A talk given in Glasgow to mark the 150th anniversary of Bakunin’s death. As usual, this write-up reflects what I wanted to say rather than what was actually said but it is close enough.
The Revolutionary Ideas of Michael Bakunin (1814 – 1876)
The meeting was advertised as follows:
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Michael Bakunin, a key anarchist thinker and activist.
Born into the Russian aristocracy, he rejected his roots and became revolutionary, taking to the barricades during the 1848 Revolutions.
Imprisoned by the Tsar before escaping from exile in Siberia, Bakunin joined the International Workers’ Association and played a key role in the development of revolutionary anarchism (as both a theory and as a movement) as well as being Marx’s most prescient critic.
Join Iain McKay (An Anarchist FAQ) while he explores Bakunin’s life and ideas, showing their relevance to radicals today.
Michael Bakunin (1814-1876)
Bakunin was born into the Russian aristocracy, he rejected his background and became a republican (1840s). He took an active part in the 1848 Revolutions as a Slav Nationalist. Captured and sentenced to death, he was sent to Russia and imprisoned – at times, chained to a wall in solitary. Suffering from scurvy, his teeth fell out and eventually replaced by wooden ones. After an appeal to the Tsar by his mother, he was exiled to Siberia, escaping in 1861.
After his return to Western Europe, he became an anarchist in the mid-1860s, forming the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy in 1868 and joined the International Workers Association the following year. During this period, he wrote a few pamphlets and books – Letters to a Frenchman on the current crisis (1871), The Political Theology of Mazini and the International (1872) and Statism and Anarchy (1873). He penned numerous articles in Égalité but was a letter writer extraordinaire.
The Conventional Wisdom
Bakunin is often portrayed as an advocate of “pan-destruction” and terrorism. This is based on Catechism of a Revolutionary and Principles of Revolution – sadly, there is no actual evidence Bakunin wrote these. Marx and Engels seem to be the first to assert this, yet Bakunin’s letter to Nechaev (June 1870) shows the truth of the matter, namely that these works were by Nechaev, but Bakunin. This has been known since the 1960s but this has not stopped the claim being repeated.
Critics often combine pre-anarchist writings with anarchist ones, suggesting a consistency which is lacking. Marxists are particularly bad at this (for example, Hal Draper) and so present a distorted account of his anarchist ideas.
Often passages are quoted without concern for context. For example, many writings were not known for decades after his death and became available with the publication of his Œuvres between 1895 and 1913. This has not stopped certain quotes being used as drivers for ideas within the movement which arose after his death (for example, propaganda by the deed). So cherry picking is rampant.
Still, there appears to be no career damage for being wrong about Bakunin (or anarchism for that matter).
Before Anarchism
No one is born an anarchist and Bakunin is no exception. He first became a Young Hegelian and during the 1848 Revolution advocated Pan-Slavism and Republicanism. He was an active participant in the revolution, taking part in the Prague and Dresden uprisings.
Arrested and sentenced to death, he was eventually repatriated to Russian where he was imprisoned by the Tsar for 6 years, of which three years were in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, followed by three years in Shlisselburg.
He was transferred to Siberia in 1857 after an appeal by his mother to the Tsar. He escaped from Siberia in 1861 and returned to Western Europe. The failure of the 1863 Polish Uprising saw the start of his move to socialism for he recognised its failure was due to its narrow nationalist position – the peasants were not interested in hoisting Polish aristocrats into power over them. Bakunin drew the conclusion that any movement for change had to address the social question to gain popular support.
Italy, Switzerland and the International
He moved to Italy in 1864 and became an anarchist around 1868. He helped organise the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, leaving the League of Peace and Freedom for the International Workers’ Association in which he successfully spread his ideas.
It must be stressed that the International was not “founded” by Marx nor was it “Marx’s International” (as many claim). Rather, Marx bumped into a German comrade who invited him along to the founding conference which had been the work of British and French trade unionists. Neither did Marx own it, it was a democratic organisation and, as a member, Bakunin had the right to expound his ideas like Marx.
Bakunin championed “collectivist” ideas within the International. He did not invent these, they had already arisen within it but he helped develop them into a coherent revolutionary theory. Its basic position was that the International should be focused “[o]n the terrain of economic struggle, daily practice of labour exploited by capital.”
Mutualists and Collectivists
The two key tendencies within the International were mutualism and collectivism. The later gained their name by its adherents supporting the Resolution on Collective Ownership passed at the International’s 1868 Congress.It must be stressed that this resolution reflected Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution (1851) in its terminology:
“machines and collective force… must in the future only benefit the workers… contracted out not to capitalists, as today, but to workers companies, on a double contract; one… guaranteeing to society… the other guaranteeing the natural rights of every member of the worker Association with respect to his colleagues.”
So both mutualists and collectivists were agreed on the need for collective ownership of industry. These debates were between mutualists over extending collective ownership to land as noted by Belgium Internationalist César de Paepe (1841-1890):“I am just as much a mutualist as Tolain… but I do not see that the collective ownership of land is opposed to the mutualist program”. In this, he was right.
Collectivists could be considered as mutualists who saw unions as Proudhon’s “agricultural and industrial combination” and in so doing prefigured syndicalism. As French Internationalist Eugène Varlin (1839-1871) argued:
“Unless you want to reduce everything to a centralising and authoritarian state… the workers themselves must have the free disposal of their instruments of labour… trade associations (resistance, solidarity, union)… are the natural elements of the social construction of the future; it is they who can easily become producer associations”
This was repeated at Congresses of the International with Jean-Louis Pindy(1840-1917) arguing for “resistance societies… to prepare for the future and to ensure as far as possible the present” for the “grouping of different trade unions by town and by country… forms the commune of the future… Government is replaced by the councils of the assembled trades unions”.
Collectivism, or Revolutionary Anarchism
Bakunin built upon these ideas and in the process played a key role in developing collectivism, or revolutionary anarchism.
It stressed that Direct Action not Political Action was needed – “at first as its sole basis the exclusively economic struggle of labour against capital… only a single path… emancipation through practice… the struggle of the workers in solidarity against the bosses. It is trades unions, organisation and the federation of resistance funds.” In other words, social change “by the development and organisation, not of the political but of the social (and, by consequence, anti-political) power of the working masses as much in the towns as in the countryside”
This meant that unions were considered as a means to both fight and replace capitalism: “The organisation of trade sections, their federation… and their representation by Chambers of Labour… uniting practice with theory… carry the living seeds of the new social order that is to replace the bourgeois world. They create not only the ideas but the very facts of the future.”
General Strike as seen a means to start the revolution for as “strikes spread from one place to another, they come close to turning into a general strike” which “can result only in a great cataclysm which forces society to shed its old skin.”
Collectivism was, as Bakunin put it, “Proudhonism widely developed and pushed right to these, its final consequences”.
The First International
So within the International arose two tendencies associated – somewhat misleadingly – with two people, Micheal Bakunin and Karl Marx.
Bakunin advocated Direct Action, Unions and Workers Councils:
“Workers, no longer count on anyone but yourselves… Abstain from all participation in bourgeois radicalism and organise outside of it the forces of the proletariat. The basis of that organisation is entirely given: the workshops and the federation of the workshops… instruments of struggle against the bourgeoisie… The creation of Chambers of Labour… the liquidation of the State and of bourgeois society.”
Marx advocated Political Action, Parties and Parliament as later summarised by Engels
“In every struggle of class against class, the next end fought for is political power; the ruling class defends its political supremacy… its safe majority in the Legislature; the inferior class fights for, first a share, then the whole of that power… to change existing laws in conformity with their own interests and requirements… the working class of Great Britain… fought ardently… for the People’s Charter, which was to give it that political power.”
These came to be known as syndicalism and social democracy.
Anarchism and Marxism
Bakunin correctly predicted that Social Democratic tactics would produce reformism as “worker deputies, transferred into bourgeois surroundings and an atmosphere of entirely bourgeois political ideas, ceasing in fact to be workers by becoming Statesmen, will become bourgeois… For men do not make situations, on the contrary it is situations that make men”.
If Marxists did manage to seize power, the problem was that the State equals minority rule, not people power:
“No state, however democratic… can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organisation and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward… because every state… is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves”
The State “has always been the patrimony of some privileged class” and “becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class”. This would be State capitalism, not socialism, as “the State” would be “the sole proprietor… all workers, both in industry and on the land, would become [its] employees.”
It should also be noted that Bakunin was well aware that at the time the proletariat was a minority (and a small one at that) of the working classes so any “dictatorship of the proletariat” implied minority rule over the majority of peasants and artisans. Not that the proletariat as a class could rule in a State – due to its centralised structure, in practice it would be the rule of a few party leaders.
History proved these predictions correct – social democracy became reformist (indeed, counter-revolutionary in the German Revolution) while the Bolsheviks created a new class system based on the State bureaucracy in Russia.
However, it must be stressed that Bakunin’s opposition to the “workers’ State” had nothing to do with defending a revolution for he recognised that “to defend the revolution… form a communal militia” and “federate… for common defence.” Likewise, he did not think a socialist society could be created in all its aspects the day after a successful insurrection – that was simply the beginning which would allow social transformation to proceed unfettered.
National Liberation
Another important aspect of Bakunin’s ideas is National Liberation.
Originally a pan-Slavist, he continued to favour national liberation for “[e]very nation, like very individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself”. As such, “we recognise no kind of historical or political right. For us, Poland exists only where the people want to be Polish and recognise themselves as such: it will cease to exist where that same people, no longer wishing to belong to the Polish Federation, freely chooses to join another national group”
This meant that every nation or national group within a nation had a right to autonomy and independence:
“What is a principle is the respect which everyone should have for natural facts, real or social. Nationality, like individuality, is one of those facts… To violate it is to commit a crime… that is why I feel myself always sincerely the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands.”
However, the national question and the social question were interwoven:
“The International does not destroy nationalities, nations; it embraces them all, without suppressing any. It cannot do otherwise, because its fundamental principle is the widest freedom. The International is not waging war on natural homelands; it is waging it only upon political homelands, on States; and it must wage this war: because, since it seriously desires the full and definitive emancipation of the proletariat, it must necessarily strive for the abolition of all classes”
As the failure of the Polish Uprising in 1863 had shown, a national movement had to address social questions in order to be successful, in other words turning national liberation into human liberation from all oppressions, including those of a native ruling class.
If you compare what Bakunin argued to the views of Marx and Engels, it soon becomes clear that Bakunin invented Lenin’s “Marxist” solution to the National Question.
The role of Anarchists
Also of note are Bakunin’s ideas on the role of anarchists within social movements and the revolution. Unlike some anarchists and syndicalists, he recognised the need for a specific anarchist grouping:
“the Alliance is the necessary complement to the International… But the International and the Alliance, while tending towards the same final goal, simultaneously pursue different objectives – One has the mission of uniting the working masses… the other… has the mission of giving these masses a truly revolutionary direction. The programmes of both, while not in any way opposed, differ in the very degree of their respective development”
It aims to influence the struggle (what was later termed the “leadership of ideas”) by its members arguing their ideas within mass organisations. So “it influences the people exclusively through the natural, personal influence of its members, who have not the slightest power… and… try… to direct the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people towards… the organisation of popular liberty… by organisation among the people themselves…”
So it was a case of the role of revolutionaries rather than the rule of revolutionaries.
The groups Bakunin created were secret often by necessity although perhaps these are better termed “private” for he once noted how the Alliance “had regular weekly open meetings and everyone was urged to participate in the discussions”.
Bakunin in the International
For Marxists, Bakunin is the bogeyman of the International and often personally blamed for its demise (they fail to note the Federalist International outlived Marx’s by a number of year). However, Marxist historian Paul Thomas admitted in Karl Marx and the Anarchists that “the International was to prove capable of expanding its membership only at the behest of the Bakuninists… Wherever the International was spreading, it was doing so under the mantle of Bakuninism.”
For example, Bakunin played a key role in replacing Mazzinism with Socialism in Italy:
“Apart from the Mazzinian system, which is that of the Republic-State, there is only one: that of the Republic-Commune, the Republic-Federation, the socialist and frankly popular Republic, that of ANARCHY. This is the politics of the social revolution, which seeks the abolition of the Sate and the economic and fully free organisation of the people, an organisation from the bottom up by means of federation”
Ironically, Engels called an anonymous polemic by Bakunin against Mazzini “an excellent production” that he “would undersign in all its parts”.
The Social Revolution
Unlike Proudhon, Bakunin was a revolutionary. He saw revolution as involving both political and economic change:
“As a political organisation, it is the absolutely free spontaneous federation of communes and workers’ associations; as a social organisation, it is the collective appropriation of capital and land by workers’ associations”
It would be a mass movement and the revolution “everywhere must be created by the people, and supreme control must always belong to the people organised into a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations… organised from the bottom upwards by means of revolutionary delegation”.
Unlike the caricature of being an advocate of violence, he repeatedly stressed that “Socialism will wage an inexorable war on ‘social positions’, not on men” and it is “these positions” that must be “destroyed and smashed” rather than men for “their present power does not reside in themselves… but in their wealth and in the support of the State”.
Needless to say, he did not think the ruling class would simply disappear and so a people in revolution would be “freed from all centralising government and all tutelage, and consequently called upon to form a new organisation by federating amongst themselves for defence”.
The Paris Commune
The single most significant event of Bakunin’s anarchist period was the Paris Commune of 1871. This revolt has had a significant impact – at least in rhetoric – upon Marxism which is ironic given its clearly Proudhonian nature. This can be seen from comparing Marx’s reporting on it to Proudhon’s writings.
Marx recounted how it was a municipal council in which “each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents”. The Commune “was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time” while the “unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organised by Communal Constitution” Economically, “it wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour.”
Proudhon had previously argued that the “choice of talents, the imperative mandate, and permanent revocability are… the inevitable program of all democracy”. It “is up to the National Assembly, through organisation of its committees, to exercise executive power, just the way it exercises legislative power”. “In the federative system”, he argued, “central authority… has a quite restricted part… concerning federal services… subordinate and entrusted to an Assembly… of delegates”. Economically, it was a case of “democratically organised workers’ associations” being the “core of that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic and social Republic” and “property restored to its proper limits… free disposition of the fruits of labour”
Little wonder Bakunin considered that “Revolutionary socialism has just attempted its first demonstration, both splendid and practical, in the Paris Commune.”
Free Association of Equals
Bakunin aimed for the free association of equals, the freedom for all within free association, the “freedom which consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers which are found in the form of latent capabilities in every individual”.
Humanity was a social animal and “man in isolation can have no awareness of his liberty. Being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection”. Hence how we associate matters – depending on its structure, an organisation can be free or authoritarian. He was a firm advocate of women’s liberation:
“Equal rights must belong to both men and women… Oppressed Women! Your cause is indissolubly tied to the common cause of all the exploited workers – men and women!”
Bakunin saw that freedom needs equality and so socialism: “The future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal”
After Bakunin
Bakunin died in 1876 but he saw the rise of the Federalist International (1872-1877). This was initially successful, with the majority of the International involved. However, it made the mistake Bakunin warned of, becoming effectively an anarchist federation rather than a union movement.
Then came the rise of Social-Democracy and eclipse of anarchism, partly a product of anarchist mistakes but also partly a natural development – but Marx made it appear “revolutionary” when it was the path to reformism. This process was reversed somewhat by the rise of syndicalism in response to its reformism, a return to the Federalist International (as the French syndicalists noted).
Kropotkin, who became the most famous anarchist after Bakunin’s death, championed “Bakuninist” ideas in 1877-82 and then from 1889 onwards. This was a return to syndicalism, a return of “Bakuninism” for Kropotkin recognised the need for dual organising – for labour and specific (anarchist) organisations.
Conclusions
Bakunin, then, laid the foundations of revolutionary anarchism, both as an idea and as a movement. In his resignation letter to the Jura Federation he gave some advice which is worth recounting:
“Hold fast to this principle of great and broad popular freedom, without which equality and solidarity themselves would be nothing but lies”
And:
“What matters most today is the organisation of the forces of the proletariat… Organise even more the practical, militant, international solidarity amongst workers of all trades and of all countries, and remember that, infinitely weak as isolated individuals, localities, or countries, you will find immense and irresistible strength in this universal collectivity.”
When anarchists have followed this advice, they have grown. When they have ignored it, they have become irrelevant.
Likewise, he was proven correct in his critique of Marxism. The socialist State “concentrating in their own hands all… production… under the direct command of state engineers” did “form a new privileged scientific and political class.” Social Democracy quickly generated in reformism, albeit masked by revolutionary rhetoric much at odds with its practice.
As noted, problems arose within the movement when anarchists after his death deviated from his ideas. This is not to say he always right nor that he cannot be improved upon, simply that we need to build and develop these ideas. as Kropotkin and others did
We need to learn from the past, not repeat it – are we ready for the challenge?
Further Reading…
There are various collections of Bakunin’s writings available: The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (1953), Bakunin on Anarchism (1971, 1980), Micheal Bakunin: Selected Writings (1973), The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869-1871 (1994) and Selected Texts 1868-1875 (2016). The anthology No Gods, No Masters, edited by Daniel Guérin, as a good selection of his writings. Also of note is the pamphlet Marxism, Freedom and the State (1984).
The biography Bakunin: The Creative Passion (2006) by Mark Leier is an excellent account of Bakunin’s life and ideas, as is Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom (1993) by Brian Morris. Also of note is Richard B. Saltman’s The Social and Political Thought of Michael Bakunin (1983).