Part of the series of biographies of Mikhail Bakunin.
A short biography of Russian anarchist, often described as the founding father of collectivist anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin.
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Born May 18 (May 30 OS), 1814 Pryamukhino, Russia – died June 13, 1876 Bern, Switzerland.
The anarchist movement throws up many men and women, who become famous because of their actions, ideas and writings. Perhaps the best known of them all was the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin.
Anarchists do not have god-like leaders, nor all-knowing prophets. Nobody gets it right all the time and nobody is above criticism. Whoever does not make mistakes is either (a) not human, or (b) someone who never does anything at all. It is possible to take inspiration from the actions and ideas of others without falling into the trap of uncritical hero-worship.
First steps to freedom
Born in 1814 in Tsarist Russia, Bakunin quickly developed a burning hatred of injustice. At age 21, after a couple of years in uniform, he resigned from the army and began to mix in democratic circles. Nine years later he met up with radicals like Proudhon and Marx in Paris. By this stage he had formulated a theory which saw freedom being achieved by a general rising, linked to revolutions in the subject nations.
His passionate campaigning for democracy and anti-colonialism made him 'public enemy number one' in the eyes of most European monarchies. In 1848 he was expelled from France for making a speech in support of independence for Poland. His passion for liberty and equality, and his condemnations of privilege and injustice gave him an enormous appeal in the radical movement of the day.
The following year Bakunin rushed to Dresden where he played a leading role in the May insurrection. This led to his arrest and he was sentenced to death. The Austrian monarchy also wanted him, so he was extradited and again sentenced to death. But before the hangman could put the noose around his neck, Russia demanded his extradition and he spent the following six years jailed without trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Release from jail was followed by exile in Siberia.
Escape from Siberia
In 1861 he made a dramatic escape and returned to Europe by way of Japan, the Panama Canal and San Francisco! For the next three years he threw himself into the struggle for Polish independence. Then he began to rethink his ideas. Would national independence, in itself, lead to liberty for working people? This took him away from nationalism and towards anarchism.
In 1868 he joined the International Working Men's Association (also known as the First International), a federation of radical and trade union organisations with sections in most European countries. Very rapidly his ideas developed and he became a famous exponent of anarchism. While agreeing with much of Marx's economic theory, he rejected his authoritarian politics and the major division within the International was between the anarchists and the Marxists.
While Marx believed that socialism could be built by taking over the state, Bakunin looked forward to its destruction and the creation of a new society based on free federations of free workers. This soon became the policy of the International in Italy and Spain, and grew in popularity in Switzerland, Belgium and France. After failing to defeat the anarchist idea, Marx and his followers resorted to a campaign of smears and lies against Bakunin.
A movement is born
A committee set up to investigate the charges found, by a majority, Bakunin guilty and voted to expel him. The Swiss section called a further congress, where the charges were found to be false. An international conference also vindicated Bakunin, and went on to adopt the anarchist position of rejecting any rule by a minority.
Defeated, Marx and his followers moved the General Council of the International to New York where it faded into irrelevance. The ideas developed by Bakunin in the last decade of his life went on to form the basis of the modern anarchist movement. Worn out by a lifetime of struggle, Bakunin died in Switzerland on July 1st 1876.
His legacy is enormous. Although he wrote manifestos, articles and books he never finished a single sizable work. Being primarily an activist he would stop, sometimes literally in mid-sentence, to play his part in struggles, strikes and rebellions. What he left to posterity is a collection of fragments. Even so, his writings are full of insights that are as relevant today as they were in his time.
The danger of dictatorship
While understanding that ideas and intellectuals have an important role to play in the revolution, a role of education and articulating people’s needs and desires, he issued a warning. He cautioned them against trying to take power and create a dictatorship of the proletariat. The notion that a small group of people, no matter how well meaning, could execute a coup d'etat for the benefit of the majority was a heresy against common sense. Long before the Russian revolution he warned that a new class of intellectuals and semi-intellectuals might seek to step into the shoes of the landlords and bosses, and deny working people their freedom.
In 1873 he foretold, with great accuracy, that under the dictatorship of the proletariat of the Marxists the party leaders would concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand and divide the masses into two great armies - industrial and agricultural - under the direct command of state engineers who will constitute a new privileged scientific and political class.
Bakunin understood that government is the means by which a minority rules. In so far as 'political power' means the concentration of authority in a few hands, he declared, it must be abolished. Instead there must be a 'social revolution' which will change the relationship between people and place power in the hands of the masses through their own federation of voluntary organisations.
It is necessary to abolish completely and in principle and in practice, everything that may be called political power, for as long as political power exists there will always be rulers and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.
Who now can say he was not right?
By the Workers Solidarity Movement
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Happy Birthday, Mikhail!!
Happy Birthday, Mikhail!!
Break out the cigars!
Break out the cigars!
And the brandy!!
And the brandy!!
Prof. John Keane said that
Prof. John Keane said that whilst in a Saxon prison in 1849 Bakunin got through 1600 cigars!
Maybe Wagner got a crate of them for Mikhail?
While Marx believed that…
Workers Solidarity Movement
Confusing "the state" with…
Confusing "the state" with the "state machinery" -- Engels explains what Marx meant by that famous quote:
"It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes: whereas all bourgeois republicans since 1848 inveighed against this machinery so long as they were in the opposition, but once they were in the government they took it over without altering it and used it partly against the reaction but still more against the proletariat." [Collected Works, vol. 47, p. 74]
Engels noted elsewhere that “the republic” is “the ready-made political form for the future rule of the proletariat” which in France “is already in being” [Collected Works vol. 50, p. 276]
Also Marx:
"We know that the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries must be taken into account; and we do not deny the existence of countries like America, England, and if I knew your institutions better I might add Holland, where the workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means. That being the true, we must admit that in most countries on the continent it is force which must be the lever of our revolution; it is force which will have to be resorted to for a time in order to establish the rule of the workers." [Op. Cit., vol. 23, p. 255]
Engels later noted as regards Holland that, as well as "a residue of local and provincial self-government" it also had "an absence of any real bureaucracy in the French or Prussian sense". This meant that "only a few changes will have to be made to establish that free self-government by the working [people] which will necessarily be our best tool in the organisation of the mode of production." [Op. Cit., vol. 47, pp. 397-8]
As In Engels' 1891 introduction to Marx's "The Civil War in France", where he asserted that the state "is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another" and that it is "at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible."
Engels argued in April 1883 while he and Marx saw "the gradual dissolution and ultimate disappearance of that political organisation called the State" as "one of the final results of the future revolution," they "at the same time . . . have always held that . . . the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organised political force of the State and with its aid stamp out the resistance of the Capitalist class and re-organise society." The idea that the proletariat needs to "possess" the existing state is made clear when he notes that the anarchists "reverse the matter" by advocating that the revolution "has to begin by abolishing the political organisation of the State." For Marxists "the only organisation the victorious working class finds ready-made for use, is that of the State. It may require adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at such a moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the working class can exert its newly conquered power." [Op. Cit., vol. 47, p. 10]
So, yes, Marx and Engels did think that once the proletariat (or party, more correctly) took over the state (possibly by parliamentarian means) then the "ready-made state machinery" would need to be changed. In short, there is no contraction between the WSM quote and the Marx one -- once you recognise the difference between "the state" and the "state machinery".
The conflation of Marx and…
The conflation of Marx and Engels by anarchists, and social-democracy in general, reminds one of the conflation of "Jesus" and Paulus by Christianity. Opposites attract.
Just to get it straight in my mind, Anarcho, the state machinery is something different from the state. The state is, state media channels, Police, military forces, Education, Social and Health systems... To your mind, and Engels', the state machinery is its political institutions. And according to Engels Marx was referring to just the political institutions. Hence the social-democrat notion that the working class can lay hold of the state merely by taking over its political institutions. It just does not stand up to reason, and our experience as a class.
westartfromhere wrote: The…
Given that Marx and Engels supported social-democracy, that is hardly surprising. We must never confuse what social democracy became with what it started as.
I'm not talking about what I think, I'm discussing Marx and Engels argued. And is Engels AND Marx, as can be seen by Marx's comments on Britain, America and Holland.
The original social-democratic position -- as seen in Kaustky and Martov -- was that the working class would use "political action" to seize political power, the State, but it would modify ("lop off", etc.) the old state machinery to secure its position. This reflects the views of Marx and Engels (as quoted above). Over time, as the de-radicalising effects of electioneering took their toll, social democracy came to the view that this was not required, that the existing state machinery could and should be used.
Lenin, of course, popularised the confusion of the State and the "State machinery", although he had to ignore or twist quite a few quotes by Marx and Engels to do so. Some Marxists acknowledge this (for example, the SPGB and Martov is worth reading on this, e.g., "Decomposition or Conquest of the State").
As I said, we should not confuse how social-democracy started with how it ended up -- anarchists (from Bakunin onwards) warned this would happen, that electioneering would produce reformism and not revolution. And so it came to pass.
Marx's "support" for social…
Marx's "support" for social-democracy extrapolated:
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Abstract of Chapter III