Mikhail Bakunin

From Volume 24 of 'Marx & Engels - Collected Works'; Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1989.

“Again, I’m not enough of a Marx scholar to pretend to an authoritative judgement. My impression, for what it is worth, is that the early Marx was very much a figure of the late Enlightenment, and the later Marx was a highly authoritarian activist, and a critical analyst of capitalism, who had little to say about socialist alternatives. But those are impressions.” Noam Chomsky.

Bakunin's essay refutes the claims made by some Marxists, then and now, that early social democracy played a largely progressive role within the working class movement. In this particular case, Bakunin's comments are also far more radical than anything Marx and Engels were willing to say publicly at the time on the subject.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Born May 30, 1814 Pryamukhino, Russia – died June 13, 1876 Bern, Switzerland.

BAKUNIN ON TRIAL

(From Anarchist Black Cross Bulletin], No. 7; Chicago, January, 1974. Also reprinted in the 'Class Struggles in China' pamphlet, Charlatan Stew, New York, 1976)

The text is from Michael Bakunin, God and the State, 1916, New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association.

God and the State by Michael Bakunin [1814-1876]

Stateless Socialism: Anarchism

by Mikhail Bakunin 1814-1876

From "The Political Philosophy of Bakunin" by G.P. Maximoff 1953, The Free Press, NY

Effect of the Great Principles Proclaimed by the French Revolution. From the time when the Revolution brought down to the masses its Gospel - not the mystic but the rational, not the heavenly but the earthly, not the divine but the human Gospel, the Gospel of the Rights of Man - ever since it proclaimed that all men are equal, that all men are entitled to liberty and equality, the masses of all European countries, of all the civilized world, awakening gradually from the sleep which had kept them in bondage ever since Christianity drugged them with its opium, began to ask themselves whether they too, had the right to equality, freedom, and humanity.