💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › michael-schmidt-bakunin-s-women.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:49:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Bakunin’s Women Author: Michael Schmidt Date: November 12, 2012 Language: en Topics: Mikhail Bakunin, book review Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/24259
Mikhail Bakunin “reappeared as a bogeyman after September 11” because
the 1920 bombing of Wall Street by the Galleanist anarchist Mario Buda
which left thirty dead, 200 injured, demolished the magnate J.P.
Morgan’s office, and caused $2-million in property damage was the worst
prior terror attack in New York, “but his casting as the grandfather of
terrorism was an exercise of mystification rather than explanation.”
Bakunin’s towering intellect has always been reduced to caricature of
his supposedly chaotic nature, despite the fact that the 1872 split in
the First International left the Marxists with perhaps a total of 1,000
adherents across the world, while the anarchist faction (usually
misrepresented as the minority) could count mass trade unions such as
the Spanish FRE of 60,000 members, the Mexican CGO of 15,000 members,
and the Italians unions with 30,000 members. It speaks volumes about the
proletarian threat that Bakunin’s ideas posed to power that unlike
Marxism, with its state-sponsored press and comfortable academic
sinecures, that his complete writings only became available in 2000
thanks to the International Institute of Social History’s multilingual
CD-ROM Bakounine: Ouvres complètes.
Given that Leier’s timely biography was published several years ago –
part of a wave of new anarchist movement studies emanating from Canada,
not least focused on what was perhaps the highest expression of “real,
existing anarchism,” the Makhnovist Ukraine – I am not going to attempt
a complete review, but rather focus on a key area in the formulation of
Bakunin’s thought: the women in his life.
While clearly sympathetic to Bakunin, Leier treats fairly with his not
very likeable primary antagonist, Karl Marx, to whom all his turbulent
life, Bakunin acknowledged a huge debt: Marx “advanced and proved the
incontrovertible truth, confirmed by the entire past and present of
human society, nations, and states, that economic fact has always
preceded legal and political right. The exposition and demonstration of
that truth constitutes one of Marx’s principle contributions to
science.” Leier also has sympathies for libertarian strains of Marxism,
concluding the book by saying that “with the main protagonists now long
dead, it may be possible to consider the similarities [between anarchism
and Marxism] and find ways to pose the differences as a progressive,
dynamic, and creative tension as we confront the problems of the
twenty-first century.”
Lively, accessible and judicious, in essence, Leier’s work is a crucial
restoration of Bakunin the thinker, who always tested his theories
against the barricades in a manner anathema to the reclusive Marx. What
emerges is a long progression from an idealistic pan-Slavism to a
rigorously materialist anarchist-collectivism, Bakunin’s evolving praxis
continually tested in the fires of revolt and reaction. And the clarity
of his thought is revealed to be penetrating, even today. Take for
example his comment on speculative capital: “speculation and
exploitation undoubtedly constitute a sort of work, but work that is
entirely unproductive. By this reckoning, thieves and kings work as
well.”
But I want to focus briefly on a group that Leier shows to have been
formative in the shaping of that intellect, the women who surrounded him
in youth: his sisters Liubov, Varvara, Tatiana and Alexandra, and their
friends, the Beyer sisters, Alexandra and Natalie. In the claustrophobic
atmosphere of the Russian academy of the 1830s where philosophy was
outlawed because it rejected received wisdom, the creation of reading
circles by the most progressive students proved a crucial first step in
creating a new post-Decembrist generation of Russian militants. “The two
most important circles were one headed and named after Nicholas
Stankevich and another jointly by Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev.
Almost exclusively male, the Stankevich circle and the Herzen-Ogarev
circle became centres for avant-garde thought in literature, philosophy
and politics.
“According to Herzen and the many historians who have accepted his
memoirs uncritically, the circles sprang up spontaneously. More careful
historians, however, have noted that they owed much to the sophisticated
discussion groups of the Bakunin and Beyer sisters. One reason Bakunin
loved his sisters was the intellectual equality they shared, and they
proved able sparring partners as he thought and rethought his own
philosophy.” The older sisters, Liubov and Varvara, “were more conscious
rebels” than their brother and the Bakunin-Beyer circle, properly
called, created “the first spaces for provocative discussion” among the
new generation that would eventually flower into the nihilist, narodnik,
Essaire, maximalist, Marxist, and anarchist strands that would play such
key roles in challenging and finally overthrowing the power of the Tsar.
Curiously, it was above all the narodniks, whose quasi-anarchist
philosophy of “going to the people” that drew an unprecedented number of
women into their ranks.
Tragically constrained by the gendered confines of Russian society,
Liubov Bakunin died of tuberculosis in 1838, and it was only Varvara who
to some extent lived her ideals, following her brother Mikhail abroad
and mimicking his wandering, free-thinking lifestyle. But Leier’s work
suggests that the Bakunin-Beyer circle and its far-reaching influences
is deserving of further serious in-depth study. Certainly, his sisters’
example early confirmed Bakunin in his sexual egalitarianism: women
“differing from man but not inferior to him, intelligent, industrious,
and free like him, is declared his equal both in rights and in political
and social functions and duties.”
His beliefs were sorely put to the test when he allowed the love of his
life, his wife Antonia, of whom he wrote to Herzen “she shares in heart
and spirit all my aspirations,” to follow her heart in falling in love
with and even bearing the children of fellow militant Carlo Gambuzzi.
Perhaps because of this generosity of spirit, Antonia Bakunin “with no
prospect of a comfortable or easy life… would stay with the errant
anarchist until his death.”
After the suppression of anarchism in Russia by Marx’s ideological
heirs, it was another woman, the indomitable historian Natalia
Mikhailovna Pirumova (1923–1997), who rescued much of the works of
Bakunin and Kropotkin from obscurity, and whose brave and tireless work
in doing so is credited with the revival of the Russian
anarchist/syndicalist movement from 1979. By 1962, Pirumova was working
for the USSR History Institute and had already scandalised Soviet
academia with her work on Bakunin and Kropotkin in the historical
journal Prometey. By 1966, she had gathered sufficient material to
publish a book on Bakunin which was extended in 1970 and reprinted in
the popular Life of Remarkable People series. Despite disgruntled
reviews from the official press, she followed this up with a book on the
life of Kropotkin in 1972. In this period, in echo of the Bakunin-Beyer
circle, she gathered around her not only historians of Russia’s
socialist movements, but the Vorozhdeniye (Renaissance) literary group
as well as political prisoners including anarchists and socialists who
had survived the gulags. A 93-year-old Essaire who attended Pirumova’s
funeral in 1997 said that in Pirumova’s presence “we stopped thinking of
ourselves as outcasts, forever excluded from society by Stalin”.
It is a distinct irony that when he died, Bakunin remained an outcast,
his funeral drawing a mere 40 mourners (albeit more than Marx’s),
whereas a measure of the movement he helped initiate is given by the
fact that Buenaventura Durruti’s funeral, 50 years later during the
aerial bombardment of Madrid, drew 500,000 mourners. In Bakunin’s very
last public fray with his pen, the tired old fighter asked only that he
be forgotten so that a new generation could take up the torch of
liberty. Fortunately, while largely deprived of Bakunin’s writings, the
militants who built the mass anarchist trade unions that came to
dominate the organised working class of Latin America in particular –
fully 50 years in Cuba, for instance, before the tiny Communist Party
was founded – relied heavily on his praxis, demonstrating to our own age
that a libertarian proletarian counter-power is viable and not only a
pretty dream.