Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (53 page)

B
AKUNIN
IS
A
PARADOXICAL
THINKER
, overwhelmed by the contradictory nature of the world around him. His life too was full of contradictions. He was a ‘scientific’ anarchist, who adopted Marx’s economic materialism and Feuerbach’s atheism only to attack the rule of science and to celebrate the wisdom of the instincts. He looked to reason as the key to human progress and yet developed a cult of spontaneity and glorified the will. He had a desire to dominate as well as to liberate and recognized that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge’. He called for absolute liberty, attacking all forms of institutionalized authority and hierarchy only to create his own secret vanguard societies and to call for an ‘invisible’ dictatorship.

Not surprisingly, Bakunin in his own lifetime inspired great controversy, and it continues until this day. On the one hand, he has been called one of ‘the completest embodiments in history of the spirit of liberty’.
¹
On the other, he has been described as ‘the intellectual apologist for despotism’, guilty of ‘rigid authoritarianism’.
²
Camus maintained that he ‘wanted total freedom; but he hoped to realize it through total destruction’.
³
It is usual to present him as a man ‘with an impetuous and impassioned urge for action’, or as an example of anarchist ‘fervour in action’.
⁴
Yet it has also been argued that he was primarily an abstract thinker who elaborated a philosophy of action.
⁵
Far from being the intellectual flyweight dismissed by Marx as a ‘man devoid of all theoretical knowledge’, he increasingly appears to be a profound and original thinker.
⁶

What is indisputable is that Bakunin had great charisma and personal magnetism. Richard Wagner wrote: ‘With Bakunin everything was colossal, and of a primitive negative power … From every word he uttered one could feel the depth of his innermost convictions … I saw that this all destroyer was the love-worthiest, tender-hearted man one could possibly imagine’.
⁷
His magnanimity and enthusiasm coupled with his passionate denunciation of privilege and injustice made him extremely attractive to anti-authoritarians. In the inevitable comparisons with Marx, he appears
the more generous and spontaneous. But his character remains as enigmatic as his theory is ambivalent. He attacked authority and called for absolute freedom, but admired those who were born to command with iron wills. He rejected arbitrary violence, but celebrated the ‘poetry of destruction’ and felt unable to condemn terrorists. He had a strong moral sense and yet doted on fanatics who believed that the revolution sanctifies all.

The contradictory nature of his life and thought has been put down to his ‘innate urge to dominate’ alongside a desire to rebel.
⁸
Others have hinted more darkly that Bakunin’s eccentricity tottered on the verge of madness, that he was a ‘little cracked’ and showed ‘hints of derangement’.
⁹

It has even been argued that his violence and authoritarianism were rooted in Oedipal and narcissistic disorders and that his concern with freedom was born of ‘weakness, fear and flight’.
¹⁰
From this perspective, his most genuine voice is that of a frightened youth.

Certainly Bakunin was brought up in a very special situation, and his relationships with his parents and siblings played a major part in shaping his personality. But he also suffered from being a superfluous aristocrat and intellectual who had no positive role to play under the despotic rule of Nicholas II. Herzen correctly observed that Bakunin had within him ‘the latent power of a colossal activity for which there was no demand’.
¹¹
His early longing to feel part of the whole, fired by his passionate involvement with German idealism, also left an indelible mark which led him to seek salvation in the cataclysmic upheaval of revolution.

Despite recent interest in him as a case study of utopian or apocalyptic psychology, Bakunin made an outstanding contribution to anarchist thought and strategy. He undoubtedly broke new ground. His critique of science is profound and persuasive. He reveals eloquently the oppressive nature of modern States, the dangers of revolutionary government, and, by his own lamentable example, the moral confusion of using authoritarian means to achieve libertarian ends, of using secret societies and invisible dictators to bring about a free society. He developed anarchist economics in a collectivist direction. He widened Marx’s class analysis by recognizing the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat.

In his historic break with Marx and his followers in the First International Working Men’s Association, he set the tone of the bitter subsequent disputes between Marxists and anarchists. By rejecting the political struggle and arguing that the emancipation of the workers must be achieved by the workers themselves, he paved the way for revolutionary syndicalism. In his own life, he turned anarchism into a theory of political action, and helped develop the anarchist movement, especially in France, French-speaking Switzerland and Belgium, Italy, Spain and Latin America. He has not only be called the ‘Activist-Founder of World Anarchism’ but hailed as
the ‘true father of modern anarchism’.
¹²
Indeed, he became the most influential thinker during the resurgence of anarchism in the sixties and seventies.
¹³

It is extremely difficult to assess Bakunin as a thinker. He was more of a popularizer than a systematic or consistent thinker. He was the first to admit that: ‘I am not a scholar or a philosopher, not even a professional writer. I have not done much writing in my life and have never written except, so to speak, in self-defence, and only when a passionate conviction forced me to overcome my instinctive dislike for any public exhibition of myself.’
¹⁴
His writings were nearly always part of his activity as a revolutionary and as a result he left a confused account of his views written for different audiences. As in his life, there is a bewildering rush in his writing; just as he is beginning to develop an argument well, he drops it to pick up another. He not only appeals to abstract concepts like justice and freedom without properly defining them, but he often relies on clichés: the bourgeoisie are inevitably ‘corrupt’, the State always means ‘domination’, and freedom must be ‘absolute’. His mental universe is Manichean, with binary opposites of good and evil, life and science, State and society, bourgeoisie and workers.

He wrote when he could during a lifetime of hectic travelling and agitation, but when begun his works sprawled in all directions. He rarely managed to finish a complete manuscript, and of his main works only
Statisn and Anarchy
was published in his lifetime and
God and the State
soon after his death. The bulk of his writings therefore remain unedited drafts. As a result, he often repeats himself and appears inconsistent and contradictory. He talks for instance of the need for the ‘total abolition of politics’ and yet argues that the International Working Men’s Association offers the ‘true politics of the workers’.
¹⁵
He uses the term ‘anarchy’ both in its negative and popular sense of violent chaos as well as to describe a free society without the State.
¹⁶
This can partly be explained by the inadequacy of existing political language for someone trying to go beyond the traditional categories of political thought, but it also resulted from a failure to correct his drafts or order his thoughts. Yet for all the fragmentation, repetition, and contradiction, there emerges a recognizable leitmotif.

Bakunin was born on 30 May 1814 in the province of Tver, north-west of Moscow. He was the son of a retired diplomat, a member of a long-established Russian family of the nobility who had become landed gentry. His mother, née Muraviev, came from a family ennobled by Catherine the Great. He was the third of ten children, but the eldest son, with two elder and two younger sisters, followed by five brothers. He therefore by sex and age enjoyed a dominant position in the family, and by tradition would have inherited the family’s property. This did not prevent him from doting on
his sisters with whom he shared his most intimate feelings and ambitions. He later became extremely jealous of their suitors.

His father had liberal sympathies, while one of his cousins on his mother’s side had been involved in the Decembrist uprising in 1825 against Tsar Nicholas I by a group of aristocrats and poets under the influence of Western ideas. Bakunin was eleven at the time and like Herzen and Turgenev belonged to the unfortunate generation which reached adulthood under the despotism of Nicholas I.

Bakunin grew up in a fine eighteenth-century house on a hill above a broad and slow river. He spent a comfortable childhood playing with his sisters on the family estate which had five hundred serfs. Nettlau suggested that Bakunin’s family circle was the most ideal group to which he ever belonged, the ‘model for all his organizations and his conception of a free and happy life for humanity in general’.
¹⁷
In fact, it would appear far from ideal. His father was forty when he married his young mother and she always sided with the old man. Bakunin in later years attributed ‘his passion for destruction to the influence of his mother, whose despotic character inspired him with an insensate hatred of every restriction on liberty’.
¹⁸

He certainly seems to have been a timid, gentle and withdrawn boy, although it goes too far to assert that his mature anarchism reflected an ‘elemental, permanent dread of society’ and that he created secret organizations in order to submerge and lose himself in them.
¹⁹
Although he later married, he allowed the children to be fathered by a close friend. His intimate relationship with his sisters, especially Tatiana, may also have accounted for his sexual impotence owing to an incest taboo. Certainly his later fantasies of fire and blood would appear to offer an outlet for his sexual frustration, or at least a partial sublimation of his repressed libido. His apocalyptical visions undoubtedly fulfilled some profound psychological need.

Bakunin received a good education from private tutors, but when he reached fifteen, it was decided to send him to the Artillery School in St Petersburg. Here he experienced the pleasures of high society, and had his first love affair, although it seems to have been largely Platonic. In contrast to his ‘pure and virginal’ aspirations, he hated the ‘dark, filthy and vile’ side of barrack life.
²⁰
He graduated and was gazetted as an ensign early in 1833, being posted to an artillery brigade in Poland.

The sensitive and thoughtful young aristocrat quickly found garrison life boring and empty. Everything in him demanded activity and movement, but as he wrote to his parents ‘my strong spiritual urges, in their vain fight against the cold and insuperable obstacles of the physical world, sometimes reduce me to exhaustion, induce a state of melancholy…’
²¹
Taking his
future into his own hands, Bakunin resigned from the army and decided to go to Moscow in 1836 to teach and to study philosophy.

He did much more of the latter. He found in German Idealism a meaning and purpose lacking in the lifeless chaos of the world around him. The new philosophy, he wrote to a friend is ‘like a Holy Annunciation, promises a better, a fuller, more harmonious life’.
²²
In August 1836, he wrote enthusiastically to his sisters that, strengthened by their love, he had overcome his fear of the external world: ‘My inner life is strong because it is not founded on vulgar expectation or on worldly hopes of outward good fortune; no, it is founded on the eternal purpose of man and his divine nature. Nor is my inner life afraid, for it is contained in your life, and our love is eternal as our purpose.’ While he recommends the ‘religion of divine reason and divine love’ to be the basis of their life, he had already decided to devote his life to expanding the freedom of all beings: