Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (30th of May 1814 - 1st of July 1876) was one of the most influential figures in the history and development of anarchism, so much so that he is sometimes referred to as the 'father of anarchism'. He is credited with linking the anarchist movement to feminism, atheism, revolution, developing the concept of anarcho-collectivism and being one of the first critics of the very concept of markets. However, he was known to be openly racist and anti-semitic, with critics accusing him of being a violent terrorist.

Biography

Family

According to legend, the Bakunin dynasty was founded in 1492 by one of the three brothers of the noble Báthory family who left Hungary to serve under Vasili III of Russia. The first documented ancestor was a Moscow dyak (clerk) Nikifor Evdokimov nicknamed Bakunya (from the Russian bakunya, bakulya meaning "chatterbox, phrase monger") who lived during the 17th century. Mikhail was the son of Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin, a diplomat who served in Italy and France and retired to a feudal estate consisting of 500 serfs (where Mikhail was born) and his grandmother, knyazna Lubov Petrovna Myshetskaya, belonged to the impoverished Upper Oka Principalities branch of the Rurik dynasty founded by Mikhail Yurievich Tarussky, grandson of Michael of Chernigov.

In 1810, Alexander Bakunin married Varvara Alexandrovna Muravyova (1792 - 1864) who was 24 years younger than him. She came from the ancient noble Muravyov family that was founded during the 15th century by the Ryazan boyar Ivan Vasilievich Alapovsky nicknamed Muravey (translates simply as "ant") who was granted lands in Veliky Novgorod. Among her second cousins were Nikita Muravyov and Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, some of the key figures of the Decembrist revolt. Alexander's commitment to liberal ideas also led to his involvement with one in the Decembrist clubs. After Nicolas I became an Emperor, he gave up politics and devoted himself to the estate and his children—five girls and five boys, the oldest of whom was Mikhail.

Youth

At the age of 14, Bakunin left for Saint Petersburg and trained as an artillery officer, and went to serve in Minsk in 1833. He did not enjoy army and having a lot of free time on his hands spent it on self-education. He eventually left the army in 1835, hoping to study philosophy in Moscow. He met and befriended several former university students in Moscow, notably Nikolay Stankevich, Konstantin Aksakov, Piotr Chaadaev, Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Ogarev.

They studied the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Hoffman and Hegel. Bakunin translated many of these works into Russian and began to advocate for a unified Slavic nation. He left for Berlin in 1840, and desired to become a university philosophy professor, and encountered many Young Hegelians and Berlin's socialist movement. He moved to Dresden, and befriended Arnold Ruge and became an avowed socialist, abandoning his interest in being a professor and became dedicated to promoting revolution. This led to troubles with the Russian government, who ordered his return to Russia, and when he refused, confiscated his property, leading him to move to Switzerland in 1842.

He stayed in Zürich and befriended Wilhelm Weitling and began calling himself a communist, authoring articles for communist newspapers. He moved to Geneva shortly before Weitling's arrest, leading to him being investigated by the Swiss police. He was once again ordered to return to Russia, but left for Belgium instead, meeting many German and Polish radicals in exile, notably Joachim Lelewel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Brussels. He came into conflict with his nationalist friends as he began to support liberty for all people and the liberation of the peasantry.

In 1844, Bakunin went to Paris and established contact with Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who greatly impressed him and with whom he formed a personal bond. He was stripped of his nobility and his land in Russia was confiscated and was condemned to exile in Siberia. But he refused to go there and travelled through Europe, advocating a joint revolution of Polish and Russian people against the Russian Empire.

Revolution, Arrest and Exile

He participated in the 1848 Revolution in Europe as was very happy, obtaining funding from the Provisional Government for the liberation of Slavs in the Prussia, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. He traveled through Germany and tried to join the insurrection in Baden, leading to conflict with Karl Marx. He was refused entry to Poland, and then travelled to Leipzig, Breslau and Prague where he participated in the First Pan Slav Congress, leading to him participating in the May Conspiracy and the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849, helping to organize the defense of the barricades against Prussian troops with Richard Wagner and Wilhelm Heine. Bakunin was captured in Chemnitz and held for thirteen months before being condemned to death by the government of Saxony.

He was saved an extradited to Russia, and then Austria, where he was sentenced to death, but then extradited to Russia, taken to the underground dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress. He spent another four years in the castle of Shlisselburg. It was here that he suffered from scurvy and all his teeth fell out as a result of the diet. He later recounted that he found some relief in mentally re-enacting the legend of Prometheus. His continuing imprisonment in these awful conditions led him to consider suicide by the consumption of smuggled poison.

Pleas from his noble family led to his release from prison, allowing him to go into exile into the Tomsk, Siberia. He married Antonina Kwiatkowska, the daughter of a Polish merchant. He had been teaching her French. He got a job with the Amur Development Agency from his second cousin, the liberal governor in Eastern Siberia. Mikhail proposed the construction of a United States of Siberia, modeled of the United States of America. Mikahil quit his job and recieved a pension from the state, and his second cousin was forced to resigned over his views and fear of a Siberian revolution. He was replaced by the new and more liberal governor Korsakov, who gave him free passage on all ships in the Amur river so long as he returned to the city of Irkutsk in winter.

Escape from Exile

On the 5th of June, 1861, Mikhail began his escape from Russia, by claiming he was on a business trip to Nikolaevsk, taking the Russian warship Strelok to the port city of Olga, where he boarded an American ship to Japan, befriending a group of Europeans in Japan by chance and took a ship to San Francisco. He then took a ship to Panama, and then to New York, where he went to Boston, finding a group of exiled European revolutionaries. He then left to Europe and became immersed in the revolutionary movement, moving to England. He attempted to join the Polish Insurrection in 1863, but became stuck in Copenhagen, with the failure of the insurrection, he met his wife in Stockholm and moved through to London, Brussels, Paris and Switzerland to get to Italy in order to create a new revolutionary force in the new country known as the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists.

By 1866, his secret society grew to have members in most of Europe's countries, and began to oppose the very existence of the state. He met Giuseppe Fanelli and later sponsored him to travel to Barcelona to share his libertarian visions and recruit revolutionists to the International Workingmen's Association. He began to advocated for the anarchism of Proudhon, and began to attend IWA conferences yearly.

During the 1867–1868 period, Bakunin responded to Émile Acollas's call and became involved in the League of Peace and Freedom (LPF), for which he wrote a lengthy essay Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism^[33] Here he advocated a federalist socialism, drawing on the work of Proudhon. He supported freedom of association and the right of secession for each unit of the federation, but emphasized that this freedom must be joined with socialism for "[l]iberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".

Bakunin played a prominent role in the Geneva Conference (September 1867), and joined the Central Committee. The founding conference was attended by 6,000 people. As Bakunin rose to speak:

At the Bern Congress of the League (1868), Bakunin and other socialists (Élisée Reclus, Aristide Rey, Jaclard, Giuseppe Fanelli, N. Joukovsky, V. Mratchkovsky and others) found themselves in a minority. They seceded from the League establishing their own International Alliance of Socialist Democracy which adopted a revolutionary socialist program.

First International and the rise of the anarchist movement

Bakunin speaking to members of the IWA at the Basel Congress in 1869

Bakunin in 1872

Bakunin's grave at the Bremgarten cemetery in Bern

In 1868, Bakunin joined the Geneva section of the First International, in which he remained very active until he was expelled from the International by Karl Marx and his followers at the Hague Congress in 1872. Bakunin was instrumental in establishing branches of the International in Italy and Spain.

In 1869, the Social Democratic Alliance was refused entry to the First International on the grounds that it was an international organisation in itself, and only national organisations were permitted membership in the International. The Alliance dissolved and the various groups which it comprised joined the International separately.

Between 1869 and 1870, Bakunin became involved with the Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev in a number of clandestine projects. However, Bakunin publicly broke with Nechaev over what he described as the latter's "Jesuit" methods, by which all means were justified to achieve revolutionary ends, ^[35] but privately attempted to maintain contact. ^[36]

In 1870, Bakunin led a failed uprising in Lyon on the principles later exemplified by the Paris Commune, calling for a general uprising in response to the collapse of the French government during the Franco-Prussian War, seeking to transform an imperialist conflict into social revolution. In his Letters to A Frenchman on the Present Crisis, he argued for a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the peasantry, advocated a system of militias with elected officers as part of a system of self-governing communes and workplaces, and argued the time was ripe for revolutionary action:

These ideas corresponded strikingly closely with the program of the Paris Commune of 1871, much of which was developed by followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; the Marxist and Blanquist factions had voted for confrontation with the army while the Proudhonions had supported a truce. Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Commune, which was brutally suppressed by the French government. He saw the Commune as above all a "rebellion against the State," and commended the Communards for rejecting not only the State but also revolutionary dictatorship.^[38] In a series of powerful pamphlets, he defended the Commune and the First International against the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, thereby winning over many Italian republicans to the International and the cause of revolutionary socialism.

Bakunin's disagreements with Marx, which led to the attempt by the Marx party to expel him at the Hague Congress (see below), illustrated the growing divergence between the "anti-authoritarian" sections of the International, which advocated the direct revolutionary action and organization of the workers and peasants in order to abolish the state and capitalism, and the sections allied with Marx, which advocated the conquest of political power by the working class. Bakunin was "Marx’s flamboyant chief opponent" and "presciently warned against the emergence of a communist authoritarianism that would take power over working people."^[39]

Personal life

In 1874, Bakunin retired with his young wife Antonia Kwiatkowska and three children to Minusio (near Locarno in Switzerland), in a villa called La Baronata that the leader of the Italian anarchists Carlo Cafiero had bought for him by selling his own estates in his native town Barletta (Apulia). His daughter Maria Bakunin (1873-1960) became a chemist and biologist. His daughter Sofia was the mother of Italian mathematician Renato Caccioppoli.

Bakunin died in Bern on 1 July 1876. His grave can be found in Bremgarten Cemetery of Bern, box 9201, grave 68. His original epitaph reads: "Remember those who sacrificed everything for the freedom of their country". In 2015 the commemorative plate was replaced in form of a bronze portrait of Bakunin by Swiss artist Daniel Garbade containing Bakunin's quote: "By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible". It was sponsored by the Dadaists of Cabaret Voltaire Zurich, who adopted Bakunin post mortem.

Freemasonry

Bakunin joined the Scottish Lodge of the Grand Orient de France in 1845.^[42]:128 However his involvement with freemasonry lapsed until he was in Florence in the summer of 1864. Garibaldi had attended first real Italian Masonic Constituent Assembly in Florence in May of that year, and been elected Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy.^[43]Here the local head of the Mazzinist party was also grand master of the local lodge. Although he was soon to dismiss freemasonry, it was in this period that he abandoned his previous belief in a god and embraced atheism. He formulated the phrase "God exists, therefore man is a slave. Man is free, therefore there is no God. Escape this dilemma who can!" which appeared in his unpublished Catechism of a freemason^[44] Indeed it was during this period that he established the International Revolutionary Association, he did so with Italian revolutionaries who had broken with Mazzini because they rejected his Deism as well as his purely ‘political’ conception of the revolution, which they saw as being bourgeois with no element of a social revolution.^[45]

Quotes

"FREEDOM, the realization of freedom: who can deny that this is what today heads the agenda of history? We must not only act politically, but in our politics act religiously, religiously in the sense of freedom, of which the one true expression is justice and love."

"The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!" (often paraphrased as "The urge to destroy is a creative urge".

"Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly. But it becomes fatal, destructive of the intelligence, the dignity, the well-being of individuals and peoples whenever it is formed without regard to liberty, either by violent means or under the authority of any theological, metaphysical, political, or even economic idea. That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism, always disastrous to the popular and real interests of the country it claims to exalt and serve. Often, without wishing to be so, it is a friend of reaction – an enemy of the revolution, i.e., the emancipation of nations and men."

"Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe."

"We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality."

"Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying."

"I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each — an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being — they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom."

"To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt."

"Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds born."

"Freedom is the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone."

"If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable – and this is why we are the enemies of the State."

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick.'"

"The modern State is by its very nature a military State; and every military State must of necessity become a conquering, invasive State; to survive it must conquer or be conquered, for the simple reason that accumulated military power will suffocate if it does not find an outlet. Therefore the modern State must strive to be a huge and powerful State: this is the indispensable precondition for its survival."

"We wish, in a word, equality — equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to their faculties, to each according to their needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically."

"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker."

"I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because humanity is for me unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State, whereas I want the abolition of the State, the final eradication of the principle of authority and the patronage proper to the State, which under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men has hitherto only enslaved, persecuted, exploited and corrupted them. I want to see society and collective or social property organized from below upwards, by way of free association, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority whatsoever."

"All exercise of authority perverts, and submission to authority humiliates."

"Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked."

"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it."

"By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward."

"The peoples' revolution will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty."

"I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation."

"The materialistic, realistic, and collectivist conception of freedom, as opposed to the idealistic, is this: Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society. He frees himself from the yoke of external nature only by collective and social labor, which alone can transform the earth into an abode favorable to the development of humanity. Without such material emancipation the intellectual and moral emancipation of the individual is impossible. He can emancipate himself from the yoke of his own nature, i.e. subordinate his instincts and the movements of his body to the conscious direction of his mind, the development of which is fostered only by education and training. But education and training are preeminently and exclusively social hence the isolated individual cannot possibly become conscious of his freedom. To be free means to be acknowledged and treated as such by all his fellowmen. The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals. I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men. In the presence of an inferior species of animal I am neither free nor a man, because this animal is incapable of conceiving and consequently recognizing my humanity. I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen. Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own."