11. LIBERTY WITHOUT SOCIALISM IS INJUSTICE; SOCIALISM WITHOUT LIBERTY IS SLAVERY
By 1867, Bakunin, always physically, mentally, and politically restive, had had enough of Italy and the relatively quiet activism of writing and politics he found there. There were other reasons to move on, chief among them Obolensky’s husband. Appalled in equal measure by her politics and her Polish lover, the general cut off her financial support in 1867 and so forced an end to the Bakunins’ Italian island interlude. Forced to economize, Obolensky and several of her circle, including the Bakunins and Gambuzzi, moved to Vevey, Switzerland, near Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline, in time for Michael to head to the founding congress of the League of Peace and Freedom. For world events too made it difficult to remain in splendid isolation. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been calling himself Emperor Napoleon III since 1852, was pushing his luck. The Crimean War and the Congress of Paris had done much to strengthen his rule. He had intervened successfully on Italy’s side in war against Austria, though he was disappointed when the Italians kept on going and unified the peninsula; he had annexed Savoy and Nice, helped the British take Canton during the Second Opium War, supported the Polish uprising of 1863, obtained colonies in Senegal and Indochina, and installed Archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico. While the Mexican escapade ended in disaster—Montezuma’s revenge took the form of a firing squad for the hapless Max—dramatic foreign policy was a useful diversion from domestic problems. Such problems, however, continued to grow, for foreign adventures could not replace progressive policy. The secularizing state angered the Catholic Church; free trade agreements with Britain harmed local industry and French workers; the growth of capitalist industrialism was no smoother in the 1860s than it had been in the 1840s or would be in the twenty-first century, and the displaced, dispossessed, and disaffected were not silent.
At the same time, while French industry was growing, it was growing more slowly than other European countries. That had a dramatic impact on both domestic and foreign policy. By the 1860s, warfare was much more industrialized than it had been during the Napoleonic wars; one lesson of the Crimean War was that sheer numbers of soldiers counted for much less than the arms they had at their disposal. But France’s industrial production was increasingly outpaced by its neighbor, Prussia. The German state used this growing productive capacity to build its armies, and used the armies to expand its territory through confederation, annexation, and conquest, all at the expense of neighboring states. This aggression in turn brought in new resources and allowed even greater economic and military expansion. By the 1860s, Prussia had the most formidable war machine in central Europe. It also had a leader keen to use it. Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” assumed the position of premier of Prussia in 1862. Acting under the orders of his king, William I, he dissolved the rudimentary parliament, increased the army substantially, and set out simultaneously to unify Germany and expand its territory. Both of these aims came at the expense of Austria when Prussia declared war on it in 1866. The pundits, just as they would in the first Gulf War, saw two opponents whose very different strengths and weaknesses canceled out, and predicted a long, drawn-out war. The pundits, of course, were wrong in both cases, for the key to both victories was technology. The telegraph and railroad meant Prussia could move men and material much more quickly than could Austria, and in less than two months the German upstart had decisively defeated the empire. While Bismarck took no Austrian territory, he annexed its German allies, including Hanover, Hesse, and Frankfurt, and created a confederation of North German states, headed, naturally, by Prussia. The balance of power in Europe was dangerously out of whack, and the leaders of France and Prussia, with all the moral sensibility of an Al Capone or a Dick Cheney, saw only opportunity in that imbalance.
Reasonable men and women across Europe feared that conflict was imminent and organized to forestall it. In 1867, they convened a congress in Geneva to bring to heel the dogs of war. Activists and intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill, Victor Hugo, Garibaldi, Blanc, and Herzen supported the congress; ten thousand others from across Europe signed petitions and the first conference drew six thousand participants.
One of them was Michael Bakunin. His name was well-known to all, and he was called upon to serve on the executive committee along with Garibaldi and others. He agreed and took his place on the raised dais with the other committee members. As he made his way over, Garibaldi rose from his chair and clasped him in his arms. It was an emotional moment, and as the two comrades embraced, they were saluted with a standing ovation from the delegates.
It was, however, the high point of the congress. It voted to create a League of Peace and Freedom, but the bulk of moderate and liberal delegates had no real plan save to pass motions indicating their opposition to war. Karl Marx observed the proceedings from London and argued that the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the International, that he had helped to create in 1864 should not formally join or support the League; instead, he urged his members to attend as individuals to try to inject some political sense into the proceedings. Accordingly, one member, James Guillaume, presented the International’s suggestion that the League include the emancipation of workers in its platform. It bewildered many of the cautious delegates, even as Garibaldi’s appeal that all adopt the “religion of God” had mystified and divided them. The delegates split on many issues, and little came of their efforts.
Bakunin’s attempts to radicalize the League were no more successful. For him, however, there were several benefits to his initial work there. It signified his return to active politics, and he met Guillaume, who would become one of his best friends and chroniclers. Most importantly, it gave Bakunin another opportunity to formulate his ideas and write. Recasting one of his speeches to the League for publication, he asked rhetorically whether he, as a Russian, had the right to address a body convened to work for peace. After all, Russia had smashed brave Poland just a few years earlier. But perhaps, he suggested, as Russia’s “most disobedient subject” he had earned the privilege to speak. Unlike many of the speakers, Bakunin understood that simply asking governments not to go to war would not work. The problem was not this or that government, but the very existence of states. The delegates needed to understand that while Russia was perhaps the worst example of empire, the state was virtually the same everywhere. If it was “cynically brutal in Russia,” it was “hypocritical and deceitful behind the mask of constitutions in the civilized countries of the west.” The state was based on violence: “internal violence under the pretext of public order, external violence under the pretext of equilibrium.” Internal violence stemmed from the fact that all European states, including the liberal republics, were “the oppressors and exploiters of the popular masses and workers for the profit of a privileged class.” The only way the masses could be kept subjugated was through violence and therefore the states maintained standing armies for use against their own people. These very armies increased the risk of war and each state believed it had to arm itself against its neighbors.
Against the power of governments, the congress was naive to think it was strong enough to ward off the “terrible war that is more imminent than ever.” What they could do was articulate the principles that would make peace possible. First and foremost, that meant adopting the principles of international justice instead of “narrow patriotism.” He drew a sophisticated distinction between the fact of nations, the reality of people who had different cultures and institutions they wished to preserve, and the recent notion of the “false principle of nationality,” an invention of “the despots of France, Russia, and Prussia to suffocate the supreme principle of liberty.” Each nation, as opposed to state, large or small, had the “incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature; this right is only the consequence of the universal principle of liberty.” From that it followed that empire and conquest were unjust. Therefore, everyone who wanted peace had to renounce “all that which is called national glory, dominion, and grandeur, all the egoistic and vain interests of patriotism.” To those who advocated a United States of Europe as an antidote to war, Bakunin pointed out that a federation of “centralized, bureaucratic, and militarized” states would be no improvement. “Universal peace,” he concluded, “will be impossible as long as the present centralized states exist.” Those who wished for peace had to prepare not for war but for the dissolution of the state and for the creation of “free units, organized from the bottom up, by the free federation of communes into a province, provinces into nations, and nations into the United States of Europe.”[249]
He expanded this theme over the next few months in a much longer document, “Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism.” Like so much of his work, it was part political platform, part manifesto, and part philosophical treatise, designed to convince, cajole, and convert its readers with logic, appeals to emotion, and careful analysis in equal proportions. It is particularly important as a clarification of Bakunin’s ideas on class and socialism. As Bakunin realized, radicals and liberals did not differ on the question of political liberty and political equality. Everyone was a democrat now if by that one meant a belief in republican government and an end to monarchy. Yet democratic, republican states could engage in the same foul crimes against humanity as any monarch. The Confederate states were as democratic as those of the North; it was, after all, the Democratic party that insisted on states’ rights “to the point of wanting secession.” There was only this one little blemish that kept them from being truly democratic and earned them the reproach of humanity, he noted sardonically, the little matter of slavery. That alone indicated that cliches about democracy meant little in the face of economic repression. In words echoing Marx’s declaration in the Communist Manifesto that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” Bakunin argued,
Citizens and slaves—that was the antagonism in the ancient world as it was in the slave states of the new world, in America today. Citizens and wage earners, that is to say, those who are compelled to work, not by law but by reality—that is the antagonism of the modern world. And just as the ancient states were destroyed by slavery, so will the modern states be destroyed by the proletariat.[250]
His point about class may grate on contemporary ears as many insist that there is no longer a working class. We are all middle class now, the line goes, since it is possible for a plumber to make as much money as a small business operator or because union pension funds own shares in companies and therefore every union member is actually a shareholder and a capitalist. It is a naive argument. Class is not about income; it is about whether you hire people to work for you or have to go to work for someone else; it is about whether you own the company or sell your labor to it. Owning a share in a company, even owning a share directly, as opposed to having it locked in a pension fund administered by someone else, no more confers real ownership and control of the corporation than owning a federal savings bond makes you a member of the government of the United States. But what about the self-employed plumber? Or the independent farmer? The dentist? They aren’t workers because they don’t sell their labor to someone else, and they aren’t capitalists because they don’t hire others to produce for them. Quite right; that’s why they’re called “middle class,” because they are somewhere between the working class and the capitalist class. They may dream of becoming the latter, and they may dread becoming the former, but their existence between the two important classes doesn’t render the idea of class moot. As Bakunin demonstrated in 1867, such examples do not cancel out class, for “it is in vain that we try to console ourselves that this is a fictional rather than a real antagonism, or that it is impossible to establish a line of demarcation between the propertied class and the disinherited, dispossessed class because these two classes shade into each other by intermediary and imperceptible degrees.” He gave an analogy from natural science. There was a point where plant life and animal life were nearly indistinguishable—the slime mold is the classic example today in first-year biology classes—but no one concludes from that observation that all plants are animals and vice versa. For those who missed Biology 101, perhaps another analogy would be more useful. Just because twilight is neither day nor night we do not conclude that day and night do not exist or cannot be distinguished with a high degree of accuracy and utility. So too with classes. Even though there were “intermediate positions that make an imperceptible transition from one level of political and social life to another, the difference between classes is nonetheless clearly marked.” The two classes of bourgeoisie and proletariat, employer and employee, owner and worker, were separated by an “abyss,” as much in the present day as slave owners and slaves were in antiquity. “Modern civilization,” no less than the ancient world, was made up of a “comparatively small minority” whose freedom and wealth was dependent on the “immense majority” forced to work, not by the lash or law but by hunger. He made his point easy to grasp. “Slavery may change its form and its name but its essence remains the same. It may be summed up thusly: to be a slave is to be forced to work for another; to be a master is to live off the work of another.” Call them slaves, call them serfs, call them wage workers, they were all forced to work by “hunger as well as the political and social institutions,” and by their labor made possible “the complete or relative idleness of others.”
It was easy to distinguish the members of classes by ownership of property and by the cultural differences that wealth and control conferred. Today most people can make fairly accurate and subtle class distinctions based on vocabulary, accent, clothing, vehicles, manners, even posture and dentition. One can even take classes in faking class. So too in Bakunin’s day was it relatively easy to distinguish the “titled aristocrat from the financial aristocrat, the upper bourgeoisie from the petit bourgeoisie, and each of those from the factory and urban proletariat; the large landowner, someone who lives from his investments, from the peasant proprietor who cultivates the land himself, and the farmer from the agricultural laborer.” His point was that whatever one might think about the disappearance of class, people in fact made class distinctions regularly. The important distinction in the modern period could be “reduced to two categories” that were “natural enemies diametrically opposed to each other”: those who had all the privileges of “land and capital,” and the “working classes without capital or land.” In the first category, he also included those with “bourgeois education,” arguing that education was a form of capital and privilege denied to workers. Such privilege meant the “work of the most mediocre bourgeois pays three to four times more than that of the most intelligent worker.” Here Bakunin introduced a new idea into class theory, and one that is still much debated today. Are professionals such as doctors and professors and lawyers and lower-level managers part of the bourgeoisie? Are they part of a new middle class? A professional managerial class? Perhaps they occupy contradictory class locations and are pulled in two directions at once. Entire books have been written on the topic, and the debate is not resolved yet. In Bakunin’s period, university education was much rarer than it is today. Virtually inaccessible to workers, universities were the preserve of the rich. He and Marx were the exceptions, not the rule, in that prison, exile, and genteel poverty went a long way toward erasing their own class privilege. But we might note parenthetically that even today most doctors, lawyers, and professors are the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, and professors. The higher education and status of these professions can be a form of capital passed on from one generation to the next, and if it is dwarfed by the capital of the wealthy, it still takes its possessors far from the daily reality of wage labor.
Bakunin’s argument about education was also part of his larger debate on the relationship of the intellectual to the working-class movement. He had long argued that workers and peasants had to control the movement for their own liberation. Intellectuals could help, but not lead; they could refine, but not dictate; theory had to give way to practice. By placing them in the class of privilege, he underlined the fact that intellectuals had interests that were different from those of workers and could not be assumed to be on the side of the working class. It was an argument he would soon take up again with Marx.
It was also an important part of his anarchism, for he saw that any privilege was an affront to equality and to freedom. “The state cannot exist a single day without having a least one privileged, exploiting class: the bureaucracy,” he wrote to a radical newspaper around the time he finished “Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism.”[251] Whether admittance to the state bureaucracy was a hereditary right, as in Russia, or one earned through education and promotion, as in Germany, that power and authority divided rulers from the ruled as clearly as class divided capitalists and workers, and with the same terrible effects. It was, after all, the classic argument of the elites to insist that it only made sense that society be ruled by the best and the brightest; it was just coincidence that they also happened to be the best and the brightest. Besides, running the world was harder work than it might appear. Bakunin tackled this argument with gusto. The state and church both assumed that humans were essentially evil and that giving liberty to all would lead to the exploitation and slaughter of the weak by the strong—”just the opposite of what goes on in our model states today,” he added sarcastically. Thus church and state assumed a “superior authority” was needed to establish and maintain order and control the worst impulses of human nature. Who was fit to rule? As long as one believed in God and the divine right of kings, it was clear enough. Once humanity got over that idea, however, it became a little more difficult to decide. After all, the whole premise of the social contract was that humans, left to their own devices, would dedicate themselves to pursuing their own self-interest in the most selfish ways possible. How did electing some of them to government change them into altruists?
The conventional answer, Bakunin suggested, was that “the best citizens, that is, the most intelligent and the most virtuous, those who best understood the common interests of society and the need for all to subordinate their particular interests,” would be chosen to rule. It wasn’t enough that they be the most intelligent, for if they had no virtue, they would use public office for their own interest. Nor could they simply be virtuous, because if they were “without intelligence,” their folly would bring ruin. But history suggested that such intelligent and virtuous men were rare; that was why they were made into heroes and role models through the ages. More often, the halls of power were filled with the “insignificant, the dull,” and “vice and bloody violence” triumphed. If indeed society depended on selecting the most able rulers, it would have “ceased to exist long ago.” Suppose, however, just suppose, that there were enough intelligent and virtuous people to rule. Who would find them and put them in power? Perhaps they would do it themselves, since they would presumably be keenly aware of their suitability to rule. There was a name for people who assumed power on their own: They were usually given the “odious name of tyrants.” What if they simply tried to persuade others to put them in power? Unfortunately, the best people were those who were least convinced they were the best and so were not the type to press themselves upon others. The people who were quickest to present themselves tended to be the “bad and mediocre,” so self-selection was a little dodgy. If the would-be rulers were not inclined to use persuasion, then they would have to use force, and that took us straight back to despotic rule by the most powerful, not the best. Finally, if the people were actually able to choose the best rulers, did that not suggest that they were smart enough and upright enough to look after themselves?
From there Bakunin argued that any government would, by definition, be the rule of the majority by a minority. Even in the most democratic countries, such as the United States and Switzerland, the “self-government of the masses” was a “fiction. In reality, it is minorities who govern.” This is obvious enough; any representative system boils down to minority rule as a handful of elected rule over those who elect them. That in turn meant that “society was separated into two categories, not to say two classes: the one, composed of the immense majority of citizens who submit freely to the government of the elected,” and a small minority chosen to govern. Twenty years before Lord Acton decreed that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Bakunin warned that those chosen to govern, even “the best, the purest, the most intelligent, the most disinterested, the most generous, will always and certainly be corrupted by this profession.” How could they avoid “contempt for the popular masses and the exaggeration of their own merit”? After all, hadn’t they been selected on the basis of their superiority by others who conceded their own inferiority? It would be natural enough for a leader to conclude that “the people need me, they cannot do without my service ... they must obey me for their own good.” Who could resist this easy conclusion? Certainly not, say, Henry Kissinger, who famously remarked that he could not “see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” especially since “the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
Bakunin’s arguments were a clever refutation of Rousseau and the social contract theory of government. He demonstrated nicely that claims about the necessity of government were “essentially founded on the principle of authority” and were circular arguments that assumed what had to be proved: that “the people” were “more or less ignorant, immature, incompetent, incapable,” little more than canaille, or rabble. It was true, he conceded, that “the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy.” While the people remained economically exploited in a republic, there were at least “brief moments” when they were not politically oppressed. In addition, republics gave citizens some slight experience in public life and political action, and this was useful as rudimentary training in governing themselves. Nonetheless, any form of government, even a republic, that was based on the “hereditary inequality of occupations, wealth, education, and rights, [and was] divided into different classes” remained a state of exclusion that maintained the “inevitable exploitation of the majority by the minority.” In fact, “the state was nothing other than regulated and systematized domination and exploitation.”
Then and now, some suggest that education is the way to end poverty. Retool, relearn, adapt, work smarter not harder, take up lifelong learning—the buzzwords go on and on. Auto plant shut down? Learn computer programming! Has technological change done away with your job in the sawmill? Become an eco-guide! Is housecleaning or food serving poorly paid? Upgrade to become an entrepreneur! But poverty was systemic, not arbitrary, Bakunin reminded his readers. It was the result of exploitation, not lack of schooling. Ignorance did not cause poverty: poverty caused ignorance. “Improve working conditions, return to labor what justice demands it be given, and in this way give the people security, affluence, and leisure. Then have no doubt, they will educate themselves. They will toss aside all your catechisms and create a more generous, sane, and elevated civilization than yours.”
The argument that economic growth, deregulation, and free trade lead to more prosperity for workers was also pretty stale by 1867. Bakunin granted that “free trade and commerce is certainly a very great thing and one of the essential foundations of the future international alliance of all the people of the world.” The problem with it, as it is with globalization today, is that capitalist free trade was designed to enrich “a very small portion of the bourgeoisie to the detriment of the immense majority of the population.” It was nothing more than the exploitation of workers on a worldwide level as opposed to a local or national level. As long as the “present states exist and labor continues to be the serf of property and capital, this freedom” will only increase the “misery, the grievances, and the righteous indignation of the masses of workers.” For proof, one had only to look at the nations of England, France, and Germany. These were the most industrially developed nations and industry there had a freer hand than elsewhere. Yet they were also where the “gulf between the capitalists and the owners, on one side, and the working classes, on the other, appears to have widened to an extent unknown in other countries.” In less developed countries, where more people lived on the land, famine was largely unknown, save in catastrophes, and these, then and now, were often caused by capitalist agriculture that exported food for profit while people starved. We might recall that during the Irish famine of the 1840s, Ireland was a net exporter of food. In the “developed” countries, starvation was common because unemployed workers, unlike peasants, could not feed themselves, and because employers, unlike lords or masters, had no responsibility to care for those who could not work. Thus in “the economic state that prevails today ... the freedom and development of commerce and industry, the marvelous applications of science to production, the machines designed to emancipate the workers and reduce human labor, all these inventions, all this progress ... far from improving the situation of the working classes only makes it worse and renders it even more intolerable.” As Bakunin observed in 1867, the system is rigged for capitalists, not for workers. All its freedoms and technologies are not designed to give all of us a better standard of living and more leisure time; they are designed to increase profits. For the record, while productivity has doubled in North America since 1970, unemployment has gone up while real wages have gone down. Those workers who have jobs are working longer hours; the eight-hour day, first fought for in 1886, is vanishing, and more years are added to working life as retirement is pushed farther and farther into the future. Instead of providing jobs, the United States leads the world in prison populations, with over two million people incarcerated. The trends are perhaps most pronounced in the U.S., but they are worldwide and spreading as more and more people are kicked off the land and out of villages to become an urban proletariat, as the process of globalization finishes what capital began with the Industrial Revolution.[252]
At the time Bakunin wrote, however, it looked to most observers as though the United States would escape the terrible price European workers paid for industrialization and free trade. He noted that American workers were generally paid more than those in Europe and “class antagonism” was much less pronounced; education was more widespread and more citizens participated more fully in the body politic. This idea of American “exceptionalism,” that the U.S. was qualitatively and essentially different from Europe and immune to the forces that wracked and shaped that continent, is an old one that still seems to resonate today. In 1630, the Puritan John Winthrop insisted that he and his fellow immigrants would create a “city upon a hill,” and the idea of America as uniquely fitted to lead the world into freedom is still popular today, at least in America. In “Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism,” Bakunin anticipated many of the explanations for this “exceptionalism.” America had two advantages over Europe, he argued. The European settlers were free in America. There was little government save what they created. With no “obsessions from the past,” they could “create a new world: a world of liberty. And liberty is a great magician, endowed with a productivity so marvelous that inspired by it alone, North America has, in less than a century ... surpassed the civilization of Europe.” But Bakunin was too much of a materialist to ascribe American prosperity only to ideas. He pointed out that while it was the material fact of freedom, the absence of government, that attracted immigrants to America in the first place, even more important was the reality of the “immense quantity of fertile land” that America offered. That too attracted immigrants and created prosperity even for workers, for it gave them a choice they did not have in Europe. If they could not find work or their wages were unsatisfactory, they could move “to the far west” to take up farming. “This possibility remains open to all the workers of America and naturally keeps wages higher and gives each an independence unknown in Europe”; as long as capital had to compete with free land, wages would be high. Those high wages in turn explained why class conflict was muted in America. The simple fact was that workers were paid better because they had an alternative to wage work. Bakunin neatly anticipated two important arguments about American exceptionalism: the frontier thesis Frederick Jackson Taylor put forward in 1893, and Werner Sombart’s 1906 observation that there was no socialism in America because class consciousness foundered on the “shoals of roast beef and apple pie.”
Yet America was not, Bakunin suggested, as exceptional as it thought. The higher price of labor meant industrialists received higher prices for their goods, and that made their products less competitive with those made in Europe. American manufacturers then sought protectionist tariffs to keep out cheaper imports, but that created industries that were artificially propped up by the state. Tariffs also hurt the southern states, which had no industrial base and were forced to pay higher prices for manufactured goods. That in turn fueled their drive for secession and turned many into internal migrants who had to head into the industrial centers to seek work. There they encountered conditions more like those of Europe than not: poverty, overcrowding, unemployment, and hunger. Despite its very great advantages, Bakunin noted, the “social question” was now being posed in America itself. If America was different, it was no exception to the general course of capitalist development, and “we are forced to recognize that in our modern world, no less than in the ancient world, the civilization of a minority is, for all that, still founded on the forced labor and the relative barbarism of the majority.”
But capitalists work too! We are always being treated to stories of the long hours the boss puts in, of how hard it is at the top, of how CEOs ruefully wish the eight-hour day applied to their jobs. Yes, Bakunin conceded, the “privileged class is no stranger to work” and it is hard work indeed to “remain at the top of the present order and to know how to profit from and keep their privileges.” But “there is this difference between the work of the comfortable classes and that of the working classes. The former is rewarded in an infinitely larger proportion than the latter. And it is given leisure, the supreme condition for human moral and intellectual development, a condition that is never achieved by the working classes.” Furthermore, the kind of work each class did was very different. The work of the capitalist involved “imagination, memory, and thought,” while the work of “millions of proletarians” was usually physically and mentally stunting. Nor was the wealth and leisure of the privileged classes a reward for intelligence, thrift, ability, or hard work. It was the result of a social structure that reproduced itself and rewarded the accident of birth. That was the insight of class: to show that the world order was not arbitrary or a question of individual merit. It was an economic system that rewarded those few who had control over the means of production, whether that was land, factories, mines, or mills, and with that control could compel others to work for them. Their ownership was not a right but a privilege, one stolen from humanity and protected by the laws, courts, police, and armies of the state. The result was that the “privileged class” received all the benefits produced by society: the “riches, the luxury, the comfort, the well-being, the tranquility of family life, the exclusive political liberty to exploit the labor of millions of workers and to govern them in their own manner and in their own interest.” But increasingly, workers rejected the notion that the world had to be as it was. They shook off the “fog of religion” and saw the “abyss” between the classes more clearly. Inspired by historical examples of revolution, increasingly workers developed their own gospel, one that was “not mystical, but rational, not celestial, but terrestrial, not divine, but human: the gospel of the rights of man.” Increasingly they asked if perhaps workers too were entitled to the rights of “equality, liberty, and humanity.” It was obvious to the masses that these abstract rights were themselves based on material well-being and a respite from work, on “bread” and “leisure” in Bakunin’s words, or, to use the slogan of the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike, on bread and roses. To obtain these required the “radical transformation of present society,” and that, for Bakunin, meant socialism.
Not, however, the technocratic socialism of Fourier or Saint-Simon, Blanc, or Cabet, he clarified. While they had contributed powerful critiques of existing society, the “doctrinaire socialism” that arose before 1848 was “more or less authoritarian,” based on the “passion to indoctrinate and organize the future.” There was one exception: Proudhon. Unlike the others, he was “the son of a peasant and thus in fact and instinct a hundred times more revolutionary than all the authoritarian and doctrinaire socialists.” Proudhon “armed himself with a critique as profound and penetrating as it was relentless” and used it to “destroy their systems.” “Opposing liberty to authority,” Proudhon distinguished himself from the “state socialists” by calling himself an anarchist, and insisted on individual as well as collective freedom. The “voluntary action of free associations” would replace government regulation and the protection of the state; anarchism would subordinate “politics to the economic, intellectual, and moral interests of society,” Bakunin argued.
But hadn’t 1848 put paid to these ideas of socialism? Hadn’t they been tried and found wanting? This would also be the refrain of later generations of cold warriors. Didn’t the tyranny and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union prove that socialism was the god that failed? Bakunin would say no. The events of 1848 demonstrated that republicanism and liberalism were more closely allied with reaction and privilege than with socialism. That year demonstrated that despite its talk about freedom, when the bourgeoisie was “terrified of the red phantom” it would choose a military regime over the “menacing dangers of a popular emancipation.” Socialism did not lose an even contest of ideas in 1848; it was smashed by all the power the state and capital could muster. More precisely, Bakunin argued, what lost in 1848 was not “socialism in general,” but “state socialism, authoritarian, regimented socialism,” the belief that the state could somehow be used to satisfy the “needs and legitimate aspirations of the working classes.” The social revolution, the people, had given the state the power to overthrow the old regimes, but instead of recognizing the bill that was owed, the state “proclaimed that it was incapable of paying the debt” and tried instead to kill its creditor. What it had killed, however, was not socialism, but faith in the state, and in the brands of socialism that depended on the state.
It was true that socialism “had lost this first battle.” It had lost for a simple reason. While it was “rich in instinct and negative theoretical ideas,” it “absolutely lacked the positive and practical ideas that were necessary to build a new system on the ruins of the bourgeois system.” The workers who fought for freedom on the barricades were “united by instinct, not ideas; and the confused ideas they did have created a tower of Babel, a chaos that could leave nothing.” This passage is an important one, for it indicates that Bakunin did not believe that instinct or moral outrage or passion were enough to build a movement. They were a necessary condition, he would always insist, but not a sufficient one. The lack of ideas had been the cause of defeat, but was it possible from that to conclude that socialism had no future? Hardly. After all, Bakunin pointed out, Christianity had taken several centuries to triumph. Socialism had posed itself a much more difficult task than the church had: “the reign of justice on earth.” Surely we might expect that to take a few years.
In the meantime, the reports of the death of socialism were highly exaggerated. Indeed, behind all the diplomatic maneuvering and saber-rattling of governments, it was “the social question” that demanded answering. The question was posed by the people themselves as they built “workers’ cooperative associations, mutual aid banks, labor banks, these trade unions and that international league of workers of all countries.” It was obvious in the “growing movement of workers in England, in France, in Belgium, and Germany, in Italy, and in Switzerland.” All this surely proved that workers had not “renounced their goal or lost faith in their coming emancipation.” Their autonomous free associations further demonstrated that they now understood they could not “count on the states or the largely hypocritical aid of the privileged classes.” Instead they had to depend on “themselves and their independent, completely voluntary associations.”[253]
The struggles of workers had won some reforms in England; they were forcing Napoleon III to the bargaining table; even Bismarck had to design a rudimentary welfare state to consolidate his power. If socialism had been defeated on the streets in 1848, now it was underground and spreading everywhere. Even people “who do not know the word socialism are today socialists,” for they “know no other flag but that which announces their economic emancipation.” Only through socialism could they be won over to politics, to “good politics.” And the reality of modern capitalism was pushing some of the petit bourgeoisie into the working class and making socialism attractive, as “big business, big industry, and especially big and dishonest speculation devoured them and pushed them into the abyss.”
From this wide-ranging argument that brought together his ideas on religion, socialism, the state, and class, Bakunin reiterated his political position for the League of Peace and Freedom. The League did not have to declare for “this or that socialist system.” But peace depended on everyone having “the material and moral means to develop their full humanity.” That in turn meant it was necessary
to organize society in such a way that every individual, man and woman ... finds the more or less equal means to develop their different faculties and utilize their labor and to organize a society in which the exploitation of labor is impossible. Social wealth is produced by labor, and no one will share in it unless they have contributed to its production.
He then gave what remains perhaps the best brief description of anarchism: “Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
The League of Peace and Freedom was not prepared to become a revolutionary society. In truth, it had about run its course anyway. Its 1868 congress attracted only a hundred or so delegates and few were disposed to adopt Bakunin’s resolutions. The congress did give him the opportunity to express more clearly what he meant by the socialism he had outlined in “Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism” and made clear the break between anarchism and state socialism, or, as he put it, between “collectivism” and “communism.” While he believed that property should be owned socially, not individually, that is, by all members of society and not by a privileged few, he agreed with Proudhon that it should not be owned and controlled by the state in the name of the people. In language reminiscent of his differences with Weitling, Bakunin made it plain that
I detest communism because it is the negation of liberty. I cannot conceive of humanity without liberty. I am not a communist because communism concentrates and absorbs all the powers of society in the state; it necessarily ends with the concentration of property in the hands of the state. I, on the other hand, want the abolition of the state, the radical elimination of the principle of authority and tutelage of the state. Under the pretext of making men moral and civilized, the state has enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and corrupted them. I want the organization of society and collective, social property by free association from the bottom up, not by authority from the top down.[254]
Having made his statement, there was little else to do at the congress. When it ended, convinced that it could play no role in securing liberty, peace, or socialism, Bakunin resigned from the League. He would instead devote his considerable energies to the International Working Men’s Association, whose most prominent spokesman was Karl Marx, and to the creation of his own secret societies.
Secret societies? Surely plots, intrigue, and iron discipline are inconsistent with open democracy and anarchism. Clearly the failure of the Soviet Union has discredited the notion of the tightly organized vanguard party operating in the name of the working class. Bakunin’s liberal critics have long insisted that his secret societies are a sordid fact that contradict his lofty theories and prove that anarchism was but a disguise for his ruthless ambition, self-aggrandizement, and his mad desire to plunge the world into terror and chaos. After all, didn’t Mussolini remark somewhere that an anarchist was simply a fascist who hadn’t figured out how to take power? For that matter, Mussolini’s father was a Bakuninist, and II Duce himself went through a brief anarchist phase. Marxist critics have argued variously that Bakunin’s secret societies meant he was the forerunner of the Leninist vanguard “party of the new type” and so to be welcomed, cautiously, aboard the Bolshevik ship of state, or that he was a Blanquist conspirator who sought to substitute the putsch for mass movements and the social revolution. Anarchists have often been placed in the uncomfortable position of denying the existence of such societies, none more awkwardly than one of Bakunin’s most devoted colleagues, James Guillaume, who denied that there were any Bakuninist secret organizations while he was revealed as belonging to one. There is, however, rather more—and rather less—to Bakunin’s secret societies than his critics have insisted or his supporters have feared.
There is no doubt that Bakunin founded a number of societies and organizations, some public and some private. The real question that needs to be examined, however, is not whether such organizations existed but what the context was and what their purposes were. It is, after all, one thing to create a radical book club that one invites only friends to join and quite another to form a conspiracy to install oneself as supreme world leader for life. At the same time, when reading radical literature is illegal, organizing sub rosa for innocent ends may be prudent and necessary even though it is technically a crime, while one can hardly be surprised that revolutionaries may, as Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, carry on a “now hidden, now open fight” as circumstance permits.
Precautions made some sense in this period. The Polish and Russian movements had been infiltrated by spies and smashed before the people could respond; one logical answer was to go underground and organize secretly. Throughout Europe, unions, still illegal even in Britain in the 1860s, were often organized as secret societies to avoid fines, arrest, and imprisonment. In North America, the Knights of Labor, formed in 1869, used elaborate passwords, secret signs, and rituals to protect the order. Fearsome oaths, complicated rituals, and coded language made it more difficult for spies to worm their way in and bound members together with shared knowledge, creating solidarity that could not be forged openly and overtly without drastic reprisals. Italy had a rich tradition of organizing underground for political purposes. Mazzini, for example, had belonged to the Carbonari, a secret society organized in the Abruzzi and Calabria to fight against the power of the Catholic Church and kings, with rituals based on the trade of charcoal makers. Rooted out by the authorities, the Carbonari were no longer a force after 1830, but many of its dispersed members formed other secret societies organized on similar lines. Mazzini created Young Italy and welcomed Garibaldi into its ranks as they fought against Austrian control of the Italian peninsula. Others joined the Freemasons, which granted Carbonari alumni instant membership. Secrecy in itself is not necessarily a reason to condemn a movement or a personality.
At the same time, several of Bakunin’s so-called secret societies existed only on paper, as a convenient format for the expression of his political ideas. Instead of crafting a formal essay with a thematic introduction, he would often give his notes a title like “The Secret Statutes of the International Fraternity of Revolutionaries,” even when no such organization existed, and then launch into a brilliant discourse on the nature of liberty and justice. On other occasions, Bakunin would, like the Utopian socialists such as Cabet and Saint-Simon, find some pleasure in designing “ideal societies,” though in his case, these were designs, rituals, and rules for revolutionary organizations, again usually for societies that did not exist. These complicated schematics were irrelevant, best understood as a sort of hobby. In practice, the revolutionary groups Bakunin belonged to functioned not as secret conspiracies but like the Russian circles and present-day affinity groups, with like-minded individuals coming together, sometimes around social activities, sometimes around particular books, to discuss and debate, to plan and to organize political activity. These circles gave Bakunin meaningful opportunities to develop his political ideas and produce articles, pamphlets, and the like. Furthermore, the circles attracted and educated a number of workers, journalists, students, and political activists, and if these were measured by the scores rather than the thousands, many continued to play important roles in the revolutionary and labor movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Italy, Spain, and France.
But what of Bakunin’s insistence in the “Revolutionary Catechism” and elsewhere that members of the secret society “must be subject to rigorous discipline”? Anarchism surely implies, even insists, that discipline is an absolute contradiction of the ideals of freedom and equality. Some commentators have gone even further, to insist that such phrases prove that Bakunin was either a proto-fascist or a proto-Leninist, or both simultaneously. Yet a careful reading of what Bakunin actually wrote makes it plain that his arguments about discipline are much more complicated and thoughtful than his critics have suggested. They represent his attempt to work out the practical political problem of how to make an organization both democratic and able to act decisively. In prisons, armies, criminal gangs, governments, and corporations, the problem of democracy seldom arises: you simply obey or suffer punishment. But organizations and societies that wish to hear and incorporate the ideas of their members need to find some balance between free and open discussion and resolution and action. All democratic governments invoke the principle of cabinet solidarity: once a decision has been made, individual members must support the decision or resign. Similarly Bakunin held that a secret society, one pledged to revolutionary action and thus liable to arrest and worse, needed discipline “in the interest of the cause it serves, as well as of effective action and the security of each of its members.”
But surely anarchists must be held to higher moral standards than presidents and prime ministers. Bakunin agreed. The “rigorous discipline” of the anarchist, he continued in the “Revolutionary Catechism,” “amounts to nothing more or less than the expression and direct outcome of the reciprocal commitment contracted by each of its members toward the other.” He put it even more plainly: the “master” of the society was not any individual but the “laws,” principles, and decisions “which we have all helped to create or at any rate equally approved by our free consent.” Furthermore, he insisted that while different members had different abilities and might make different contributions to the society, whether these were ideas, funds, or influence, none of these were grounds for authority, privilege, or power. Indeed, any appeals to past service or present contributions were “motives for distrust,” symptoms of the old world and its habits of obedience and conformity, and potential threats to the freedom of the individuals and the society. “Rigorous discipline” was the free choice to belong to and participate in the society, to obey those decisions one freely participated in and agreed to, and the duty to reject authoritarianism and privilege within the society.
For those who argue that anarchism can mean only the complete absence of guidelines and formal procedures, it might be noted that such an absence does not guarantee democracy in an organization. Without acknowledged and accepted methods for discussion and debate, the result is less likely to be freedom and equality than control by a clique that is virtually inaccessible because its decisions are not accountable or open. It may be argued, for example, that insisting on quorum and a scheduled meeting day are infringements on personal liberty, but without them, the group runs the risk of having a self-appointed faction determine policy with the mass membership in absentia.
Yet however we may parse and explain Bakunin, we are left with passages in his writing that suggest he believed not in democratic, social revolutions of the masses but in secret conspiracies, putsches, and coups made by small bands of revolutionaries organized in shadowy, elite vanguards. In 1868, for example, he wrote that the creation of a “secret universal association” was necessary “for the triumph of the revolution.” Organized properly as the International Brotherhood, “a hundred powerfully and seriously allied revolutionaries are enough for the international organization of the whole of Europe.” In 1870, he again called for the “creation of a secret organization,” of perhaps ten and no more than seventy members, to aid the revolution in Russia and form the “collective dictatorship of the secret organization.” This organization would “direct the people’s revolution” through “an invisible force—recognized by no one, imposed by no one—through which the collective dictatorship of our organization will be all the mightier, the more it remains invisible and unacknowledged, the more it remains without any official legality and significance.” That same year, he wrote to a friend, Albert Richard, “we must be the invisible pilots guiding the revolution, not by any kind of overt power but by the collective dictatorship of all our allies ... all the more powerful as it does not carry the trappings of power.” These and similar phrases are chilling in their calculated cynicism. They sound completely contrary to Bakunin’s arguments on liberty and equality, community, and democracy, and this sharp contrast has convinced many that these stark pronouncements are the real, dark, covert key to Bakunin’s thought and authoritarian designs.[255]
Such an interpretation, however, can be made only if the quotes are ripped out of context and served up on a platitude. Bakunin’s 1868 call for a secret, universal association was prefaced by his insistence that such a society “rules out any idea of dictatorship and custodial control.” Anarchists were the “natural enemies of these revolutionaries—future dictators, regimenters, and custodians of revolution” who feared the honest, if disorderly, aspirations of the people and were “longing to create new revolutionary states just as centralist and despotic as those we already know.” In contrast to the top-down model of revolution, Bakunin held that
revolutions are never made by individuals or even secret societies. They make themselves, produced by the force of affairs, by the movement of events and facts. They are prepared in the depth of the instinctive consciousness of the masses—then they burst out, instigated by what often appear to be frivolous causes. All that a secret, well-organized society can do is to help at the birth of a revolution by spreading the ideas that correspond to the instincts of the masses and to organize not the revolutionary army—the army must always be the people—but a sort of revolutionary general staff composed of individuals who are devoted, energetic, intelligent, and most important, sincere and lacking ambition and vanity, capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and popular instinct.[256]
While the notion of a “revolutionary general staff” is not without significant problems for any anarchist, it is clear from the context that it was to serve only as an “organ in the midst of the popular anarchy” to unite “revolutionary thought and action,” rather than an order-giving vanguard, its function restricted to articulating the demands the masses themselves made and exhorting them to refuse to surrender their autonomy.
Bakunin’s 1870 call for a “collective dictatorship” was more carefully described in surrounding passages as a “popular auxiliary force” and a “practical school of moral education for all its members.” It was to serve as “an organizer of the people’s power, not its own, a middleman between popular instinct and revolutionary thought.” To attempt to dictate or control the revolution, “to strive to foist on the people your own thoughts—foreign to its instinct—implies a wish to make it subservient to a new state,” he warned. “A revolutionary idea,” he continued, “is revolutionary, vital, real, and true, only because it expresses and only as far as it represents popular instincts which are the result of history.” He explicitly denied the utility, “or even the possibility, of any revolution except a spontaneous or a people’s social revolution. I am deeply convinced that any other revolution is dishonest, harmful, and spells death to liberty and the people.” Not only was it wrong, Bakunin added, it was also impossible, for the modern state had such power that “all contrived secret conspiracies and non-popular attempts, sudden attacks, surprises, and coups are bound to be shattered against it.” Therefore, “the sole aim of a secret society must be, not the creation of an artificial power outside the people, but the rousing, uniting, and organizing of the spontaneous power of the people.”
In his letter to Richard, Bakunin was likewise unambiguous. The secret dictatorship, “the only dictatorship I will accept,” would not attempt to seize power. It would instead oppose the efforts of “the political revolutionaries, the believers of overt dictatorship,” who would call for “order, trust, and submission to the established revolutionary power” and would, ostensibly for “the good of all,” install “dictatorship, government, the state.” He warned Richard unequivocally against those who would seek to make themselves the “Dantons, Robespierres, Saint-Justs of revolutionary socialism” and would use the masses as a “stepping-stone” for their own glory. Such revolutionaries, Bakunin cautioned, not only “served reaction; they would themselves be reaction.” In contrast, Bakunin’s revolutionary society would exist not to dominate or control the masses but to prevent them from being co-opted by others. It would not take or exercise power; it would only encourage the people to trust their passions and instincts and resist the attempts of politicos to channel the social revolution into a mere political revolution. For if the revolution of the people led to the “triumph of individuals,” the result would not be socialism, but “politics, the concern of the bourgeoisie, and the socialist movement will perish.”
In another letter, Bakunin elaborated further on his vision of the role of the secret society. Such a society does not “foist upon the people any new regulations, orders, style of life,” he wrote, “but merely unleashes its will and gives wide scope to its self-determination and its economic and social organization, which must be created by itself from below and not from above.” The band of revolutionaries he envisioned was to provide inspiration, not directives, in the swirling chaos of a revolutionary uprising, working as the “servant and a helper, but never the commander of the people, never under any pretext its manager, not even under the pretext of the people’s welfare.” Far from dominating the people or taking the reins of state, Bakunin envisioned the revolutionary organization helping “the people achieve self-determination on a basis of complete and comprehensive human liberty, without the slightest interference from even temporary or transitional power, that is, without any mediation of the state.”[257] With no power other than the power of moral suasion, without recourse to the coercive force of the state, Bakunin’s revolutionary societies can hardly be called “dictatorships”; his insistence that the people, not individuals or parties, made social revolutions demonstrates plainly he actively opposed the coup and putsch.
What his writings on secret societies do show is his belief that education, rational thought, and sincere discussion were necessary to combine thought and action, theory and practice. What made his formulation different was his insistence that the intellectual should play the junior role in this process, acting, at best, as helpful editor while the writing of the script was the work of the people themselves. Why was such a role even necessary? Bakunin sketched an answer to that question in a later article. What would happen if you, convinced that workers understood that the present system did not and could not satisfy their desire for the good life, showed up at the factory gate or office tower and started talking about abolishing God, capital, and the state? If you made such a proclamation to
the unlearned workers, crushed by their daily labor, workers who are demoralized and corrupted, by design, one might say, by the perverse doctrines liberally dispensed by governments in concert with every privileged caste—the priests, the nobility, the bourgeoisie—then you will alarm the workers. They may resist you without suspecting that these ideas are only the most faithful expression of their own interests, that these goals carry in themselves the realization of their dearest wishes, and that the religious and political prejudices in the name of which they may resist these ideas and goals are on the contrary the direct cause of their continued slavery and poverty.
Bakunin too understood that rulers, whether they were kings, lords, prime ministers, or capitalists, put a great deal of effort into creating and maintaining “the prejudices of the masses.” But “the masses’ prejudices are based only on their ignorance and totally oppose their very interests, while the bourgeoisie’s are based precisely on its class interests ... The people want but do not know; the bourgeoisie knows, but does not want. Which of the two is incurable? The bourgeoisie, to be sure.” The “great mass of workers,” he continued, were “exhausted by their daily labor” and so were “poor and unlearned.” Yet they, despite the
political and religious prejudices implanted in their mind, are socialist without knowing it; their most basic instinct and their social situation makes them more earnestly and truly socialist than all the scientific and bourgeois socialists taken together. They are socialist because of all the conditions of their material existence and all the needs of their being, whereas others are socialist only by virtue of their intellectual needs. And in real life the needs of the being are always stronger than those of the intellect, since the intellect is never the source of being but is always and everywhere its expression, reflecting its successive development.
In this we see Bakunin’s attempt to find a synthesis that gave sufficient weight both to material conditions and class experience and to reflective thought and more general knowledge. He acknowledged that “the people” were not always right in their views and ideas, but understood that unlike the intellectual, their ideas sprang directly from their experience. Bakunin argued that the role of the revolutionary was to appreciate the anger and frustration that led to prejudice and attempt to show the real causes. For “workers lack neither the potential for socialist aspirations nor their actuality; they lack only socialist thought.” They did have the “germ” of such thought, since they could only “be emancipated by the overthrow of all things now existing; either injustice would be destroyed or the working masses will be condemned to eternal slavery.” How then should the revolutionary proceed? “Education and propaganda” were the obvious place to start, but “the isolated worker is too overwhelmed by his daily grind and his daily cares to have much time to devote to education.” The question of who would educate them also posed a problem. While the “few sincere socialists who come from the bourgeoisie” and, we might add, the university, might be learned enough, they were too few. More importantly, they “do not adequately understand the workers’ world because their situation puts them in a different world,” and as a result “the workers rather legitimately distrust” them. The best teacher was experience, or, as Bakunin put it, “emancipation through practical action,” through “workers’ solidarity,” through “trade unions, organization, and the federation of resistance funds,” through the “progress of the collective struggle of the workers against the bosses.” When the worker began “to fight, in association with his comrades, for the reduction of his working hours and for an increase in his salary ... as soon as he begins to take an active part in this wholly material struggle,” he will soon “abandon every preoccupation with heaven” and rely “on the collective strength of the workers.”[258]
What Bakunin understood was that workers and peasants could only transform their lives through revolution, that the very conditions of their lives provided the inspiration for protest, and, as the vast majority of society, they had the strength to succeed. But he did not believe that they would spontaneously develop all the ideas and strategies necessary for success. That required reflection, discussion, and sometimes knowledge that went beyond the individual factory or commune. As he had suggested in “Romanov, Pugachev, or Pestel?” the revolutionary had some useful skills of information gathering and generalization that could draw conclusions from the particular and offer them to others. The secret societies could help perform that function. That he deemed such societies important indicates that Bakunin did not blithely assume political consciousness and revolutionary strategy were the direct, inevitable, unmediated results of oppression. Individual resistance might well be as natural as submission, but collective action required tactics and strategies, and they required thought as well as “instinct” and motivation. Collective action required that a militant minority educate, agitate, and organize without any notion of controlling the masses. To claim that Bakunin advocated the coup or putsch is to commit the intellectual sin he warned against, that of chopping and hacking at reality to make it fit preconceived theory. Those who continue to do so should give thanks that it is not possible to be sued for libeling the dead.
Despite, or, more accurately, because of, all the attention paid to the references to secret societies, the substantive ideas Bakunin developed in this period have largely been ignored. In the 1868 statutes for the International Brotherhood, for example, Bakunin elaborated a theory of materialist history and revolution. The aim of revolution was to change the “present order of things,” an order that was founded on “property, exploitation, domination, and the principle of authority, be it religious, be it metaphysical and bourgeois doctrinarian, be it even revolutionary Jacobinism.” Revolution, however, was not the same as a bloody uprising aimed only at destruction. On the contrary, Bakunin pointed out that the source of oppression was not individuals but “the organization of things” and the “social position” of oppressors. Therefore, violence was not the point of the revolution. It was instead a “disaster,” and if the oppression of the masses made such a violent reaction inevitable, it was no more rational, moral, or useful than “the ravages caused by a storm.” It was irrational because “the kings, the oppressors, the exploiters” were no more guilty or responsible than the “common criminals,” no less the “involuntary products” of the social system, and so punishing them was no more moral than society’s punishment of the petty thief. Each human being was the “involuntary product of the natural and social milieu in which he was born,” and thus was less responsible for his actions than society as a whole; “the organization of society is always and everywhere the unique cause of the crimes committed by individuals.” Nor was such violence moral, for no society, not even the revolutionary one, had the “right to judge and condemn,” only the right to self-defense. Revolutionary violence was useless, and for that one had only to look at the French Revolution. To the degree the nobility was vanquished, it was not the result of the guillotine but of the confiscation of property. “Carnage” was less effective against the ruling class because its “power resides less in the individuals than in their positions,” in “the organization of things,” in “the institution of the state and its natural foundation, private property.” For that reason, the aim of the revolution was not to kill individuals but to “attack positions and things,” to do away with institutions, to “destroy property and the state.” Thus there would be, he pressed, “no need to destroy human life” and provoke the “reaction” that massacres always created. If there was no need for it, he feared that it could well be a “natural, distressing, but inevitable fact.” It was inevitable because “the oppressed, the suffering victims,” were naturally filled with “hate” and it would not be surprising that the revolution would unleash their anger and give them opportunity to wreak vengeance on their oppressors. Franz Fanon would make a similar point in 1961 in his book The Wretched of the Earth, though unlike Bakunin, he would see such catharsis as a positive force. But “the whole secret of the revolution” was not violence against people but the destruction of “property and its inevitable corollary—the state.” This distinguished the social revolutionary from the political revolutionaries who did not wish to abolish private property but only to confiscate it in the name of the state. To do so meant they had to capture and use the state, not against institutions in general, but only against those individuals they wished to displace. To take the power and property of the king, one does not abolish the right to rule or distribute property to the people; one simply takes the crown. That did not free the people. It simply led to “military dictatorship and a new master. Thus the triumph of the Jacobins or Blanquists would be the death of the Revolution.”
In contrast, the social revolution meant “unchaining what today is called the ‘evil passions’ and the destruction of what is called in the same fashion ‘public order. ‘“ These passions were the passion for liberty and equality, while “public order” was nothing more than the violent suppression of the fight for freedom. Unlike the forces of “order,” the social revolutionaries “do not fear anarchy; we invoke it,” meaning by this not chaos but “revolutionary organization from the bottom up, not from the center to the circumference in authoritarian fashion.” Bakunin then outlined some of the measures the revolution would take. It would abolish public and private debt, end taxes, and dissolve the army, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and police. Capital and the machinery of production would be turned over to workers; the property of churches would be confiscated and dispersed. Revolutionary committees, democratically selected and recallable, would organize self-defense; and “revolutionary messengers,” not “official revolutionary commissionaires with sashes of office,” would be sent as envoys to win support in surrounding regions.
Bakunin’s careful thoughts on the nature of revolution and organization were, however, overshadowed by his relationship with one of the most repellent characters of the nineteenth-century revolutionary movements. His active work with Sergei Nechaev took up only a few months of Bakunin’s life, yet it would have immediate repercussions and would taint Bakunin and anarchism for generations to come.
[249] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Discours prononce au Congres de la Paix et de la Liberte, deuxieme seance,” 10 September 1867.
[250] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Federalisme, socialisme et antitheologisme,” 1867–1868.
[251] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to La Democratic, March-April 1868.
[252] See, for example, Pietro Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-first Century, New York: Verso, 2003.
[253] Again, I have translated “spontaneous” as “voluntary”; it is clear from the context that Bakunin does not mean such associations would spring from the void.
[254] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Deuxieme discours au deuxieme Congres de la Paix et de la Liberte,” 23 September 1868.
[255] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Statuts secrets de 1’Alliance: Programme et object de l’organisation revolutionnaire des Freres internationaux,” autumn 1868. Parts are translated in “Programme and Purpose of the Revolutionary Organization of International Brothers,” in Selected Writings, Arthur Lehning, ed., page 172; it is also available in Dolgoff, “The Program of the International Brotherhood,” which gives the date as 1869. Bakunin, letter to Nechaev, 2 June 1870, in Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechayev Circle, Michael Confino, ed., Hilary Sternberg and Lydia Bott, trans., LaSalle, 111.: Library Press, 1973, pages 259–63; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Albert Richard, 1 April 1870. This letter is abridged in Lehning, Selected Writings, pages 178–82, and Dolgoff, pages 178–81.
[256] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Statuts secrets de 1’Alliance: Programme et object de l’organisation revolutionnaire des Freres internationaux,” autumn 1868.
[257] Bakunin, letter to Nechayev, 2 November 1870, in Daughter of a Revolutionary, pages 258–9.
[258] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “La politique de 1’Internationale,” August 1869; I have also used the translation in Robert M. Cutler, The Basic Bakunin: Writings, 1869–1871, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992, pages 100–3.
