Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (58 page)

In a fragment on ‘The Programme of the Alliance’ written at this time, Bakunin further elaborated on the correct relationship between his Alliance as a conscious revolutionary vanguard and the workers’ movement in and outside the International. In the first place, he rejects class collaboration and parliamentary politics. Next, he attacks union bureaucracy in which the elected leaders often become ‘absolute masters’ of the rank-and-file, and replace popular assemblies by committees. Finally, he insists that his recommended libertarian organization is quite distinct from State structures since it involves the diffusion of power. Whereas the ‘State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the possessing classes over the masses … the International wants only their complete freedom, and calls for their revolt’. For Bakunin, the fundamental idea underlying the International is ‘the founding of a new social order resting on emancipated labour, one which will spontaneously erect upon the ruins of the Old World the free federations of workers’ associations’.
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This rejection of parliamentary politics and insistence that the workers’ organizations should reflect the structure of future society helped lay the foundations of the revolutionary syndicalist movement.

It is difficult not to conclude that Bakunin’s invisible dictatorship would be even more tyrannical than a Blanquist or Marxist one, for its policies could not be openly known or discussed. It would be a secret party; it would operate like conspirators and thieves in the night. With no check to their power, what would prevent the invisible dictators from grasping for absolute power? It is impossible to imagine that Bakunin’s goal of an open and democratic society could ever be achieved by distorting the truth and manipulating the people in the way he suggests.

It is not enough to excuse Bakunin’s predilection for tightly organized, authoritarian, hierarchical secret organizations by appealing to his ‘romantic temperament’ or the oppression of existing States.
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His invisible dictatorship is a central part of his political theory and practice, and shows that for all his professed love of liberty and openness there is a profound authoritarian and dissimulating streak in his life and work. His habit of simultaneously preaching absolute liberty in his polemics with the Marxists while defending a form of absolute dictatorship in his private correspondence with members of his clandestine Alliance would certainly seem to point to ‘acute schizophrenia’ on Bakunin’s part.
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His love of destruction and
struggle also prevented him from realizing that it is impossible to employ violence and force as means to achieve libertarian and peaceful ends.

After the collapse of the Lyon uprising, Bakunin retreated to Locarno, deeply depressed. The Paris Commune in the spring of 1871, the greatest urban uprising in the nineteenth century, temporarily raised his hopes. It seemed to confirm his belief that a war could trigger off a social revolution. Harking back to the revolutions of 1793 and 1848, it also rejected centralized authority and experimented with women’s rights and workers’ control. Bakunin immediately recognized its decentralist and federalist tendencies; it was not Marx’s proletarian dictatorship that it exemplified, but ‘the bold and outspoken negation of the state’, bringing about ‘a new era of the final emancipation of the people and their solidarity’. In his essay
The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State
, Bakunin further wrote:

The Lyon uprising and the Paris Commune inspired some of Bakunin’s greatest writing. From the end of 1870 to 1872, he composed his first and last book, the sprawling
The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.
The strange tide of the work was meant to suggest that there was an alliance between the Tsar of Russia on the one hand and Wilhelm I and Bismarck of the new German Empire on the other to use the Russian whip
(knout
) to prevent the social revolution. But the work went far beyond international politics and Bakunin developed his views on a whole range of subjects in an attempt to give a philosophical foundation to his anarchism. One section was published in 1882 as a pamphlet entitled
God and the State
and became Bakunin’s most famous work. For a long time, it was the only sizeable part of his writing translated into English.

Although Bakunin was a philosophical idealist as a young man with a spiritual yearning to become part of the whole, he had since the early 1840s been a materialist and a determinist. But while he had become a militant atheist, he was not uncompromising; he did not want atheism to become a fundamental principle of the International for fear of alienating many superstitious peasants. Nothing, he felt, is more natural than that the people, especially in the country, should believe in God as the creator, regulator,
judge, master and benefactor of the world. People would continue to believe in a Superior Being until a social revolution provided the means to realize their aspirations on earth and overcome their instinctive fear of the world around them. Religious beliefs are therefore not so much ‘an aberration of mind as a deep discontent at heart. They are the instinctive and passionate protest of the human being against the narrowness, the platitudes, the sorrows, and the shame of a wretched existence.’
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Nevertheless, while recognizing religious belief as an inevitable consequence of the oppressive and miserable life here on earth, Bakunin goes out of his way to deny its metaphysical truth. He develops the Left-Hegelian critique of religion, to argue like Feuerbach that the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man discovers his own image divinized. Christianity is for Bakunin the religion
par excellence
which exhibits the essence of every religious system, which is
‘the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity’.
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The idea of God implies
‘the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice’.
But since man is born free, slavery is not natural. As all Gods, according to Bakunin, desire to enslave man they too must be unnatural. Hence they cannot exist. Bakunin puts his ontological refutation of God in the form a syllogism: ‘If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle.’ Bakunin’s sentiments might be admirable but his logic is faulty: he not only assumes paradoxically that God exists as an idea in order to disprove his existence, but his syllogism is only valid if we accept his initial premiss that the essence of God is always to enslave man. Be that as it may, Bakunin considers God to be such a threat to human liberty and virtue that he reverses the phrase of Voltaire to say
‘if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him’.
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Although dogmatically denying the existence of God, Bakunin is sceptical in his epistemology. There are inevitable limits to man’s understanding of the world, and we must content ourselves with only ‘a tiny bit of knowledge about our solar system’.
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Nevertheless, Bakunin accepts the reality of a Newtonian universe governed by natural laws. The laws are not known by nature itself, and are only of a relative character, but they are discovered by human reason as constant and recurrent patterns.

Yet Bakunin is not a mechanical materialist like Feuerbach. He adopts an evolutionary perspective and argues that the gradual development of the material world is a ‘wholly natural movement’ from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the superior, the inorganic to the organic.
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But like Marx, he sees change occurring through the clash of opposite forces both in nature and society: ‘the harmony
of the forces of nature appears only as the result of a continual struggle, which is the real condition of life and of movement. In nature, as in society, order without struggle is death.’
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There is thus a mutual interaction in nature which produces a ‘natural authority’ which dominates all life.

When it comes to humanity’s place in nature, Bakunin rejects all dualism which tries to separate the two. Indeed, far from being separate, ‘Man forms with Nature a single entity and is the material product of an indefinite number of exclusively material causes.’
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The human species is only one species amongst others, with two basic drives of sex and hunger. Nevertheless, Bakunin claims that the human world is the highest manifestation of animality. Our first ancestors, if not gorillas, were ‘omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts’.
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But they were endowed to a higher degree than the animals of any other species with two faculties — the power to think and the desire to rebel. In addition, while denying free will in an absolute sense of some contra-causal autonomous power, Bakunin argues that man is alone among all the animals on earth in possessing a relatively free will in the sense of ‘conscious self-determination’.
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Due to his intelligence man can develop his will to modify his instinctive drives and regulate his own needs. It follows that moral responsibility exists but it is only relative.

It is the ability to think and to act deliberately which enables human beings to negate the animal element in themselves and to develop their consciousness and freedom. It is man’s rational will which enables him to free himself gradually from the hostility of the external world. Whereas Jehovah wanted man to remain an ‘eternal beast’, ignorant and obedient, Satan urged him to disobey and eat of the tree of knowledge. As such, Satan is ‘the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds’.
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Indeed, Bakunin believed that in general the vitality and dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt. The ‘goddess of revolt’, he declared in one of his resounding phrases, is the ‘mother of all liberty’.
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As the human species revolts and rises from other animal species, they not only become more complete and free, but also more individual: ‘man, the last and most perfect animal on earth, presents the most complete and remarkable individuality.’
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Like Hegel, Bakunin saw the complete emancipation of the individual as the supreme aim of history which can only be achieved by growth in consciousness.

But while born with an innate ability to think and to rebel, Bakunin believed that human beings are almost entirely shaped by their environment,
products of history and society. Every individual inherits at birth in different degrees the capacity to feel, to think, to speak and to will, but these rudimentary faculties are without content. It is society which provides the ideas and impressions which form the common consciousness of a people. It is the same with moral dispositions. We are born with a capacity to be egoistic or sociable, but not innate moral characteristics. Our moral behaviour will result from our social tradition and education.

Man is therefore largely a product of his environment, but it does not follow that he is its eternal victim. In the final stage of his development, man, unlike other animal species, managed to transform the greater part of the earth, and to make it habitable for human civilization. Although an inseparable part of nature, man in the past came to conquer nature, turning ‘this enemy, the first terrible despot, into a useful servant’. For all his evolutionary perspective and stress on the animal origins of man, Bakunin is no ecologist and believes that we must continually struggle against external nature: ‘Man … can and should conquer and master this external world. He, on his part, must subdue it and wrest from it his freedom and humanity.’
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Although Bakunin refers to the human species in the habit of the day by the abstraction ‘Man’, he did not believe that he was merely an atomized creature. Indeed, ‘Man is not only the most individual being on earth — he is also the most social being.’ Bakunin totally rejects Rousseau’s portrayal of primitive man as a self-sufficient individual living in isolation. Society is the basis of human existence: ‘Man is born into society, just as an ant is born into an ant-hill or a bee into its hive.’
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It is necessarily anterior to our thought, speech and will and we can only become humanized and emancipated in society. Outside society, not only would a human being not be free, he would not even become genuinely human, ‘a being conscious of himself, the only being who thinks and speaks’.
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Society is also essential to our development. In the first place, the basis of morality can only be found in society, and the moral law to observe justice is a social fact, a creation of society. Secondly, human beings can only free themselves from the yoke of external nature through collective labour. Thirdly, a person can only realize his individual freedom and his personality through the individuals who surround him. Fourthly, solidarity is a fundamental law of human nature: ‘All social life is nothing but the incessant mutual interdependence of individuals and of masses. All individuals, even the strongest and most intelligent, are at every moment of their lives both the producers and the products of the will and action of the masses.’
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