Bakunin’s years of prison and exile meant that he was unaffected by the post-1848 gloom among émigrés, and he did not really engage with the IWA for four years after its foundation. Over this time his position became more explicitly anarchist. He made his entry into the association at a congress in Basel, with Marx absent. The powerful impression he created led Marx to see him not so much as an errant comrade but as a dangerous rival. Marx had been arguing with anarchists since the 1840s when he took on Proudhon, thereby ensuring a rift between two wings of the same movement that was never healed. Proudhon’s strength lay in his writings, as his strategic judgment was always problematic. He had thrown himself into the uprisings in Paris in 1848, as a writer and speaker, but also briefly entered the National Assembly. This unhappy experience, after which he complained about the isolation and fear of the people that marked his fellow representatives, left him more enthusiastic about economic than political progress. In 1852, he had decided that Louis-Napoleon could lead France down a revolutionary road, a position he later abandoned. Although he retained a following in France, Proudhon drifted to the right in his views, becoming increasingly xenophobic, loathing direct action while recoiling from strikes and elections. Rather than wrestle with how to mobilize the masses to topple the state, he urged withdrawal from organized politics of all forms to concentrate on educating people in the ways of mutual support among free men.17 “The Workers, organized among themselves, without the assistance of the capitalist, and marching by Work to the conquest of the world, will at no time need a brusque uprising, but will become all, by invading all, through the force of principle.”18 So he dealt with the problem of strategy by not advocating any course that needed one.
Bakunin represented a quite different strand of anarchism. He rejected all forms of collectivism but enthusiastically embraced revolution, asserting the creativity of destruction. “Only life itself, freed from all governmental and doctrinaire fetters and given the full liberty of spontaneous action, is capable of creation.” A compelling orator, he was a much more charismatic figure than Proudhon. He also had his own international network of activists. Marx accused Bakunin of maintaining a clandestine organization independent of the IWA. There was some truth to the charge: Bakunin was maintaining his network in order to give the movement as a whole a surreptitious push in the preferred direction. At the same time, Marx’s campaign was tendentious and spiteful. The net result was to finish off the IWA. Eventually in 1872, Marx was able to get both Bakunin expelled and the seat of the association’s general council moved to the United States, which effectively led to its demise.
Their differences were brought to a head by the Paris Commune of 1871, a defining event for revolutionaries, comparable in significance to 1848 and just as unsuccessful. It followed the Franco-Prussian War. As Louis-Napoleon was defeated, radicals took over in France, declared the Third Republic, and continued to resist. After five months, Paris fell in January 1871. The drama was still not over. The city was in a fevered state. The people were well armed and the radicals took control. Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers from the Center-Right government fled to Versailles, where he regrouped with those of his troops, police, and administrators who had not gone over to the radicals. In Paris, a central committee arranged elections for a commune. Sundry radicals and socialists stepped forward, some looking back to the glories of 1789 while others looked forward to the new communist utopia. Louis Blanqui’s election as president was largely symbolic as the government had already arrested him. The red flag was flown, the old Republican Calendar reinstated, church and state separated, and modest social reforms introduced. Feminist and socialist ideas were actively canvassed. In the leadership, anarchists, revolutionary socialists, and sundry republicans worked reasonably well together. It did not last. Thiers’s new army eventually found a way into the city and overwhelmed a brave but hopeless defense, conducted with little central coordination and direction. Paris was retaken and reprisals began, with estimates of initial executions as high as twenty thousand.
Neither Marxists nor Bakuninists played a major role in the Commune. “They owed more to the commune than the commune owed to either of them.”19 Marx’s The Civil War in France claimed the Commune as a prototype for a revolutionary government, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a term that later acquired more sinister overtones. The Commune demonstrated that the working class could hold power but also the difficulty of using the established state machinery for its own purposes. The Communards had “lost precious moments” organizing democratic elections rather than instantly finishing off the Versailles government once and for all. This, Marx thought, might have been achieved by conscripting the able-bodied and having a centralized command. Bakunin’s view was quite different. The whole meaning of the Commune lay in its spontaneity and decentralization to workers’ councils. Marx’s idea of a hard state under strong central direction appalled him. He warned of the “ruling of the majority by the minority in the name of the alleged superior intelligence of the second.” In retrospect, Bakunin’s warnings about the rise of a new elite and the oppressive role of the state under socialism looked prescient.20 They flowed naturally from his conviction that the state was the root of all evil, and from his opposition to anybody setting themselves up as a power over others.
Marx denied that he considered a strong coercive state necessary for the indefinite future. It would eventually, as Engels put it, “wither away.” According to the theory the emancipation of the proletariat would be the emancipation of all humanity. As a means of class domination, the state would become redundant. The theory offered comfort, but Marx was never sentimental about the exercise of political power or under any illusions about how vicious class struggle could become. The bourgeoisie would not hand over power willingly and they would fight to get it back if it was taken from them. That could, and probably would, involve war with reactionary states. So, in the short term, Marx did not doubt for one minute that the proletariat would have to fight to hold on to power. This was the lesson of the Commune. To believe that the revolution could survive without central direction and coercive capacity was naïve. For Engels, revolution was “certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—authoritarian means, if such there be at all.”21
For his part, Bakunin considered Marx naïve to believe that a state so forged would ever wither away. States could be expressions of any sectional interests and not just classes. Even well-intentioned revolutionary elites were capable of authoritarianism and deploying state power to maintain and develop their own position. “I am not a communist,” he explained, “because communism concentrates and absorbs all the powers of society in the state; it necessarily ends with the concentration of property in the hands of the state.” Instead, Bakunin argued for “the abolition of the state, the radical elimination of the principle of authority and the tutelage of the state.” He sought “free association from the bottom up, not by authority from the top down.”22 The challenge was not to those who wielded political power but to the very idea of political power. He acknowledged that the revolution must contend with “a military force that now respects nothing, is armed with the most terrible weapons of destruction.” Against such a “wild beast,” another beast was needed, also wild but more just, “an organized uprising of the people; a social revolution which, like the military reaction, spares nothing and stops at nothing.”23
Though this approach “allowed power to be studied in its own right,”24 it assumed that revolutions could be conducted in a way that abolished political power rather than transferred it. Power to Bakunin was an artificial construct, an unnecessary and therefore immoral imposition on humanity. Without power, humanity would be in a more authentic state, with laws reflecting its essentially harmonious nature. Only this optimism could deny anarchy its connotations of chaos and disorder, with less potential-fulfilling liberation and mo
re chronic insecurity. But if the revolution was against power how could it succeed? Bakunin solved the problem for himself by describing a restricted role for a professional revolutionary, though he still left himself open to charges of hypocrisy. Though objecting to power in principle, he seemed to fancy it for himself, as he was always at the heart of these conspiracies. In 1870, for example, he contemplated the “creation of a secret organization of up to 70 members” who would aid the revolution in Russia and form the “collective dictatorship of the secret organization.” This organization would “direct the people’s revolution” through “an invisible force—recognized by no one, imposed by no one—through which the collective dictatorship of our organization will be all the mightier, the more it remains invisible and unacknowledged, the more it remains without any official legality and significance.”
Bakunin was, of course, operating in a milieu infested by government agents, where survival depended on concealing intentions and networks. The conspiracies were also largely products of Bakunin’s lively imagination. Few of his plans came close to serious implementation. Nonetheless, Bakunin put some effort into defining the special role for professional revolutionaries. True, they must be exceptional, constituting a “sort of revolutionary general staff composed of individuals who are devoted, energetic, intelligent, and most important, sincere and lacking ambition and vanity, capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and popular instinct.”25 The metaphor of the general staff was revealing in itself: this was after all the strategy-making body of a conventional army. Moreover, Bakunin’s critique of orthodox political activity always warned how “the best, the purest, the most intelligent, the most disinterested, the most generous, will always and certainly be corrupted by this profession [of government].” This is why he opposed participation in elections. Good people were not enough.
The way out of the logical morass was to stress how limited a role professional revolutionaries could play, whatever their intentions. For Marx, revolutions were positive, constructive events, arising naturally out of shifts in underlying economic conditions. Bakunin described them as supremely unpredictable affairs, with deep causes that could neither be manipulated nor necessarily recognized by those encouraging or opposing them. Revolutions “make themselves, produced by the force of affairs, by the movement of the masses—then they burst out, instigated by what often appear to be frivolous causes.” They emerged out of “historical currents which, continuously and usually slowly, flow underground and unseen within the popular strata, increasingly embracing, penetrating, and undermining them until they emerge from the ground and their turbulent waters break all barriers and destroy everything that impedes their course.” In this respect they were not set in motion by individuals or organizations. Instead, they “occur independently of all volition and conspiracy and are always brought about by the force of circumstances.”26
It is interesting to note how close this view of history was to Tolstoy’s. Both conveyed a sense of events emerging out of the individual responses of many people to their circumstances in ways that could neither be predicted nor manipulated. The influence was quite possible. Tolstoy’s War and Peace was written during the 1860s, appearing first in a serialized form and then in its final version in 1869. Both men were also influenced by Proudhon. Proudhon showed Tolstoy his own new book, War and Peace, when the two met in Brussels in 1861. Tolstoy borrowed the title as an act of homage.27 His own brand of Christian anarchism, which took inspiration from the simple faith of the peasantry, was close to Proudhon’s vision of a new society developing from the bottom up.
Unlike Tolstoy or Proudhon, Bakunin did see even modest scope for human agency in providing direction to revolutions. There was a role for bringing together the popular instinct—the people were socialist without realizing it—with revolutionary thought. If they did not, then they might be taken in by those who sought a dictatorship, using the people as “a stepping-stone for their own glory.” As one biographer put it, “the intellectual should play the junior role in this process, acting, at best, as helpful editor while the writing of the script was the work of the people themselves.”28 This was a comforting hypothesis but as much of a fudge as Marx’s claim that the proletarian dictatorship would be no more than a transitional phase. The idea that there were forms of authority and influence so pure and natural that they could be distinguished from artificial and oppressive forms depended on an extremely simplistic view of power. Politicians always claimed to be no more than servants of the people, listening as much as leading, but in practice—as Bakunin observed—things often turned out differently.
A contrast between the two approaches can be found in their responses to the events of September 1870 as Prussia occupied France. Marx, writing for the IWA, used contemptuous language but his analysis was tight, well informed, and subtle, describing the maneuvers which led to the end of the Second Empire and the German war of conquest. He wanted the German working class, which had supported the war, to insist on an honorable peace with France, while the French working class must escape their fascination with the past. He noted presciently that if the working classes stayed passive, “the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds.” The overall perspective was that of a caring spectator.
Bakunin’s Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis, addressed to no one in particular, was long and rambling but deeply engaged. One core theme was that the German army could be defeated and another was that this required an alliance between the working class and the peasants. Together, the French people could not be conquered by any “army in the world, however powerful, however well organized and equipped with the most extraordinary weapons.” If the bourgeoisie had not been so pathetic, there could already have been “a formidable insurrection by guerrillas or, if necessary, by brigands” against the Germans. Much now depended on the peasants. Though they could be ignorant, egoistic, and reactionary, they retained “their native energy and simple unsophisticated folkways” and would react badly to the “ideas and propaganda which are enthusiastically accepted by the city workers.” Yet the gulf between the two was really only a “misunderstanding.” The peasants could be educated away from their religion, devotion to the emperor, and support for private property if only the workers made the effort.
As the actual moment of revolution had arrived, it was too late for organization-building or the “pretentious scholastic vocabulary of doctrinaire socialism.” Instead, this was a time to “embark on stormy revolutionary seas, and from this very moment we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.” Once stirred up the peasants could be incited “to destroy, by direct action, every political, judicial, civil, and military institution, and to establish and organize anarchy through the whole countryside.” At such times it “is as though an electric current were galvanizing the whole society, uniting the feelings of temperamentally different individuals into one common sentiment, forging totally different minds and wills into one.” Alternatively it might be one of those “somber, disheartening, disastrous epochs, when everything reeks of decadence, exhaustion, and death, presaging the exhaustion of public and private conscience. These are the ebb tides following historic catastrophes.”
Propaganda of the Deed
This notion of the “propaganda of the deed” reflected Bakunin’s growing impatience with theory and a conviction that only dramatic action could penetrate the dim consciousness of the befuddled masses. Here the aim was to show how the peasants could be rid of their shackles. If only they could see the vulnerability of the existing order, their best instincts would kick in and the uprising would follow. Because the sort of deeds chosen by anarchists to stir up the masses often involved assassination, Bakunin came to be viewed as the intellectual father of radical terrorism. A key part of Marx’s indictment against Bakunin was his association with Sergei N
echayev. Bitter, ascetic, and militant, Nechayev took nihilism to destructive extremes, claiming the right and obligation to do anything in the name of the cause (a conclusion he did not solely reserve for revolutionary business). On meeting Bakunin in Switzerland in late 1868, he claimed to have escaped from prison and to represent a Russian revolutionary committee. This led Bakunin to proclaim him a member of the Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance (number 2771).29
The next few months were disastrous for Bakunin. Later he rejected Nechayev’s brutal philosophy. Despite allegations to the contrary, he probably did not coauthor some of Nechayev’s starker publications, which celebrated the role of “poison, the knife, the noose” and spoke of the purifying effects of “fire and sword.” The “massacre of personages in high places,” Nechayev claimed, would create a panic among the ruling classes. The more the mighty were shown to be vulnerable the more others would be emboldened, leading eventually to a general revolution. Nechayev’s most notorious publication was the Catechism of a Revolutionary, which opened: “The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion; the revolution.”30 It was the revolution alone which distinguished between good and evil. In the end Bakunin, beguiled by a young man whose energy and militancy offered hope for the future, did not break with Nechayev because of his philosophy but because of an abuse of hospitality. Nechayev took off with his money, issued gruesome threats to a publisher on his behalf, attempted to seduce Herzen’s daughter, and murdered a fellow student to protect his own reputation.
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