite deity, in the temple of the Unknown God. The Real Presence of
Capitalist society is not the man of sorrows but the gold that lures.
“The Black Hand” myth was romance and calculation. It was a brutal and
bloody calculation as the reader will understand.
As a matter of fact, the “Black Hand” campaign was but the aggravated
aftermath of the terrible agrarian struggle. The ruling class was
endeavouring to stamp out Anarchism. Fourteen Anarchists were condemned
to death for complicity in the death of Bartolomie Gago, and scores of
others were condemned to “chains for life.” Cadiz received the sentences
with threats of working class rebellion and in the end only seven of the
condemned men mounted the scaffold. The scaffolds were erected on the
Plaza of Jerez on 14^(th) June, 1884. What tortures were experienced by
those condemned to imprisonment, pen cannot describe. In 1903, twenty
years after the arrests, eight prisoners were still held in durance
vile. Others had died in prison. These eight, after much agitation, were
reprieved. The shocking victimization of these Anarchist workers only
stimulated the cause. In 1887, explosions occurred at the Palace of the
Cortes in Madrid and in the courtyard of the
Ministry of Finance. Then came May Day, 1890, and the General Strike in
several provinces. Striking reigned in the Basque provinces and
Barcelona was decreed to be in a stage of siege. In Valencia, the
workers attacked a Jesuit convent and the residence of a Carlist
aristocrat. Two years later came a plot to release the “Black Hand”
prisoners from the prison of Jerez de la Frontera. This ended in an
attempt to sieze the town. This attempt was made on 9^(th) January,
1892, and the next month, four Anarchists were executed and others
sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. But the workers were unquelled.
There are no more rebellious spirits in the world, than the people of
Barcelona. Before the days of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, the
fortress of Montjuy has controlled the town and made the rebellion of no
avail. Risings were futile and foredoomed to defeat. But the courage of
the people vindicated Ferrer and took possession of Montjuy. Anarchism
controlled Montjuy. Against the spirit of Anarchism, entrenched in
Montjuy, Franco was but the embodied futility of the ages, reaction
sprawling through hysteria towards paralysis and extinction; the
extinction of authority and class society.
In 1896, the Spanish Anarchists were in revolt again. No persecution
subdued their powers of organization. Following upon an attack on the
Madrid palace, the clericalists of Barcelona staged an attack on a
clerical procession, which injured only working men and women. This was
to enable Don Antonio Canovas del Castillo, who was then Prime Minister,
to lay before the Cortes his Bill to suppress the Anarchists. From this
time on, Castillo was a doomed man, and the Spanish people merely waited
to learn of his deserved execution. He was shot dead, on 8^(th) August,
1897, by the Italian Anarchist, Michele Angiolillo. No man more richly
deserved execution. Angiolillo’s deed inspired the beautiful American
Anarchist soul, Voltairine De Cleyre, to write the most pathetic poem,
entitled: “Angiolillo,” in which she visions the triumph of Anarchism in
Spain and the world.
In Barcelona, Barril wounded the chief of police, and in October, Queen
Cristina replaced the avowed Conservative Ministry with a nominal
Radical one, under Praxedas Mateo Sagasta. The latter made some pretence
of restoring liberty of the press, raising the state of siege in
Barcelona, and releasing all untried prisoners from Montjuy. In 1899,
Silvela succeeded Sagasta, and middle class revolts occurred, as well as
working class ones, in Barcelona. In 1901, and again in 1904, and during
the Intervals, strikes are the rule in Barcelona. In 1906, comes the
infamous marriage of Alfonso to Princess Ena, the bomb thrown by Mateo
Morral of Roca, son of a wealthy cotton spinner of Sabadell, in
Catalonia, and the first frame-up of Ferrer. The execution of Ferrer in
1909 for alleged complicity in the general strike in Barcelona belongs
to history.
There is no need to plunge into the later history of Spain. Fascism
under the monarchy and Fascism under the Republic, until at last, there
came the parliamentary administration, which hesitated to arm the
workers against the Fascist rebellion of Franco. At least, enough has
been told to prove that Anarchism is irrepressible.
In 1897 Terrade de Marmol, in his Les Inquisiteurs d’Espagne, described
the terrible horrors the Anarchists endured in Spanish dungeons, form
which he escaped I have these horrors listed before me as I write and
have heard de Marmol dilate on them before a private audience in London.
These horrors, or many of them, were repeated under the Fascist
Republic.
In 1936, the martyrs won. “Germinal” was no longer a vain cry. Anarchism
was on the March. Fascism, triumphing against Universal Suffrage in
Germany and elsewhere, crumpled before the struggle of Anarchism.
Lassalle was proven a false prophet, with his “Through Universal
Suffrage to Victory.” There is no such thing as the progressive conquest
of the powers of democracy under Capitalism. Proudhon is right. Through
Reaction to Revolution! And in Spain, inspired by Bakunin, the tide of
reaction was checked. True, alien Fascism won—only that a second world
war might arise, and capitalist democracy be compelled to advance the
challenge made by Catalonia. Anarchist Spain promised that Fascism would
be rolled back by European revolution, by the steady, unbeaten onmarch
of Anarchism. Spain, once the land of darkness, became the light of the
world!
History stages the question. Hitler or Bakunin? The clown-sadist or the
Anarchist-revolutionist. The sadist-careerist of authority or the man of
liberty. History stages the question in satire of Capitalist authority.
And at last, the right answer is given: “For Bakunin and Liberty.”
Fascism passes to its doom, attended by the hirelings of class
authority, of statism, and oppression. An anti-militarist commonwealth
of liberty, equality, and fraternity is being born
---
As stated in the Foreword, the manuscript of the present biography was
completed in 1934. Three years after this work had been written,
Professor E.H. Carr published his magnificent book, Michael Bakunin. The
publishers were MacMillan & Company, of St. Martin’s Street, London. The
book consisted of thirty-four exhaustive chapters. Unfortunately, it was
published at the impossible price, so far as the workers were concerned,
of twenty-five
shillings. No effort has been made to produce a popular addition. This
militates seriously against the excellent research work of Professor
Carr being popularised. Professor Carr’s study is a growth: for his
Bakunin embodies chapters from his previous writings on Herzen.
The reception that was accorded to Carr’s work did not make for welcome
understanding. Reviews in the capitalist press stated that Professor
Carr had nothing but affectionate contempt for this sinister political
buffoon. The reviewers also spoke of the “wretched Bakunin, who threw
away everything he loved to pursue a phantom in whose reality he
believed until his death.” They spoke of Bakunin choosing exile from his
respectable semi-aristocratic home for the sake of his shifty
principles, and thereafter living on whatever money he could borrow form
friends and acquaintances. They declared that Carr had pictured Bakunin
as a man who achieved immortality “because of his unremitting quarrel
with Karl Marx for whom he entertained a permanent hatred, for the
double reason: that Marx was a Germany and also a Jew.” It was admitted
that Carr had brought out the fact that although Bakunin’s life was one
long record of dismal failures, he will live for all time in the history
of Socialism, as one of those giant personalities that become legends
long even before death.
The capitalist reviewer did not do tribute to the care and scrupulous
research which went to make up Professor Carr’s study. They pretended
that Carr had enshrined merely an old clown and they made no attempt to
realise how much freedom of every man and woman depends, and has
depended upon, the apparently futile struggle for liberty made by men
like Bakunin who fought and struggled, borrowed and starved, and were
jailed, often under fearful conditions, in order that their political
principles might become social realities.
Bakunin was not a buffoon and he was not a clown. Those who attack him
for borrowing money from friends after he had thrown away his heritage,
have understanding of the sordid and bitter struggle that represents the
soil in which the agitator flowers. It may be said that Bakunin failed;
but whoever studies the wars of capitalist society, its their
magnificent destruction of its magnificent civilisation, its calculated
scientific desolation, must confess that capitalist society, its
statesmen and politicians, have no claim to success. In his own person,
living and dwelling in poverty, Bakunin by contrast with the Labour
leader of the Radical politician, who ends his life in comfort, is a
failure. He may seem both clown and buffoon to those who believe that
the aim of life is a career. Men like Bakunin are not failures but
protests. It is not exactly what they say that matters. Many of their
doctrines may be false. True or false, they are often embodied in
formulas that to the mass of mankind read like so much metaphysical
gibberish. Their writings are often unreadable and the records of many
of their orations
Offend by arrogance and conceit. Yet they represent fundamental truth
and the hope of mankind for a new and higher social order. It is very
hard to estimate the worth of an agitator and it will remain hard until
a new social order has been born and our present system of finance and
corruption, militarism and exploitation, has been condemned at the bar
of history for the worthless thing it is.
Carr’s life of Bakunin, although applauded, was reviewed so poorly by
the capitalist press that its worth suffered in consequence. The result
was that Max Nettlau, who has doted on Bakunin’s life and manuscript so
much, in an anarchist paper, protested against nearly all Carr’s
assertions. Nettlau is far from being the accurate authority the
so-called anarchists have pretended; but he has certainly cherished
Bakunin’s writings and the anecdotage about his career. In the excellent
bibliography to his work, Carr acknowledges at great length his debt to
Nettlau. But Nettalu sees no good in Carr. My view is that Nettlau’s
review of Carr’s book should be published in pamphlet form and read in
connection with the work to which it refers. Meanwhile, I refer the
reader to Professor Carr’s work for a very full study of phases of
Bakunin’s life that have no been touched upon in my own words. Nettlau
condemns Carr for dealing so thoroughly with Bakunin’s private affairs.
Some of the incidents related are not absolutely to Bakunin’s credit. If
they are true I do not think that this criticism matters. If the idol
has feet of clay, and if the feet are still well-fashioned it might be
nice to look at the idol with his feet of clay as well. Actually the
picture presented by Carr is not such a terrible one. He shows a man of
great purpose, with a strong libertarian impulse, anxious to do
tremendous things, hating the wrongs of the world in which he lived,
handicapped in a thousand ways, and straining with all the might of his
tremendous volcanic personality against the bonds that bound him. Of
course he did things that he ought not to have done. Of course he was
not always equal to his own greatness. He had many foibles and many
conceits. Some of his errors were almost criminal. But they merited
forgiveness; for they arose out of a boundless energy to serve mankind
and out of a feeling of loneliness in facing the disaster that
represents the capitalist world of struggle. Fundamentally, Professor
Carr has given the world a picture of Bakunin in his true setting; a
living picture of a living man. And now that Bakunin belongs to
immortality, it does not matter too much whether every offence charged
against him is true.
Since Professor Carr gives such a complete Bakunin bibliography, there
is no need to cover that ground in the present chapter.
I now refer to the book to which Carr made no reference. This is “The
Spirit of Russia” written by the late President Masaryk, and published
in English in two volumes by Allen and Unwin, London, 1919. The second
volume deals very thoroughly with
Bakunin and his place in Russian literature and European thought and
struggle. Masaryk’s book is a wonderful work of scholarship. It is not
concerned with the personal life of Bakunin but with his literary life,
with his political career, with his entire scholastic background. I
would advice every person who wishes to understand Bakunin’s life to
read this book. This does not mean that I endorse all its conclusions.
Masaryk depicts Bakunin as a zealot, a fanatical autocrat, a
revolutionary Czar. He shows that Bakunin is not merely a theorist but a
would-be man of action limited in his capacity to achieve by the force
of his own zeal.
Masaryk discusses very completely the history of Russian Socialism and
the ideals that moved the exiles under the Czardom. He considers fully
Lavrov’s relationship with Herzen; relates the breach between Katkov and
Bakunin (1840) and describes how they came to blows in Belinksi’s house.
He shows the influence on Bakunin of Marx. Contrasting Bakunin against
Kropotkin, Masaryk concludes the difference consisted in the fact that
Bakunin aimed solely at disorganisation and never gave any heed to
re-organisation. It may be that Kropotkin stands in relation to Bakunin
as Edward Carpenter does to Walt Whitman. There is a roughness and an
original force about Whitman that is lacking in Carpenter. The latter is
cultured and essentially the disciple, but the disciple who has refined
the strength of the master. Bakunin lacks much of the culture that finds
expression in Kropotkin’s writings. Nowhere does Kropotkin express
himself with the energy and force that is to be found in Bakunin.
Especially in this the case when we compare Kropotkin’s tracing of the
anarchist idea in England back to the Whigs, ignoring entirely the
Radical Republicans whom the Whigs persecuted, with Bakunin’s analysis
of the Liberals in Russia. Masaryk deals very thoroughly with his
analysis. To Bakunin, as to Dobroljubov, the Liberals are superfluous
persons; cultured and hyper-cultured persons suffering form the
paralysis and morbidity of civilisation. They are superfluous weaklings
as contrasted against the Muzik.
As I have referred the reader to Masaryk’s work I do not need to analyse
it at great length in the present appendix. He discuses the relation of
Cernysevskii to Herzen and Bakunin as interpreters of Russian literature
and thought. He describes how Cernysevskii had Marx’s writings sent to
him during his exile in Siberia but displayed no interest whatever in
the philosophy of Marx. Masaryk concludes that Cernysevskii continued
the literary work of Belinski, whereas Herzen and Bakunin departed form
Russian traditions and supplied the younger generation with
revolutionary ardour. He quotes Bakunin’s definition of government and
of the reactionaries who maintain the government as privileged persons
in point of political blindness. He concludes from Bakunin’s severity
that he served as the model for Turgenev’s “Dmitri Rudin,” and also
for his “Bazarov.” These creations are supposed to define Bakunin at
different stages of his career and to bring home to the student the fact
that Bakunin’s gospel was that of socio-political destruction, or
pan-destruction.
As a protest against this criticism of Bakunin, it may be urged that the
capitalist world has produced so much self-destruction that Bakunin’s
gospel may prove to be less reprehensible and less destructive than his
critics assume.
Masaryk drives home his conception in an excellent criticism of Thomas
Paine in contrast to Bakunin. In the twenty-forth chapter of his book,
dealing with democracy versus theocracy, and charging Bakunin with
theocracy, despite his Atheism, Masaryk, in section 206, makes the
following comparison: —
“If I mistake not, among the participators in the French Revolution
Thomas Paine may be regarded as the most conspicuous example of a
modern, democratically minded, deliberately progressive revolutionary.
His writings supply the philosophical foundations of the democratic
revolution. Precisely because his participation in the revolution was so
deliberate, he was able to estimate very accurately the errors of the
revolution, and yet would not allow these errors to confuse his mind as
to the general necessity of the movement. Paine, and here he stood
alone, had the courage to defend Louis XVL, saying ‘Kill the king, not
the man,” thus modifying Augustine’s maxim, ‘Dilligite homines,
interficte errores.” Paine, too, was valiant enough to defend the
republic and democracy against his brother revolutionaries.”
“The Russian revolutionaries lack Paine’s qualities. The errors of the
revolutionary movement alarmed Herzen and warped his judgment both of
Europe and of Russia. Bakunin clung to revolution, but his revolutionism
was blind; it is always Bakunin to whom Russians appeal, and to
Bakunin’s doctrine of revolutionary instinct, when what is requisite is
intelligent revolutionary convention. Cernysevskii might perchance have
developed into a Russian Paine, had he not been monstrously condemned to
a living death in Siberia.”
Masaryk overlooks the fact that Bakunin defended liberty against the
dictatorship idea the dictatorship idea of his Marxian brother
revolutionaries. Time may yet prove that Bakunin visioned with more
understanding than his Parliamentary, Marxist, Liberal, and Social
Democratic critics admit.
Karl Marx: His Life and Work, by Otto Ruhle was published in English by
Allen and Unwin in 1929. This work devotes a considerable amount of
space to Bakunin, and in the main is friendly to the great Russian
revolutionist. Ruhle treats very thoroughly of the difference between
Marx and Bakunin.
TO EDITORS, READERS, AND LIBRARIANS
[The author has collected nine pamphlets, Word Library, 1^(st) Series,
into one Volume, and issued them in collected form under the title
Essays in Revolt.. This second series will be collected into another
volume.]
This collection of essays will be sent to a number of papers in all
parts of the world for review. It will be sent specifically to the press
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Editors are asked, as a favour, to send copies of their papers
containing review notices to the author.
The volume will be sent, also, to the chief public libraries in Britain
and the United States. It will be sent post free to any public library
in the world on the receipt of an application from the librarian.
Readers are reminded that the first editions of each of the pamphlets,
revised and collected in this volume, can be consulted in the British
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Readers are asked to purchase several copies of the work and to
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