12. THE REVOLUTIONARY IS A DOOMED MAN

Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev sorely tested Bakunin’s belief that society, not individuals, should be held responsible for crimes and transgressions. Nechaev stole money and reputation from the anarchist, inadvertently aided Marx in purging him from the International Working Men’s Association, and provided ample, if indiscriminate and inaccurate, munitions to the enemies of anarchism that they are still firing off today. Yet to the degree the historian seeks to provide explanation, not blame, it is useful to sketch the world that thrust up Nechaev.

Despite the best efforts of the secret police and the persuasive effect of prison and exile, revolutionary activity in Russia continued to grow after Young Russia and Land and Liberty had been smashed. Peasants, though formally free, were little better off after emancipation, and if they were largely unable to organize across communes and regions, they still presented a threat to the stability of the regime. Students continued to organize in the face of harsh repression. Confronted with the failure of reform and the impossibility of open political work, convinced that whatever their instincts might be, peasants and workers were not prepared to join the revolution, many radicals concluded that new methods were needed. Some formed cooperatives; others became teachers, hoping to influence the next generation. Still others concluded that tightly disciplined cells were needed if the resistance were to continue, and they went underground to create secret groups very different from the relatively open circles of Herzen’s and Bakunin’s day. Around 1866, a small number of students, most of them the sons of priests, had coalesced around an informal but secret society named the Organization. Headed by Nicholas Ishutin, the Organization held that reform was dangerous, for it co-opted the revolution; constitutions and parliaments would only speed up the introduction of capitalism. If capitalism meant liberty and wealth for the nobility and merchant class, it would do nothing for peasants save turn them into factory hands and destroy their forms of collective property on which socialism could be based. Members of the Organization took up political propaganda in the provinces and in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

If Bakunin agreed with the Russian radicals on the need for revolution rather than reform, he had long distanced himself from their revolutionary Jacobinism and consistently argued that revolutionaries must not separate themselves from the people. The Organization paid lip service to that ideal, but in practice it functioned as a small sect whose members increasingly spoke only to themselves. In the fetid atmosphere of the underground, an even smaller group split off and abandoned most connections to their earlier lives. Deploring the relatively comfortable existence of student life, they toughened themselves for the coming conflict through a rigid asceticism, to the point of sleeping on hard floors and eating a highly restricted diet. Calling their group Hell, they insisted that the revolutionary could not be bound by any ethics or morality apart from dedicated opposition to the Russian regime. That opposition increasingly took one form: terrorism. Where Bakunin insisted that the revolution sought to destroy institutions, not individuals, the members of Hell talked openly of assassination. On 4 April 1866, Ishutin’s cousin, Dimitri Karakozov, did more than talk. Dressed as a peasant and armed with a cheap revolver, he entered the Summer Gardens in St. Petersburg and fired at Alexander II. His shots went astray, and Karakozov was arrested and hanged five months later. As Bakunin had predicted in “The People’s Cause: Romanov, Pugachev, or Pestel?” the peasantry rallied around the tsar. Alexander’s advisors turned the failed assassination into a public relations coup, claiming that a real peasant had risked his life to grab Karakozov and cause him to miss the target. The story was a complete fabrication, but it was a successful, cynical move. It won the regime some support for its crackdown on radicals and reformers in the “White Terror” headed by the minister of the interior, yet another Muraviev, known as the “Hangman of Vilna” for his bloody repression of the Polish revolt. Thus could Bakunin claim to be the kin of both Muraviev the Hanged, a reference to his Decembrist cousin, and Muraviev the Hanger. Once again newspapers were shut down, the universities placed under stricter surveillance, and those who looked suspicious, including women with short hair, watched carefully. Dozens of radicals were arrested, including Ishutin, who spent several years in prison before dying in exile in Siberia in 1879.

Bakunin agreed with Herzen that the assassination attempt would generate nothing except a wave of public and peasant support for the tsar. Unlike Herzen, however, he refused to attack Karakozov in print, insisting that he would “not throw a stone” at him. To criticize Karakozov’s personal motives was to give tacit support to the regime, he argued.[259] Bakunin continued to support the student revolutionaries, and by 1868 a small number made their way to Switzerland. Together with Bakunin they put out a new Russian journal, The People’s Cause, in time for a new wave of student unrest. Though Bakunin worked with them and found much to admire, he was not uncritical of the new student movement. In particular, he was critical of its tendency toward elitism. Increasingly the new generations of student radicals believed it was their duty to make the revolution themselves. If populism, socialism, and anarchism were the ideologies of Bakunin’s generation, the students of the late 1860s were more inclined to nihilism.

Nihilism! The belief in nothing! The amoral, destructive assault on all beliefs, ideals, and morality! Complete anarchy, plus apathy! The nineteenth-century equivalent to rock ‘n’ roll, or heavy metal, or hip-hop! Well, no. Russian nihilism was very different from the meaning usually ascribed to the word today. Today it is often used to describe a lack of belief of any kind, an existential notion of meaninglessness, and thus a moral skepticism, even amoralism, as summed up in the Coen brothers’ movie The Big Lebowski. When the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges, is threatened by self-proclaimed nihilists, his friend Walter Sobchak, played by John Goodman, exclaims, “Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

Strictly speaking, nihilism refers to an ethos of a Russian intellectual movement in the 1860s. Nihilists were not surrealists or existentialists or insouciant hipsters. Nihilism was an insistence that one should not believe in anything that could not be demonstrated to be true. In its essence, it was a critical approach to virtually everything. It was uninterested in debating art or beauty, preferring the harsh reality of empirical knowledge to the feeble efforts of romanticism, sentimentality, or philosophy. More than anything else, nihilism was a form of literary and political criticism based on a broad definition of science. In this sense, the nihilist movement had evolved to the position Bakunin held in 1842, that criticism and destruction were needed before building could begin. Chernyshevsky gave nihilists literary models in What Is To Be Done? while Turgenev tried to parody the movement with the character of Bazarov in his novel Fathers and Sons. To the horror of Turgenev’s generation, one young writer, Dimitri Pisarev, quickly adopted the term and the characterization of Turgenev’s nihilist. He stressed that the fundamental role of the young intellectual was to criticize and corrode, to assert a fierce, negative realism that confronted ideas, tradition, and accepted wisdom. In that, nihilism had much in common with the Bakunin who had insisted that the passion for destruction was a creative passion. But Bakunin had at the same time contended that workers and peasants could be, in fact had to be, revolutionary agents. The nihilists had no such belief in the masses. Their movement reflected the failure of revolution, of political organization, and of the Russian state, and it represented a retreat away from the people to the insulated hothouse and coffeehouse of the academy, resulting in what Abbott Gleason has labeled “bitter militancy, ironic superiority, and general extremism.” Like the vulgar postmodernism that superficially resembles nihilism, especially if we replace “general extremism” with “banal liberalism,” it had more than a tinge of elitism to it. The “real” revolutionary was the one who rejected the sophistry and deception of tradition, hegemony, and faith. In this rejection, however, nihilism too often also rejected the possibility of real political struggle. If Bakunin agreed in principle with the importance of criticism, he also understood that the first job of the radical was to bring people together in collective action, not to tell them they were idiots. But the self-referential world of the nihilist did not see organizing others as the primary task. Individual emancipation, the freeing of the self from false ideas, and ruthless condemnation applied to all without favor were the guiding principles. This critical realism could be applied as easily to the peasantry as to the tsar, and in a philosophy that stressed individual revolt and the enlightened minority, there was no more of a role for workers and peasants than there was for anyone else who had not seen the light.[260]

Thus the logical politics for the nihilist was less anarchism than it was Jacobinism. Such at least was the conclusion of one young radical, Peter Tkachev, who as much as anyone gave the movement a coherent political expression. Born in 1844 into the lower gentry, he had been involved in the student demonstrations of the early 1860s, knew Ishutin and his organization, and wrote for several radical newspapers. By 1867, he had been arrested several times for revolutionary activity. For him, the logical outcome of economic materialism, the backwardness of the Russian peasantry, the overwhelming power of the Russian state, and the invigorated spirit of the small fraction of radical students, was the vanguard party that would pull the masses into the new world. The revolutionary had to “impart a considered and rational form to the struggle, leading it toward determined ends, directing this coarse material element toward ideal principles.” It was far from Bakunin’s description of the relationship of the revolutionary to the people and represented a very different political tradition, one founded as much in intellectual elitism and isolation as repression and state violence.[261]

There was more to Tkachev’s philosophy than that, of course. But the emphasis on conspiracy was enough to attract one young Russian radical, Sergei Nechaev. In the course of his career, Nechaev insisted that the radical had the right and obligation to engage in any crime, any vice, any monstrous deed that might advance the cause. It was a foul doctrine that he applied in his daily life. He was, in words crafted for another political activist, “a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and even if he caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.” The description was of Richard Nixon, made by Harry Truman, but it suits Nechaev nicely. He—Nechaev, that is—extorted and stole money from colleagues and people who had befriended him; he endangered comrades with his carelessness and his unscrupulous machinations; and he attempted to seduce Herzen’s daughter solely to extract money from her. When one of the members of his Russian group, Ivan Ivanov, disagreed with his schemes, Nechaev accused him of being an agent of the Third Section and ordered the others to murder him; in the end, Nechaev himself strangled and shot the young man. Later it was revealed that he knew the man to be completely innocent and had made up the charge to rid himself of a competitor, to test the loyalty and squeamishness of his comrades, and to implicate them in a crime so he could more easily control them. When the body of Nechaev’s victim was found, it triggered a police dragnet that caught up three hundred revolutionaries, many of whom were tried and sentenced for their role in the radical movement. In the meantime, Nechaev abandoned his comrades and slipped into Western Europe. Yet he managed to dupe many in the revolutionary movement for some time, and Bakunin was no better at ferreting him out than those he betrayed in Russia had been.

Nechaev was born in Ivanovo, sometimes called the “Russian Manchester,” a textile mill town about 160 miles from Moscow. His grandparents had been serfs long since freed by the time Nechaev was born in 1847. His maternal grandparents owned a small painting business that often employed his father, and his mother worked as a seamstress. The family was by no means wealthy, but it could afford to give Nechaev a solid education. In 1865, he moved to Moscow to study and take the examination to become an elementary school teacher. He failed, however, and moved to St. Petersburg, arriving there in time to be inspired by Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate the tsar. He found his way into the radical student movement as he audited university classes, managing at the same time to pass his teacher’s exam and take a job instructing religion. By 1868, he was working with Peter Tkachev, and combined the idea of the elitist party with the asceticism preached by Chernyshevsky’s fictional character Rakhmetov and practiced by members of Hell. He added to it a strong dose of class hatred laced with a rich dollop of amorality. He was soon able to give the Carbonari lessons in secrecy and conspiracy and set about making himself a legend in his own mind. He exaggerated stories of his humble origins to appear to be a gifted proletarian rather than an underachieving student, and his prolier-than-thou attitude gave him some cachet among his fellow students. He duped several of his comrades into believing that he had been arrested by the secret police, and when he “miraculously” reappeared, he became renowned as the first revolutionary ever to escape from the Peter and Paul fortress that had held Bakunin for so many years. In fact, he was simply preparing to leave Russia, and while that was no easy feat in itself, it was much less heroic than imprisonment and a daring escape. He had, however, created a successful “backstory” that would gain him entrance into the radical communities in Western Europe.

The story was helpful when Nechaev met Bakunin in Geneva in March 1869. The anarchist, always more trusting and forgiving of individuals than of institutions, was delighted to be in contact with one of the radical Russian students he had heard so much about. Nechaev, thirty-three years Bakunin’s junior, seemed to be the embodiment of the model Russian revolutionary youth. He was of the people, and thus understood from personal experience the need for radical change. He was educated and could generalize from his particular situation to understand the difference between rebellion and revolution. Nechaev seemed to Bakunin to be “one of those young fanatics who doubt nothing and who fear nothing” and who had pledged themselves not to rest until the people rose in revolt. The anarchist expressed his admiration in these “believers without God and heroes without oratory,” welcomed Nechaev into his circles of friends, and helped him produce several pamphlets between April and August 1869 for distribution in Russia.

The pamphlets have been the center of controversy and legend ever since, for together they outline a cynical program of deceit, wholesale destruction, and implacable revolutionary violence. One, “Principles of Revolution,” calls for the “massacre of personages in high places” by lone terrorists on the model of Karakozov. Such actions had, in the past, been undertaken by individual idealists driven by hope and desperation. Now they were to be based on the “severe, cold, and implacable logic” of systematic assassinations committed to create widespread panic among the ruling class. These assassinations would show others that the mighty could fall and would embolden others to take up the bullet and bomb in a “a generalized passion among the youth” and culminate in a “general uprising.” Since the revolution was a “battle of life and death between the profiteers and the oppressed,” the revolutionary advocated “no other activity than the act of annihilation,” using “poison, the knife, the noose.” The “revolution” sanctioned all means and all those who fell in combat even as it “darkened the last days of the social leeches”; the “sacred work of the extermination of evil, of purification” by “fire and sword” would finally free Russia and ultimately Europe.[262]

Another pamphlet, “The Catechism of a Revolutionary,” distinct from Bakunin’s earlier “Revolutionary Catechism,” outlined a complicated structure of revolutionary cells, the appointment of secretaries, the notion of distributing information on a “need-to-know basis,” and suggestions on how to gather funds and information. It is not, however, the first pages that are of historical interest. It is the section entitled “The Attitude of the Revolutionary Toward Himself” that has continued to resonate with radicals, including Eldridge Cleaver, who “fell in love with” the passage and took it “for my bible.”[263] The hook is set with the first sentence:

The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion: the revolution. In the very depths of his being, in words and in deeds, he has broken every tie with the civil order and the entire cultured world, and with all the laws, proprieties, conventions, and morality of this world.[264]

If the above has a romantic sweep to it, the next paragraphs make it clear that revolution is serious business. The revolutionary is the “merciless enemy” of society, and “if he continues to live in it, then it is only in order to destroy it more certainly.” The revolutionary has no interest in science or art, save “the science of destruction,” especially chemistry, physics, and related fields that could aid in “the quickest and surest destruction of this foul order.” The revolutionary “despises public opinion” and feels no constraints of social morality. Instead, morality has only one criterion: That which hastens the revolution is ethical and moral; that which hinders it is evil. The revolutionaries should expect and give no quarter, and in the certain knowledge that the state would do its best to eradicate them, have to prepare themselves to withstand torture.

There was no place for “romanticism, sentimentality, enthusiasm, or excitement” in this movement; even “personal hatred and vindictiveness” were forbidden. Only “cold calculation” dedicated to “merciless destruction” was permitted. The same remorseless logic was applied to friends, colleagues, comrades, and acquaintances as it was to the enemy. Comrades were divided into different groups, depending on their loyalty and utility to the cause. The lower groups were considered to be “revolutionary capital” for the revolutionary to “expend”—expend “economically,” of course, with an eye to extracting their “maximum value.” If comrades were reduced to commodities, the rest of society fared worse. The Catechism divided people into six categories. The first was made up of government officials who were “especially harmful” to the cause. They were to be executed immediately. Other officials were given a stay of execution so their acts of repression and cruelty would outrage the people and drive them to revolt. The third category consisted of those not distinguished by their intelligence or energy but by wealth and influence. They were to be “exploited in every possible way,” their secrets found out and turned against them, their weaknesses used so they could be controlled by the revolutionaries, their power and riches taken from them by extortion and blackmail and used for the revolution. The fourth category held politicians and liberals who could be used by pretending to agree with them while carefully weaving them into radical conspiracies without their knowledge. Once they were deeply entangled, they could be brought under control and sacrificed for the cause as needed. Armchair radicals made up the fifth category: all those “doctrinaires, conspirators, and revolutionaries who chatter in circles and on paper.” The best use for them was to push them into foolhardy and dangerous political actions, so the “majority will vanish without a trace and a few will make real contributions to the revolution.” The final category was “women.” If a few might earn the designation of “comrades” and thus be regarded as “our most valuable treasure,” most were to be put into the above third, fourth, and fifth categories, and used accordingly.

The brutal cynicism and violence of the two articles are appalling; they have been accurately described by one anarchist as revolting rather than revolutionary. [265] They are the pieces that earned Bakunin the reputation as the apostle of pan-destruction and are the basis for the accusations that his revolutionary credo consisted of little more than apocalyptic violence and revolutionary terror.

The only problem with this argument is that Bakunin did not write either the “Catechism” or “Principles of Revolution.”

Historians have long debated the authorship of the 1869 essays. One was signed by Nechaev, another by Ogarev, a third, “A Few Words to My Young Brothers in Russia,” by Bakunin. Four others, including the “Catechism” and “Principles of Revolution,” were unsigned. The provenance of the “Catechism” is even more obscure. The original has been lost since 1869. The version that survived was written in code and taken from Nechaev by the Russian police, who deciphered it and made it public. There is no evidence that Bakunin wrote the “Catechism,” and it has been attributed to him only through textual analysis, that is, by finding phrases or ideas in it that seem similar to those written by Bakunin. The strongest evidence for his authorship is that it was cast in the form of a “catechism,” a stylistic device Bakunin had used previously. But the Nechaev piece was not originally titled a catechism; the name was given to it later by others. It certainly had the form of a catechism, but so did many articles by any number of revolutionaries and radical organizations. Bakunin himself was borrowing an accepted and common practice when he earlier penned his own catechisms, and thus we can draw no conclusions about authorship from the form of the piece.

Drawing conclusions from its content is equally problematic. Some of the ideas are superficially similar to Bakunin’s. But those statements that give the “Catechism” its unique amoral cast have no antecedents in Bakunin’s thought and the references to violence and destruction are very different from those made by Bakunin before and after the “Catechism” was written. As we have seen, he insisted that revolutionary violence was to be directed against institutions, not people, and nowhere did he advocate terrorism or assassination. The elitism of the “Catechism” and “Principles of Revolution,” where the revolutionary exists outside the people and brings the revolution to them, is radically different from Bakunin’s insistence that intellectuals learn from the people. In the only article from the seven known to be by Bakunin, he insists on the contrary that the young intellectuals and radicals had to “leave these universities, these academies” and “go among the people. There should be your career, your life, your knowledge. Learn amid these masses whose hands are hardened by labor how you should serve the people’s cause.” Far from instigating the revolution from above, the “cultured youth should be neither master nor protector nor benefactor nor dictator to the people, only the midwife of their spontaneous emancipation, the uniter and organizer of their efforts and their strength.” This was very different from the notion that the revolutionary should spark the inevitable conflagration with poison, knife, noose, or bomb. The idea that women were a “treasure” when they were not to be used without compunction also runs counter to Bakunin’s longstanding insistence on sexual equality.

There is one piece of evidence that connects Bakunin to the “Catechism,” and on the surface, it is damning. One anarchist, Michael Sazhin, also known as Armand Ross, claimed to have seen a copy of the “Catechism” in Bakunin’s handwriting. But eye-witness testimony is often unreliable, and certainly cannot be accepted easily in this case. As best as can be determined, Ross did not meet Bakunin until the spring of 1870 and they were not close until 1872. The earliest Ross could have seen any original manuscript was more than a year after the “Catechism” was written, encoded, and confiscated by the police from Nechaev’s Russian colleagues. Since the “Catechism” figured in the trials of Nechaev’s comrades, it is highly unlikely that Bakunin would keep such an incriminating piece of evidence on hand for a year. That alone casts considerable doubt on Ross’s claim. More importantly, Ross did not come forward with his story until 1904. Thirty-five years is a long time. It is not too long to remember an important event, but it is long enough for the careful reader to require some corroborating evidence before accepting any claim. Nor was it a question of Ross keeping a secret all that time to protect Bakunin. The two had fallen out by 1874, and Ross’s animosity did not end with Bakunin’s death. To sum up: The only evidence that Bakunin wrote the “Catechism” is an allegation made by an unfriendly witness more than thirty years after the fact that a copy in Bakunin’s handwriting existed and then vanished.

Against this claim we have Bakunin’s own writings, which are very different in argument, tone, and principle. The “Catechism” and “Principles of Revolution” do resemble the writings of Tkachev and other Russian Jacobins. While Bakunin knew relatively little of them or their work, Nechaev was part of their circle and the “Catechism” is more consistent with their ideas than Bakunin’s, suggesting that Nechaev wrote the article himself. Finally, Bakunin formally and explicitly disassociated himself from the “Catechism” in 1870. It was precisely in response to Nechaev that Bakunin, as we have seen previously, insisted that anything other than a “spontaneous or a people’s social revolution ... is dishonest, harmful, and spells death to liberty and the people. It dooms them to new penury and new slavery.” It was also where Bakunin pointed out that only a mass social revolution could possibly succeed, for “centralization and civilization,” modern communications, arms, and military organization, and the “techniques of administration” rendered secret conspiracies ineffective and obsolete. In particular, the “science and suppression of people’s and all other riots, carefully worked out, tested by experiment and perfected in the last seventy-five years of contemporary history” gave the state such power that only the people’s revolution could hope to overcome it.

Against Nechaev’s hope that assassinations and terrorism would rouse the people, Bakunin argued that “it is impossible to rouse the people artificially.” He repeated the point he had made earlier:

People’s revolutions are born from the course of events, or from historical currents which, continuously and usually slowly, flow underground and unseen within the popular strata, increasingly embracing, penetrating, and undermining them until they emerge from the ground and their turbulent waters break all barriers and destroy everything that impedes their course. Such a revolution cannot be artificially induced. It is even impossible to hasten it, although I have no doubt that an efficient and intelligent organization can facilitate the explosion. There are historical periods when revolutions are simply impossible; there are other periods when they are inevitable.[266]

Bakunin went further, criticizing Nechaev for his failure to believe in either people or the people, and for his constant attempts to “subdue them, frighten them, to tie them down by external controls ... so that once they get into your hands they can never tear themselves free.” Nechaev was less a revolutionary than an abrek, a member of a Caucasus mountain tribe banished from his people for his antisocial behavior and driven to blood feuds. And Nechaev’s catechism, Bakunin continued, was “a catechism of abreks.” Nechaev did not desire a world of morality; he sought only to make “your own selfless cruelty, your own truly extreme fanaticism, into a rule of common life,” and thus he more closely resembled “religious fanatics and ascetics ... nearer to the Jesuits than to us.” Using the methods of the Jesuits, Nechaev sought to “systematically kill all personal human feeling in [other revolutionaries], all feeling of personal fairness,” and replace them with “lying, suspicion, spying, and denunciation.” While Bakunin had no scruples when it came to dealing with the enemy, he deplored Nechaev for treating “your friends as you treat your enemies, with cunning and lies,” hoping always “to divide them, even to foment quarrels,” seeking not unity but disunity to protect his own position in the movement.

Nechaev’s personal relations were no better, Bakunin continued. His attempt to seduce Natalie Herzen was “repugnant,” and Nechaev had embroiled Bakunin himself in a nasty little scandal. Bakunin had been commissioned to translate Marx’s Capital into Russian. He soon gave up on the job, and of course had long spent the advance. Nechaev wrote a threatening letter to the publisher, without Bakunin’s knowledge, complete with intimidating pictures of a knife, a revolver, and the peasant’s axe, to “persuade” him to let Bakunin abandon the project and keep the advance. When the letter was made public, many believed, erroneously, that Bakunin was responsible for it. The episode was a blow to Bakunin’s reputation and honor, and became a useful tool for those who wished to kick him out of the International. The anarchist would sadly confess later that he had been duped by Nechaev. No one, he wrote to Ogarev, “has done me, and deliberately done me, so much harm as he.”[267]

Given his very real and profound differences with Nechaev, why would Bakunin work with him? He even continued to defend Nechaev against the early misgivings of Herzen and others, and supported him even when the younger man denounced him, deprived him of money, and blackened his name. He explained it to Nechaev simply enough. By 1869, he had long been out of touch with Russian radicals and Nechaev seemed to be a bridge to the youth movement. The aging anarchist welcomed the chance to pitch in. He wrote pamphlets and worked to secure funds for the revolution. In particular, he went after the Bahkmetov fund, named after its donor who, in 1858, established a trust fund of about eight hundred pounds for Russian revolutionary activities. Administered by Herzen and Ogarev, the principle was still available in 1869, when Bakunin lobbied to give it to Nechaev. They reluctantly agreed to give Bakunin half, and he then turned the money over to Nechaev, who promptly made his way to Russia. There his principle accomplishment was the murder of Ivanov in November 1869, after which Nechaev returned to Switzerland, where he was able to conceal public knowledge of his crime for some time.

Even before he was told of the murder, Bakunin began to have doubts about Nechaev. But he put them aside, believing that the ardent radical was sincere and that he shared Bakunin’s views. Later he would understand that Nechaev would lie, even to him, to pursue his own goals, and the realization came as a crushing disappointment. Until then, he was willing to overlook Nechaev’s flaws, believing, or hoping, they were signs of immaturity he would outgrow and that they were in any case overshadowed by Nechaev’s “real and indefatigable strength, devotion, passion, and power of thought” and his selfless dedication. Even when Bakunin broke with him, when he was forced to acknowledge the depth of Nechaev’s crimes and treachery, he still held a faint hope that the young man would redeem himself, abandon his nasty creed, and serve the revolution.[268]

To an extent, Nechaev did. Arrested by the Swiss police in 1872, two years after Bakunin broke with him, Nechaev was turned over to the Russian authorities and charged with Ivanov’s murder. During his trial, he denounced the court and the Russian empire, insisting that he was a political activist and should be tried as one, not as a common criminal. Despite his protests, he was quickly found guilty and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in Siberia. He was instead put into solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul fortress. He remained steadfast, refusing to name names or accept an offer of leniency in return for serving as a spy for the Third Section. He remained in solitary for ten years, until his death from scurvy and tuberculosis in 1882. He could not be said to have redeemed himself for his life of treachery and murder, but at the end, he showed something of the mettle that Bakunin had seen in the brutish young man.

Why have historians been so quick to attribute the “Catechism” to Bakunin? The confusion over its authorship has distorted the popular understanding of Bakunin and greatly contributed to the mistaken notion that he was an advocate of terrorism. It has even shaped the way succeeding generations have interpreted Bakunin, leading many of them to trace his life backward from the “Catechism” to find hints of violence and instability in every casual remark and incident. In part, it is a question of evidence. Bakunin’s 1870 letter to Nechaev, the strongest evidence that Bakunin did not write or agree with the “Catechism,” was not made public until 1966. Yet it is hard to shake the notion that many historians have made a rush to judgment, seeing anarchism only as a threat to be smashed rather than an ideology to be understood. The easiest way to dismiss the ideas of Bakunin and other anarchists, apart from warning that sexual dysfunction would result from reading their pamphlets, was, and is, to preach that it is no more than mindless violence. The “Catechism” was a useful way to make that spurious connection, and too many historians have eagerly insisted Bakunin was its author as part of their campaign to discredit him and anarchism.

It is certainly true that Bakunin advocated revolution. But as we have seen, his idea of revolution was very different from terrorism. It was primarily a social movement that likely would have to resort to violence in self-defense as capitalists and lords fought to retain the property and privileges they had extracted from workers and peasants. That anarchism might be created peacefully was something to hope for, but the grim reality, and one Bakunin had experienced directly, was that the rich and powerful would use any means, however barbaric, to maintain their positions. Furthermore, Bakunin understood that property and power were not individual attributes but social relationships between classes. These social relationships, unlike individuals, could not be destroyed by bomb or axe, but by dismantling social institutions. Throughout his career, he stressed that the revolution was aimed at institutions, not people. For him, revolutionary violence did not mean a strategy of assassination or destruction by an elite group in the hope that the resulting repression would enrage and mobilize the people. On the contrary, Bakunin rejected the so-called “immiseration theory” that held that there is a certain level of misery that people must hit before they revolt. “The most terrible poverty ... is not a sufficient guarantee of revolution,” he observed. Humanity possessed “an astonishing and, indeed sometimes despairing patience,” and immiseration, either in the form of greater poverty or greater repression was as likely to produce “obedience” as rebellion.[269]

Nor was violence acceptable as a strategy of eliminating representatives of the regime for the theatrical or propaganda effect, or even to rid the people of a particularly nasty oppressor. Social relationships, not individuals, were the enemy, and if the bourgeoisie and lords and prime ministers and kings would hand over the wealth and power they had usurped, there would be no need for violence. That did seem unlikely, of course, but it meant that the people’s violence, aimed at reclaiming what was rightfully theirs, was as justified and moral as the violence of anyone used to resist a thief. At the same time, Bakunin understood human nature enough to imagine that after years of repression, a people prepared to revolt might well commit excesses in a fury of unleashed rage. He deplored such passions even as he recognized them, and more importantly, understood they stemmed not from peasants and workers themselves but from systems of government and economics that were designed to exploit them. Employers and governments sowed the wind; they should not be surprised if the whirlwind reaped them.

Linking Bakunin to the “Catechism” is also a way to dodge the very real question of the relationship of politics to violence. Virtually every political ideology save pacifism has justified violence for its cause while deploring the violence of every other. We may also reflect that adherents of virtually every political ideology have turned to violence at some instance and there is no particular reason why anarchism should be exempt. More often than not, the violence of anarchists is reviled not because it is violence but because it is anarchist. That is, it is the end that is objected to, not the means. If justified violence is a matter of ends, then the old question, “Is it moral to kill Hitler to avoid the death of millions?” opens the door to justify political violence. Many would agree that defending their country from an invader would be justified, even though defense is, obviously enough, violence for political ends. Many have gone further, to rationalize preemptive violence to eliminate the chance of attack on the homeland. Few states or individuals have ever insisted that all violence was equally wrong, and their defense of their own actions is more often special pleading than consistent ethics. The argument that your freedom fighter is their terrorist, your preemptive strike their unprovoked attack, your aerial bombing of innocent civilians self-defense, their suicide bomber a crime against humanity, has become a cliche, but it is one that is still worth remembering in any assessment of anarchist violence.

A sense of perspective is also useful. The violence of capital and the state outweighs that of the anarchists on the order of millions to one. Any American president is responsible for thousands more deaths through wars foreign and native than all the anarchist assassinations put together. Indeed, George W. Bush as governor of Texas oversaw more people executed by the state than anarchists assassinated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor is capital blameless. We may argue that many, perhaps most, wars have been waged to protect its interests and to that toll we may add up the deaths caused by slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. If this seems too remote, then we may calculate the deaths caused by industrial accidents and unsafe procedures, and these too number in the hundreds of thousands. To take one small example: nearly six thousand workers die on the job in the U.S. annually. These are accidents, to be sure, but the fact remains that these deaths, almost entirely preventable, have been whisked out of the category of violence. They are not seen as the result of a particular way of organizing society but as “acts of God.” This sleight of hand, the anarchists and labor activists argue persuasively, tells us something significant about the power of the state and capital to define violence against them as a crime and violence against the weak as merely unfortunate and unavoidable. While crimes against the powerful and their property are rooted out with the police and legislation and the courts and prisons, violence against workers goes relatively unchecked. One might make a lofty argument about all life being equal and that the slaughter of thousands in the workplace and millions in war does not justify the taking of a single life by anarchists. We might well agree with this argument and still ask, along with St. Matthew, “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own?” The answer of course is that the state and capital are not opposed to violence as such but only to violence directed against them, and they have the power to define their violence as acceptable, even honorable. A disinterested analysis, however, would make the question of anarchist violence almost irrelevant on the scales of history. Because it has never had the sanction or the power of the state, anarchist violence has remained small-scale and individual. There have been no anarchist gulags, no anarchist genocide of native peoples, no anarchist concentration camps or death camps, no anarchist atomic bombs or mass bombings of civilian populations, no anarchist poison gas attacks. If the pundit replies that war is different because the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, anarchists may be forgiven for retorting that that is precisely their point.

The anarchists may legitimately point out that that the state does more than kill; it enlists others to do its killing and to die for it, and it usually lies to them about what they are doing. No serious historian today believes that World War I was fought by Britain, France, and their allies to preserve democracy or to end all war. Yet millions of citizens were told precisely that in order to secure their compliance. Purposely deluded about the cause and meaning of the war, they went off to slaughter and be slaughtered. Even those who would argue that such violence was justified may hold that at the bare minimum the organized violence of war, to be moral, requires that those who are being asked to do unspeakable deeds and to die be told the real reasons for their sacrifice.

It was also relatively easy to link Bakunin to the “Catechism” because of the bewildering melange of Russian revolutionaries of the 1860s through the 1880s and several lone assassins operating; in the name of anarchism from 1890 to 1914. As we have seen, Karakozov tried to assassinate the tsar in 1866, and in 1881 another group, the People’s Will, succeeded in blowing up Tsar Alexander II. Descended from the student movement of the 1860s and 1870s, the People’s Will advocated terrorism and assassination, but it owed little to Bakunin and anarchism. The group was not formed until 1879, three years after Bakunin’s death, and called not for anarchism but for a constituent assembly and universal suffrage. The most famous member of People’s Will, Vera Figner, commented that while they carried Bakunin “in our hearts as a fighting revolutionary,” they were not guided by his ideas. The broad similarities of their program to some of Bakunin’s ideas—land to be divided among the peasants, a vague antistate sentiment, and a belief “in the creative abilities of the popular masses to build new and just ways of life”—owed much more to the student movement and the radical organizations of the 1860s and 1870s than to Bakunin. More recent radical groups that adopted violence, ranging from the Black Panthers to the Weather Underground to the German Red Army Fraction, popularly known as the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, identified themselves as Marxists, not anarchists, while Eldridge Cleaver’s commitment was to the credo of Nechaev’s “Catechism,” not Bakunin’s thought. [270]

Nonetheless, anarchists have on occasion advocated terrorism, and between 1892 and 1901, a handful of anarchists engaged in a number of such acts. In France, Francois-Claudius Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, and Emile Henry did as much as anyone to create the image of the anarchist as an indiscriminate, mad bomb-thrower. Ravachol set off an explosion in the apartment building where antilabor magistrates lived, then blew up a restaurant. Vaillant threw a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies, while Henry bombed a mining company and a Parisian cafe, proclaiming coldly, “There are no innocents.” Italian anarchists in particular turned to assassination: In 1894, one stabbed French president Carnot to death; three years later, another killed Antonio Canovas, the prime minister of Spain; the following year, still another killed Austria’s Empress Elizabeth. After a number of attempts on his life that he shrugged off as occupational hazards, Umberto I of Italy was finally struck down by yet another Italian anarchist in 1900. Perhaps the most famous anarchist assassin was Leon Czolgosz, pronounced “choll-gosh,” who shot and killed U.S. president William McKinley in 1901. But Czolgosz was virtually unknown to contemporary American anarchists such as Emma Goldman. Some of these anarchists, such as Johann Most and Alexander Berkman, had advocated assassination years earlier. Most was famous for an 1885 how-to book entitled Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, Etc., Etc., and Berkman served fourteen years in prison for the attempted assassination of Andrew Carnegie’s lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick, for his role in smashing the Homestead Steel strike of 1892. But Czolgosz had no connection with them or the larger anarchist movement. It is worth noting too that of the four American presidents who have fallen to assassins, only one was killed by an anarchist, and that statistic alone suggests that political violence is not the exclusive preserve of the anarchist. The more important point, however, is that while some anarchists, like advocates of other political ideologies, have advocated terrorism and assassination, Bakunin did not. None of the anarchist assassins or bombers had any connection to Bakunin, or claimed any, and their particular interpretation of anarchism devolved long after Bakunin’s death. None could draw inspiration or support for their actions from his writings or his life.

Finally, Bakunin was often linked to Nechaev and viewed as the first theorist of anarchist violence by three connected ideas: direct action, propaganda by the deed, and the criminal as revolutionary. While direct action has today been greatly expanded to include any sort of street protest and demonstration, and though the term has been appropriated by a number of groups that advocate violence against the state and capital, in Bakunin’s time it had a very restricted meaning. Direct action was originally used by anarchists in the 1870s to describe economic action taken by workers against their employers. It was the opposite of political, indirect action, which aimed at electing reform politicians or lobbying them to pass laws and regulations to improve wages and working conditions. Workers were exploited by employers, and so it was employers they should be fighting, the direct actionists held. After all, why talk to the monkey when you could talk to the organ grinder? What did the capitalist revere most of all? Profit. Therefore, the quickest—the direct—way to bring the boss to heel was to attack those profits through economic action. That meant measures such as the strike, the boycott, and sabotage, which could range from working to rule and slow-downs to breaking machinery, anything that would put direct economic pressure on the employer. In its original use, direct action had no connection to terrorism or violence against people.[271]

Nor did propaganda by the deed. The phrase has often been attributed to Bakunin, but it appears nowhere in his writings and appears in anarchist literature only after his death. It does find a precedent in one of his letters, written in 1873 to his comrades in the Jura Federation, an organization of workers and anarchists that included James Guillaume and that argued for direct action. “I am convinced that the time of grand theoretical discourse, written or spoken, is past,” Bakunin wrote. “Over the last nine years, the International has developed more than enough ideas to save the world—if ideas alone can save the world—and I defy anyone to invent a new one. It is no longer the time for ideas but for deeds and acts.” What were these deeds and acts to consist of? Not terrorism or violence, but “the organization of the forces of the proletariat.”[272] Subsequent anarchists such as Errico Malatesta, Paul Brousse, and Peter Kropotkin built on Bakunin’s argument that action, not theory, was needed, and developed the doctrine of propaganda by the deed. Their argument was that workers and peasants would not be convinced by words, for they did not have the time to read and so needed practical proof that revolt was possible. Propaganda by the deed meant demonstrations, burning of deeds, titles, and mortgages, and other forms of collective action extending even to insurrections. Only later did it degenerate into terrorism and assassination, and by then it bore no resemblance to Bakunin’s tactic. For him, propaganda by the deed could be a bridge between theory and practice, between intellectuals on the one hand and workers and peasants on the other, for it provided concrete examples of how to organize and fight. The peasant commune itself was such an example for future societies, and Bakunin argued that radicals should look to it as a “basic embryo of all future organizations.”[273] Furthermore, the peasants had expressed their revolutionary ideal in practice, if not in theory, for “every time the people’s rising succeeded for a while,” Bakunin explained, “the people did one thing only: They took all the land into common ownership, sent the landowning gentry and the tsar’s government officials, sometimes the clergy as well, to the devil and organized their own free communes.” As a result of their practical action, “our people holds in its memory and as its ideal one precious element which the Western people do not possess, that is, a free economic community,” and with it, “the conviction that this is its indubitable right.” This memory was a historical form of propaganda by the deed, and Bakunin believed that radicals could build on these examples and create new ones to show people, rather than preach to them, about revolution.[274]

Bakunin argued that Russian peasants and workers had another revolutionary example they could draw upon: the brigand, or outlaw. By this he meant something very different than a motley crew of gangsters, hoodlums, and thugs. He meant specifically those outlaws who continued the tradition of Stenka Razin and Pugachev, who drew their strength from the peasantry and engaged in crimes against property and lord not to enrich themselves but to aid the poor. In the same way that the legends of Robin Hood resonated among English workers and peasants, so too were the exploits of Razin and Pugachev celebrated in Russia. There, the historical role of the brigand was much more overtly political than the romanticized Hell’s Angels or the Mafia of The Godfather and The Sopranos. Both the motorcycle gang and the mob were little more than capitalist enterprises set up by those excluded from the larger society by ethnicity, class, manners, or status. They functioned largely as businesses, extracting wealth from their workers and customers and funneling it up to the top. The brigand armies of Razin and Pugachev, in contrast, had an overt political aim: the redistribution of land to the peasants. The threat they posed to the regime was not competition for control of vice or the accidental murder of upstanding citizens or the corruption of willing public officials; it was the utter destruction of the social relationship of peasant and lord on which the Russian empire depended. Nor could the brigands hope or wish to parlay their loot into legitimate, respectable businesses and political offices and become virtually indistinguishable from the ruling elite in a generation or two. Successive tsars understood well that the brigands represented a fierce, radical menace to their rule. Nobles, even old Alexander Bakunin at Priamukhino, by all accounts a liberal and kindly lord, had feared the possibility of a peasants’ uprising as much as they feared Napoleon’s armies, and understood that the same arms issued to the serfs to repel the foreign invader could be turned against the master. For Bakunin, brigandage represented an important peasant tradition that could be drawn upon as further examples of the strength of the people. The songs, stories, and literature of Stenka Razin and Pugachev were proof that alongside the daily practice of deference and obedience, peasants had a culture of liberty and revolt upon which a revolutionary consciousness could be built. The brigands also could be a formidable fighting force that could spread the message of insurrection as they rode from village to village. In Bakunin’s words, “the Cossacks and the world of brigands and thieves ... include both protest against oppression by the state and by the patriarchal society.” These groups had “played the catalyst and unifier of separate revolts under Stenka Razin and under Pugachev,” and along with the tramps who traveled Russia in search of work and bread, were ready-made organizers and “promoters of general popular unrest, this precursor of popular revolt.”

Bakunin’s faith in the brigand bands, however, was not naive or unqualified. They were a potential revolutionary force, but one with “unquiet passions, misfortunes, frequently ignoble aims, feelings, and actions.” The world of the brigand was, he admitted, “far from beautiful from the truly human point of view.” But if the brigands were “wild and cruelly coarse people,” that was their strength as well as their weakness. Unlike the weary, dispirited proletariat and peasantry, they had a “fresh, strong, untried, and unused nature” that was fertile ground for propaganda. If their ferocity meant that “a Russian revolution will certainly be a terrible revolution,” that was because “the Russian world, both privileged state and popular, is a terrible world.” Reaction and regime would only reap what they had sowed. After all, Bakunin asked, “who among us in Russia is not a brigand and thief? Is it perhaps the government? Or our official and private speculators and fixers? Or our landowners and our merchants?” Between the “brigandage and thieving of those occupying the throne and enjoying all privileges, and popular thieving and brigandage, I would without hesitation take the side of the latter.” In an official Russia marked from top to bottom by a “depravity of thought, feelings, relationships, and deeds ... the people’s depravity is natural, forceful, and vital. By sacrifice over many centuries, they have earned the right to it,” for their violence was “a mighty protest against the root cause of all depravity and against the state, and therefore contains the seeds of the future.” For that reason, Bakunin declared himself “on the side of popular brigandage” and saw it as “one of the most essential tools for the future people’s revolution in Russia.” The key was for the radicals and intellectuals to work with the brigands to give them “new souls and arousing within them a new, truly popular aim.” If this was, as he admitted, easier said than done, it was nevertheless necessary.[275]

Bakunin’s ideas on the nature and purpose of brigandage were considerably more complicated than a desire to set the countryside ablaze and slaughter lords and overseers. Together, peasants, workers, and brigands could form a revolutionary force powerful enough to topple the Russian regime, just as an organized and radicalized proletariat was strategically placed to overthrow capitalism in the West. Bakunin’s argument that the Russian brigands represented a potential revolutionary force has led many to conclude that he believed criminals in western nations could play a similar role. More specifically, Bakunin’s liberal and Marxist opponents and some anarchist supporters have claimed that he put less faith in the proletariat than the so-called “lumpenproletariat.” The term was coined from the German Lump, roughly “scoundrel” or contemptible person, from Lumpen, that is, “rag” or “ragged,” and by extension, one eking out a bare subsistence as a ragpicker or dressed in rags, and proletariat. Marx used the word to characterize “a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, people without hearth or home ... as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.” As early as the Communist Manifesto, he made reference to “the dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society,” while in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” he described the lumpenproletariat as consisting of “decayed roués, with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie” together with “vagabonds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni [idlers], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus [pimps], brothel keeps, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither.”[276] For Marx, the important point was less who made up the group than its déclassé position. Without a clear class interest, this group could be won over by the right as well as the left. Since it had no obvious allegiance, it was untrustworthy and provided a ripe climate for demagogues and opportunists such as Louis Bonaparte. The lumpenproletariat, in Marx’s view, had no particular reason to side with the proletariat, since it had no employer and was not exploited in the same way; relying on handouts, charity, and crime, it was dependent on the existing order and could be employed by the forces of reaction against workers.

To argue that this group was a potential revolutionary class flew in the face of Marxist analysis. To orthodox Marxists, such an argument represents “substitutionism,” that is, the belief that groups other than the working class had as much to gain from abolishing capitalism and could in fact form the leading edge of the revolution. C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, for example, would argue in the 1960s that African-Americans and students, rather than the American working class, would form the real vanguard of radical politics. More recently, “post-Marxists” such as Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau have made similar arguments; much of the so-called “identity politics” and social movement theory that began in the 1980s is explicitly a rejection of class and class analysis.[277] Some anarchists have also found much in this, decrying Marx’s reliance on the proletariat as little more than “privileging” a working class that has shown little interest in revolution or progressive politics. Bakunin, it is argued, championed the downtrodden lumpenproletariat along with the déclassé students, intellectuals, peasants, and brigands and so held out a very different vision of how the revolution would be made and who would make it.

Certainly déclassé intellectuals, in Russia and the West, had a role in radical politics. This was as true for Marx as it was for Bakunin, both of whom could be characterized either as men of “dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin” or the “portion of the bourgeois ideologists ... [that] goes over to the proletariat” he described in the Communist Manifesto, depending on how one looked at them. But as we have seen, Bakunin’s analysis of the Russian peasants and brigands was not a rejection of class so much as a recognition of the reality of the very different Russian class structure and the belief that a spirit and practice of revolt was a critical element of revolution. Did the lumpenproletariat play a similar role in Western Europe? Was it, rather than the proletariat, the class that had nothing to lose and a world to win?

The point of class analysis, as Bakunin had recognized in 1842, when he determined that the revolution would be made by the working class, was not to rule out individuals who might decide to become radicals or to insist that only certain segments of the society could take part in the revolutionary movement. Nor was it to predict which specific individuals might move to the left. As a poster from the late 1970s put it, “Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you’re on. Class analysis is figuring out who is there with you.” Class analysis was to understand which large groups had the potential to become revolutionary. This potential was assessed by asking two questions. The first was, whom is the system exploiting? The answer to that question would indicate who would benefit from toppling the present order. After all, at the level of idealism and possibilities, nothing precludes the Baron Rothschild, John D. Rockefeller, or Bill Gates from becoming anarchists, and some scions of the wealthy have. But by and large, this is not a group from which one expects radical politics simply because it is not in their best, material interests. They benefit just fine from the existing social arrangements. The second question was, which groups were able to make the revolution? That is, which groups were numerous enough and strategically placed to overthrow capitalism? As someone once remarked about student radicals of the 1960s, “If every student radical in the United States were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” The point was not that students could not understand or support radical politics, but that in their social role as students they could not make the revolution. If they all boycotted their seminars, the ruling order would not collapse. By the same token, if every street beggar refrained from begging, little would change. Furthermore, students and beggars make up small, isolated percentages of the population. On the other hand, in nineteenth-century Europe, peasants and workers made up the vast majority of the population, and the moment they withdrew their labor, capital was threatened. Thus for Bakunin and Marx, revolutionary groups were defined less by their potential to learn about revolutionary ideas than their strategic place in the economic and social order.

If Bakunin argued that brigands, with their intrinsic connection to the peasantry, occupied such a place in Russia, there is little evidence that he viewed the lumpenproletariat of Europe in the same way. In fact, he rarely used the word “lumpenproletariat.” While he does use the French word canaille, this is better translated as “mob” or “rabble.” But these are descriptions of how people have organized, not their class position. It was, after all, a mob of middle-class Tories who burned down Montreal’s parliament buildings in 1849. When Bakunin does talk about the canaille or rabble, he usually refers not to the lumpenproletariat as such but to the poorer sections of the working class. Thus in a famous passage in his Statism and Anarchy, often quoted to prove Bakunin held the lumpenproletariat was the revolutionary class, he is not talking about the criminal element or even beggars, but about a section of the working class that is paid much less than skilled workers:

In Italy [it] is that destitute proletariat to which Marx and Engels, and, following them, the whole school of German social democrats, refer with the utmost contempt. They do so completely in vain, because here, and here alone, not in the bourgeois stratum of workers, is to be found the mind as well as the might of the future social revolution.[278]

While we might translate “destitute proletariat” as “lumpenproletariat,” Bakunin himself goes on to define this group as “largely illiterate and wholly destitute,” but consisting of “two or three million urban factory workers and small artisans, and some twenty million landless peasants.” Clearly Bakunin is referring to a portion of the proletariat and the peasantry, not the lumpenproletariat. In “The Politics of the International,” published in L’Egalité in 1869, Bakunin refers to la canaille but more exactly to la canaille ouvriere, better translated as “the working rabble” than lumpenproletariat. Again, Bakunin makes it clear in the same sentence that it is not the criminal or beggar he is referring to but to “the lowly people whose labor feeds the world.” After all, it was impossible to “convert to socialism a noble who covets riches, a member of the bourgeoisie who would like to be a noble, or even a worker who in his soul strives only to be a member of the bourgeoisie!” The point was that “the prejudices of the masses are based only on their ignorance, and are contrary to their own interests, whereas the prejudices of the bourgeoisie are based precisely upon the interests of that class.” Instead, one had to organize among the “real workers,” “all those who are truly crushed by the weight of labor,” who are in “so destitute and precarious a situation,” among the “great mass of workers, who, exhausted by their daily labor, are ignorant and miserable.” Whatever Bakunin thought about the potential of the Russian brigand, clearly the different historical and economic development of Western Europe meant that workers, not the lumpenproletariat or criminal elements, were the revolutionary class.[279]

It is true that Bakunin often argued that it was the poorest elements of the working class, not the relatively well-paid skilled worker, who were most likely to be revolutionary. Artisans engaged in traditional crafts might well tend to identify less with factory workers than with the small bourgeoisie; they might, he suggested, even consider themselves as “semi-bourgeois.” So too might better-paid workers, who because of their “self-interest and selfdelusion” might identify with employers and oppose the revolution. This was hardly a point of disagreement with Marx, who had attacked Weitling and others on precisely the same grounds, and, along with Engels, often complained that the “labor aristocracy” was inclined to be less radical than other workers.[280] At the same time, Bakunin held that it was precisely through “trade unions” and the “struggle against the bosses” that workers would come to understand where their interests lay and how their instinct and passion for freedom would express itself in purposeful action.[281] That action, in the West and increasingly in Russia, would be the strike. Strikes were more than a way to bargain with the employer. They showed workers the need for solidarity and unity, for a strike brought them “together with all the other workers in the name of the same passion and the same goal; it convinces all workers in the most graphic and perceptible manner of the necessity of a strict organization to attain victory.” At the same time, strikes “awaken in the masses all the social-revolutionary instincts which reside deeply in the heart of every worker” but which were normally “consciously perceived by very few workers, most of whom are weighed down by slavish habits and a general spirit of resignation.” The strike, Bakunin continued, “jolts the ordinary worker out of his humdrum existence, out of his meaningless, joyless, and hopeless isolation.” The “economic struggle” made workers more receptive to the message of the revolutionary, which was, after all, “the purest and most faithful expression of the instinct of the people.” Once the revolutionary message was made clear, provided it represented the “genuine thought of the people,” workers would respond positively and resolutely. Strikes had another educational function as well, Bakunin observed. They drew a clear line between worker and capitalist and made it clear that a “gulf” separated the “bourgeois class from the masses of the people.” Anyone who believed that the employer and the employees were on the same team would soon learn that in fact “their interests are absolutely incompatible.” Still today workers’ wages are the employer’s expense, and there is still no way to reconcile the fact that capitalism remains a zero-sum game: whatever one side wins, it wins from the other side. Modern labor relations law, industrial relations schools, and sophisticated state intervention ranging from mediation to arbitration to the use of police to break picket lines and, on occasion, heads, try to convince people otherwise, but Bakunin was right: Their interests are not the same, and “there is no better way of detaching the workers from the political influence of the bourgeoisie than a strike.”[282]

From all of this, it seems clear enough that neither direct action, propaganda by the deed, nor the social role of the criminal were used by Bakunin to justify violence or terrorism. Nowhere in his work do we find calls for assassination; instead, there are warnings against the harm caused by revolutionary violence. This may be counted as further evidence of Bakunin’s distance from, and distaste for, Nechaev’s amoral “Catechism” and Jacobin politics. It was, however, evidence that would be conveniently ignored as Bakunin struggled against Marx, this time within the First International.

[259] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Herzen and Ogarev, 19 July 1866.

[260] Venturi, pages 316–30; Gleason, Young Russia, page 72.

[261] Cited in Venturi, page 423.

[262] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Les principes de la revolution,” spring/summer 1869.

[263] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, New York: Dell, 1970, page 25.

[264] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Le catechisme du revolutionnaire,” 1869. I have been guided by the translations in Daughter of a Revolutionary, pages 221–30; and Philip Pomper, Sergei Nechaev, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979, pages 90–4.

[265] Nicolas Walter, cited in Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, page 38.

[266] See Avrich, “Bakunin and Nechaev,” Anarchist Portraits, for an excellent elaboration of the debate around authorship of the “Catechism.” Confino, Daughter of a Revolutionary, makes the argument that Nechaev was the sole author of the “Catechism” and draws attention to the parallels between the “Catechism” and the Russian manifestos and catechisms of the period; the “Catechism” and Bakunin’s letter to Nechaev of 2 June 1870 are also translated in this volume. Philip Pomper, in Sergei Nechaev, argues that Bakunin collaborated with Nechaev, but is unconvincing. K. J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx, pages 130–1, provides important information on Sazhin/Ross’s claim that he had seen a manuscript of the “Catechism” in Bakunin’s handwriting.

[267] Bakunin, letter to Ogarev, 2 November 1872, in Confino, page 323.

[268] Bakunin, letter to Nechaev, 2 June 1870, in Confino, page 242.

[269] Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz, trans., ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pages 31–2.

[270] Vera Figner, Studencheskie gody, 1872–1876, cited in Bakounine et les autres, page 400.

[271] See Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pages 213–30; and David Miller, Anarchism, London: J. M. Dent, 1984, pages 124–40.

[272] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Letter to the Comrades of the Jura Federation,” 1–15 October 1873.

[273] Bakunin, letter to Nechaev, 2 June 1870, Confino, page 256.

[274] Bakunin, letter to Nechaev, Confino, pages 251–6.

[275] Bakunin, letter to Nechaev, Confino, pages 252–6.

[276] Marx, “The Class Struggles in France,” in Selected Works, volume 1, pages 219–20; The Communist Manifesto, page 48; “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Selected Works, volume 1, page 442.

[277] For a compelling critique of identity politics and new social movement theory, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism, London: Verso, 1986.

[278] Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz, trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, page 7. Eugene Pyziur, The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael Bakunin, Chicago: Gateway, 1968, page 81, uses this passage to argue that Bakunin held that the lumpenproletariat was the revolutionary class, apparently unaware that his own translation renders the passage as “wretchedly poor proletariat,” and so obviously a section of the working class. Similarly, the Marxist Paul Thomas, in Karl Marx and the Anarchists, pages 290–2, is mistaken to assert that Bakunin “turned away from the proletariat” to fix his hopes on “the peasant, the rural brigand, and the bandit.”

[279] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Politique de 1’Internationale”; Cutler, pages 99–101, gives a slightly different interpretation, including translating l’politique as “the policy.” See also The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, G. P. Maximoff, ed., New York: The Free Press, 1964, pages 312–5.

[280] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Alliance Universelle de la Democratic Sociale. Section russe. A la jeunesse russe,” March 1870; “Lettre a un Francais,” continuation III, 27 August 1870. See also Richard B. Saltman, The Social and Political Thought of Michael Bakunin, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, pages 137–8. There is a vast literature on Marx and Engels and the labor aristocracy. See Mark Leier, Red Flags and Red Tape: The Making of a Labour Bureaucracy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, pages 102–8, for a brief discussion.

[281] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Politique de 1’Internationale.”

[282] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Alliance Universelle de la Democratic Sociale. Section Russe. A la jeunesse russe,” March 1870. See also Maximoff, page 384.