Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (61 page)

For his part, Marx wrote in November 1871 that Bakunin was ‘a man devoid of all theoretical knowledge’ and wanted to make his ‘children’s primer’ of a programme the propaganda of his ‘second
International within the International
’. His doctrine moreover was a secondary matter – ‘merely means to his own personal self-assertion’.
¹⁶³
Engels also wrote that Bakunin’s ‘peculiar theory’ was a medley of Proudhonism and communism. He saw the State as the main evil to be abolished, maintaining that it is the State which has created capital; hence his strategy of complete abstention from politics and his wish to replace the State with the organization of the International. For Marx and Engels, however, Bakunin had got it the wrong way round. To abolish the State without a previous social revolution is nonsense since ‘the abolition of capital
is
precisely the social revolution’.
¹⁶⁴

The final battle took place at the Congress of the International held at the Hague in September 1872. Marx attended in person for the first time.
He alleged with Engels in a note on Bakunin’s secret Alliance to the General Council that ‘these intransigent defenders of openness and publicity have, in contempt of our statutes, organized in the bosom of the International a real secret society with the aim of placing its sections, without their knowledge, under the direction of the high priest Bakunin.’
¹⁶⁵
They accused him of founding with Nechaev a secret society in Russia and produced the latter’s threatening letter to the publisher’s agent who had commissioned the translation of
Capital.
They also claimed that he had tried to control his Alliance groups in France, Spain and Italy. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s Cuban son-in-law, was the principal source of their information.

At the Congress, Bakunin and his closest collaborator James Guillaume were expelled from the International. The headquarters were then moved to New York to save it from the control of the non-Marxist majority but it soon collapsed. Engels went on to write in an essay ‘On Authority’ that it is impossible to have any organization without authority since modern technology imposes upon men ‘a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation’. It is absurd to want to abolish political authority in the form of the State at a stroke for a ‘revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other.’
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The anarchists set up in 1872 a new International at St Imier in Switzerland (with delegates from the Jura, Italy and Spain) as a loose association of fully autonomous national groups devoted to the economic struggle only. Its programme as outlined by Bakunin formed the basis of revolutionary syndicalism:
‘the organization of solidarity in the economic struggle of labour against capitalism’.
¹⁶⁷

While the tactics of character assassination employed by the Marxist camp, reviving claims that Bakunin was a Russian spy and unscrupulous with money, were contemptible, it is difficult to refute the main thrust of their accusation. At the height of his campaign against Marx’s centralism and authoritarianism, Bakunin undoubtedly tried to establish a secret, centralized and hierarchical organization with the intention of directing the International. In a letter to his Spanish followers, he described the Alliance as ‘a secret society which has been formed in the very bosom of the International in order to give the latter a revolutionary organization, to turn it … into a force sufficiently organized to exterminate all the political-clerical-bourgeois reaction and destroy all the economic, legal, religious and political institutions of the state’.
¹⁶⁸
The Alliance, as Guillaume asserted, might have been principally an ‘informal revolutionary fraternity’, held together by affinity rather than a rule-book, but they undoubtedly formed a secret network of cells within the International.
¹⁶⁹
The anarchist historian Max Nettlau admitted that the Alliance was a ‘secret society so to
speak’.
¹⁷⁰
Arthur Lehning, former editor of the Bakunin Archives, on the other hand insisted that the secret Alliance did not exist within the International, although he recognized that it may have been ‘reconstructed in one form or another’ after 1869.
¹⁷¹
But even if Bakunin’s secret societies remained vague and unreal (in the sense that they did not have a coherent existence) they were still central to his notion of anarchist strategy.

Bakunin tried to justify his position and vented his anger against Marx and his followers in a letter to the Brussels paper
La Liberié
which was never sent. He reiterated his belief that the revolutionary policy of the proletariat should be the destruction of the State for its immediate and only goal. The Marxists on the other hand remained devoted Statists: ‘As befits good Germans, they are worshippers of the power of the State, and are necessarily also the prophets of political and social discipline, champions of the social order built from the top down.’
¹⁷²

He also qualified Marx’s economic determinism. He had long argued that facts come before ideas. He followed Proudhon, by claiming that the ideal is a flower whose root lies in the material conditions of existence, and Marx, by asserting that ‘the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its economic history.’
¹⁷³
Now he argued that while the economic base determines the political superstructure, the superstructure can in turn influence the base. According to Bakunin, Marx says: ‘“Poverty produces political slavery, the State.” But he does not allow this expression to be turned around, to say: “Political slavery, the State, reproduces in its turn and maintains poverty as a necessary condition for its own existence; so that to destroy poverty, it is necessary to destroy the State!”’
¹⁷⁴
And while recognizing the inevitable linking of economic and political facts in history, Bakunin refused to accept as Marx did that all events in the past were necessarily progressive, particularly if they revealed themselves to be in contradiction to the ‘supreme end’ of history which is nothing less than
‘the triumph of humanity, the most complete conquest and establishment of personal freedom and development — material, intellectual, and moral — for every individual, through the absolutely unrestricted and spontaneous organization of economic and social solidarity’.
¹⁷⁵

Bakunin further qualified Marx’s version of historical materialism by stressing the importance in history of the particular character of each race, people, and nation. He claimed, for instance, that the spirit of revolt is an instinct found in more intense form in the Latin and Slav peoples than in the German. He also felt that patriotism, love of the fatherland, is a natural passion — a passion of social solidarity. It involves an instinctive attachment to a traditional pattern of life, and hostility towards any other kind of life. It is thus ‘collective egoism on one hand, and war on the other’. Its roots are in man’s ‘bestiality’ and it exists in inverse ratio to the development of
civilization. Again nationality, like individuality, is a natural and social fact, but it should be imbued with universal values. In the final analysis, we should place ‘human, universal justice above national interests’. Bakunin therefore recommends a form of ‘proletarian patriotism’ which takes into account local attachments but which is internationalist in scope.
¹⁷⁶

Finally, Bakunin rejected Marx’s designation of the urban proletariat as the most progressive and revolutionary class since it implied the rule of the factory workers over the ‘rural proletariat’. To consider the city proletariat as the vanguard class is a form of ‘aristocracy of labour’ which is the least social and the most individualist in character. On the contrary, Bakunin considers the
‘flower of the proletariat’
to be the most oppressed, poorest and alienated whom Marx contemptuously dismissed as the
‘lumpenproletariat’.
‘I have in mind’, he wrote, ‘the “riffraff”, that “rabble” almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future …’
¹⁷⁷
Just as Marx idealized the proletariat, so Bakunin romanticized the lumpenproletariat.

In the last years of life, Bakunin grew increasingly pessimistic about the triumph of the social revolution. The Franco-Prussian war had not led to revolution in Europe and his attempts to foment rebellion in Russia achieved little. By 1872, his hopes for the political consciousness and spirit of revolt of the masses were at a nadir:

By now Bakunin was prematurely old, his health ruined by his years in Russian prisons and by a precarious life of incessant movement. In a letter dated 26 September 1873, he announced his retirement as a professional revolutionary:

With the help of his Italian comrade Carlo Cafiero a house was bought for him and his family near Locarno but peace still eluded him. The house
proved too expensive and Bakunin was obliged to move on and spend the last two years of his life in Lugano. The sap of the old revolutionary could still rise however: he came out of retirement to join a final abortive insurrection in the province of Bologna in May 1874. It left him even more disillusioned, and in February 1875 he wrote to the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus of his ‘intense despair’ since there was ‘absolutely no revolutionary thought, hope, or passion left among the masses’. The only hope remaining was world war. ‘These gigantic military states must sooner or later destroy each other. But what a prospect!’
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The crumbling colossus, who had exhausted himself in the sisyphean task of inspiring a world revolution, eventually died in Berne on 1 July 1876, just before his sixty-second birthday. He was buried in the city.

But Bakunin’s life and work were not in vain. While Marx may have won the initial dispute within the International subsequent events have tended to prove the validity of Bakunin’s warnings about centralism, State socialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He had prophetic insight into the nature of Communist States which have all become to varying degrees centralized, bureaucratic and militaristic, ruled by a largely self-appointed and self-reproducing elite. The string of Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe were overthrown in the 1980s by a mass display of the Popular Will, and progressive forces in the former Soviet Union are calling for a loose federation of independent republics. Bakunin, not Marx, has been vindicated by the verdict of history.

Soviet scholars liked to compare Bakunin’s notion of invisible dictators with Lenin’s concept of a disciplined elite of committed revolutionaries and saw it as a ‘great step forward’ in theoretical terms.
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He certainly called like Lenin for violent revolution and shared a faith in a secret vanguard controlled by himself. But it is Bakunin’s critique of Marxism which has been most remembered in the West. While the historical controversy between anarchists and Marxists has tended to exaggerate the differences between Bakunin and Marx, in fact they both adopted a form of historical materialism, accepted class struggle as the motor of social change, and saw the goal of history as a free and equal society. They both wanted the collective ownership of the means of production.

Their principal difference lay in strategy. Bakunin rejected parliamentary politics, called for the immediate destruction of the State, and insisted that the workers and peasants should emancipate themselves. Marx on the other hand dismissed as ‘nonsense’ his belief in the ‘free organization of the working class from below upwards’.
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Where Marx despised the peasantry as rural idiots and the lumpenproletariat as riffraff, Bakunin recognized their revolutionary potential. To Marx’s call for the conquest of political power, Bakunin opposed economic emancipation first and foremost.
Bakunin further tempered Marx’s determinism by stressing the role of the people’s spontaneous will in bringing about revolution.

Beyond their theoretical differences, Bakunin and Marx became symbols of different world-views. Bakunin is usually presented as the more attractive personality — generous and spontaneous, the embodiment of a ‘free spirit’.
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Bakunin was the more impetuous and Marx doubtlessly envied him for his ability to charm and influence others. Bakunin possessed what he admired most in others: ‘that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new.’
¹⁸⁴
Yet for all his turbulent eccentricities and contradictions, he was invariably kind, considerate and gentle with his friends.