Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (60 page)

Although many workers believed at the time that once universal suffrage was established, political liberty would be assured, it inevitably leads, according to Bakunin, to the collapse or demoralization of the radical party. The whole system of representative government is an immense fraud since it rests on the fiction that executive and legislative bodies elected by universal suffrage represent the will of the people. Irrespective of their democratic sentiments, all rulers are corrupted by their participation in government and begin to look down upon society as sovereigns regarding their subjects: ‘Political power means domination. And where there is domination, there
must be a substantial part of the population who remain subjected to the domination of their rulers.’ Even if a government composed exclusively of workers were elected by universal suffrage, they would become tomorrow ‘the most determined aristocrats, open or secret worshippers of the principle of authority, exploiters and oppressors’. They would rapidly lose their revolutionary will. It follows that representative government is ‘a system of hypocrisy and perpetual falsehood. Its success rests on the stupidity of the people and the corruption of the public mind.’
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Bakunin was opposed to universal suffrage because he felt that it would not fundamentally change the distribution of power and wealth. Whereas Marx believed that universal suffrage could eventually lead to communism, Bakunin quoted Proudhon approvingly to the effect that
‘Universal suffrage is the counter-revolution’.
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Nevertheless, Bakunin was never dogmatic about general principles, and while he was in theory a determined abstentionist from politics, in the particular circumstances of Italy and Spain at the time of the Paris Commune, he advised members of his Alliance to become deputies or help the socialist parties. He held that the most imperfect republic would always be preferable to the most enlightened monarchy.

Bakunin not only distinguished between different kinds of States, but also between the State and government. Every revolutionary government represents the principle of the minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged ‘stupidity’ of the latter. But it is impossible for such a dictatorship of the minority to bring about the freedom of the people since it only perpetuates itself and enslaves the people. In one of his resounding aphorisms, Bakunin declares: ‘Freedom can be created only by freedom, by a total rebellion of the people, and by a voluntary organization of the people from the bottom up.’
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A People’s State even in a transitional period is therefore an absurd contradiction in terms: ‘If their State is effectively a popular State, why should they dissolve it? If on the other hand its suppression is necessary for the real emancipation of the people, why then call it a popular State?’
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The issue of revolutionary government in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the principal source of conflict between the ‘revolutionary socialists’ or anarchists in Bakunin’s Alliance and the ‘authoritarian communists’ who followed Marx. As Bakunin acknowledged, their ultimate aim was similar — to create a new social order based on the collective organization of labour and the collective ownership of the means of production. But where the communists looked to the development of the political power of the working classes, especially the urban proletariat in alliance with bourgeois radicals, the anarchists believed that they could succeed only through ‘the development and organization of the non-political or
antipolitical social power of the working classes in city and country, including all men of goodwill from the upper classes’.
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This led to a fundamental divergence in tactics. The communists wanted to organize the workers in order to seize the political power of the State, while the anarchists wished to liquidate the State. The former advocated the principle and practice of authority; the latter put their faith in liberty. Both equally favoured science, but the communists wanted to impose it by force, while the anarchists sought to propagate it so that groups could organize themselves spontaneously and in keeping with their own interests. Above all the anarchists believed that ‘mankind has far too long submitted to being governed; that the cause of its troubles does not lie in any particular form of government but in the fundamental principles and the very existence of government, whatever form it may take’.
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Bakunin concludes that the people were therefore left with a simple choice: ‘the State, on one hand, and social revolution, on the other hand, are the two opposite poles, the antagonism which constitutes the very essence of the genuine social life of the whole continent of Europe’. And in one of his famous maxims, Bakunin insists that
‘freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality’.
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Bakunin did not provide any detailed sketch of a free society and only elaborated its most general principles of voluntary association and free federation. Indeed, he singled out for criticism ‘all those modern Procrusteans who, in one way or another, have created an ideal of social organization, a narrow mould into which they would force future generations’. He insisted however that there is no middle path between rigorously consistent federalism and bureaucratic government. The future social organization should be carried out ‘from the bottom up, by the free associations, then going on to the communes, the regions, the nations, and, finally, culminating in a great international and universal federation’.
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Land would be appropriated by agricultural associations and capital and the means of production by industrial associations.

Such communes would have little in common with existing rural communes. Bakunin was particularly critical of the Russian
mir
or peasant commune. Although the Russian peasants felt that the land belonged to the community and were hostile to the State, they were weakened by paternalism, which made the family patriarch a slave and a despot; by confidence in the Tsar, which followed from the patriarchal tradition; and by the absorption of the individual into the community.

By contrast, the new commune in an emancipated society would consist
of a voluntary association of free and equal individuals of both sexes. Unlike Proudhon, who extended his anarchist principles to only half the human species, Bakunin insists on the complete emancipation of women and their social equality with men. Perfect freedom can only exist with complete economic and social equality: ‘I am free only when all human beings surrounding me — men and women — are equally free. The freedom of others, far from limiting or negating my liberty, is on the contrary its necessary condition and confirmation.’ Every person would be personally free in that he or she would not surrender his or her thought or will to any authority but that of reason. They would be ‘free collectively’, that is by living among free people. Thus freedom involves the development of solidarity. Such a society would be a moral society, for socialism is justice and the basic principle of socialism is
‘that every human being should have the material and moral means to develop his humanity’.
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Human relations would be transformed. With the abolition of the patriarchal family, marriage law and the right of inheritance, men and women would live in free unions more closely united to each other than before. The upbringing and education of children would be entrusted to the mother but remain mainly the concern of society. Indeed, an integral ‘equal education for all’ is an indispensable condition for the emancipation of humanity. Such a system of education would not only eradicate existing differences, but prepare every child of either sex for a life of thought and work, imbibe him or her with ‘socialist morality’, and encourage respect for the freedom of others which is the ‘highest duty’. Children cannot, however, choose not to be educated or to remain idle.

Bakunin lays down the law here:
‘Everyone shall work, and everyone shall be educated’
, whether they like it or not. No one will be able to exploit the labour of others. Every one will have to work in order to live, for ‘social and political rights will have only one basis — the labour contributed by everyone’. Without the use of positive law, the pressure of public opinion should make ‘parasites’ impossible, but exceptional cases of idleness would be regarded ‘as special maladies to be subjected to clinical treatment’.
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Such authoritarian statements open up a potential world of tyranny and oppression in Bakunin’s so-called free society.

Bakunin is not only prepared to establish an invisible dictatorship but also to employ widespread revolutionary violence. Bakunin is quite frank about the issue: ‘Revolution, the overthrow of the State means war, and that implies the destruction of men and things.’ Although he regrets it, he insists that ‘Philosophers have not understood that against political forces there
can be no guarantees but complete destruction.’ At the same time, he argues that terrorism is alien to a genuine social revolution; it should not be directed against individuals who are merely the inevitable products of society and history. Once the ‘hurricane’ has passed, true socialists should oppose ‘butchery in cold blood’.
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Bakunin further recommended certain forms of economic struggle, such as organizing strikes which train workers for the ultimate struggle. While not opposed to workers’ co-operatives, he pointed out that they cannot fundamentally change society, cannot compete with big capital, and, if they are successful, they must result in a drop in wages as well as prices. As to the agents of change, Bakunin consistency called for an alliance between peasants and industrial workers. Although the city workers might take the initiative in the revolutionary movement, they should not underestimate the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and should try to win their support.

Even while elaborating his mature political philosophy, Bakunin was never one to rest in theory. He constantly searched for opportunities to put his ideas into practice, or at least have them confirmed by experience. The failure of the Lyon rising of 1870 in which he had participated left him with little confidence in the triumph of the social revolution, but the great social upheaval of the Paris Commune which followed shortly after from March to May in 1871 raised his hopes once again. Although the majority were Jacobins calling for a revolutionary government and centralized State, many of the communards were Proudhonians, and the most active members of the committee of the twentieth
arrondissement
and the central committee of the National Guard were followers of Bakunin. Not surprisingly, Bakunin welcomed the Paris Commune as a striking and practical demonstration of his beliefs and called it ‘a bold, clearly formulated negation of the Suite’. On its defeat, he wrote: ‘Paris, drenched in the blood of her noblest children — this is humanity itself, crucified by the united international reaction of Europe’.
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When Mazzini attacked the International for being anti-nationalist, decried the Commune for being atheistic, and declared that the State is ordained by God, Bakunin immediately took up his pen and wrote hundreds of pages against Mazzini. He defended his own version of atheism and materialism in a pamphlet entitled
The Response of an Internationalist
, which was followed up with a second pamphlet called
The Political Theology of Mazzini.
Bakunin respected Mazzini as ‘incontestably one the noblest and purest personalities’ of the century and preferred him to Marx, but criticized him as ‘the last high priest of an obsolescent religious, metaphysical and political idealism’.
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The pamphlets helped to extend the International in
Italy and ensured that anarchism took firm root amongst the Italian working class.

Marx himself saw in the federalist programme of the communards a ‘self-government of producers’ and described it as ‘the political form at last discovered under which the economic emancipation of work could be realized’.
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Engels went on to call it the first demonstration of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. It is an irony of history that both Marx, Engels and Lenin all should hail the Paris Commune as a model of the proletarian revolution, while its attempt to abolish the machinery of the State at a stroke was clearly more in accord with the anarchist and federalist ideas of Proudhon and Bakunin.

Their common praise for the Commune did not prevent a new row breaking out between Marx and Bakunin in the International soon after. The defeat of the Paris Commune prevented the congress from taking place in Paris in 1871, and at the conference which was held in London the supporters of Bakunin from the Jurassian Federation were not invited. The two previous congresses had avoided any philosophical and political principles and merely asserted that ‘the economic emancipation of the workers in the great aim to which must be subordinated every political movement’. Without the Bakuninist opposition, Marx now was able to get accepted the conquest of political power as an integral part of the obligatory programme of the International.

In addition, according to Bakunin, he managed to establish ‘the dictatorship of the General Council, that is, the personal dictatorship of Marx, and consequently the transformation of the International into an immense and monstrous State with himself as chief’. What Marx proposed with his scientific socialism, Bakunin wrote, was ‘the organization and the rule of the new society by socialist
savants
… the worst of all despotic governments!’
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