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Title: Michael Bakunin Author: James Guillaume Date: August 1907 Language: en Topics: history, Michael Bakunin, biography Source: Retrieved on September 14, 2011 from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/guillaume/works/bakunin.htm Notes: From Bakunin on Anarchy, translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff, 1971.
James Guillaume, Bakunin’s friend and comrade-in-arms, edited the last
five volumes of the six-volume French edition of his collected works.
Guillaume’s biographical sketch of Bakunin, originally appeared in his
introduction to Volume II of that edition.
This sketch is a primary source not only on the life of Bakunin, but
also on the most significant events in the socialist movement of that
period. It incidentally contributes valuable background information for
many of the other selections in the present volume. Guillaume, who did
not limit himself to recording events but also took part in shaping
them, had been inclined toward anarchism even before he met Bakunin in
1869. Earlier, he had been one of the founders of the First
International in Switzerland, where it held its first congress, in
Geneva, in 1866. He attended all its congresses, and eventually
published a four-volume history of the International. Guillaume also
wrote widely on libertarian theory and practice and edited a number of
periodicals. His extensive writings on cultural subjects included
substantial contributions to the theory of progressive education as
represented particularly by the early-nineteenth-century Swiss educator
Johann Pestalozzi.
Michael Alexandrovich Bakunin was born on May 18, 1814 on his family’s
estate in the little village of Premukhino, in the province of Tver. His
father was a career diplomat who, as a young attache, had lived for
years in Florence and Naples. Upon his return to Russia, he settled down
on his paternal estate where, at the age of forty, he married an
eighteen-year-old girl from the prominent Muraviev family. Given to
liberal ideas, he was for a while platonically involved with one of the
Decembrist’ clubs. After Nicholas I became Tsar, however, Bakunin gave
up politics and devoted himself to the care of his estate and the
education of his children, five girls and five boys, the oldest of whom
was Michael.
At fifteen, Michael entered the Artillery School in St. Petersburg
where, three years later, he was commissioned a junior officer and sent
to garrison in the provinces of Minsk and of Grodno, in Poland. He
arrived in the latter post shortly after the Polish insurrection of 1832
had been crushed. The spectacle of Poland terrorized shocked the gently
bred young officer and deepened his hatred of despotism. Two years
later, he resigned from the army and went to Moscow, where he lived for
the next six years, spending some summer vacations on the family estate.
In Moscow, Bakunin studied philosophy and began to read the French
Encyclopedists. His enthusiasm for the philosophy of Fichte, shared with
his friends Stankevich and Belinsky, led Bakunin to translate, in 1836,
Fichte’s Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (Lectures on the
Vocation of the Scholar). From Fichte, Bakunin went on to immerse
himself in the philosophy of Hegel, then the most influential thinker
among German intellectuals. The young man wholeheartedly embraced
Hegelianism, bedazzled by the famous maxim that “Everything that exists
is rational” — even though it also served to justify the Prussian state.
In 1839 he met Alexander Herzen and the latter’s friend Nicholas Ogarev,
who had returned from exile to Moscow; but their ideas and his were too
divergent at the time for a meeting of minds.
In 1840, aged twenty-six, Bakunin went to St. Petersburg and thence to
Germany, to study and prepare himself for a professorship in philosophy
or history at the University of Moscow. When, in the same year, Nicholas
Stankevich died in Italy, Bakunin still believed in the immortality of
the soul (letter to Herzen, October 23, 1840). In the course of his
intellectual evolution, however, he came to interpret the philosophy of
Hegel as a revolutionary theory. As Ludwig Feuerbach, in his The Essence
of Christianity, arrived at atheism by means of Hegelian doctrine, so
Michael Bakunin applied Hegel to bis own political and social ideas and
arrived at social revolution.
From Berlin, Bakunin moved in 1842 to Dresden. There he collaborated
with Arnold Ruge in publishing the Deutsche Jahrbücher (“German
Yearbooks”), in which he first began to formulate his revolutionary
ideas. His article “Reaction in Germany: A Fragment by a Frenchman”
concluded with the famous declaration:
Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and
annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative
source of all life. The desire for destruction is also a creative
desire.
Herzen believed at first that the article had actually been written by a
Frenchman, and wrote in his personal diary that “this is a powerful and
firm appeal, a victory for the democratic party. The article is from
beginning to end bound to arouse wide interest.”
The illustrious German poet Georg Herwegh visited Bakunin in Dresden,
and the two men formed a lasting friendship. A resident of Dresden who
also became Bakunin’s devoted friend was the musician Adolf Reichel.
Within a short time the Saxon government became overtly hostile toward
Ruge and his collaborators, and Bakunin and Herwegh left Saxony for
Switzerland. There Bakunin came into contact with the German communists
grouped around Wilhelm Weitling. In Bern during the winter of 1843–44, a
lifelong friendship developed with Adolf Vogt, who later became
professor of medicine at the University of Bern. When the Russian
government demanded that the Swiss authorities deport Bakunin to Russia,
he left Bern in February 1844, stopping first in Brussels and then in
Paris, where he remained until 1847.
In Paris Bakunin again met Herwegh, the latter’s wife, Emma Siegmund,
and Karl Marx, who had arrived there in 1843. Marx at first collaborated
with Arnold Ruge, but he and Engels soon went their own way and began to
formulate their own ideology. Bakunin saw much of Proudhon, with whom he
held night-long discussions, and was also on friendly terms with George
Sand. The years in Paris were the most fruitful for Bakunin’s
intellectual development — it was then that the basic outlines of the
ideas underlying his revolutionary program began to take shape, though
it was not until much later that he freed himself entirely of
metaphysical idealism. Bakunin himself informs us, in a manuscript
written in 1871, of his intellectual relations with Marx and Proudhon
during this period. He recalls that:
As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably
more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy,
I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical aberrations, and my
socialism was only instinctive. Although younger than I, he was already
an atheist, a conscious materialist, and an informed socialist. It was
precisely at this time that he was elaborating the foundations of his
system as it stands today. We saw each other often. I greatly respected
him for his learning and for his passionate devotion — though it was
always mingled with vanity — to the cause of the proletariat. I eagerly
sought his conversation, which was always instructive and witty when it
was not inspired by petty hate, which alas! was only too often the case.
There was never any frank intimacy between us — our temperaments did not
permit it. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right, I
called him vain, perfidious, and cunning, and I also was right.
Bakunin offers the following characterization of Engels in his book
Statism and Anarchy:
In 1845 Marx was the leader of the German communists. While his devoted
friend Engels was just as intelligent as he, he was not as erudite.
Nevertheless, Engels was more practical, and no less adept at political
calumny, lying, and intrigue. Together they founded a secret society of
German communists or authoritarian socialists.
In a French manuscript of 1870, Bakunin evaluates Proudhon, comparing
him to Marx:
As I told him a few months before his death, Proudhon, in spite of all
his efforts to shake off the tradition of classical idealism, remained
all his life an incorrigible idealist, immersed in the Bible, in Roman
law and metaphysics. His great misfortune was that he had never studied
the natural sciences or appropriated their method. He had the instincts
of a genius and he glimpsed the right road, but hindered by his
idealistic thinking patterns, he fell always into the old errors.
Proudhon was a perpetual contradiction: a vigorous genius, a
revolutionary thinker arguing against idealistic phantoms, and yet never
able to surmount them himself.... Marx as a thinker is on the right
path. He has established the principle that juridical evolution in
history is not the cause but the effect of economic development, and
this is a great and fruitful concept. Though he did not originate it —
it was to a greater or lesser extent formulated before him by many
others — to Marx belongs the credit for solidly establishing it as the
basis for an economic system. On the other hand, Proudhon understood and
felt liberty much better than he. Proudhon, when not obsessed with
metaphysical doctrine, was a revolutionary by instinct; he adored Satan
and proclaimed Anarchy. Quite possibly Marx could construct a still more
rational system of liberty, but he lacks the instinct of liberty — he
remains from head to foot an authoritarian.
On November 29 1847, at a banquet in Paris commemorating the Polish
insurrection of 1830, Bakunin delivered a speech in which he severely
denounced the Russian government. At the request of the Russian
Ambassador, Kiselev, he was expelled from France. To counteract the
widespread protests of those who sympathized with Bakunin, Kiselev
circulated the rumor that he had been employed by the Russian government
to pose as a revolutionary, but that he had gone too far. (This is
related by Bakunin in a letter to Fanelli, May 29, 1867.) Bakunin then
went to Brussels, where he again met Marx. Of Marx and his circle
Bakunin wrote to his friend Herwegh:
The German workers, Bornstadt, Marx, Engels — especially Marx — poison
the atmosphere. Vanity, malevolence, gossip, pretentiousness and
boasting in theory and cowardice in practice. Dissertations about life,
action, and feeling — and complete absence of life, action, and feeling
— and complete absence of life. Disgusting flattery of the more advanced
workers — and empty talk. According to them, Feuerbach is a “bourgeois,”
and the epithet BOURGEOIS! is shouted ad nauseam by people who are from
head to foot more bourgeois than anyone in a provincial city — in short,
foolishness and lies, lies and foolishness. In such an atmosphere no one
can breathe freely. I stay away from them and I have openly declared
that I will not go to their Kommunistischer Handwerkerverein [Communist
Trade Union Society] and will have nothing to do with this organization.
The revolution of February 24, 1848, opened the doors of France once
again to Bakunin. just as he was about to return to Paris, however,
events in Vienna and Berlin caused him to change his plans, and he left
for Germany in April. He was also then hoping to participate in the
Polish insurrectionary movement. In Cologne, he again met Marx and
Engels, who had begun publication of their Neue Rheinische Zeitung. It
was at this time that the “Democratic Legion of Paris” organized an
expedition to Germany to stage an insurrection in the Grand Duchy of
Baden. The attempt was a disastrous failure. Marx and Engels violently
attacked Bakunin’s friend Herwegh, who together with other German exiles
was one of the leaders of this ill-fated expedition. Bakunin came to his
defense. Much laterin 1871 — Bakunin wrote that “I must openly admit
that in this controversy Marx and Engels were in the right. With
characteristic insolence, they attacked Herwegh personally when he was
not there to defend himself. In a face-to-face confrontation with them,
I heatedly defended Herwegh, and our mutual dislike began then.”
Later, in June 1848, Bakunin went to Berlin and Breslau and then to
Prague, where he tried to influence the Slav Congress in a revolutionary
democratic direction. After participating in the week-long insurrection,
which was brutally suppressed, he returned to Breslau. He was still
there when the Neue Rheinische Zeitung — controlled by Marx — published
in its July 6 issue a letter from a Paris correspondent which read, in
part:
In regard to pro-Slav propaganda, we were told yesterday that George
Sand possesses documents which greatly compromise the Russian exile
Michael Bakunin and reveal him as an instrument or newly enrolled AGENT
OF RUSSIA, who played a key part in the arrest of the unfortunate Poles.
George Sand has shown these documents to some of her friends. [See Neue
Rheinische Zeitung of 3^(rd) August 1848]
Bakunin immediately protested this infamous slander in a letter
published in the Allgemeine Oder Zeitung of Breslau, and reprinted in
the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on July 16. He also wrote to George Sand
asking for an explanation. She replied in an open letter to the editor
of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
The allegations of your correspondent are entirely false. There are no
documents. I do not have the slightest proof of the insinuations that
you make against M. Bakunin. I have never had, nor have I ever
authorized any one else to cast, the slightest doubt on his personal
integrity and devotion to his principles. I appeal to your sense of
honor and to your conscience to print this letter immediately in your
paper.
Marx printed her letter together with the comment: “We have fulfilled
the obligation of the press to exercise strict vigilance over prominent
public individuals and at the same time given M. Bakunin the opportunity
to dispel suspicions which have been current in certain Paris circles.”
It is useless to elaborate on the singular theory that it is the duty of
the press to publish false and libelous accusations without attempting
to verify the facts!
The next month Bakunin and Marx met again in Berlin, and a reluctant
reconciliation was effected. Bakunin recalled the incident in 1871:
“Mutual friends induced us to embrace, and during our conversation Marx
remarked, half-smilingly, ‘Do you know that I am now the chief of a
secret communist society, so well disciplined that had I said to any
member, “Kill Bakunin,” you would be dead?’
Expelled from Prussia and Saxony, Bakunin spent the rest of the year
1848 in the principality of Anhalt. There he published, in German, the
pamphlet Appeal to the Slavs: By a Russian Patriot, Michael Bakunin,
Member of the Slav Congress. In this work he proposed that revolutionary
Slavs unite with the revolutionaries of other nations — Hungarians,
Germans, Italians — to overthrow the three major autocracies of the
time: the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Kingdom
of Prussia; this would be followed by the free federation of the
emancipated Slavic peoples. Marx criticized these ideas in the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung of February 14, 1849:
Bakunin is our friend, but this does not prevent us from criticizing his
pamphlet. Apart from the Russians, the Poles, and perhaps the Turkish
Slavs, no Slavic people has a future, for the simple reason that they
lack the indispensable historical, geographical, political, and
industrial conditions for independence and vitality.
Regarding the difference between Marx’s and his own views on the Slavic
question, Bakunin wrote, in 1871:
In 1848 we disagreed, and I must admit that his reasoning was more
correct than mine. Carried away, enraptured by the atmosphere of the
revolutionary movement, I was much more interested in the negative than
in the positive aspect of the revolution. Nevertheless, there is one
point on which Marx was wrong, and I was right. As a Slav, I wanted the
emancipation of the Slavic race from the German yoke, and as a German
patriot he did not admit then, nor will he admit now, the right of the
Slavs to free themselves from German domination. He thought then, as he
does now, that the mission of the Germans is to civilize — that is to
say, Germanize — the Slavs, for better or for worse.
In January 1849 Bakunin secretly arrived in Leipzig. There, together
with a group of young Czechs from Prague, he occupied himself with
preparations for an uprising in Bohemia. In spite of the growing
reaction in Germany and France, hope still lived, for there was more
than one place in Europe where the revolution had not yet been crushed.
Pope Pius IX, expelled from Rome, had been replaced by the Roman
Republic, headed by the triumvirate of Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini,
with Garibaldi in command of the army. ‘Venice, its freedom regained,
heroically repulsed the siege of the Austrians; the Hungarians,
rebelling against Austria under the leadership of Kossuth, proclaimed
the defeat of the Habsburgs. And on May 3, 1849, a popular rebellion
broke out in Dresden, provoked by the refusal of the King of Saxony to
accept the constitution of the German Empire approved by the Frankfurt
Parliament. The King fled, and a provisional government was proclaimed.
For five days the rebels controlled the city. Bakunin, who had left
Leipzig for Dresden in the middle of April, became one of the leaders of
the rebellion and inspired the highest measure of heroism in the men
defending the barricades against the Prussian troops. A gigantic figure
of a man, already renowned as a revolutionary, Bakunin became the focus
of all eyes. An aura of legend soon enveloped him. To him alone were
attributed the fires set by the rebels; about him it was written that he
was “the very soul of the Revolution,” that he initiated widespread
terrorism, that to stop the Prussians from shooting into the barricades
he advised the defenders to take the art treasures from the museums and
galleries and display them from the barricades — the stories were
endless.
On May 9 the rebels — greatly outnumbered and outgunned — retreated to
Freiberg. There Bakunin pleaded in vain with Stephen Born (organizer of
the Arbeiter Verbruderung, the first organization of German workers) to
take his remaining troops to Bohemia and spark a new uprising. Born
refused, and disbanded his forces. Seeing that there was nothing more to
be done, Bakunin, the composer Richard Wagner, and Heubner — a democrat,
very loyal to Bakunin — went to Chemnitz. There, during the night, armed
bourgeois arrested Heubner and Bakunin and turned them over to the
Prussians. Wagner hid in his sister’s house and escaped.
The role of Bakunin in this rebellion had been that of a determined
fighter as well as a leading strategist. Even the hostile Marx felt
obliged to acknowledge his outstanding contribution in one of his
letters, some years later, to the New York Daily Tribune (October 2,
1852), entitled “ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany ”:
In Dresden, the battle in the streets went on for four days. The
shopkeepers of Dresden, organized into “community guards,” not only
refused to fight, but many of them supported the troops against the
insurrectionists. Almost all of the rebels were workers from the
surrounding factories. In the Russian refugee Michael Bakunin they found
a capable and cool-headed leader.
Conducted to the Königstein fortress, Bakunin spent many months in
detention, and eventually was condemned to death, on January 14, 1850.
In June his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and the prisoner
was then extradited to Austria, at the request of the Austrian
authorities. Bakunin was first jailed in Prague and then, in March 1851,
transferred to Olmutz, where he was sentenced to hang. Once again his
sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was brutally treated in
the Austrian prisons: his hands and feet were chained, and in Olmutz he
was chained to the prison wall.
Shortly thereafter, the Austrians handed Bakunin over to Russia, where
he was imprisoned in the dreadful dungeons of the Fortress of Peter and
Paul. At the beginning of his captivity, Count Orlov, an emissary of the
Tsar, visited Bakunin and told him that the Tsar requested a written
confession, hoping that the confession would place Bakunin spiritually
as well as physically in the power of the Russian Bear. Since all his
acts were known, he had no secrets to reveal, and so he decided to write
to the Tsar:
You want my confession; but you must know that a penitent sinner is not
obliged to implicate or reveal the misdeeds of others. I have only the
honor and the conscience that I have never betrayed anyone who has
confided in me, and this is why I will not give you any names.
When the Tsar, Nicholas I, read Bakunin’s letter, he remarked, “He is a
good lad, full of spirit, but he is a dangerous man and we must never
cease watching him.”
With the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, the Fortress of Peter and
Paul was exposed to bombardment by the English, and Bakunin was
transferred to Schlusselberg prison. ‘here he was attacked by scurvy,
and all his teeth fell out. Let me now interject what I myself wrote the
day after Bakunin died, stating only what he personally told me about
the last period of his imprisonment:
The atrocious prison diet had completely ruined his stomach (scurvy) so
that anything he ate caused nausea and vomiting, and he could digest
only finely chopped sour cabbage. But if his body was debilitated, his
spirit was indomitable. It was this above all he feared, that prison
life would break his spirit; that he would no longer hate injustice and
feel in his heart the passion for rebellion that sustained him; that the
day would come when he would pardon his tormentors and accept his fate.
But he need not have feared: not for a single moment did his spirit
waver, and he emerged from the purgatory of his confinement as he
entered, undaunted and defiant....
He recounted to us, also, that to distract his mind from his long,
loathsome solitude, he found pleasure in mentally re-enacting the legend
of Prometheus the Titan, benefactor of mankind. who while chained to the
Caucasian Rock by order of Olympus, heard the sweet plaintive melody of
the ocean nymphs bringing consolation and joy to the victim of Jupiter’s
vengeance.
It was hoped that with the death of Nicholas I Bakunin’s situation would
be to some extent alleviated. However, the new Tsar, Alexander II,
personally crossed Bakunin’s name off the amnesty list. Much later,
Bakunin’s mother went before the Tsar and begged him to have mercy on
her son; but the autocrat answered, “Madame, while your son remains
alive, he will not be freed.” One day Alexander, while reading the
letter that Bakunin had written his predecessor in 1851, remarked to his
aide, Prince Goncharov. “But I don’t see the least sign of repentance.”
In 1857 Alexander was at last induced to relent, and Bakunin was
released from prison and sentenced to perpetual exile in Siberia. He was
given permission to reside in the Tomsk region. In the latter part of
1858 he married a young Polish girl, Antonia Kwiatkowski. Somewhat later
— through the intervention of a relative on his mother’s side, Nicholas
Muraviev, Governor General of Eastern Siberia — Bakunin was permitted to
move to Irkutsk. There he was at first employed by a government agency,
the Amur Development Authority, and later in a mining enterprise.
Bakunin had expected to be freed quickly and allowed to return to
Russia. But Muraviev, who was trying to help him, lost his post because
he opposed the bureaucracy, and Bakunin realized that he could regain
his liberty in only one way: escape. Leaving Irkutsk in mid-June 1861 on
the pretext of business — alleged commercial negotiations and a
government-authorized study — Bakunin arrived in Nikolaevsk in July.
From there he sailed on the government vessel Strelok to Kastri, a
southern port, where he managed to board the American merchant ship
Vickery, which took him to Hakodate, Japan. He went next to Yokohama,
then in October to San Francisco, and in November to New York. On
December 27, 1861, Bakunin arrived in London, where he was welcomed like
a long-lost brother by Herzen and Ogarev.
I will briefly summarize Bakunin’s activity during the six years after
his return to Western Europe. He soon realized that despite his personal
friendship with Herzen and Ogarev, he could not associate himself with
the political line of their journal, Kolokol (“The Bell”). During the
year 1862, Bakunin expounded his current ideas in two pamphlets: To My
Russian, Polish, and Other Slav Friends and Romanov, Pugachev, or
Pestel?
The outbreak of the Polish insurrection of 1863 found Bakunin trying to
unite all men of action to render effective aid and deepen the
revolution. But attempts to organize a Russian legion failed, and the
expedition of Colonel Lapinski came to naught. Bakunin then went to
Stockholm — where he was reunited with his wife — hoping to get help
from Sweden. His plans all failed, however, and he returned to London.
He next went to Italy, and in the middle of 1864 returned to Sweden.
Thence he went back once more to London, where he again saw Marx, and
then to Paris, where he was reunited with Proudhon. Finally he went back
to Italy.
As a consequence of the war of 1859 and Garibaldi’s heroic expedition of
1860, Italy then stood on the threshold of a new era. Bakunin remained
there until 1867, living first in Florence and then in and around
Naples. It was during this period that he conceived the plan of forming
a secret organization of revolutionaries to carry on propaganda work and
prepare for direct action at a suitable time. From 1864 onward he
steadily recruited Italians, Frenchmen, Scandinavians, and Slavs into a
secret society known as the International Brotherhood, also called the
Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists. He and his friends also combated
the devoutly religious followers of the republican Mazzini, whose
watchword was “God 2^(nd) Country.” In Naples, Bakunin established the
journal Libertà e Giustizia (“Liberty and justice”), in which he
developed his revolutionary program.
In July 1866 he informed his friends Herzen and Ogarev about the secret
society and its program, on which he had been concentrating all his
efforts for two years. According to Bakunin, the society then had
members in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, England, France, Spain, and
Italy, as well as Polish and Russian members.
In 1867 bourgeois democratic pacifists of many lands (though
preponderantly French and German) founded The League for Peace and
Freedom and convened a congress in Geneva which aroused wide interest.
Although Bakunin had few illusions about the new organization, he hoped
to propagandize its members in favor of revolutionary socialism. He
attended the congress, addressed the delegates, and became a member of
the Central Committee of the League. For a whole year he tried to induce
the Committee to adopt a social revolutionary program. At the second
congress of the League, in Bern in 1868, Bakunin and his colleagues in
the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists tried to persuade the congress
to adopt unambiguously revolutionary resolutions. After several days of
heated debate, however, the resolutions were voted down. The minority
faction of revolutionary socialists then resigned from the League, on
September 25, 1868, and that same day founded a — new, open — not secret
— organization, called the International Alliance of Socialist
Democracy. The Alliance’s Declaration of Principles was written by
Bakunin; a summary of his ideas, it was the product and culmination of
the long period of ideological development he had begun in Germany in
1842. Among other things, it stated that:
The alliance declares itself atheist; it seeks the complete and
definitive abolition of classes and the political, economic, and social
equality of both sexes. It wants the land and the instruments of labor
(production), like all other property, to be converted into the
collective property of the whole society for utilization by the workers;
that is, by agricultural and industrial associations. It affirms that
all the existing political and authoritarian States, which are to be
reduced to simple administrative functions dealing with public utilities
in their respective countries, must eventually be replaced by a
worldwide union of free associations, agricultural and industrial.
The New Alliance affirmed its desire to become a branch of the
International, whose statutes it accepted.
just a few weeks earlier (September 1) the first issue of a
Russian-language journal, Narodnoye Dyelo (“Public Affairs”), had
appeared, under the editorship of Bakunin and Nicholas Zhukovsky, and
had published a “Program of Russian Socialist Democracy” — a program
that coincided, in the main, with that of the Alliance. With the second
issue, however, the editorship changed hands: the paper fell under the
control of Nicholas Utin, who gave it an entirely different orientation.
The International Workingmen’s Association was founded in London on
September 23, 1864, but its structure and its constitution were not
formally adopted until the first congress convened in Geneva, September
3–8, 1866. In October 1864 Bakunin again met Marx, whom he had not seen
since 1848. Marx requested this meeting to re-establish friendly
relations with Bakunin who had been estranged when, in 1853, Marx’s Neue
Rheinische Zeitung [Neue Rheinische Zeitung was closed down in 1849. The
newspaper which published the accusation was unconnected with Marx]
repeated the old libel that Bakunin was a Russian agent. Mazzini and
Herzen defended Bakunin, who was at that time in a Russian prison. Later
in 1853 Marx had declared in the English paper Morning Advertiser that
he was Bakunin’s friend and had personally assured Bakunin that this was
still the case. At their reunion in 1864, Marx invited Bakunin to join
the International, but Bakunin preferred to return to Italy to devote
himself to his secret organization. Bakunin’s decision was
understandable. At that time the International, outside of the General
Council in London and a few Mutualist workers from Paris, could hardly
be considered an international organization, and no one could foresee
the importance it later assumed. It was only after the second congress
at Lausanne in September 1867, the two strikes in Paris, and the great
strike at Geneva (1868) that it drew serious attention and its
revolutionary capabilities could no longer be ignored. In its third
congress, in Brussels in 1868, the theories of cooperativism and
Proudhonist Mutualism were seriously challenged by those of revolution
and collective ownership.
In July 1868 Bakunin became a member of the Geneva section of the
International, and after resigning from the “League for Peace and
Freedom” at its Bern Congress, he settled in Geneva in order to
participate actively in the labor movement of the city. Intensive
propaganda sparked the growth of the International. A trip to Spain by
Fanelli (an Italian revolutionary socialist and coworker of Bakunin)
resulted in the establishment of the International in Madrid and
Barcelona. The French sections of French-speaking Switzerland united
into a federation under the name “Romance Federation of the
International” and in January 1869 launched their official organ, the
magazine L’Égalité. L’Égalité attacked the false socialists of the Swiss
Jura (mountains) and won the enthusiastic support of a majority of the
region’s workers for revolutionary socialism. On various occasions,
Bakunin came to the Jura to denounce what he called “collaboration
between workers and employers, alliances — masked as cooperation — with
bourgeois political parties and reactionary groups,” gradually forming a
lasting friendship with the militant workers. In Geneva itself, a
conflict took place between construction workers, who were instinctively
revolutionary, and the better-paid and highly skilled watch and
jewellery workers, who called themselves “Fabrica” and who wanted to
participate in election campaigns with the bourgeois radicals. Those of
a revolutionary tendency had the powerful encouragement of Bakunin, who,
in addition to his public addresses, formulated his program and exposed
the opportunists in a series of notable articles such as “The Policy of
the International” [see selection in present volume], printed in
L’Égalité. As a result, the Bakuninists won out — although this victory
proved, regrettably, temporary. Nonetheless, since the Belgian, Spanish,
French, and French-Swiss sections of the International all favored
collectivism, its adoption by a large majority at the next congress was
assured.
The General Council of London refused to admit the Alliance as a branch
of the International because the Alliance would constitute what amounted
to a second international body in the International, thereby causing
confusion and disorganization. Unquestionably one of the motives for
this decision was Marx’s ill will toward Bakunin, whom the German
regarded as a schemer aiming to “break up the International and convert
it into his own tool.” But in any case, irrespective of Marx’s personal
sentiments, Bakunin’s idea of forming a dual organization was
unfortunate. When this was explained to him by his Belgian and Swiss
comrades, he recognized the justice of the General Council’s decision.
The Central Bureau of the Alliance, after consulting the members,
dissolved the Alliance and the local group in Geneva became a simple
section of the International which was then admitted to membership by
the General Council in July 1869.
The fourth general congress of the International (Basel, September 6–12,
1869) almost unanimously endorsed the principle of, collective property,
but it soon became evident that the delegates were divided into two
distinct ideological groups. The Germans, Swiss-Germans, and English
were state communists. The opposing group — Belgians, Swiss-French,
French, and Spaniards — were antiauthoritarian communists, federalists,
or anarchists who took the name “Collectivists!’ Bakunin, naturally,
belonged to this faction, which included the Belgian De Paepe and the
Parisian Varlin.
The secret organization founded by Bakunin in 1864 was dissolved in
January 1869 because of an internal crisis, but many of its members kept
in touch with each other. The intimate circle attracted new friends,
Swiss, Spaniards, and Frenchmen, Varlin among them. This free contact of
men united for collective action in an informal revolutionary fraternity
was continued in order to strengthen and give more cohesion to the great
revolutionary movement which the International represented.
In the summer of 1869, Borkheim, a friend of Marx, repeated in the
Berlin journal Zukunft (“The Future”) the old libel that Bakunin was a
Russian agent, and Wilhelm Liebknecht, a founder of the German Social
Democratic party, at various times continued to spread this falsehood.
When Bakunin met Liebknecht at the Basel Congress, he challenged him to
prove his charges before an impartial “court of honor.” Liebknecht
explained that he had never personally slandered Bakunin, but had only
repeated what he read in the papers, primarily the Zukunft. The court of
honor unanimously found Liebknecht guilty and signed a statement to that
effect. Liebknecht admitted that he was wrong and shook hands with
Bakunin, who then set fire to the statement, using it to light his
cigarette.
After the Basel Congress, Bakunin moved to Locarno, where he could live
cheaply and where he would not be distracted while making a number of
Russian translations for a St. Petersburg publisher (the first was of
volume one of Marx’s Das Kapital). Unfortunately, Bakunin’s departure
from Geneva left the field open for the political machinations of a
group headed by the Russian immigrant Nicholas Utin. In a few months
they disrupted the Russian section of the International, occupied the
key posts, and seized control of its organ, L’Égalité. Marx entered into
an alliance with Utin and his camarilla of pseudosocialists of the
“Temple Unico,” the old Masonic hall used as a meeting place for the
Geneva International. Meanwhile, on March 28, Marx addressed his
notorious “Confidential Communication” to his German friends in order to
stir up hatred among the German Democratic Socialists against Bakunin.
He represented him as an agent of the pan-Slavist party, from which,
Marx declared, Bakunin received twenty-five thousand francs per year.
In April 1870, Utin and his Geneva conspirators engineered a split of
the Romance Federation into two factions. The first faction, which took
the name “Jura Federation,” was in agreement with the Internationalists
of France, Belgium, and Spain. They adopted a revolutionary
antiauthoritarian position, declaring that “all participation of the
working class in the politics of bourgeois governments can result only
in the consolidation and perpetuation of the existing order.” The other,
the Temple Unico faction, backed by the London General Council as well
as by the Germans and Swiss-Germans, believed in “electoral action and
workers’ candidates for political posts.”
Bakunin was at that time preoccupied with Russian events. In the spring
of 1869 he became friendly with the fiery young revolutionist Sergei
Nechaev. Bakunin still believed at that time in the possibility of a
vast peasant uprising in Russia, much like that of Stenka Razin. The
second centennial of this great revolt of 1669 seemed almost like a
prophetic coincidence. It was then that Bakunin wrote in Russian the
manifesto Some Words to My Young Brothers in Russia and the pamphlet
Science and the Present Revolutionary Cause. Nechaev soon returned to
Russia, but was forced to flee again after the arrest of almost all his
friends and the destruction of his organization. He reached Switzerland
in January 1870. Nechaev then prevailed upon Bakunin to abandon the
translation of Marx’s Das Kapital which he had already begun, and to
concentrate entirely upon Russian revolutionary propaganda. Nechaev also
succeeded in obtaining money for his alleged “Russian Committee” from
the remainder of the Bakhmetiev Fund for Russian revolutionary
propaganda, which was administered by Ogarev.
Bakunin also wrote, in Russian, the pamphlet To the Officers of the
Russian Army, and, in French, The Bears of Bern and the Bear of St.
Petersburg. He edited a few issues of the new series of Kolokol and
engaged in feverish activity for many months. In July 1870, when Bakunin
realized that Nechaev was using him to attain a personal dictatorship by
Jesuitical methods, he broke off all relations with the young
revolutionist. He had been the victim of excessive trustfulness and of
his admiration for Nechaev’s savage energy. Bakunin wrote to Ogarev on
August 21, 1870:
We have been pretty fine fools. How Herzen would have laughed at us if
he were still alive, and how right he would have been!! Well, all we can
do is to swallow this bitter pill, which will make us more cautious in
the future.
When the Franco-Prussian War of 870–7 broke out, Bakunin passionately
followed the course of battle. To his friend Ogarev he wrote in a letter
dated August 11, 1870, “You are only a Russian, but I am an
Internationalist.” To Bakunin, the crushing of France by feudal,
militarist Germany would mean the triumph of the counterrevolution; and
this defeat could only be avoided by calling upon the French people to
rise en masse and throw out both the foreign invader and their own
domestic tyrants who were holding them in economic and political
bondage. To his socialist friends in Lyons, Bakunin wrote:
The patriotic movement is nothing in comparison with what you must now
do if you want to save France. Therefore, arise my comrades to the
strains of the Marseillaise which today is once again the true anthem of
France palpitating with life, the song of liberty, the song of the
people, the song of humanity. In acting patriotically we are (also)
saving universal liberty. Ah! if I were young again, I would not he
writing letters. I would be among you!
A correspondent of the Volksstaat (Wilhelm Liebknecht’s paper) had
reported that the Parisian workers were “indifferent toward the war.”
Bakunin felt that it was perverse to accuse the workers of an apathy
which, if actually present, would be criminal on their part. He wrote to
the workers that they could not remain indifferent to the German
invasion, that they must absolutely defend their liberty against the
armed gangs of Prussian militarism.
If France were invaded by an army of German, English, Belgian, Spanish,
or Italian proletarians, holding high the banner of revolutionary
socialism and proclaiming to the world the final emancipation of labor,
I would have been the first to cry to the workers of France: “Open your
arms, embrace them, they are your brothers, and unite with them to sweep
away the rotten remains of the bourgeois world!” ... But the invasion
that today dishonors France is an aristocratic, monarchic, military
invasion.... If they remain passive before this invasion, the French
workers will betray not only their own liberty, they will also betray
the cause of the workers of the world, the sacred cause of revolutionary
socialism.
Bakunin’s ideas about the situation facing French workers and the means
that should be employed to save France and the cause of liberty were
expressed by him in a small pamphlet which appeared anonymously, in
September 1870, under the title Letters to a Frenchman on the Present
Crisis.
Bakunin left Locarno on September 9, 1870, and arrived in Lyons on the
fifteenth. On his arrival, a Committee for the Salvation of France,
whose most active and determined member was Bakunin, was immediately
organized to mount a revolutionary insurrection. The program of the
movement was printed on a huge red poster and was signed by the
delegates of Lyons, St.Étienne, Tarare, and Marseilles. Although Bakunin
was a foreigner and his position therefore more precarious, he did not
hesitate to add his signature to those of his friends, thus sharing
their perils and their responsibilities. The poster proclamation first
declares that “The administrative and governmental machinery of the
State having become impotent is abolished,” and that “The people of
France [have] regained full control over their own affairs. ‘ . .” It
then immediately proposes the formation in all the federated communes of
Committees for the Salvation of France, and the immediate dispatch to
Lyons of two delegates from each committee in the capital of each
department of France, to form the Revolutionary Convention for the
Salvation of France.
On September 28, a popular uprising put the revolutionists in possession
of the Lyons City Hall; but the treason of General Cluseret, in helping
to suppress an uprising he had endorsed, and the cowardice of some of
those who had betrayed the trust of the people caused the defeat of the
revolutionists. Bakunin, against whom the prosecutor of the Republic,
Andrieux, had issued an order of arrest, fled to Marseilles where he
remained in hiding for some time, trying to prepare a new uprising. In
the meantime, the French authorities spread the rumor that Bakunin was a
paid agent of Prussia and that the Government of National Defense could
prove it. On its part, Liebknecht’s Volksstaat, commenting on the
twenty-eighth of September and the red poster proclamation, declared
that “Not even the Berlin [government’s] press could have better served
Bismarck’s plans.”
On October 24, Bakunin, in despair over events in France, sailed from
Marseilles on a ship returning to Locarno by way of Genoa and Milan. The
day before his departure he had written the following to the Spanish
Socialist Sentinon, who had come to France hoping to participate in the
revolutionary movement:
The French people are no longer revolutionary at all... . Militarism and
Bureaucracy, the arrogance of the nobility and the Protestant Jesuitry
of the Prussians, in affectionate alliance with the knout of my dear
sovereign and master, the Emperor of all the Russias, are going to
command all Europe, God knows for how many years. Goodbye to all our
dreams of impending Revolution!!
The uprising that broke out in Marseilles on October 31, only seven days
after Bakunin’s departure, confirmed his pessimistic prediction: the
Revolutionary Commune which had been established when news of the
capitulation of Bazaine reached Marseilles held out for only five days
before surrendering to Alfonso Cent, who had been sent by Gambetta.
In Locarno, where he spent the winter in seclusion, battling against
poverty and despair, Bakunin wrote the continuation of his Letters to a
Frenchman, an analysis of the new situation in Europe. It was published
in the spring of 1871 with the characteristic title, The Knouto-Germanic
Empire and the Social Revolution. News of the Parisian insurrection of
March 18, 1871 (the Paris Commune) lightened his pessimism. The Paris
proletariat, at least, had lost neither their energy nor their spirit of
revolt. But France, exhausted and defeated, could not be galvanized by
the heroism of the people of Paris. The attempts in various provinces to
spread the communalist movement (self-governing communes) failed, and
the Parisian insurrectionists were finally crushed by their innumerable
enemies. Bakunin, who had gone to stay with friends in the Jura to be
nearer the French frontier, was unable to help and was compelled to
return to Locarno.
But this time Bakunin did not give way to discouragement. The Commune of
Paris, upon which all the reactionary forces concentrated their furious,
venomous hatred, kindled a spark of hope in the hearts of all the
exploited. The proletariat of the world saluted the heroic people whose
blood ran in torrents for the emancipation of humanity. “The modern
Satan, the great rebellion, suppressed, but not pacified!” exclaimed
Bakunin. The Italian patriot Mazzini added his voice to those who cursed
the Commune and the International. Bakunin wrote the Response of an
Internationalist to Mazzini which appeared in August 1871 in both
Italian and French. This work made a deep impression in Italy, and
produced among the youth and the workers of Italy a climate of opinion
which gave birth, toward the end of 1871, to many new sections of the
International. A second pamphlet, The Political Theology of Mazzini and
the International, even further consolidated and extended the
International. Bakunin, who by sending Fanelli to Spain had created the
International there, was by his polemic with Mazzini also the creator of
the International in Italy. Now he threw himself passionately into the
struggle not only against the domination of the bourgeoisie over the
proletariat, but against the men who were trying to install the
principle of authority in the International Workingmen’s Association.
The split in the Romance Federation (French-speaking Switzerland), which
could have been healed if the London General Council had so desired and
if the agents of that Council had been less perfidious, was aggravated
to the point of irreversibility. In August 1870 Bakunin and three of his
friends were expelled from the Geneva section because they had declared
their sympathy for the Jura Federationists. Soon after the end of the
Franco-Prussian War Marx’s agents came to Geneva to revive the discords.
The members of the now-dissolved Geneva section of the Alliance believed
that they had given sufficient proof of their friendly intentions by
dissolving their section. But the party of Marx and Utin did not cease
its harassments: a new section, called “Propaganda and Revolutionary
Socialist Action,” formed by refugees from the Paris Commune and
including old members of the Alliance section, was promptly refused
admission to the International by the General Council. Instead of a
general congress of the International, the General Council, controlled
by Marx and his friend Engels, in September 1871 convened a secret
conference in London, attended almost entirely by partisans of Marx. The
conference adopted resolutions destroying the autonomy of the sections
and federations of the International and giving the General Council
powers that violated the fundamental statutes of the International and
the conference. At the same time it tried to promote and organize, under
the direction of the General Council, what it called “the political
[parliamentary] action of the working class.”
Immediate action was necessary. The International, a vast federation of
groups organized to fight the economic exploitation of the capitalist
system, was in imminent danger of being derailed by a little band of
Marxist and Blanquist sectarians. The sections of the Jura; together
with the “Propaganda and Revolutionary” section of Geneva, met in
Sonvilier (November 12, 1871 ) and established the Jurassian Federation
of the International. This association sent a circular to all the
federations of the International urging them to jointly resist the
usurpations of the General Council and to energetically reconquer their
autonomy. The circular, among other things, declared:”
If there is an undeniable fact, attested to a thousand times by
experience, it is the corrupting effect produced by authority on those
who manipulate it. It is absolutely impossible for a man who wields
power to remain a moral man....
The General Council could not escape this inevitable law. These men,
accustomed to march at our head and to speak in our name, have been led
by the very demands of their situation to desire that their particular
program, their particular doctrine, should prevail in the International.
Having become in their own eyes a sort of government, it was natural
that their own particular ideas should appear to them as official
theory, as they had the sole “freedom of the city” [unlimited power] in
the Association whilst divergent views expressed by other groups
appeared no longer the legitimate expression of opinions With rights
equal to their own, but as veritable heresies....
We do not impugn the intentions of the General Council. The persons who
compose it found themselves the victims of an inevitable necessity. They
wanted in good faith, and for the triumph of their particular doctrine,
to introduce into the International the principle of authority.
Circumstances appeared to favor their doctrine, and it appears to us
quite natural that this school, whose ideal is THE CONQUEST OF POLITICAL
POWER BY THE WORKING CLASS, should have believed that the International
was going to alter its original structure and transform itself into a
hierarchical organization directed and governed by the General
Council....
But while we understand these tendencies we feel obliged to fight them
in the name of that Social Revolution whose program is “Emancipation of
the workers by the workers themselves.” ...
The future society must be nothing else than the universalization of the
organization that the International has formed for itself. We must
therefore strive to make this organization as close as possible to our
ideal. How could one expect an egalitarian society to emerge out of an
authoritarian organization? It is impossible. The International, embryo
of the future society, must from now on faithfully reflect our
principles of federation and liberty, and must reject any principle
tending toward authority and dictatorship.
Bakunin enthusiastically welcomed the Sonvilier circular and devoted
‘all his energies to actively propagating its principles in the Italian
sections of the International. Spain, Belgium, most of the French
sections (secretly reorganized in spite of the Versailles reaction
following the defeat of the Paris Commune), and most of the United
States sections declared themselves in agreement with the Swiss-Jura
Federation. It was soon certain that the attempts of Marx and his allies
to capture the International would be repulsed. The first half of 1872
was marked by a “confidential circular” issued by the General Council,
written by Karl Marx and printed as a pamphlet entitled Les prétendues
scissions dans I’Internationale (“The Alleged Splits in the
International”). Prominent Federalist militants and others seeking
independence from the General Council were personally slandered, and the
widespread protests against certain acts of the General Council were
depicted as sordid intrigues by members of the old International
Alliance of the Social Democracy (the Alliance) who, directed by “the
Pope of Locarno” (Bakunin), were working for the destruction of the
International. Bakunin gave his reaction to this circular in a letter:
“The sword of Damocles that hung over us so long has at last fallen over
our heads. It is not really a sword, but the habitual weapon of Marx, a
heap of filth.”
Bakunin passed the summer and autumn of 1872 in Zurich, where on his
initiative a Slavic section was founded, composed almost entirely of
Serbian and Russian students, which joined the Jura Federation of the
International. Since April Bakunin had been in contact with Russian
emigre youths in Locarno who organized themselves into a secret action
and propaganda group. The most militant member of this group was Armand
Ross (Michael Sazhin). In intimate contact with Bakunin from the summer
of 1870 to the spring of 1876, Ross was the principal intermediary
between the great revolutionary agitator and Russian youth.
Bakunin’s propaganda during this period was an inspiration to the young
Russians in the following years. Bakunin’s dictum that the youth must
“GO TO THE PEOPLE” had become an axiom within the populist movement. In
Zurich, Ross established a Russian-language printing plant which in 1873
published Istoricheskoye Razvitiye Internatsionala (“ne Historical
Development of the International”), a collection of articles translated
from Swiss and Belgian socialist papers, with explanatory notes by
different writers, and a chapter on the Alliance written by Bakunin. In
1874 Ross’s press printed Gosudarstvennost i Anarkhiya (“Statism and
Anarchy”). A conflict with Peter Lavrov and personal dissensions among
some of its members led to the dissolution of the Zurich Slav section of
the International in 1873.
in the meantime the General Council decided to convene a general
congress for September 7, 1872. It chose to meet at The Hague for two
main reasons: it was a location close to London, and thus allowed many
delegates who agreed with Marx’s policies or held fictitious credentials
to get to the congress easily; at the same time, the location made it
more difficult for delegates representing remote or legally ‘banned
federations to attend; there was no possibility, for example, of
Bakunin’s attending. The newly constituted Italian Federation refused to
send delegates. The Spanish Federation sent four, the Jura Federation
two, the Belgian Federation seven, the Dutch Federation four, the
English Federation five. These twenty-two delegates, the only ones truly
representing constituents of the International, made up the core of the
minority. The majority of forty who, in reality, represented only
themselves had already pledged themselves in advance to faithfully carry
out the orders of the clique headed by Marx and Engels. The only
decision of the congress with which we deal here is the expulsion of
Bakunin [Guillaume was also expelled] from the International. This
action was taken on the last day of the congress, September 7, after
one-third of the delegates had already gone home, by a vote of
twenty-seven for and seven against, with eight abstentions. A mock
inquiry by a five-member commission, held behind closed doors, found
Bakunin guilty of the charges made by the Marxist clique, and he was
expelled on two grounds:
1. That a draft of principles and letters signed “Bakunin” proves that
said citizen has tried to establish, and perhaps has succeeded in
establishing, a society in Europe named “The Alliance’ with rules on
social and political matters entirely different from those of the
International.
2. That Citizen Bakunin has made use of deceptive tricks in order to
appropriate some portion of another person’s fortune, which constitutes
fraud; that further he or his agents resorted to threats lest he be
compelled to meet his obligations.
The second Marxist accusation refers to the three hundred rubles
advanced to Bakunin for the translation of Marx’s Das Kapital and the
letter written by Nechaev to the publisher Poliakov.
A protest against this infamy, immediately published by a group of
Russian immigrants, made these points:
Geneva and Zurich, October 4, 1872. They have dared to accuse our friend
Michael Bakunin of fraud and blackmail. We do not deem it necessary or
opportune to discuss the alleged facts on which these strange
accusations against our friend and compatriot are based. The facts are
well known in all details and we will make it our duty to establish the
truth as soon as possible. Now we are prevented from so doing by the
unfortunate situation of another compatriot who is not our friend, but
whose persecution at this very moment by the Russian government renders
him sacred to us. [This refers to Nechaev, who was arrested in Zurich on
August 14, 1872, and extradited to Russia via Switzerland on October 27,
1872.] Mr. Marx, whose cleverness we do not, like others, question, has
this time at least shown very bad judgment. Honest hearts in all lands
will doubtless beat with indignation and disgust at so shameful a
conspiracy and so flagrant a violation of the most elementary principles
of justice. As to Russia, we can assure Mr. Marx that all his maneuvers
will inevitably end in failure. Bakunin is too well esteemed and known
there for calumny to touch him. Signed: Nicholas Ogarev, Bartholomy
Zaitsev, Vladimir Ozerov, Armand Ross, Vladimir Holstein, Zemphiri
Ralli, Alexander Oelsnitz, Valerian Smirnov.
The day after the Hague Congress of September 5, 1872, another congress
of the International — comprising delegations from the Italian, Spanish,
Swiss-Jura federations, as well as representatives from American and
French sections — convened in St.-Imier Switzerland. The congress stated
that it unanimously:
Rejects absolutely all resolutions of the Hague Congress and does not
recognize to any extent the powers of the new General Council named by
it. [The General Council had been transferred to New York.]
The Italian Federation had already affirmed, on August 4, 1872, the
resolutions of the St.-Imier Congress, which the Jura Federation also
adopted at a special meeting held the same day as that of the congress.
Most of the French sections hastened to express their complete approval.
The Spanish and Belgian federations endorsed the resolutions at their
congresses held respectively in Cordoba and Brussels during Christmas
week of 1872. The American Federation did likewise at its meeting in New
York City on January 12, 1873. The English Federation, which included
Marx’s old friends Eccarius and Jung, refused to recognize the decisions
of the Hague Congress and the new General Council.
On June 5, 1873, the General Council in New York, exercising the powers
vested in it by the Hague Congress, suspended the Jura Federation,
declaring it subversive. As a result, the Dutch Federation, which had
been neutral, joined the other seven federations of the International,
declaring on February 14, 1873, that it refused to recognize the
“suspension” of the Jura Federation.
The publication by Marx and the little group that still remained
faithful to him of a pamphlet filled with gross lies, entitled The
Alliance of the Social Democracy and the International [written in
French in the second half of 1873], only provoked the disgust of all
those who read this product of blind hatred.
On September 1, 1873, the sixth congress of the International opened in
Geneva. The Belgian, Dutch, Italian, French, English, and Swiss-Jura
federations were represented and the Lasallean socialists of Berlin sent
a telegram of greetings. The congress concerned itself with the revision
of the statutes of the International, pronounced the dissolution of the
General Council, and made the International a free federation without
any directing authority over it:
The federations and sections comprising the International each reclaims
its complete autonomy, the right to organize itself as it sees fit, to
administer its own affairs without any outside interference, and to
determine the best and most efficient means for the emancipation of
labor. [Article 3 of the new statutes]
His lifelong battles had left Bakunin exhausted. Prison had aged him
before his time, his health had seriously deteriorated, and he now
craved repose and retirement. When he saw the International reorganized
in a way that fulfilled the principle of free federation, he felt that
the time had come to take leave of his comrades. On October 12, 1873, he
addressed a letter to the members of the Jura Federation:
I beg you to accept my resignation as a member of the Jura Federation
and the International. I no longer feel that I have the strength needed
for the struggle: I would be a hindrance in the camp of the Proletariat,
not a help ... I retire then, dear comrades, full of gratitude to you
and sympathy for your great cause — the cause of humanity. I will
continue to follow, with brotherly anxiety, all your steps and I will
greet with joy each of your new victories. Till death I will be yours.
[For full text, see p. 351.]
He had but three years to live.
His friend, the Italian revolutionist Carlo Cafiero, invited him to stay
in his villa near Locarno. There Bakunin lived until the middle of 1874,
apparently absorbed by his new life, one in which he had at last found
tranquillity, security, and relative well-being. But he still regarded
himself as a soldier of the revolution. When his Italian friends
launched an insurrectionary movement, Bakunin went to Bologna in July
1874 to participate. But the insurrection, poorly planned, collapsed and
Bakunin returned in disguise to Switzerland.
At this time Bakunin and Cafiero became estranged. Cafiero, having
sacrificed his entire fortune for the cause of the revolution, found
himself ruined and was forced to sell the villa. Bakunin, unable to stay
in Locarno, settled in Lugano where, thanks to his paternal inheritance
sent to him by his brothers, he was able to support himself and his
family. The temporary coolness between Bakunin and Cafiero did not last
long, and friendly relations were soon re-established. But Bukunin’s
illness progressed, ravaging both spirit and body, so that by 1875 he
was only a shadow of his former self. Hoping to find relief, Bakunin
left Locarno for Bern to consult his old friend, Vogt, to whom he said,
“I have come to be restored to health or to die.” He was taken to a
hospital, where he was affectionately attended by Dr. Vogt and another
close friend, the musician Reichel.
In one of his last conversations, recalled by Reichel, Bakunin in
speaking of Schopenhauer remarked:
All our philosophy starts from a false base; it begins always by
considering man as an individual, and not as he should be considered —
that is, as a being belonging to a collectivity; most of the
philosophical (and mistaken) views stemming from this false premise
either are led to the conception of a happiness in the clouds, or to a
pessimism like that of Schopenhauer and Hartmann.
In another conversation, Reichel expressed his regret that Bakunin could
never find time to write his memoirs. Bakunin replied:
And why should you want me to write them? It is not worth the effort.
Today the people in all lands have lost the instinct of revolution. No,
if I get a bit of strength back again, I would rather write an ethic
based on the principles of collectivism, making no use of philosophical
or religious phrases.
He died at noon on July 1, 1876.
On July 3, socialists from all parts of Switzerland arrived in Bern to
pay their last respects to Michael Bakunin. At his graveside, eulogies
were offered by some of his friends from the Jura Federation: Adhemar
Schwitzguebel, James Guillaume, Elisee Reclus; by Nicholas Zhukovsky,
representing the Russians; by Paul Brouse for the French Revolutionary
Youth; by Betsien for the German proletariat. At a meeting after the
funeral all were moved by one sentiment: to forget, upon the grave of
Bakunin, all personal bickering, and to unite on the basis of liberty
and mutual tolerance all the socialist factions in both camps. The
following resolution received unanimous approval:
The workers gathered in Bern on the occasion of the death of Michael
Bakunin belong to five different nations. Some are partisans of a
Worker’s State, while others advocate the free federation of groups of
producers. But all feel that a reconciliation is not only very essential
and very desirable, but also easy to establish on the basis of the
principles of the International, as formulated in Article 3 of the
revised statutes adopted at the Geneva Congress of 1873.
Therefore this assembly, meeting in Bern, calls upon all workers to
forget the vain and unfortunate dissensions of the past and to unite on
the basis of strict adherence to the principles enunciated in Article 3
of the above-mentioned statutes [autonomy of the sections].
Do you want to know how this moving appeal to forget past hatreds and to
unite in liberty was answered? The Marxist Tagwacht of Zurich on July 8
printed the following:
Bakunin was regarded by many fair-minded men and good socialists as a
Russian agent. This suspicion, doubtless erroneous, was aroused by the
fact that Bakunin greatly harmed the revolutionary movement; it was the
reaction which benefited most from his activity.
Similar malevolent accusations vented by the Volksstaat of Leipzig and
the Russian-language Vpered of London compelled the friends of Bakunin
to conclude that his enemies did not intend to desist from their
campaign of hatred. Hence the Bulletin of the Jura Federation on
September 10, 1876, faced with hostile manifestations, declared:
We desire, as our conduct has always established, the most complete
reconciliation possible of all socialist groups: we are ready to extend
our hand in friendship to all those who sincerely wish to struggle for
the emancipation of labor. But we are at the same time determined not to
allow anyone to insult our dead.
Will the time come when posterity will assess the personality and
achievements of Bakunin with the impartiality that we have a right to
expect? Further, can one hope that the wishes expressed by his friends
on his freshly covered grave will someday he realized?