Politics & International Relations
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary and anarchist thinker who played a significant role in the development of anarchist theory. He advocated for the abolition of the state and the establishment of a decentralized, self-governing society. Bakunin's ideas on the liberation of the working class and the rejection of authority have had a lasting impact on anarchist and socialist movements.
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6 Key excerpts on "Mikhail Bakunin"
eBook - ePubThe Dictionary of Alternatives
Utopianism and Organization
- Martin Parker, Valerie Fournier, Patrick Reedy(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Zed Books(Publisher)
BBAKUNIN, MIKHAIL One of the founding figures (1814–76) of both ANARCHIST theory and tactics. Born into the Russian aristocracy to a politically liberal father, he undertook military training at the Artillery University in St Petersburg. He took up a commission with the Russian Imperial Guard and served in Lithuania, resigning three years later in disgust at the repression of the local people. He then threw himself into reading and translating Hegel’s writings, which took him to Germany in 1842 where he came into contact with the German SOCIALIST movement. He went on to live in Paris, meeting and being heavily influenced by PROUDHON. Settling in Switzerland, he became active in the socialist movement there. After taking part in an attempted REVOLUTION in Dresden in 1849, he was captured and condemned to death. Instead of executing him, however, the authorities handed him back to the Russian government. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the notorious Peter and Paul fortress. Eight years later, after petitions by his family, his sentence was commuted and he was sent to Eastern Siberia. Eventually he escaped to AMERICA, becoming an influence on the American anarchist tradition via the thought of Benjamin Tucker. He arrived in England in 1861, and lived the rest of his life in various Western European countries.Bakunin led the COMMUNIST anarchists in the First INTERNATIONAL but came into conflict with MARX. Bakunin accepted Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the need for its overthrow by revolution but strongly disagreed with Marx’s insistence on the need for a transitional worker’s state, believing that it would simply lead to new forms of repression and authoritarianism. Bakunin believed that workers should organize their own institutions from the ground up, achieving more complex forms by voluntary FEDERALISM. It was not only this political difference that was to blame for the rupture with Marx, as Bakunin also frequently displayed the casual anti-semitism common at the time. Eventually Bakunin and his followers were expelled from the International in 1872.
eBook - PDF- William L. Remley(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
I want to turn now to the work of Bakunin, not so much as an end in itself, but as a continuation of Proudhon’s thoughts, since in many respects that is exactly what the larger-than-life Russian anarchist represents. 5 Mikhail Bakunin and Revolutionary Anarchism ‘I believe in the absurd; I believe in it, precisely and mainly, because it is absurd’. —Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State The Development of Bakunin’s Political Philosophy If Proudhon grew up a peasant, Bakunin enjoyed the genteel upbringing of the son of a Russian aristocrat; if Proudhon eschewed the violence of strikes and revolutions, Bakunin seemed to revel in them; if Proudhon based his political philosophy on moral grounds, Bakunin cared less for abstract thought and more for action; and if Proudhon tended to intellectual introspection, the flamboyant Bakunin loved nothing other than intrigue and secret societies. Yet, the two were by most accounts close friends, and it was Bakunin who felt Proudhon to be the master of them all. As with Proudhon, I am not interested in a strictly biographical account of Bakunin’s life, however colourful it was. 1 Rather, the aspects of his political philosophy as they shed light on anarchism generally and how they compare with Sartre’s own political philosophy is of greater importance. Inescapably, however, Bakunin was an unusual character whose life intersected his philosophy. Physically, Bakunin was a giant of a man, everything about him was, as his friend Richard Wagner explained, colossal and full of a primitive exuberance and strength. He smoked constantly, drank copious amounts of tea as well as brandy, and lived financially off his compatriots. As another friend, Alexander Herzen, described: his activity, his laziness, his appetite, his titanic stature and the everlasting perspiration he was in, everything about him, in fact, was on a superhuman scale.
eBook - ePub- Hal Draper(Author)
- 1990(Publication Date)
- Monthly Review Press(Publisher)
One of the dreadfully authoritarian questions posed to the Bakuninists was how the organization could defend itself even against the infiltration of known police spies. Engels tried arguing with an Italian anarchist as follows:They [the Bakuninists] do not want any authority exercised through the General Council even if it were freely assented to by all . I would very much like to know how without that authority (as they call it) it would have been possible to bring the Tolains, Durands, and Nechayevs to account, and how the intrusion of Mardocheans [police agents] and traitors is going to be prevented by your fine phrase, autonomy of the sections, as is explained in the [Bakuninist] circular.44The Bakuninist cry for “autonomy” made excellent sense as simple demagogy: it helped to suck in all malcontents with an all-purpose slogan against the General Council’s alleged “despotism”—never documented—and to strike a pose in favor of Freedom.7. BAKUNINIST IDEOLOGY: THE STATE
If the conceptions of Bakuninism in the field of organization were on the dark side, the case was not much different with Bakunin’s ideology in general. Even today it has to be pieced together from fragmentary writings, with indifferent success. Anarchism as a movement and a creed was going to have its period of bloom in the future, a couple of decades ahead; as yet there was not much to take hold of.Bakunin himself was, notoriously, incapable of a systematic presentation of his ideas; he was, for example, constitutionally unable to finish any of the propaganda fragments that he did write. Marx knew him well enough to understand that he was not really interested in developing a theory that hung together: “His program was a mishmash superficially scraped together right and left… For Mr. Bakunin, doctrine (bits and pieces he has cadged together from Proudhon, Saint-Simon, etc.) was and is a secondary matter…” Engels, though he lived longer into the period of anarchism’s international notoriety, always thought of Bakuninism mainly as a “botched form” of Proudhonized Stirnerism, and gave no sign of considering it worth any extended analysis.45 (The first more or less systematic critique of anarchist doctrine from a Marxist viewpoint came before Engels’ death, from a Russian: Plekhanov’s pamphlet Anarchism and Socialism
eBook - PDF- Nunzio Pernicone(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
7 The Italian sojourn has been viewed traditionally as a transitional phase bridging the revolutionary nationalism of Bakunin's middle years with the revolutionary anarchism of his maturity. In reality the years spent in Italy represent the critical period during which Bakunin laid the foundation of his anarchist philosophy. 8 Because of his twelve-year isolation, Bakunin arrived in Italy still espousing many of the ideas he had acquired from various European leftists in the 1840s: the German radicals Arnold Ruge and Georg Herwegh, the German communists Wilhelm Weitling and Karl Marx, the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and an assortment of Slavic nationalists and democrats, such as the Pole Joachim Lelewel. Bakunin had learned much from Marx at a time when his own socialism, he admitted, was "purely instinctive." 9 But Marx's authoritarian commu- nism, like Weitling's before him, impressed Bakunin as the negation of freedom, and he rejected it completely. Proudhon's contribution, in con- trast, was crucial. Reading one of Proudhon's works, Bakunin exclaimed: "This is the right thing!"—that is, freedom was attainable only through abolition of the state. 10 Proudhon, more than any other political thinker, was responsible for transforming Bakunin's instinctive rebelliousnous against authority into a formal anarchist credo. 11 The antistatism derived from Proudhon in the 1840s remained latent, however. Revolutionary pan-Slavism was at the heart of Bakunin's political philosophy in this period. Yet he did not consider nationalism intrinsically important; it was a useful vehicle for revolutionary purposes, and by late 1848 social revolution was becoming preeminent for Bakunin, as evident in the drafts of his Appeal to the Slavs. The federation of free Slav republics he 7 For the literature on Bakunin, see Arthur Lehning, "Michel Bakounine et les historiens: Un ape^u historiographique," in Jacques Catteau, ed., Bakounine: Combats et debuts (Paris, 1979), 17-43.
eBook - PDFHow Russia Shaped the Modern World
From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism
- Steven G. Marks(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
Bakuninist anarchism became an important rejectionist force in Italian politics from the 1870s into the 1920s. Although uprisings inspired by Bakunin’s ideas between 1874 and 1877 failed for lack of organization, he was the first to offer a left-wing alternative to republicanism in Italy, which satisfied very few at the time because of the compromise its leaders had made with Italy’s elites and its resulting weak social program. Bakuninism was the first socialist movement in Italy, the first of many subversive movements to fight against the national government, and the first to introduce the idea of social revolution—as opposed to narrow political revolution. Well after the 1890s, when Marxism was on the rise, Bakuninism retained strong support throughout central and northern Italy. It played an integral role in the antimilitarist campaigns during World C H A P T E R O N E 24 War I and remained strong in the radical syndicalist unions. In 1914, 1919, and 1920, anarchist shock troops were active in strikes, demonstrations, and revolutionary agitation. Mussolini’s father was a lifelong devotee of Bakunin and raised his son in a family atmosphere accepting of revolutionary extremism; what better example of the way Bakuninism encouraged the violent mood among Italian radicals, helped to lay the groundwork for antiauthoritarian and antiliberal revolutionary movements, and undermined stability in general? With his influence in Italy consolidated by the early 1870s and growing among e ´migre ´ Russian and European radicals, Bakunin was prepared to convert Spain. 38 Here he achieved his greatest suc-cess (much of it posthumous), with the creation of an extensive and long-lasting anarchist movement.
eBook - PDF- Andrew Vincent(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
The same point holds for William Godwin and Leo Tolstoy, who, despite their focus on the individual, do not cohere with the American conception of individualism. ANARCHISM 117 Collectivist anarchism was primarily associated with the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin (Kelly 1982; Leier 2006). Apart from his idiosyncratic pan-Slavist ideas and anti-German sentiments, Bakunin was celebrated for his belief in revolutionary spontane-ity, his theoretical solemnization of the destructive urge, his virulent anti-Marxism and his conception of revolutionary anarchist dictatorship. In organizational terms Bakunin believed in the collectivization of the means of production, where distribu-tion would be determined by the criteria of work. Peter Kropotkin thus argued that collectivist anarchists had a very different conception of justice to the communist anarchists, who thought in terms of need (Kropotkin 1914, 217ff). Communist anarchism is one of the strongest components of anarchist thought to the present day. Kropotkin is the best-known early exponent of this variant. Others included Errico Malatesta, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Colin Ward and Murray Bookchin (see Ward 2004; Fellner 2005; Guérin ed. 2005; Goldman 2006). Communist anarchism is committed to the common ownership principle, in terms of property, production and housing. In the case of Kropotkin, distribution is premised on need. Such a commitment overlaps with some aspects of reformist socialism and social liberalism. Communist anarchists also assert the necessity of social solidarity and cooperative dispositions. Such notions are seen to be implicit in human nature. This tendency is repeated by Bookchin in his writings and linked with themes of ecological balance and harmony (see Bookchin 1982, 1986b, 1992). 15 The first communist anarchist work to present this case was Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid . Freedom remains a slightly ambivalent issue in commu-nist anarchy.
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