Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (59 page)

Bakunin called himself ‘a fanatical lover of Liberty; considering it as the only medium in which can develop intelligence, dignity, and the happiness of man’.
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He invariably called for ‘absolute liberty’. By liberty in this sense he did not mean the ‘liberty’ regulated by the State, nor the ‘individual liberty’ of the liberals who see the rights of individuals protected by the rights of the State. Nevertheless, Bakunin acknowledges that liberty has a natural and social context and is inevitably limited by certain boundaries. Without recognizing these limits, liberty remains an empty and abstract concept. Thus the only liberty which Bakunin believes worthy of the name is

Liberty for Bakunin is therefore a condition of being free from all external restraints imposed by man, but in keeping with natural laws. It cannot escape the Tao of things. Liberty thus becomes an inevitable consequence of natural and social necessity.

At the same time, liberty does not begin and end with the individual, as with Stirner, where the individual is a self-moving atom. Bakunin makes clear that ‘absolutely self-sufficient freedom is to condemn oneself to nonexistence’; indeed such absolute independence is a ‘wild absurdity’ and the ‘brainchild of idealists and metaphysicians’.
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Instead, Bakunin recognizes the social context of liberty; society is ‘the root, the tree of freedom, and liberty is its fruit’.
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He also acknowledges that the liberty of one must involve the liberty of all: I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free, ‘only in society and by the strictest equality’.
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For Bakunin, liberty without equality means the slavery of the majority; equality without liberty means the despotism of the State and the unjust rule of a privileged class. Equality and liberty are therefore inextricably connected and confirm each other. It follows that the liberty of the individual ‘far from halting as at a boundary before the liberty of others, finds there its confirmation and its extension to infinity; the
illimitable liberty of each through the liberty of all, liberty by solidarity, liberty in equality …’
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Bakunin correctly sees that liberty is meaningless unless people treat each other equally and have similar economic conditions in which to realize their potential.

Intimately connected with his notion of liberty is authority. Indeed, Bakunin defines liberty as an
‘absolute rejection of any principle of authority’.
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Authority is the principal evil in the world: ‘If there is a devil in human history, the devil is the principle of command. It alone, sustained by the ignorance and stupidity of the masses, without which it could not exist, is the source of all the catastrophes, all the crimes, and all the infamies of history.’
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Since authority is the ‘negation of freedom’, Bakunin called for the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective and individual authority and repudiated both God and Master, the Church and the State.

But Bakunin was not so naive as to deny all power and authority at a stroke. All men possess a ‘natural instinct for power’ in the struggle for survival which is a basic law of life. This lust for power is however the most negative force in history and the best men amongst the oppressed necessarily become despots. Bakunin opposed power and authority precisely because they corrupt those who exercise them as much as those who are compelled to submit to them. No one therefore should be entrusted with power, inasmuch as ‘anyone invested with authority must, through the force of an immutable social law, become an oppressor and exploiter of society’.
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Again, Bakunin may have rejected all imposed authority and usurped power in the form of the State and its laws, but he acknowledged that there was such a thing as the ‘authority of society’. Indeed, the authority of society is ‘incomparably more powerful than that of the State’. Where the State and the Church are transitory and artificial institutions, society will always exist. As a result, the action of social tyranny is ‘gentler, more insidious, more imperceptible, but no less powerful and pervasive than is the authority of the State’. But while it is easier to rebel against the State than society around us, Bakunin is convinced that it is possible to go against the ‘stream of conformity’ and revolt against all divine, collective and individual authority in society.
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While this may be true of society, it is not of nature. Bakunin’s political philosophy might well be an argument against ‘the social institutionalization of authority’, but he accepted ‘natural’ authority as legitimate and efficacious. As a determinist, he accepts the natural laws governing phenomena in the physical and social worlds. It is impossible to revolt against the authority of these laws, for ‘Without them we would be nothing,
we simply would not exist.
’
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Bakunin is not against all authority
perse
, but only against imposed external authority. Thus it makes sense to talk about a man being
free if ‘he obeys natural laws because he has
himself
recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by an extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual’.
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When it comes to the authority of knowledge, Bakunin is more circumspect. For special matters, he will consult the appropriate expert: ‘In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer.’
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But he will consult several and compare their opinions and choose what he thinks is most likely to achieve his desired end. Bakunin recognizes no infallible authority and will not allow anyone to impose their will upon him. Like Godwin, Bakunin believed that the right of private judgement is paramount, ‘my human right which consists of refusing to obey any other man, and to determine my own acts in conformity with my convictions’.
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Bakunin is thus ready to accept in general the ‘absolute authority of science’ because it is rational and in keeping with human liberty. But outside this legitimate authority, he declares all other authorities to be ‘false, arbitrary and fatal’.
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But even in the special case of science Bakunin had his reservations. At a time when confidence in science to interpret the world and bring about progress was at its height, whether in the form of Comte’s positivism or Marx’s scientific socialism, Bakunin raised doubts about its universality. Science, he argued, cannot go outside the sphere of abstractions, and cannot grasp individuality or the concrete. For this reason, science is inferior to art which is ‘the return of abstraction to life’. On the contrary, it is ‘the perpetual immolation of life, fugitive, temporary, but real, on the altar of eternal abstractions’. Bakunin therefore preached the
‘revolt of life against science
, or rather against the
government of science’.
Bakunin set out not to destroy science but rather to reform it and keep it within legitimate boundaries. It would be better for the people to dispense with science altogether than be governed by
savants
, for ‘Life, not science, creates life; the spontaneous action of the people themselves alone can create liberty.’
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Bakunin is not simplistically anti-reason or anti-science, but is principally concerned with the authoritarian dangers of a scientific elite. Instead of science remaining the prerogative of a privileged few, he would like to see it spread amongst the masses so that it would represent the ‘collective consciousness’ of society.
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Yet even when science is in the reach of all, men of genius should be allowed to devote themselves exclusively to the cultivation of the sciences.

Bakunin thus called for freedom both in its negative sense as freedom from imposed authority and in its positive sense as freedom to realize one’s nature. The latter is most important in his philosophy and Bakunin remained enough of a Hegelian to see freedom primarily in terms of a state
of wholeness in which all duality between the individual and society, between humanity and nature, is dialectically overcome. But it is as misleading to claim that he had a yearning to identify with ‘a universal, omnipotent force’ as it is to assert that individualism is ‘the essence of Bakunin’s social and political system and his opposition to Marx’.
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In the final analysis, Bakunin recognized man as an individual as well as a social being, and asserted that the freedom of one can only be realized with the freedom of all. Collective liberty and prosperity, he asserts, exist only in so far as they represent ‘the sum of individual liberties and prosperities’.
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At the same time, he stressed the need for human solidarity and international associations. More than any other classic anarchist thinker Bakunin perceived that personal and social freedom are intertwined and that they can only be grounded in a form of communal individuality.

Bakunin was never a consistent or systematic thinker, but he was a powerful thinker nonetheless. After his conversion from German idealism to historical materialism he tried to give his abstract definition of liberty a social and natural dimension. He saw the intimate connection between liberty and authority and recognized natural and social boundaries to liberty. His notion of freedom is a form of collective self-discipline within the inescapable boundaries of nature and society. It was not so much a case of exerting ‘maximum authority’ over the conditions of one’s life, but rather of accepting the context of freedom.
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Far from offering a theory of liberty based on a ‘hotchpotch of empty rhetoric’ or ‘glib Hegelian claptrap’, Bakunin’s position is both realistic and plausible.
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The supreme case of illegitimate and imposed authority for Bakunin is the State. It is an artificial growth which negates individual liberties. All States are by their very nature oppressive since they crush the spontaneous life of the people: ‘The State is like a vast slaughterhouse or an enormous cemetery, where all the real aspirations, all the living forces of a country enter generously and happily, in the shadow of that abstraction, to let themselves be slain and buried.’
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With it comes economic centralization and the concentration of political power which inevitably destroy the spontaneous action of the people.

All Bakunin’s mature writings are devoted to showing how the State is hostile to a free existence. He never tires of asserting that the State means domination: ‘If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable — and this is why we are enemies of the State.’
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Bakunin further develops his critique by arguing that 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.’
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Bakunin concludes that

Bakunin traces the origin of the State to a mutual understanding between exploiters who then used religion to help them in the ‘systematic organization of the masses called the State’. It is only in this sense that ‘The State is the younger brother of the Church’. Like Marx, he sees class struggle as inevitable in society between the privileged classes and the working classes, and the former will always control ‘the power of the State’ in order to maintain and enjoy their privileges.
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Political power and wealth are therefore inseparable. But unlike Marx, he sees nothing but harm resulting from the conquest of political power by the workers.

The liberal defence of the State which portrays it as the guarantor and protector of political rights holds little water for Bakunin since he is convinced that the State will always be controlled by an exploitative and oppressive elite. He makes clear that ‘right’ in the language of politics is ‘nothing but the consecration of fact created by force’. To call for ‘equality of rights’ therefore implies a flagrant contradiction for where all equally enjoy human rights, all political rights are automatically dissolved. The same is true of a so-called ‘democratic State’. The State and political law denote ‘power, authority, domination: they presuppose inequality in fact’.
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Even in the most radical political democracy, as in Switzerland in his own day, the bourgeoisie still governs.