Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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It has been suggested that we should not take all this too literally.
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But there can be few fantasies for exercising absolute dictatorial power as lamentable as this in the history of political thought. It would seem that Bakunin was almost schizoid, celebrating absolute freedom and condemning dictatorship in his public writings only to fantasize about an invisible dictatorship which he would lead in private. It reveals an unsavoury authoritarian streak to his personality, undermines his criticism of Marx, and shows a profound flaw in his tactics. Yet this undoubted lacuna does not change the validity of his public statements on freedom nor does it alter his importance in the history of anarchism. It merely shows his failure to achieve an adequate praxis.
Bakunin was unable to realize his secret society at this stage, but he manned the barricades again during the brief Prague rising in 1848. After its failure, he wandered around Germany only to take part in another insurrection in Dresden in May 1849. The workers, according to Engels, found Bakunin ‘a capable and cool-headed leader’, although he has been accused of causing many casualties by persuading them to rise against impossible odds.
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Bakunin had little interest in supporting the pro-constitutional forces who sought German unification against the King of Saxony, and he did not think the rebellion would succeed, but he could not stand idly by. In the streets of Dresden, he came across Richard Wagner, the conductor of the Dresden Opera, and they went together to the City Hall to see what was happening. The new Provisional Government had just been announced. Bakunin immediately advised the leaders to fortify the city against the approaching Prussian troops who arrived that night. Only one of the provisional triumvirate held firm, and Bakunin backed him to the hilt, doing the rounds on the barricades to keep morale up. The soldiers however fought their way through. Bakunin urged the rebels to blow themselves up in the City Hall but they fell back to Freiburg and then to Chemnitz instead. The exhausted revolutionaries were arrested in their beds.
Bakunin was so tired he made no attempt to escape — his energy had at last run out. This time he was sentenced to death. He was woken up one night and led out as if to be beheaded only to learn that his sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. He was then handed over to the Austrians who again sentenced him to death for high treason but he was eventually deported to Russia. He spent the next eight years in solitary confinement in the notorious Peter-and-Paul and the Schlüsselburg fortresses. It not only ruined his health — he developed scurvy and his teeth fell out — but it produced his remarkable
Confessions.
Addressed to Tsar Nicholas I, it contained a bizarre blend of political prophecy, self-accusation and dramatization, as well as genuine personal insight. He calls himself the ‘repentant sinner’ and declares: ‘I am a great criminal and do not deserve forgiveness.’ At the same time, he suggests that he suffered from the ‘philosophical disease’ of German metaphysics and that his follies sprang in large part from false concepts, ‘but even more from a powerful and never satisfied need for knowledge, life, action’.
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This highly ambivalent document appears to be both a cunning ruse as well as an outright betrayal of his beliefs.
Bakunin’s voluntarism comes clearly through when he relates how, after failing to foment an uprising in Bohemia, he reasoned that since the revolution is essential, it is possible. At this stage, revolutionary will was more important for Bakunin than objective conditions: ‘faith alone’, he declares,’ is already half of success, half the victory. Coupled with a strong will, it gives rise to circumstances, it gives rise to people, it gathers, unites, and merges the masses into one soul and one power.’
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After outlining his scheme for an invisible dictatorship, and appealing to the despotic Tsar to bring about reforms, he maintains that he was not capable of being a dictator:
To look for my happiness in the happiness of others, my personal dignity in the dignity of all those who surrounded me, to be free in the liberty of others, that is my credo, the aspiration of my whole life. I considered it as the most sacred of duties to revolt against all oppression, whoever was the author or the victim.
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Whatever his intentions in his
Confessions
, the man of action in Bakunin undoubtedly felt despair in prison at being cut off from the world. When his beloved sister came to see him and failed to gain admittance, he slipped out the note:
You will never understand what it means to feel yourself buried alive, to say to yourself every moment of the day and night: I am a slave, I am annihilated, reduced to impotence for life; to hear even in your
cell the echoes of the great battle which has had to come, which will decide the most important questions of humanity — and to be forced to remain idle and silent. To be rich in ideas, some of which at least could be useful, and to be unable to realize even one of them … capable of any sacrifice, even of heroism in the name of a cause that is a thousand times holy, and to see all these impulses shattered against four bare walls, my only witnesses, my only confidants! That is my life!
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In keeping with his new philosophy of action, he regretted the time he had wasted with the ‘Chinese shadows’ of metaphysics, and urged his brothers to concentrate on improving their estates.
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It was only after the accession of Alexander II in 1855 that Bakunin’s family managed to change his sentence from imprisonment to banishment. He left for Siberia where he married in 1857 an eighteen-year-old Polish girl called Antonia Kiriatkowska. She later bore two children by a family friend Carlo Gambuzzi but seemed quite happy to follow her itinerant revolutionary husband across the face of the earth. The Governor of Eastern Siberia, General Nikolai Muravev, turned out to be a second cousin on the Decembrist side of the family. Bakunin became deeply impressed by his colonizing methods: he told Herzen that he was the ‘best man in Russia’ who seemed ‘born to command’; he was a true statesman ‘who will not tolerate chatter, whose word has been his deed all his life, with a will of iron’.
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It would seem that Bakunin saw in Muravev a potential leader of one of his secret societies. The Governor moreover hoped that one day it would be possible to free the peasants by giving them the land they cultivated, and to establish ‘self-government, the abolition of the bureaucracy and, as far as possible, the decentralization of the Russian empire, without constitution or parliament’. In the process, it would be necessary to establish an ‘iron dictatorship’ which would liberate all the Slavs, and declare war on Austria and Turkey.
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Kropotkin later met Muravev in Siberia after he had annexed the Amúr region to Russia, but he was not taken in as Bakunin had been; ‘like all men of action of the governmental school’, Kropotkin wrote of Muravev, ‘he was a despot at the bottom of his heart’.
54
Bakunin spent four years in Siberia, from 1857 to 1861. He broke his word to Muravev’s successor while acting as an agent for a trading company. On an expedition to the river Amúr, he took an American ship to Japan and then to San Francisco. He crossed the United States, and mingled with the leading lights of the progressive and abolitionist circles in Boston. He liked the country and was impressed by its federalist system, but he left no discernible impact on the embryonic labour movement. Only later did Benjamin Tucker publicize his ideas.
55
Bakunin stayed little more than a
month in America, and eventually reached England at the end of 1861. In London, he met his old socialist friend Alexander Herzen and his cousin Nikolai Ogarev. His first statement for thirteen years ‘To my Russian, to my Polish and all my Slav friends’ appeared in their journal
The Bell
in February 1862. Quoting the journal’s motto ‘Land and Liberty’, he reaffirmed his faith in the instincts of the people and called for a revolution which would bring about the self-government of the Slavs in a fraternal union organized from the bottom up and based on the peasant commune. While this clearly echoed Proudhon’s federalism, Bakunin went beyond his economic mutualism to insist on the communal possession of land.
Herzen left a vivid picture of Bakunin at this time: ‘His activity, his idleness, his appetite, and all his other characteristics, such as his gigantic height and his continual sweat, were of superhuman dimensions, as he was himself — a giant with a leonine head and a tousled mane.’ He saw in him more of an ‘abstract theorist’ than a man of action, and told him candidly:
Cut off from life, thrown from early youth into German Idealism … you have lived to the age of fifty in a world of illusions, of student expansiveness, of great aspirations and petty failings … unscrupulous in money matters, with a streak of discreet but stubborn epicureanism and with an itch for revolutionary activity that lacks a revolution.
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It was stunningly accurate, but Bakunin had little choice but to ignore it. He tried to go to Poland after the insurrection in January 1863, but the expedition he joined collapsed and he ended up in Sweden. He then made his way to Italy where he began to put his Panslavist hopes behind him and moved closer to fully fledged anarchism. His search for a revolution was as strong as ever. But as he wrote to a Russian acquaintance in 1864 he felt that he was living in a transitional period, an unhappy age for unhappy people:
Civilization is rotting, barbarism has not yet developed into a force and we find ourselves
entre deux chaises.
It is very hard — if only one could live at least until the great day of Nemesis, the last judgement, which this despicable European society is not destined to escape. Let my friends build — I thirst only for destruction, because I am convinced that to build on carrion with rotten materials is a lost cause, and that new living materials and with them, new organisms, can arise only from immense destruction … For a long time ahead I see no poetry other than the grim poetry of destruction, and we will be fortunate if we get the chance to see even destruction.
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In Italy, Bakunin lived first in Florence and then moved to Naples in October 1865. After the failure of the Polish insurrection, he no longer
believed in a national liberation movement as a revolutionary force and began to advocate a social revolution on an international scale. Although he had met the Italian revolutionary Mazzini in London and had respected him as person, he now found his religious idealism and nationalism irksome. Bakunin also took leave at this time of his early philosophical idealism and developed a materialist and atheistic view of the world. He was helped in this direction by the positivist Comte but more especially by Marx. He praised Marx for having been the first to understand ‘that all the intellectual and political developments of society are nothing other than the ideal expression of its material and economic developments’.
58
On Marx’s request, Bakunin met him as he was passing through London in November 1864. Bakunin was still smarting about a report which had appeared in Marx’s journal
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
that he was a Russian spy, but Marx assured him that he had no part in it nor in the defamatory articles on Bakunin in the English press. Marx was charmed by the encounter and wrote to Engels that Bakunin was one of the few men who had developed instead of retrogressing during the previous sixteen years.
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At the same time, Bakunin was impressed by the International Working Men’s Association Marx had just help set up, and apparently agreed to work on its behalf in Italy. It turned out to be their last meeting.
It was during his stay in Italy that Bakunin’s anarchist ideas took final shape. The way had been prepared by his conversations with Proudhon and the reading of his works, but he now met Giuseppe Fanelli, a friend of the anarchist leader Carlo Pisacane. Pisacane defined property and government as the principal sources of slavery, poverty and corruption, and called for a new Italy organized from the bottom up on the principle of free association. This was to become the central plank of Bakunin’s programme.
Yet despite his conversion, Bakunin was still unable to abandon his love of conspiracy and penchant for secret societies. In the absence of a well-organized workers’ movement, he still relied on a vanguard to ensure the triumph of the social revolution. In Florence in 1864, he created a secret society, although it consisted of only a few men and women. When he moved to Naples, he set up a secret revolutionary Brotherhood and in 1866 wrote down
Principles and Organization of the International Brotherhood.
He wrote to Herzen and Ogarev at this time telling them how he had spent the last three years engaged in the ‘foundation and organization of a secret international revolutionary society’ and sent them a statement of its principles.
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The document not only offers the most detailed glimpse of Bakunin’s version of a free society but also sketches the prototype of all his subsequent secret societies. The Brotherhood was to be organized into two ‘families’, national and international, with the latter controlling the former. Its aim
was to overthrow the existing States and to rebuild Europe and then the world on the principles of liberty, justice and work.
But while the Brotherhood would be hierarchical and centralized, Bakunin in the main document entitled ‘Revolutionary Catechism’ elaborated his fundamental anarchist principles. In the first place, he insists that
‘individual and collective freedom’
is the only source of order in society and morality. Next, he identifies, like Proudhon, justice with equality, and argues that liberty is inextricably linked with equality: ‘The
freedom
of each is therefore realizable only in the equality of all. The realization of freedom through equality, in principle and in fact is
justice.’
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But unlike the patriarchal Proudhon, Bakunin maintains that women and men have equal rights and obligations. They would be able to unite and separate in
‘free
marriage’ as they please, and have their children subsidized by society. Children belong neither to their parents nor to society but ‘to themselves and to their own future liberty’.
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Finally, true freedom can only be realized with the complete destruction of the State, with the
‘Absolute rejection of every authority including that which sacrifices freedom for the convenience of the State’.
The Brotherhood would therefore strive to destroy the
‘all-pervasive, regimented, centralized State
, the alter ego of the Church, and as such, the permanent cause of the impoverishment, brutalization, and enslavement of the multitude’.
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