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Title: The Legacy of Bakunin Author: Paul Avrich Date: April 1970 Language: en Topics: Mikhail Bakunin Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2021 from https://libcom.org/history/paul-avrich-legacy-bakunin Notes: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, D. C., December 30, 1969 [Ed.]. Published in Russian Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1970), pp. 129–142.
A century ago anarchism was emerging as a major force within the
revolutionary movement, and the name of Bakunin, its foremost champion
and prophet, was as well known among the workers and radical
intellectuals of Europe as that of Karl Marx, with whom he was competing
for leadership of the First International. In contrast to Marx, however,
Bakunin had won his reputation chiefly as an activist rather than a
theorist of rebellion. He was not one to sit in libraries, studying and
writing about predetermined revolutions. Impatient for action, he threw
himself into the uprisings of 1848 with irrepressible exuberance, a
Pronetlhcan figure moving with the tide of revolt from Paris to the
barricades of Austria and Germany. Men like Bakunin, a contemporary
remarked, “grow in a hurricane and ripen better in stormy weather than
in sunshine.”[1]
Bakunin’s arrest during the Dresden insurrection of 1849 cut short his
feverish revolutionary activity. He spent the next eight years in
prison, six of them in the darkest dungeons of tsarist Russia, and when
he finally emerged, his sentence commuted to a life term in Siberian
exile, he was toothless from scurvy and his health seriously impaired.
In 1861, however, he escaped his warders and embarked upon a sensational
odyssey that encircled the globe and made his name a legend and an
object of worship in radical groups all over Europe.
As a romantic rebel and an active force in history, Bakunin exerted a
personal attraction that Marx could never rival. “Everything about him
was colossal,” recalled the composer Richard Wagner, a fellow
participant in the Dresden uprising, “and he was full of a primitive
exuberance and strength.”[2] Bakunin himself speaks of his own “love for
the fantastic, for unusual, unheard-of adventures which open up vast
horizons, the end of which cannot be foreseen.”[3] This in turn inspired
extravagant dreams in others, and by the time of his death in 1876 he
had won a unique place among the adventurers and martyrs of the
revolutionary tradition. “This man,” said Alexander Herzen of Bakunin,
“was born not under an ordinary star but under a comet.”[4] His broad
magnanimity and childlike enthusiasm, his burning passion for liberty
and equality, his volcanic onslaughts against privilege and
injustice-all this gave him enormous human appeal in the libertarian
circles of his day.
But Bakunin, as his critics never tired of pointing out, was not a
systematic thinker. Nor did he ever claim to be. For he considered
himself a revolutionist of the deed, “not a philosopher and not an
inventor of systems like Marx.”[5] He refused to recognize the existence
of any preconceived or preordained laws of history. He rejected the view
that social change depends on the gradual unfolding of “objective”
historical conditions. He believed, on the contrary, that men shape
their own destinies, that their lives cannot be squeezed into a
Procrustean bed of abstract sociological formulas. “No theory, no
ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the
world,” Bakunin declared. “I cleave to no system. I am a true
seeker.”[6] By teaching the workers theories, he said, Marx would only
succeed in stifling the revolutionary fervor every man already
possesses-“the impulse to liberty, the passion for equality, the holy
instinct of revolt.” Unlike -Marx’s “scientific socialism,” his own
socialism, Bakunin asserted, was “purely instinctive.”[7]
Bakunin’s influence, then, as Peter Kropotkin remarked, was primarily
that of a “moral personality” rather than of an intellectual
authority.[8] Although he wrote prodigiously, he did not leave a single
finished book to posterity. He was forever starting new works which,
owing to his turbulent existence, were broken off in mid-course and
never completed. His literary output, in Thomas Masaryk’s description,
was a “patchwork of fragments.”[9]
And yet his writings, however erratic and unmethodical, abound in
flashes of insight that illuminate some of the most important questions
of his own time and of ours. What this article seeks to demonstrate is
that Bakunin’s ideas, no less than his personality, have exerted a
lasting influence, an influence that has been particularly noticeable
during the past few years. If ever the spirit of Bakunin spoke, it was
in the student quarter of Paris in May 1968, where the black flag of
anarchism was prominently displayed and where, among the graffiti
inscribed on the walls of the Sorbonne, Bakunin’s famous declaration
that “The urge to destroy is a creative urge” occupied a conspicuous
place. In our own country Eldridge Cleaver, in Soul on Ice, has
expressed his indebtedness to Bakunin and Nechaev’s Catechism of a
Revolutionary, which, interestingly enough, has recently been published
in pamphlet form by the Black Panther organization in Berkeley. The
sociologist Lewis Coser has detected a neo-Bakuninist streak in Regis
Debray, whom he has cleverly dubbed “Nechaev in the Andes,” after
Bakunin’s fanatical young disciple.[10] And Frantz Fanon’s influential
book, The Wretched of the Earth, with its Manichaean visions of the
despised and rejected rising from the lower depths to exterminate their
colonial oppressors, occasionally reads as though lifted straight out of
Bakunin’s collected works. In short, at a time when a new generation has
rediscovered spontaneous, undoctrinaire insurrectionism, Bakunin’s
teachings have come into their own.
What are these ideas that have proved so relevant in the twentieth
century-more so, perhaps, than in Bakunin’s own time? Above all, Bakunin
foresaw the true nature of modern revolution more clearly than any of
his contemporaries, Marx not excepted. For Marx the socialist revolution
required the emergence of a well-organized and class-conscious
proletariat, something to be expected in highly industrialized countries
like Germany or England. Marx regarded the peasantry as the social class
least capable of constructive revolutionary action: together with
Lumpenproletariat of the urban slums, the peasants were benighted and
primitive barbarians, the bulwark of counterrevolution. For Bakunin, by
contrast, the peasantry and Lumpenproletariat, having been least exposed
to the coraupting influences of bourgeois civilization, retained their
primitive vigor and turbulent instinct for revolt The real proletariat,
he said, did not consist in the skilled artisans and organized factory
workers, who were tainted by the pretensions and aspixiations of the
middle classes, but in the great mass of “uncivilized, disinherited, and
illiterate” millions who truly had nothing to lose but their chains.
Thus, while Marx believed in an organized revolution led by a trained
and disciplined working class, Bakunin set his hopes on a peasant
jacquerie combined with a spontaneous rising of the infuriated urban
mobs, a revolt of the uncivilized massts driven by an instinctive
passion for justice and by an unquenchable thirst for revenge. Bakunin’s
model had been set by the great rebellions of Razin and Pugachev in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His vision was of an all-embracing
upheaval, a true revolt of the masses, including, besides the working
class, the darkest elements of society-the Lumpenproletariat, the
primitive peasantry, the unemployed, the outlaws-all pitted against
those who throve on their misery and enslavement.
Subsequent events have, to a remarkable extent, confirmed the accuracy
of Bakunin’s vision. It is small wonder, then, that contemporary
historians have shown a new appreciation of the role of spontaneous and
primitive movements in shaping history. From the work of Barrington
Moore, who has recently investigated the relationship between
modernization and agrarian revolt, as well as of Eric Hobsbawm, George
Rude, E. P. Thompson, and others, we are coming to understand that most
modem revolutions, like those of the past, have been largely unplanned
and spontaneous, driven by mass movements of urban and rural laborers,
and in spirit predominantly anarchistic. No longer can these naive,
primitive, and irrational groups be written off as fringe elements to be
ignored by the historian. They lie, rather, at the very basis of social
change.
Bakunin foresaw that the great revolutions of our time would emerge from
the “lower depths” of comparatively undeveloped countries. He saw
decadence in advanced civilization and vitality in backward, primitive
nations. He insisted that the revolutionary impulse was strongest where
men had no property, no regular employment, and no stake in things as
they were; and this meant that the universal upheaval of his dreams
would start in the south and east of Europe rather than in such
prosperous and disciplined countries as England or Germany.
These revolutionary visions were closely related to Bakunin’s early
Panslavism. In 1848 he spoke of the decadence of Western Europe and saw
hope in the more primitive, less industrialized Slavs for its
regeneration. Convinced that the breakup of the Austrian Empire was an
essential condition for a European revolution, he called for its
destruction and replacement by independent Slavic republics, a dream
realized seventy years later. He correctly anticipated the future
importance of Slavic nationalism, and he saw, moreover, that a
revolution of Slavs would precipitate the social transformation of
Europe. He prophesied, in particular, a messianic role for his native
Russia akin to the Third Rome of the past and the Third International of
the future. “The stars of revolution,” he wrote in 1848, “will rise high
above Moscow from a sea of blood and fire, and will turn into the
lodestar to lead a liberated humanity.”[11]
We can see then why it is Bakunin, rather than Marx, who can claim to be
the true prophet of modem revolution. The three greatest revolutions of
the twentieth century-in Russia, Spain, and Chinahave all occurred in
relatively backward countries and have largely been “peasant wars”
linked with spontaneous outbursts of the urban poor, as Bakunin
predicted. The peasantry and unskilled workers, those primitive groups
for whom Marx expressed withering contempt, have become the mass base of
twentieth-century social upheavals-upheavals which, though often
labelled “Marxist,” are far more accurately described as ‘Bakuninist.”’
Bakunin’s visions, moreover, have anticipated the social ferment within
the “Third World” as a whole, the modem counterpart on a global scale of
Baku nin’s backward, peripheral Europe.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the spirit of Bakunin should
pervade the writings of such contemporary theorists of mass revolt as
Frantz Fanon and Regis Debray, and to a lesser degree of Eldridge
Cleaver and Herbert Marcuse. Fanon, no less than Bakunin, was convinced
that the working class had been corrupted by the values of the
establishment and had thus lost its revolutionary fervor. “The great
mistake,” he wrote, “the inherent defect in the majority of political
parties of the underdeveloped regions has been, following traditional
lines, to approach in the first place those elements which are the most
politically conscious: the working classes in the towns, the skilled
workers and the civil servants-that is to say, a tiny portion of the
population, which hardly represents more than one percent.”[12] Fanon,
like Bakunin, pinned his hopes on the great mass of unprivileged and
un-Europeanized village laborers and Lumpenproletariat from the shanty
towns, uprooted, impoverished, starving, and with nothing to lose. For
Fanon, as for Bakunin, the more primitive the man, the purer his
revolutionary spirit. When Fanon refers to “the hopeless dregs of
humanity” as natural rebels, he is spealdng the language of Bakunin.
With Bakunin, moreover, he shares not only a common faith in the
revolutionary potential of the underworld, but also a vision of rebirth
through fire and a thoroughgoing rejection of European civilization as
decadent and repressive-in place of which, he says, the Third World must
begin “a new history of man.” The Black Panthers, in turn, have
appropriated many of Fanon’s ideas, and Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton
freely acknowledge their debt to him-and indirectly to Bakunin-when
describing the blacks in America as an oppressed colony kept in check by
an occupation army of white policemen and exploited by white businessmen
and politicians.
In a similar vein, Herbert Marcuse writes in One Dimensional Man that
the greatest hope of revolutionary change lies in “the substratum of the
outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and
other colors, the unemployed and the unemployables.” If these groups, he
adds, should ally themselves with the radical intellectuals, there might
occur an uprising of “the most advanced consciousness of humanity and
its most exploited force.”[13] Here again it is Bakunin rather than Marx
whose influence is apparent. For Bakunin set great store by the
disaffected students and intellectuals and assigned them a key role in
the impending world revolution. Bakunin’s prophetic vision of an
all-encompassing class war, in contrast to Marx’s more narrowly
conceived struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, made ample room
for this additional, fragmented element of society for which Marx had
only disdain. In Marx’s view, rootless intellectuals did not comprise a
class of their own, nor were they an integral component of the
bourgeoisie. They were merely “the dregs” of the middle class, “a bunch
of déclassés”-lawyers without clients, doctors without patients, petty
journalists, impecunious students, and their ilk-with no vital role to.
play in the historical process of class conflict.[14] For Bakunin, on
the other hand, the intellectuals were a valuable revolutionary force,
“fervent, energetic youths, totally déclassé, with no career or way
out.”[15] The déclassés, Bakunin pointed out, like the jobless
Lumpenproletariat and the landless peasantry, had no stake whatever in
things as they were and no prospect for improvement except through an
immediate revolution that would demolish the existing order.
In general, then, Bakunin found the greatest revolutionary potential in
uprooted, alienated, déclassé elements, elements either left behind by,
or refusing to fit into, modem society. And here again he was a truer
prophet than his contemporaries. For the alliance of estranged
intellectuals with the dispossessed masses in guerrilla-style warfare
has been a central feature of modem revolutions. Regis Debray, in
Revolution in the Revolution?, another influential manual of modem
rebellion, carries this idea to its ultimate conclusion. People who have
jobs, says Debray, who lead more or less normal working lives in town or
village, however poor and oppressed, are essentially bourgeois because
they have something to lose-their work, their homes, their sustenance.
For Debray only the rootless guerrilla, with nothing to lose but his
life, is the true proletarian, and the revolutionary struggle, if it is
to be successful, must be conducted by bands of professional
guerrillas-i.e. déclassé intellectuals-who, in Debray’s words, would
“initiate the highest forms of class struggle.”[16]
Bakunin differed with Marx on still another point that is of
considerable relevance for the present. Bakunin was a firm believer in
immediate revolution. He rejected the view that revolutionary forces
will emerge gradually, in the fulness of time. What he demanded, in
effect, was “freedom now.” He would countenance no temporizing with the
existing system. The old order was rotten, he argued, and salvation
could be achieved only by destroying it root and branch. Gradualism and
reformism in any shape were futile, palliatives and compromises of no
use. Bakunin’s was a dream of immediate and universal destruction, the
levelling of all existing values and institutions, and the creation of a
new libertarian society on their ashes. In his view, parliamentary
democracy was a shameless fiction so long as men were being subjected to
economic exploitation. Even in the freest of states, he declared, such
as Switzerland and the United States, the civilization of the few is
founded. on the travail and degradation of the many. “I do not believe
in constitutions and laws,” he said. “The best constitution in the world
would not be able to satisfy me. We need something different:
inspiration, life, a new lawless and therefore free world.”[17]
In rejecting the claim of parliamentary democracy to represent the
people, Bakunin, as his biographer E. H. Carr has noted, “spoke a
language which has become more familiar in the twentieth century than it
was in the nineteenth.”[18] Sounding still another modem note, Bakunin
saw the ideal moment for popular revolution in time of war -and
ultimately during a world war. In 1870 he regarded the FrancoPrussian
War as the harbinger of an anarchist revolution in which the state would
be smashed and a free federation of communes arise on its ruins. The one
thing that could save France, he wrote in his Letters to a Frenchman,
was “an elemental, mighty, passionately energetic, anarchistic,
destructive, unrestrained uprising of the popular masses,”[19] a view
with which Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his fellow rebels of May 1968 would
enthusiastically agree. Bakunin believed, like Lenin after him, that
national war must be converted into social rebellion. He dreamt of a
general European war, which he felt was imminent and would destroy the
bourgeois world. His timing, of course, was faulty. As Herzen once
remarked, Bakunin habitually “mistook the third month of pregnancy for
the ninth.” But his vision was at length fulfilled when the First World
War brought about the collapse of the old order and released
revolutionary forces that have yet to play themselves out.
Let us focus for a moment on the Russian Revolution, the prototype of
twentieth-century social upheavals. Here, in essence, was the
spontaneous “revolt of the masses” that Bakunin had foreseen some fifty
years before. In 1917 Russia experienced a virtual breakdown of
political authority, and councils of workers and peasants sprang up
which might form the basis of libertarian communes. Lenin, like Bakunin
before him, encouraged the raw and untutored elements of Russian society
to sweep away what remained of the old regime. Bakunin and Lenin, for
all their differences of temperament and doctrine, were alike in their
refusal to collaborate with the liberals or moderate socialists, whom
they regarded as incurably counterrevolutionary. Both men were
anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal to the roots. Like Bakunin, Lenin called
for instant socialism, without any prolonged capitalist phase of
development. He too believed that the global revolution might be
centered on backward peasant Russia. In his April Theses, moreover, he
put forward a number of specifically Bakuninist propositions: the
transformation of the world war into a revolutionary struggle against
the capitalist system; the renunciation of parliamentary government in
favor of a regime of soviets patterned after the Paris Commune; the
abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy; and the
levelling of incomes. Lenin’s appeal for “a breakup and a revolution a
thousand times more powerful than that of February” had a distinctly
Bakuninist ringso much so, that one anarchist leader in Petrograd was
convinced that Lenin intended to “wither away the state” the moment he
got hold of it.[20]
And, indeed, Lenin’s greatest achievement was to return to the
anarcho-populist roots of the Russian revolutionary tradition, to adapt
his Marxist theories to suit the conditions of a relatively backward
country in which a proletarian revolution made little sense. While the
Marxist in Lenin told him to be patient, to let Russia evolve in
accordance with the laws of historical materialism, the Bakuninist in
him insisted that the revolution must be made at once, by fusing the
proletarian revolution with the revolutions of a land-hungry peasantry
and a militant elite of déclassé intellectuals, social elements for
which Marx, as we have seen, had expressed only contempt. Small wonder
that Lenin’s orthodox Marxist colleagues accused him of becoming an
anarchist and “the heir to the throne of Bakunin.”[21] Small wonder,
too, that several years later a leading Bolshevik historian could write
that Bakunin “was the founder not only of European anarchism but also of
Russian populist insurrectionism and therefore of Russian Social
Democracy from which the Communist party emerged” and that Bakunin’s
methods “in many respects anticipated the emergence of Soviet power and
forecast, in general outline, the course of the great October Revolution
of 1917.”[22]
But if Bakunin foresaw the anarchistic nature of the Russian Revolution,
he also foresaw its authoritarian consequences. If 1917 began, as
Bakunin had hoped, with a spontaneous mass revolt, it ended, as Bakunin
had feared, with the dictatorship of a new ruling elite. Long before
Machajski or Djilas or James Burnham, Bakunin had warned that a “new
class” of intellectuals and semi-intellectuals might seek to replace the
landlords and capitalists and deny the people their freedom. In 1873 he
prophesied with startling accuracy that under a so-called dictatorship
of the proletariat “the leaders of the Communist party, namely Mr. Marx
and his followers, will proceed to liberate humanity in their own way.
They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand... They
will establish a single state bank, concentrating in its hands all
commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production,
and then divide the masses into two armies-industrial and
agricultural-under the direct command of state engineers, who will
constitute a new privileged scientific and political class.”[23]
And yet, for all his assaults on revolutionary dictatorship, Bakunin was
determined to create his own secret society of conspirators, whose
members would be “subjected to a strict hierarchy and to unconditional
obedience.” This clandestine organization, moreover, would remain intact
even after the revolution had been accomplished in order to forestall
the establishment of any “official dictatorship.“24 Thus Bakunin
committed the very sin he so bitterly denounced. He himself was one of
the principal originators of the idea of a secret and closely knit
revolutionary party bound together by implicit obedience to a
revolutionary dictator, a party that he likened at one point to the
Jesuit Order. While he recognized the intimate connection between means
and ends, while he saw that the methods used to make the revolution must
affect the nature of society after the revolution, he nonetheless
resorted to methods which were the precise contradiction of his own
libertarian principles. His ends pointed towards freedom, but his
means-the clandestine revolutionary party -pointed towards totalitarian
dictatorship. Bakunin, in short, was trapped in a classic dilemma: He
understood that the lack of an efficient revolutionary organization
would spell inevitable failure, but the means he chose inevitably
corrupted the ends towards which he aspired.
More than that, on the question of revolutionary morality Bakunin
preached in effect that the ends justify the means. In his Catechism of
a Revolutionary, written with Nechaev exactly a hundred years ago, the
revolutionist is depicted as a complete immoralist, bound to commit any
crime, any treachery, any baseness to bring about the destruction of the
existing order. The revolutionist, wrote Bakunin and Nechaev, “despises
and hates present-day social morality in all its forms. He regards
everything as moral that favors the triumph of the revolution... All
soft and enervating feelings of friendship, love, gratitude, even honor
must be stifled in him by a cold passion for the revolutionary cause...
Day and night he must have one thought, one aim-merciless
destruction.”[24] Eldridge Cleaver tells us in Soul on Ice that he “fell
in love” with Bakunin and Nechaev’s Catechism and took it as a
revolutionary bible, incorporating its principles into his everyday life
by employing “tactics of ruthlessness in my dealings with everyone with
whom I came into contact.”[25] (The Catechism, as mentioned above, has
recently been published as a pamphlet by Cleaver’s Black Panther
organization in Berkeley.)
Here again, as in his belief in a clandestine organization of
revolutionaries as well as a “temporary” revolutionary dictatorship,
Bakunin was a direct forebear of Lenin. This makes it easier to
understand how it was possible for the anarchists in 1917 to collaborate
with their Bolshevik rivals to overthrow the Kerensky government. After
the October Revolution, in fact, one anarchist leader even tried to work
out an “anarchist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[26]
There is tragic irony in the fact that, as in Spain twenty years later,
the anarchists should have helped to destroy the fragile embryo of
democracy, thus preparing the way for a new tyranny which was to be the
author of their downfall. For once in power the Bolsheviks proceeded to
suppress their libertarian allies, and the revolution turned into the
opposite of all Bakunin’s hopes. Among the few anarchist groups allowed
to remain in existence was one which solemnly declared its intention to
launch the stateless society “in interplanetary space but not upon
Soviet territory”[27]-which raises some interesting prospects in this
year of Armstrong and Aldrin! For most anarchists, however, there
remained only the melancholy consolation that their mentor, Bakunin, had
predicted it all fifty years before.
Bakunin’s legacy, then, has been an ambivalent one. This was because
Bakunin himself was a man of paradox, possessed of an ambivalent nature.
A nobleman who yearned for a peasant revolt, a libertarian with an
irresistible urge to dominate others, an intellectual with a powerful
anti-intellectual streak, he could preach unrestrained liberty while
spinning from his brain a whole network of secret organizations and
demanding from his followers unconditional obedience to his will. In his
notorious Confession to the tsar, moreover, he was capable of appealing
to Nicholas I to carry the banner of Slavdom into Western Europe and do
away with the effete parliamentary system. His Panslavism and
anti-intellectualism, his pathological hatred of Germans and Jews (Marx,
of course, being both), his cult of violence and revolutionary
immoralism, his hatred of liberalism and reformism, his faith in the
peasantry and Lumpenproletariat all this brought him uncomfortably close
to later authoritarian movements of both the Left and the Right,
movements from which Bakunin himself would doubtless have recoiled in
horror had he lived to see their mercurial rise.
Yet, for all his ambivalence, Bakunin remains an influential figure.
Herzen once called him “a Columbus without an America, and even without
a ship.”[28] But the present revolutionary movement owes him a good deal
of its energy, its audacity, and its tempestuousness. His youthful
exuberance, his contempt for middle-class conventions, and his emphasis
on deeds rather than theories exert considerable appeal among today’s
rebellious youth, for whom Bakunin provides an example of anarchism in
action, of revolution as a way of life. His ideas, too, continue to be
relevant-perhaps more relevant than ever. Whatever his defects as a
scholar, especially when compared with Marx, they are more than
outweighed by his revolutionary vision and intuition. Bakunin was the
prophet of primitive rebellion, of the conspiratorial revolutionary
party, of terrorist amoralism, of guerrilla insurrectionism, of
revolutionary dictatorship, and of the emergence of a new ruling class
that would impose its will on the people and rob them of their freedom.
He was the first Russian rebel to preach social revolution in cosmic
terms and on an international scale. His formulas of self-determination
and direct action exercise an increasing appeal, while his chief bete
noire, the centralized bureaucratic state, continues to fulfil his most
despairing predictions. Of particular note, after the lessons of Russia,
Spain, and China, is Bakunin’s message that social emancipation must be
attained by libertarian rather than dictatorial means. Moreover, at a
time when workers’ control is again being widely discussed, it is well
to remember that Bakunin, perhaps even more than Proudhon, was a prophet
of revolutionary syndicalism, insisting that a free federation of trade
unions would be “the living germ of the new social order which is to
replace the bourgeois world.”[29]
But above all Bakunin is attractive to present-day students and
intellectuals because his libertarian brand of socialism provides an
alternative vision to the bankrupt authoritarian socialism of the
twentieth century. His dream of a decentralized society of autonomous
communes and labor federations appeals to those who are seeking to
escape from a centralized, conformist, and artificial world. “I am a
student: do not fold, mutilate, or spindle me” has a distinctive
Bakuninist flavor. Indeed, student rebels, even when professed Marxists,
are often closer in spirit to Bakunin, whose black flag has occasionally
been unfurled in campus demonstrations from Berkeley to Paris. Their
stress on the natural, the spontaneous, and the unsystematic, their urge
towards a simpler way of life, their distrust of bureaucracy and of
centralized authority, their belief that all men should take part in
decisions affecting their lives, their slogans of “participatory
democracy,” “freedom now,” “power to the people,” their goals of
community control, workers’ management, rural cooperation, equal
education and income, dispersal of state power-all this is in harmony
with Bakunin’s vision. Even the ambivalence among so many youthful
rebels, who combine the antithetical methods of libertarian anarchism
and authoritarian socialism, reflects the ambivalence within Bakunin’s
own revolutionary philosophy and personal makeup.
Finally, Bakunin has found an echo wherever young dissidents question
our uncritical faith in self-glorifying scientific progress. A hundred
years ago Bakunin warned that scientists and technical experts might use
their knowledge to dominate others, and that one day ordinary citizens
would be rudely awakened to find that they had become “the slaves, the
playthings, and the victims of a new group of ambitious men.”’[30]
Bakunin therefore preached a “revolt of life against science, or rather,
against the rule of science.” Not that he rejected the validity of
scientific knowledge. But he recognized its dangers. He saw that life
cannot be reduced to laboratory formulas and that efforts in this
direction would lead to the worst form of tyranny. In a letter written
barely a year before his death, he spoke of the “evolution and
development of the principle of evil” throughout the world and
forewarned of what we now call the “military-industrial complex.”
“Sooner or later,” he wrote, “these enormous military states will have
to destroy and devour each other. But what a prospectl”[31]
How justified were his fears can be appreciated now in an age of nuclear
and biological weapons of mass destruction. At a time when the
idealization of primitive social elements is again in fashion, when mass
rebellion is again being widely preached, and when modern technology
threatens Western civilization with extinction, Bakunin clearly merits a
reappraisal. One is reminded, in conclusion, of a remark made by the
great anarchist historian Max Nettlau some thirty years ago: that
Bakunin’s “ideas remain fresh and will live forever.”[32]
[1]
E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, London, 1957, p. 118.
[2]
E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin, New York, 1961, p. 196.
[3] Lampert, op. cit., p. 138.
[4] Eugene Pyziur, The Philosophy of Anarchism of M. A. Bakunin,
Milwaukee, 1955, p. 1
[5] Iu. M. Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, 4 vis., Moscow,
1926–27, III, 112.
[6] Carr, op. cit., p. 175.
[7]
M. A. Bakunin, Oeuvres, 6 vls., Paris, 1895–1913, II, 399; Steklov,
op. cit., I, 189.
[8] Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Boston, 1899, p. 288.
[9] Pyziur, op. cit., p. 10.
[10] Dissent, January-February 1968, pp. 41–44.
[11] George Woodcock, Anarchism, Cleveland, 1962, p. 155.
[12] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York, 1966, p. 88.
[13] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, Boston, 1964, pp. 256–57.
[14] Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, Boston, 1939, p. 127. Cf. Lewis
Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals, New York, 1969, pp. 216–28.
[15]
M. A. Bakunin, Gesammelte Werke, 3 vls., Berlin, 1921–24, III, 120–21.
[16] Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, New York, 1967, pp.
95–116.
[17] Carr, op. cit., p. 181.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid., p. 411.
[20] Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, Princeton, 1967, p. 129.
[21] Ibid., p. 128.
[22] Steklov, op. cit., I, 9, 343–45; III, 118–27.
[23]
M. A. Bakunin, Izbrannye sochineniia, 5 vls., Petrograd, 1919–22, I,
237.
[24] Nomad, op. cit., pp. 227–33.
[25] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, New York, 1968, p. 12.
[26] Avrich, op. cit., p. 200.
[27] Ibid, p. 231
[28] Pyziur, op. cit., p. 5.
[29] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Indore, n.d., p. 88.
[30] Bakunin, Oeuvres, IV, 376.
[31] Nomad, op. cit., p. 206; K. J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl
Marx, Melbourne, 1948, p. 304.
[32]
G. P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, New York,
1953, p. 48.