Mikhail
Bakunin
was born in Premukhino, Russia on 30th May, 1814. The eldest son of
a landowner he entered the Imperial Russian Artillery School at the
age of fourteen. He became an army officer in 1833 but after being
sent to the Polish frontier he resigned his commission and began studying
philosophy. As a young man he met and was deeply influenced by the
radical philosopher, Alexander Herzen.
Bakunin left Russia in 1842 and lived in Dresden before moving to
Paris where he met Karl Marx. He participated
in the 1848 French Revolution and then moved to Germany
where he called for the overthrow of the Hapsburg Empire.
During
the Dresden insurrection in May, 1849, Bakunin was arrested and sentenced
to death. He was reprieved and extradited to Austria where he was
wanted for his role in the Czech revolt in 1848. He was once again
found guilty and sentenced to death. This was eventually commuted
and in 1851 he was passed on to the Russian government and imprisoned
in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. In 1854 he was transferred
to to the Schlisselburg Fortress and stayed there until 1857 when
he was exiled to Siberia.
In
1861 Bakunin managed to escape from Siberia and after traveling to
the United States he reached London where
he joined his old friend, Alexander Herzen.
The two men worked together on the journal, The
Bell, until 1863 when Bakunin
went to join the insurrection in Poland.
However, he failed to reach his destination and after a spell in Sweden
he moved to Italy before settling in Geneva in 1868.
Bakunin
had a great influence on radical young students in Russia. In 1869
he co-wrote Catechism of a Revolutionist
with Sergi Nechayev. It included the
famous passage: "The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no
private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even
a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one
thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely
by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order
and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners,
conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy
and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it."
Bakunin
joined the First International, a federation of radical political
parties that hoped to overthrow capitalism and create a socialist
commonwealth. Bakunin had several disagreements with Karl
Marx,
the other prominent figure in the organization. Bakunin opposed Marx's
ideas on state socialism, claiming that it would replace one oppressive
form of government with another.
Bakunin
was accused of anarchism and in 1872
he was expelled from the First International. The following year Bakunin
published his major work, Statism and Anarchy.
In the book Bakunin advocated the abolition of hereditary property,
equality for women and free education for all children. He also argued
for the transfer of land to agricultural communities and factories
to labour associations.
Over
the last few years of life, Bakunin continued to be active in politics,
hoping that he would help to create a world revolution that would
enable an international federation of autonomous communities to be
created. Mikhail
Bakunin died
in Berne, Switzerland, on 1st July, 1876.
(1) Mikhail
Bakunin and Sergi
Nechayev,
Catechism of a Revolutionist (1869)
The
Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs,
sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire
being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution.
Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every
link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with
the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He
is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose
- to destroy it.
He
despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality
of his time, its motives and manifestations. Everything which promotes
the success of the revolution is moral, everything which hinders it
is immoral. The nature of the true revolutionist excludes all romanticism,
all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.
(2) Mikhail
Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (1871)
I am a passionate seeker
after Truth and a not less passionate enemy of the malignant fictions
used by the "Party of Order", the official representatives
of all turpitudes, religious, metaphysical, political, judicial, economic,
and social, present and past, to brutalise and enslave the world;
I am a fanatical lover of Liberty; considering it as the only medium
in which can develop intelligence, dignity, and the happiness of man;
not official "Liberty", licensed, measured and regulated
by the State, a falsehood representing the privileges of a few resting
on the slavery of everybody else; not the individual liberty, selfish,
mean, and fictitious advanced by the school of Rousseau and all other
schools of bourgeois Liberalism, which considers the rights of the
individual as limited by the rights of the State, and therefore necessarily
results in the reduction of the rights of the individual to zero.
No, I mean the only liberty
which is truly worthy of the name, the liberty which consists in the
full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers
which are to be found as faculties latent in everybody, the liberty
which recognises no other restrictions than those which are traced
for us by the laws of our own nature; so that properly speaking there
are no restrictions, since these laws are not imposed on us by some
outside legislator, beside us or above us; they are immanent in us,
inherent, constituting the very basis of our being, material as well
as intellectual and moral; instead, therefore, of finding them a limit,
we must consider them as the real conditions and effective reason
for our liberty.
(3) Mikhail
Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (1871)
This principle, which constitutes
besides the essential basis of scientific Socialism, was for the first
time scientifically formulated and developed by Karl Marx, the principal
leader of the German Communist school. It forms the dominating thought
of the celebrated "Communist Manifesto" which an international
Committee of French, English, Belgian and German Communists assembled
in London issued in 1848 under the slogan: "Proletarians of all
lands, unite" This manifesto, drafted as everyone knows, by Messrs.
Marx and Engels, became the basis of all the further scientific works
of the school and of the popular agitation later started by Ferdinand
Lassalle in Germany.
This principle is the absolute opposite to that recognised by the
Idealists of all schools. Whilst these latter derive all historical
facts, including the development of material interests and of the
different phases of the economic organisation of society, from the
development of Ideas, the German Communists, on the contrary, want
to see in all human history, in the most idealistic manifestations
of the collective as well as the individual life of humanity, in all
the intellectual, moral, religious, metaphysical, scientific, artistic,
political, juridical, and social developments which have been produced
in the past and continue to be produced in the present, nothing but
the reflections or the necessary after-effects of the development
of economic facts. Whilst the Idealists maintain that ideas dominate
and produce facts, the Communists, in agreement besides with scientific
Materialism say, on the contrary, that facts give birth to ideas and
that these latter are never anything else but the ideal expression
of accomplished facts and that among all the facts, economic and material
facts, the pre-eminent facts, constitute the essential basis, the
principal foundation of which all the other facts, intellectual and
moral, political and social, are nothing more than the inevitable
derivatives.
(4) Mikhail
Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (1871)
All work to be performed in the employ and pay
of the State - such is the fundamental principle of Authoritarian
Communism, of State Socialism. The State having become sole proprietor--at
the end of a certain period of transition which will be necessary
to let society pass without too great political and economic shocks
from the present organisation of bourgeois privilege to the future
organisation of the official equality of all--the State will be also
the only Capitalist, banker, money-lender, organiser, director of
all national labour and distributor of its products. Such is the ideal,
the fundamental principle of modern Communism.
The Communist idea later passed into more serious
hands. Karl Marx, the undisputed chief of the Socialist Party in Germany
- a great intellect armed with a profound knowledge, whose entire
life, one can say it without flattering, has been devoted exclusively
to the greatest cause which exists to-day, the emancipation of labour
and of the toilers - Karl Marx who is indisputably also, if not the
only, at least one of the principal founders of the International
Workingmen's Association, made the development of the Communist idea
the object of a serious work. His great work, Capital, is not in the
least a fantasy, an "a priori" conception, hatched out in
a single day in the head of a young man more or less ignorant of economic
conditions and of the actual system of production. It is founded on
a very extensive, very detailed knowledge and a very profound analysis
of this system and of its conditions. Karl Marx is a man of immense
statistical and economic knowledge. His work on Capital, though unfortunately
bristling with formulas and metaphysical subtleties which render it
unapproachable for the great mass of readers, is in the highest degree
a scientific or realist work: in the sense that it absolutely excludes
any other logic than that of the facts.
Living for very nearly thirty years, almost exclusively
among German workers, refugees like himself and surrounded by more
or less intelligent friends and disciples belonging by birth and relationship
to the bourgeois world, Marx naturally has managed to form a Communist
school, or a sort of little Communist Church, composed of fervent
adepts and spread all over Germany. This Church, restricted though
it may be on the score of numbers, is skilfully organised, and thanks
to its numerous connections with working-class organisations in all
the principal places in Germany, it has already become a power. Karl
Marx naturally enjoys an almost supreme authority in this Church,
and to do him justice, it must be admitted that he knows how to govern
this little army of fanatical adherents in such a way as always to
enhance his prestige and power over the imagination of the workers
of Germany.
(5) Mikhail
Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (1871)
Any State, under pain of perishing and seeing itself
devoured by neighbouring States, must tend towards complete power,
and, having become powerful, it must embark on a career of conquest,
so that it shall not be itself conquered; for two powers similar and
at the same time foreign to each other could not co-exist without
trying to destroy each other. Whoever says conquest, says conquered
peoples, enslaved and in bondage, under whatever form or name it may
be.
It is in the nature of the State to break the
solidarity of the human race and, as it were, to deny humanity. The
State cannot preserve itself as such in its integrity and in all its
strength except it sets itself up as supreme and absolute be-all and
end-all, at least for its own citizens, or to speak more frankly,
for its own subjects, not being able to impose itself as such on the
citizens of other States unconquered by it. From that there inevitably
results a break with human, considered as univesrsal, morality and
with universal reason, by the birth of State morality and reasons
of State. The principle of political or State morality is very simple.
The State, being the supreme objective, everything that is favourable
to the development of its power is good; all that is contrary to it,
even if it were the most humane thing in the world, is bad. This morality
is called Patriotism. The International is the negation of patriotism
and consequently the negation of the State. If therefore Marx and
his friends of the German Socialist Democratic Party should succeed
in introducing the State principle into our programme, they would
kill the International.
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