15. WE DETEST ALL POWER

It is tempting to reduce the fight between Bakunin and Marx to a personality conflict. Despite their occasional overtures, they did not much like each other and there was never any warmth or affection between the two. They shared many ideas, though both were loath to admit it. They were devout atheists; they called for the abolition of private property; they understood the necessity of revolution, though they had different timetables and disagreed on precisely who was likely to make it. But their struggle in the International reflected more than personal dislike. It was in part the result of the political strategy both adopted. Bakunin and Marx each exaggerated their differences in a strategy of polemical brinkmanship that forced people to take sides. Both accentuated their differences to make the choice clear and unequivocal. This political strategy was necessary precisely because the two sides had much in common and because they differed on two important and related issues: that of reform and that of the state.

Bakunin was not unalterably opposed to reform. He was, however, much less enamored of the process than Marx. Bakunin was keenly aware that measures such as the ten-hour day could be won, that such efforts required organization, and that such relief meant much to those who received it. He also rejected the version of the immiseration theory that insisted all reform should be refused on the grounds that it would take the edge off the workers’ need and desire for revolution; neither did he hold that things had to get much worse to inspire people to rebel. Reformism made him wary, not because it was impossible but because it was partial and incomplete. Shortening the working day did not stop the exploitation of workers any more than a kinder and gentler slavery—say, one where whippings were restricted by law to every second Tuesday—would make slaves free. The point was not to reform the system, but to overthrow it. If reforms came from the agitation for revolution, fair enough; but there were reformers aplenty already, and Bakunin preferred to work for revolution.

There were other reasons to be suspicious of reform. Reform meant compromise with the very authority that oppressed workers and peasants. That compromise legitimated authority by acknowledging its right to exist and control. Compromise could have a corrosive effect on reformers as well. Capital and the state were not interested in dealing with “the people” at the bargaining table; they spoke to representatives. These representatives were only recognized if they made it clear they were ready to cut a deal and that they had the power to make such deal and hold the people to it. Put plainly, it meant that power had shifted from the people to the delegates, from the masses to an elite. Once tangled up in the spirit of negotiating, bargaining, and conceding, it was easy to forget just what the real point was; in the eagerness to come to an arrangement, it was easy to put too much on the table. Furthermore, the rewards of status, power, and position made it easy for reformers themselves to be corrupted. For all these reasons, reform had a way of becoming an end itself; instead of building toward the revolution, reform too often replaced it. That was, according to Bakunin, in keeping with Marx’s evolutionary model of historical change that stressed the need to wait until economic development had reached a certain point. It meant always postponing the revolution, always settling and coming to an agreement with the enemy. There were examples enough to point to. Lassalle, after all, had given up revolution when he courted the Prussian state; for all their denials, the leaders of the SPD, including Liebknecht and Bebel, and later Kautsky and Bernstein, went down the same road. They were so eager to put the top down and floor it that one critic, Robert Michels, in his 1915 book, Political Parties, asked of these socialist leaders, “What interest for them has now the dogma of the social revolution? Their own social revolution has already been effected.” The chance for political power and status corrupted and made leaders more conservative, Michels argued, following closely the argument made by Bakunin years earlier.[338]

Was Bakunin’s criticism applicable to Marx? Surely Marx on the state was a little too Pollyanna-like when he insisted that immediate reforms could “only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency.”[339] Yet Marx rejected Lassalle’s political opportunism and took several opportunities over the years to distance himself from Liebknecht. He said a great many things about revolution and reform, and it is possible to read him in many different ways. Thus we may look for and find both a revolutionary and a reformist Marx, just as we may find a Marx who insisted history was a fairly mechanical process of economic development and one who said it was moved by class struggle, that is to say, by humanity. The real question for activists is perhaps not “Which is the real Marx?” but “Which Marx is useful to us and for what purpose?”

The question of reform is not so easily resolved as many revolutionaries have held, and Bakunin’s own arguments were rather more complicated. For anarchists, the question may be, must the anarchist also be a revolutionary? Not just in the sense of intellectually realizing that a society without exploitation and domination would be revolutionarily, radically different from our own, but in the sense of insisting revolution is the only acceptable short-term and long-term tactic and goal? If the Paris Commune showed that workers could organize autonomously, surely it also demonstrated that insurrection was likely to be futile, at least in the short term. If insurrection was not a realistic tactic, what then was left for the revolutionary to do? When Noam Chomsky suggests that the present-day state might be strengthened and democratized—that is to say, reformed—to defang the particularly brutal capitalism we face today, he is not calling for immediate social revolution. Does that mean he has abandoned anarchism? Or is the question of means and ends more complicated than Chomsky’s anarchist critics insist? Furthermore, as Bakunin observed, oppression often divides people and sends them to find sanctuary in the church, the pub, and authority. Fears alone are not enough; people need community and confidence to build movements. Reform can forge the links and small successes that are necessary to build self-reliance. When the insurrection fails, reform may be a way to salvage something. The all-or-nothing strategy too often leads to isolation and retreat, especially among intellectuals who wagered everything on the struggle. Thus the wave of anarchist bombings and assassinations between the late 1880s and early 1900s represented despair rather than hope, as some radicals falsely concluded that the working class could or would do nothing. Desperate, futile acts, they resolved, had to replace organization, for there was nothing else to do. Similarly, the flight of intellectuals from radical politics to postmodernism, “identity politics,” and resignation, reflected their disappointment after May 1968. The mistaken conclusion was again that the working class had somehow failed its prescribed historical mission, and so could now be abandoned, ignored, or explained away.

This was not a mistake Bakunin made. He did not believe the masses required only a single spark to ignite the prairie fire, and he understood that their fears and conservatism were where the movement started, not where it gave up. Therefore strikes, cooperatives, propaganda by the deed or leaflet, and reform were important for their educational value as much as for their revolutionary potential. Anarchists could take part in nonrevolutionary activities and advocate measures other than unrelenting revolt. Even elections and parliament could be useful on occasion, Bakunin suggested, when he urged Carlo Gambuzzi to seek election in Naples during the Franco-Prussian War. Aware that this advice would surprise Gambuzzi, given that Bakunin usually advocated abstaining from such action, he argued that winning political office was important, for “times have become so grave that it is necessary for all good men to step into the breach” where they could exert as much influence as possible. In 1872, he argued that anarchists should not hesitate to help the left-wing Spanish political parties, without diluting their own anarchist position; later, as the movement developed, there would be time to abstain from the parliamentary struggle. The trick was to work for reform without sacrificing revolution. If we may conclude that it is possible for a consistent anarchist to consider tactics other than outright revolution at a given moment, then it is possible to argue that the divide between anarchists and Marxists is not necessarily the question of reform versus revolution.[340]

For Bakunin, the chief difference between them could be summed up in two words: the state. If this seems clear enough, misinterpretations fueled misunderstanding and needless animosity. Engels, for example, was just flat-out wrong to claim that Bakunin “maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state which must be abolished and then capitalism will go to blazes of itself.”[341] What Bakunin did argue was that the social revolution had to be launched against the state and capitalism simultaneously, for the two reinforced each other. Instead of viewing capital as the creation of the state, as Engels alleged, Bakunin saw that “exploitation and government are two inseparable expressions of all that is called politics. The first gives the means of governing and makes up both the necessary base and the goal of all government. Government in turn guarantees and legalizes the power to exploit.” This was the reciprocal relationship of lord and state, fogged by religion until the French Revolution. The Revolution displaced religion, but it also brought to power the bourgeoisie, who, “tired of being the anvil, became in turn the hammer” and “inaugurated the modern state.” “Exploitation,” Bakunin concluded, is “the visible body of the bourgeois regime, and government is its soul.”[342] It was not a question of the state creating capital, or vice versa, but their reciprocal—dare one say dialectical?—relationship. The most vulgar of Marxists, who hold that the state is completely determined by economic structures and interests, might argue that this formulation gave the state too much autonomy and moved away from historical materialism. But Bakunin reinforced his commitment to materialist history, arguing that “the base of all the historical, national, religious, and political problems, for workers and all other classes, and even for the state and church, the most important, the most vital of all, has been the economic problem.” At the same time, more sophisticated Marxists, including Marx himself, stressed precisely the reciprocal relationship between state and economy that Bakunin sketched.[343] It is a mistake to insist Marx argued that the economic “base” completely determines the “superstructure” of the state, ideology, and culture. It is true that Engels and Marx would argue in the battles against Bakunin that “the abolition of capital is precisely the social revolution” and when capital had been destroyed “the state will collapse of itself.”[344] Taken at face value, this remark suggests that the two believed that the state was just a reflection of the economic system and had no independent existence. That argument led both to reformism and political revolution. In the first case, it implied that little could be done politically until the economic system had evolved and changed. In the second case, it implied that revolutionaries could take over the state in a coup, effect changes in the economic system, and see these changes render the state irrelevant. Yet throughout their writing, Marx and Engels avoided such a simplistic, one-way analysis of the relationship between capital and the state. Even as early as the Communist Manifesto they argued that the “executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The use of the word “manage” clearly implies that the state has some coercive power over capital and is not simply its tool any more than it is a neutral arbiter between capital and labor. A strand of Marxism that rejects both social democracy and the vanguard has usually—save when battling anarchists—argued that the state has some “relative autonomy” and is not a direct, simple reflex of a given economic system.

Having conceded all this, there still remained important differences between the anarchist and the revolutionary Marxist conception of the state. Anarchism is opposed to the state. Bakunin insisted that representative democracy was essentially a swindle that promised freedom to all but in practice empowered the liberal bourgeoisie. Even a workers’ state would, by definition, have a government, which is to say, a minority ruling a majority, and that power would corrupt those who wielded it. “We certainly are all sincere socialists and revolutionaries,” Bakunin observed, “and yet, if we were given power, if only for a few months, we would not be what we are now. As socialists we are convinced ... that social environment, social position, and conditions of existence, are more powerful than the intelligence and will of the strongest and most energetic individual. It is precisely for this reason that we demand not natural but social equality of individuals as the condition for justice and the foundation of morality. And that is why we detest power, all power, just as the people detest it.”[345]

Even revolutionary Marxism is statist, in that it does not hold that capital and the state must be abolished simultaneously. It argues instead that the state can be seized, perhaps altered drastically, and then used by workers and their allies. The state may wither away or it may not, but there is no question of abolishing it on the first day of the revolution. For his part, Bakunin summed up “the difference between us, a difference that digs an abyss between us” precisely. Marx and his followers wanted “the transformation of private property into collective property to be accomplished by the power of the state. We claim on the contrary that it can be only be effected by the abolition of the state.” When Marxists “agitated the people for the reconstitution of states,” the anarchists agitated “the masses with a view to the destruction of all states.” That single difference led to important consequences far beyond the quarreling in the International, and Bakunin would spend the years between 1870 and 1873 developing and refining his position. [346]

Much of this time was spent writing a document entitled “The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.” It is a sprawling manuscript of nearly one thousand pages, some of them concise, even elegant arguments that break off in midsentence, others polished sections that stand alone, still others fragmented notes, corrections, and additions, none of it well organized and little of it edited. It was a work Bakunin intended to leave as his philosophical and political testament. The title suggested he would concentrate on the political repression that followed the Franco-Prussian War: the “knout” was a reference to the reactionary role Russia played once again, now in conjunction with Prussia, and that was a theme that ran through the manuscript. But it became only one theme among many. In the end, the project was an attempt to sum up Bakunin’s vast, wide-ranging analysis of the historical connections between religion, the state, science, and economic exploitation, of modern philosophy, political thought and action, and the differences between anarchism and Marxism.

Little of it made its way to print. Of the pieces that did, the hundred pages titled by his editors God and State are the most famous. Published six years after his death, it restates Bakunin’s materialism, atheism, and critique of intellectuals powerfully and dramatically. It does not deal much with economic exploitation, so the publication of this fragment may have reinforced the notion that Bakunin saw the state as the primary problem of contemporary society. But the piece left no doubt that Bakunin was a strong materialist. “Who are right, the idealists or the materialists?” it opens. “The question once stated in this way, hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, is but a reflection of its economic history.”[347] Humanity was not something separate from the world or an ideal construction; it was “the highest manifestation of animality” and thus bounded by the laws of nature that were increasingly being revealed by science. But unlike animals, “man has emancipated himself.” That emancipation, as even biblical accounts of the Garden of Eden acknowledged, began a “distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science—that is, by rebellion and thought.”[348]

From there he segued to a critique of religion. Science had exposed it as a lie, but the question remained: “How comes an intelligent and well-informed man ever to feel the need of believing in this mystery?” He elaborated on the arguments he had made earlier. The people “are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily labor, deprived of leisure, of intellectual intercourse, of reading ... the people generally accept religious traditions without criticism and in a lump.” The traditions were sustained by a professional caste of priests and laymen and became “a sort of mental and moral habit, too often more powerful even than their natural good sense.” There was, of course, a material cause for this as well: “the wretched situation to which they find themselves fatally condemned by the economic organization of society in the most civilized countries of Europe.” They had three escape routes: “the dramshop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is the social revolution,” and if the people “have no reason to believe, they will have at least a right.”

Oppression and ignorance explained why the masses believed in God; what of the educated? Many did not, but found it expedient to pretend to believe, Bakunin noted. This group was made up of “all the tormentors, the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity; priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, capitalists, tax leeches, contractors and landlords, lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats.” They believed in religion as a “safety valve,” as a way to stifle the independent thought that would lead to revolt. Thus they “will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ “ But for Bakunin, “the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.” Bakunin’s conclusion was clear: “I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”

But if humanity were merely the highest expression of animality, as Bakunin had asserted, did it make sense to speak of human liberty? If we are bound by natural laws, then we are bound, not free. Nice return by the idealists, but Bakunin spiked it right back. Yes, we are bound by natural laws of physics, biology, chemistry, and the like. But obviously these constitute our existence. They are not external to us; they are us. We must breathe; this is a natural fact or law. That fact does not oppress us, it defines us, and so, “Yes, we are absolutely the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery there is no humiliation, or rather, it is not slavery at all. For slavery supposes an external master, a legislator outside of him whom he commands, while these laws are not outside of us; they are inherent in us; they constitute our being, our whole being, physically, intellectually, and morally; we live, we breathe, we act, we think, we wish only through these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not. Whence, then, could we derive the power and the wish to rebel against them?” The only liberty humanity could achieve within the realm of natural laws—and again, it is clear he meant the laws that govern the functioning of the universe—was to increase our knowiedge of them so we did not waste time and effort in needlessly opposing these physical limits. That required science, broadly defined to include all aspects of human knowledge, and it required complete and thorough education of all members of society.

Human laws, however, were a very different phenomenon. These were not a reflection of natural law but a distortion of it, and so “the liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he himself has recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.” Even if the lawgiver were right, that did not give the authority to govern or to rule. That was true equally of the scientist who discovered laws of nature, the philosopher who identified laws of human development, and the revolutionary who invented laws for a new society. Why not let these people rule? First, human science, Bakunin observed, “is always and necessarily imperfect,” and any attempt “to force the practical life of men, collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science” condemned society “to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes,” the mythological thief who stretched or amputated his visitors so they would fit the bed he offered them. Furthermore, any legislation from the scientists that was imposed rather than freely accepted—or rejected—would be imposed in the name of a science that the rest of humanity “venerated without comprehending,” and such a society would be one “not of men, but of brutes.” Finally, the power invested in this scientific caste would soon corrupt the scientists themselves. “It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men,” even those of science. Once given the authority to decide and rule, they would soon divert their energies into finding ways to perpetuate their privilege.

If that were true of Bakunin’s hypothetical scientific managers, it was equally true of existing “constituent and legislative assemblies, even those chosen by universal suffrage.” Elections might change the composition of a legislature—though the flagrant gerrymandering in the United States has almost eliminated such changes in our day—but that would not prevent legislators of all stripes from forming a “political aristocracy or oligarchy,” devoted to maintaining its privilege. Consequently, liberty and equality demanded “no external legislation and no authority—one, for that matter being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themselves.”

That did not mean that Bakunin rejected knowledge or specialized skills. “In the matter of boots,” for example, “I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer.” No one could possibly become a master in all branches of knowledge, and humanity advanced in part because of the division and association of labor, mental as well as physical. But freedom meant that “I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me.” One listened, compared, evaluated; and then one made a free, informed decision. One must “recognize no infallible authority,” for such “faith would be fatal to my reason, my liberty ... it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.” One hears an echo of Fichte here: “Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual change of mutual, temporary, and above all, voluntary authority and subordination.” In short, Bakunin explained,

we accept all natural authorities and all influences of fact, but none of right; for every authority or influence of right, officially imposed as such, becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood, would inevitably impose upon us ... slavery and absurdity. In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really anarchists.

This argument had to be applied even against the positivism of Comte. And it especially had to be applied against the “doctrinaire school of German Communism,” by which he meant Marx and Engels. Science, even that of political economy, dealt with abstraction, the general case, the broad argument. It could not, by definition, consider the individual; it was in the business of determining the general law. For that reason, Bakunin preached “to a certain extent, the revolt of life against science, or rather against the government of science,” not to “destroy science,” but to “remand it to its place.” History had been the “perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction—God, country, power of state, national honor, historical rights, political liberty, public welfare.” The role of science, especially social science, was to “point us with faithful and sure hand to the general causes of individual suffering,” including the subordination of people to abstractions, and to show “the general conditions necessary to the real emancipation of the individuals living in society.” It should do no more than indicate the path, for “it is time to have done with all popes and priests; we want them no longer, even if they call themselves Social Democrats.”

God and the State returned to its critique of idealism in its remaining pages as Bakunin explored the roots of religious belief and metaphysics and traced the development of the state. He noted that by 1830, France had replaced the old landed aristocracy with “an aristocracy of capital,” and it too used religion to underpin its rule. He anticipated Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, arguing that while “the state is force,” force alone “is not sufficient in the long run. Some moral sanction or other is absolutely necessary” to “convince the masses” so they “morally recognize its right.” That was the role of religion, and thus “there cannot be a state without religion.” Different economic systems required different religions and more than thirty years before Max Weber, Bakunin declared Protestantism “the bourgeois religion par excellence.”

It was in another fragment of “The Knouto-Germanic Empire” that Bakunin clarified his arguments about capitalism. “Is it necessary to repeat the irresistible arguments of socialism, the arguments that no bourgeois economist has succeeded in destroying?” he asked rhetorically. “What is property, what is capital, in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner, it is the power and the right, guaranteed and protected by the state, to live without working. Since capital and property produce absolutely nothing unless they are made productive by labor, this is the power and the right to live off the work of others, to exploit the work of those who, having neither property nor capital, are forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of one or the other.” Since capitalists and property owners “did not live by their own productive labor, but from the rent of their land, the rent of their buildings, and the interest of their capital,” or from “speculation” or by the “commercial and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat,” they “live at the expense of the proletariat.” Yes, he granted, “speculation and exploitation undoubtedly constitute a sort of work, but work that is entirely unproductive. By this reckoning, thieves and kings work as well.” He then pointed out that while the folklore of capitalism held that workers and employers came together freely in the marketplace for their mutual advantage, workers were compelled by hunger to seek employment. If capitalists were “forced” to hire labor, they entered the market with much greater resources and so could insist on exploitive terms of work; if the price of labor meant they would make no profit, the capitalists could invest somewhere else or simply live off their savings. Workers had no such options and so were forced to take what was offered. “If there were equality between the necessity to purchase labor and the necessity to sell it, the slavery and the poverty of the proletariat would not exist,” he explained. Furthermore, there would be “neither capitalists and property owners nor proletarians, neither rich nor poor; there would only be workers. The exploiters are only possible because this equality does not exist.”

Bakunin conceded that administration was work, and necessary work at that. There was, however, no need to put this work in the hands of the capitalist or to pay more for this work than for any other labor. Workers’ cooperatives had already shown that the proletariat was competent to administer complex affairs. The truth was that capitalists and managers were paid more because they had the power to pay themselves more, always at the expense of their employees. But weren’t profits the reward for taking risks? The worker was assured of wages, at least, and so traded wealth for security; the capitalist gambled, and so deserved greater compensation. “Yeah, right,” Bakunin replied, in an incredibly loose translation. More precisely, he pointed out that workers risked even more than capitalists did. The conditions of work and relative poverty meant that an employed worker risked accident and ill health at the best of times; no capitalist faced those problems as a term of employment. Even a ruined capitalist was usually left with greater resources than an employed worker. Family connections, class ties, and greater education made it possible for the bankrupt capitalist to find work in management, the civil service, or even in the higher-paid jobs in the proletariat, if worse came to worst, while unemployment meant instant hardship for workers. The collapse of the company usually meant workers were thrown out of work with wages still owing, since then, as now, wages were not paid as the work was performed but a week or more after. If he were a capitalist, Bakunin continued, “and if I wanted to be sincere, and if I were well guarded,” he would say to workers,

Look, my dear children, I have here some capital, which strictly speaking, can produce nothing because a dead thing can produce nothing; it is labor that makes it productive. Since once I have consumed it, I have nothing left, and so there is nothing to be gained from using it unproductively. But thanks to the social and political institutions we have, and which are all in my favor in the present economic system, my capital is supposed to produce as well; it gives me interest. From whom this interest must be taken—and it must be taken from someone, since in reality, by itself it produces nothing at all—is not something that concerns you ... In addition to the pleasures I want it to provide, I also want my capital to increase. How will I achieve this goal? Armed with my capital, I propose to exploit you, and I propose that you let yourself be exploited by me. You will work and I will collect and I will appropriate and I will sell for my own benefit the product of your work. You will be left only what is absolutely necessary for you to keep from dying of hunger today so that tomorrow you can work again for me under the same conditions. And when you are worn out, I will throw you out and replace you with others. Understand clearly that I will pay you the lowest wage possible and I will make you work as long a day as possible under the most severe, despotic, and harshest conditions possible. This is not from spite; I have no reason to hate you or harm you. It is from the love of wealth and to enrich myself quickly, because the less I pay you and the more you work, the more I gain.

This is what is said implicitly by every capitalist, every industrial entrepreneur, every business head, everyone who requires labor from the workers they recruit.

And in case the reader has forgotten, workers were forced to take this offer because they had no other options; they had no money to invest and had “the terrible threat of starvation” facing them. Implicitly hearkening back to the theme of alienation he had addressed as a young man, just as Marx did in much of his work, Bakunin pointed out that unlike the capitalist who sold things, the worker sells “his labor, his personal service, the productive force of his body, mind, and spirit that is found in him and is inseparable from him; it is his own self.” Despite the fact that workers, unlike serfs, were free and had the right to quit, this amounted to a “theoretical freedom” at best, since they still had to sell their labor to someone. In reality, “the whole life of the worker is nothing other than a grievous succession of terms of legally voluntary but economically forced servitude, momentarily interrupted by liberty accompanied by starvation, and consequently a real slavery.”[349]

Bakunin returned to his critique of “German Communism” and social democracy in other pieces of “The Knouto-Germanic Empire,” especially in the short essay known as “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State.” His most trenchant critique of Marx, however, was made in his book Statism and Anarchy. Written in 1873, the book may be Bakunin’s most polished work, but it suffers greatly from its strains of anti-Semitism and what Marshall Shatz has labeled “virulent Germanophobia,” the result undoubtedly of Bakunin’s experience of German prisons and liberals, the Franco-Prussian War, and Marx.[350] These are sometimes repellent and irrational screeds, and it is no defense to point out that these were common assumptions held by many of his generation and class. They are also more subtle in places than one might expect, and are woven among trenchant and perceptive criticisms. For the most part, his arguments are directed not against the German people, but against the policies and tendencies of the German government. Bakunin’s criticisms of Bismarck’s militarism, totalitarianism, and alliances with big business were accurate and foreshadowed kaiserism, fascism, monopoly capitalism, and the military-industrial complex. [351] Written in Russian for a Russian audience, much of the book went over ideas and arguments Bakunin had made earlier. The bulk of the book was a criticism of the rise and power of the German state in the light of its victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War. Bakunin argued that Bismarck’s state was but the clearest expression of the modern state; what one saw in Prussia in its extreme form there was only the logical extension of the essence of all states. “The sole objective” of the modern state, he warned, was to “organize the most intensive exploitation of the people’s labor for the benefit of capital concentrated in a very small number of hands.” In order to develop fully, “modern capitalist production and bank speculation require enormous centralized states, which alone are capable of subjecting the many millions of laborers to their exploitation.” Representative democracy, the “latest form of the state, based on the pseudo-sovereignty of the people in sham popular assemblies,” combined the centralized state and the subordination of the people to the intellectual minority “supposedly representing them but invariably exploiting them.” The modern state was also “necessarily a military state.” Just like the capitalist company, it had to grow or be crushed; it was propelled into war with its competitors by its very nature.

The sections of particular interest, however, were the critique of Marxism and the outlines of anarchist theory. Both were provided in more concrete language than Bakunin usually employed. The attack on Marx made an especially bold claim. Where Marx claimed to be a rigorous materialist, Bakunin suggested that the crucial problem with his theory was that he had failed to move far enough away from the metaphysics of the German idealists and Hegel. Whether Marx stood Hegel on his head, or, as Marx himself insisted, stood him on his feet to plant social criticism firmly on the ground, or remained within the confines of Hegelian thought, is still debated today. Bakunin’s argument is interesting, not least because many later Marxists have maintained that authoritarian socialism traced its way from the Marx who believed he had found a science of materialism. Searching for a humanist, libertarian socialism, they turned instead to the Hegelian Marx. Bakunin, however, found a root of authoritarianism precisely in that Hegelianism as well as in Marx’s positivism.

Science, Bakunin said, was essentially inductive. That is, it began “from the real fact to the idea that encompasses it, expresses it, and thereby explains it.” That too was the method of the anarchist social revolution, to proceed “from life to thought.” Metaphysicians and idealists, however, began with thought and abstraction and tried to fit reality into their ideas. They moved “from thought to life.” Thus metaphysicians were not just those who studied the philosophical field of metaphysics; these, mercifully, were rather rare. Nor were they simply those who followed Hegel. It included “positivists” and the “present-day worshipers of the goddess science,” indeed all those who “have created for themselves an ideal social organization” that they wished to “force the life of future generations” into. This was the problem with Marx, Bakunin held. In another essay, he made the point more concretely. A consistent Hegelian, and Marxist, Bakunin suggested, would have to conclude that the Roman empire represented a positive advance over the Greek civilization it replaced. Rome was, for all its barbarism, a necessary step in human development, and in that sense had to be applauded as progress, in this conception of history. Bakunin disagreed. True, the materialist understood that “the conquest and destruction of Greece and its comparatively higher development of liberty by the military and civic barbarism of the Romans was a logical, natural, and absolutely inevitable fact. But this does not prevent me from taking, retrospectively and very resolutely, the side of Greece against Rome in that struggle. I find that humanity has gained absolutely nothing by the triumph of Rome.” Only the idealist who sought to impose a particular theory on the real world could see Rome’s victory as both inevitable and progressive, Bakunin held. And that idealism was a dangerous political philosophy, for it legitimized the rule of the theorists who insisted they had determined how history, and the future, worked.[352] This repeated the theme he had addressed in God and State, that scholars and scientists, academics and intellectuals, could not be trusted to rule humanity. “Power should no more be given to them than to anyone else,” he emphasized in Statism and Anarchy, “for anyone who is invested with power by an invariable social law will inevitably become the oppressor and exploiter of society.”

For that reason, revolutionaries could not make use of the power of the state. By definition, “every state power, every government, by its nature and by its position stands outside the people and above them, and must invariably try to subject them to rules and objectives which are alien to them.” Anarchists, in marked contrast, “have neither the intention nor the least desire to impose on our own people or on any other an ideal social organization that we have drawn from books or thought up on our own.” Instead, they understood that “the masses bear all the elements of their future organizational norms in their own more or less historically evolved instincts, in their everyday needs, and their conscious and unconscious desires”; anarchists sought “that ideal within the people themselves.” “Doctrinaire revolutionaries,” by which Bakunin particularly meant Marx in both his Hegelian and positivist incarnations, insisted that science had to be “the point of departure for social upheavals and reconstructions.” Since “thought, theory, and science, at least for the present, are the property of a very few individuals,” it logically followed that “those few must be the directors of social life. They must be not only the instigators but the managers of all popular movements,” and managing the revolution meant not “the free union” of people and associations “from below upward,” but “solely by means of the dictatorial power of this learned minority which supposedly expresses the will of all the people.”

Thus theories of “revolutionary dictatorship” were, in their essence, identical to classical justifications of the state. Both meant “the government of the masses by an insignificant handful of privileged individuals,” elected or not. Both meant “the same government of the majority by a minority in the name of the presumed stupidity of the one and the presumed intelligence of the other,” and both were “equally reactionary.” For that reason, Marxists could “never be enemies of the state.” At best, they were “enemies only of existing governments, because they want to take their place,” enemies of “existing political institutions because these preclude the possibility of their own dictatorship.” They remained the “most impassioned friends of state power,” because without the state, the social revolution would simply sweep the intellectuals aside as the masses created their own free institutions and associations.

Whether this was true of Marx himself is still a matter of debate, not least among the competing schools of Marxism themselves. But it was certainly an accurate prediction of what would become “actually existing” Marxism, from the German Social Democratic Party to the Bolsheviks, from the Second International of Social Democracy through the Third International of Communist Parties to the Fourth International of the Trotskyists. Nor did the Chinese Communists, with their reliance on the peasantry instead of the proletariat, counter Bakunin’s argument. Bakunin, however, insisted that it did apply to Marx and his theories. He was unable, however, to make his case solely by logic and demonstration. He attributed it also to Marx’s character, his personality, and his religious and national origins. Whatever the provocation, such tactics are shameful. Bakunin was on much stronger ground when he pointed out that the class origins of many left-wing intellectuals led them to put their faith in the state. The “bourgeois-radical party,” as he described Marx’s politics, “is separated from the mass of laborers by the fact that it is profoundly, one might say organically, tied to the exploiting class by its economic and political interests and by all its habits of life, its ambition, its vanity, and its prejudices. How, then, can it have any desire to use the power it has won for the benefit of the people, even if it has won it with the people’s help?”

Did such an analysis apply to Bakunin himself with his aristocratic roots? His point was not that class origins were destiny but that without careful attention, they would influence political thought and lead to political action that favored one’s class, knowingly or not. The answer for those who were “bourgeois by origin but not by convictions or aspirations” was to “immerse themselves in the people, solely in the people’s cause. If they continue to exist outside of the people, they will not only be useless to them but positively harmful.” This was a very different role than that of the “radical party,” which constituted “a separate party, living and acting outside of the people.” [353]

With all his criticism of Marx, Bakunin could still appreciate the considerable achievements of his antagonist. Among these he counted Marx’s vast knowledge and study of economics. Again Bakunin insisted that where Proudhon was wrong to start from the “abstract idea of right” and proceed from there to “economic fact,” Marx “advanced and proved the inconvertible truth, confirmed by the entire past and present history of human society, nations, and states, that economic fact has always preceded legal and political right. The exposition and demonstration of that truth constitutes one of Marx’s principal contributions to science.” But he remained a scholar who believed that his possession of truth entitled him not just to be listened to, but to instruct and to lead. After all, there was no point in figuring out the course of history and then being ignored. That was, in Bakunin’s view, why Marx remained a statist; it was the only way a minority of intellectuals could direct history in the direction they believed it had to go. It was also why Marx believed peasants were, for the most part, reactionary. Peasants had a strong distaste for and distrust of the state; a peasant revolution, like any popular revolution, was “by nature anarchistic and leads directly to the abolition of the state.” Again, taken at face value as an accurate criticism of what Marx thought about the role of the state and peasants, it is an oversimplification. Yet for all that, it contains more prescience than Marx might care to concede.

Bakunin then turned to a logical dissection of the claims made by those socialists who believed they could take over the state and use it to create free socialism. They had, Bakunin observed, only two ways to do that. They could make a political revolution, that is, a coup d’etat, or they could advocate a “legal popular agitation for peaceful reform.” Either way, such socialists had, “if not as their ultimate ideal, then at least as their immediate and principal objective, the creation of a people’s state.” This, in their mind, would be “the proletariat raised to the level of a ruling class.” But “if the proletariat is to be the ruling class, it may be asked, then whom will it rule?” After all, to rule is to rule over someone else; “if there is a state, then necessarily there is domination and consequently slavery,” and this new state could be no different. What exactly did it mean to raise the proletariat to a ruling or governing class? Bakunin asked. Did it mean that the entire proletariat would head the government? Would all forty million Germans, say, be members of the government? Obviously not, Bakunin concluded, and therefore socialists who looked to the state had to fall back on arguments of “popular government,” which actually meant “government of the people by a small number of representatives elected by the people.” But that was the line of liberals and the bourgeoisie; when voiced by socialists, it still remained “a lie behind which the despotism of a ruling minority is concealed, a lie all the more dangerous in that it represents itself as the expression of a sham popular will.”

But wouldn’t a socialist government be made up of workers? Wouldn’t that make the difference? So the Marxists claimed, Bakunin responded. But in fact, it would be a government of “former workers, who, as soon as they become rulers or representatives of the people will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people but themselves and their own pretensions to govern the people.” It would be even worse if the elected representatives were the educated radicals who spoke of “scientific socialism,” for, as Bakunin had already suggested, a “government of scholars” was perhaps the most oppressive government of all precisely because its members were convinced by their objective science that they were right. To the counterargument that such a dictatorship would be temporary, lasting only until the people were educated enough to govern themselves and thus make government unnecessary, Bakunin pointed out the obvious contradiction. If that provisional socialist government were “truly a people’s state, then why abolish it? But if its abolition is essential for the liberation of the people, then how do they dare call it a people’s state?” Any call for a “transitional state,” a people’s state, a dictatorship of the proletariat, amounted to little more than claiming “for the masses to be liberated they must first be enslaved.” In contrast, Bakunin put forward the anarchist position: “Liberty can only be created by liberty, by an insurrection of all the people and the voluntary organization of the workers from below upward.”

That in turn meant the anarchists had to break completely with all governments and bourgeois politics, leaving the “social revolution” as the only tactic and strategy. It was a logical outcome of his argument against Marx, but it is not so clear that it resolved the issue as cleanly as Bakunin implied. What of his own argument that it could be useful to have some say in governments between now and the social revolution? Given the immense problems of organizing the social revolution, to which Bakunin’s entire life was testament, was it less Utopian than Marx and Engels’s hope that the state would eventually “wither away”? At the same time, was Bakunin’s prediction not largely borne out by the Russian Revolution and the triumph of the Bolshevik Party? This is not the same as the argument of anarchists, liberals, and social democrats alike that Marx was the theorist of Stalinism or the architect of the gulag. It is to argue that Bakunin raised crucial questions of revolutionary tactics and strategy that are more substantial than his critics on the left and the right have usually acknowledged. His answer—the social revolution—is not as complete or useful as he implied, but no one on the left has yet found a serviceable solution. Perhaps Bakunin’s real answer is that we ourselves should resolve the issue, and if that is not helpful, it is at least hopeful.

Marx in turn advanced his own criticisms of Statism and Anarchy in a copy of the book he annotated thoroughly. Some of the comments echoed his earlier reactions to Bakunin’s work. “Schoolboyish rot!” Marx exclaimed unhelpfully in one margin. “The will, not economic conditions, is the basis of his social revolution ... A radical social revolution is connected with definite historical conditions of economic development; the latter are its prerequisites.” Bakunin “has no idea of social revolution, knows only its political phrases; its economic conditions have no meaning for him.” As we have seen, this is a blatant misinterpretation, but it was not proof of Bakunin’s accusations that Marx was essentially a metaphysician who believed he had divined the secrets of history. They were not Marx’s final words on historical materialism, and given the animosity between the two radicals, it pays to be cautious in putting too much weight on them.

Where Bakunin asked over whom the proletariat would rule if it were the ruling class, Marx suggested that as long as other classes, especially the capitalist class, still existed, the proletariat would need “coercive means, hence governmental means,” to protect itself. This is not a refutation of Bakunin’s argument, but it is a more sophisticated defense of the state than the one Bakunin attacked. Marx also noted that in countries where peasants made up an important segment of the population, the revolution had to be careful not to alienate them and the proletariat had to avoid colliding with their interests. Less helpfully, he suggested that the revolutionary government had to both improve the conditions of the peasantry and “facilitate the transition from private to collective property in land so that the peasant himself is converted for economic reasons.” This is a far cry from Stalin’s forced collectivization of the peasantry; though it is tempting to connect the dots, it would be a mistake to do so, for Marx would continue to develop his ideas on the peasantry and would end up much closer to Bakunin’s position.

More interesting was Marx’s reaction to Bakunin’s rhetorical question of whether all forty million Germans might be members of the government. “Certainly,” Marx snorted, “for the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.” “Exactly!” Bakunin might have replied and ordered drinks all around. Yet their essential difference reasserted itself later. The anarchist had argued that a government of workers would in fact be a government of ex-workers. Marx replied that since a manufacturer did not cease to be a capitalist when he was elected to municipal council, why would a worker cease to be a worker? One response consistent with Bakunin’s reasoning might be that such an answer firstly proves that government is about maintaining class privilege. Secondly, it dodges the argument that governments evolve their own interests, which often differ from the precise interests of capitalists as a class or as individuals. Workers would be no less immune to such a process, especially if they came to prefer electoral office to the factory floor. Finally, Marx suggested that Bakunin needed some work experience, perhaps as a “manager in a workers’ cooperative.” That would “send all his nightmares about authority to the devil.” Given that Marx was, if anything, further removed from the workplace than Bakunin, this can hardly be considered a definitive counterargument. What Marx’s annotations do suggest is that fruitful debate between Marx and Bakunin might have developed the arguments of both in provocative and useful ways. That such a debate was impossible tells us less about the potential relationship and critiques of anarchism and Marxism than it does about the vagaries of history, less about the incompatibility of the two ideologies than the very different approaches of Bakunin and Marx.[354]

Bakunin had no opportunity to respond to Marx’s scribbled criticisms of Statism and Anarchy. The book marked his last sustained political writing. Bakunin’s life following the congress at the Hague was filled with chaos and instability, but that will hardly come as a surprise by now. In June 1872, Antonia had left for Russia with the two children, Carlo and Sophia, to visit her family after the death of her last surviving brother. “Separation,” Bakunin wrote in his diary, “for how long? For a year? Forever?”[355] After seeing them off from Basel, Bakunin went on to Zurich, where another generation of Russian émigrés gathered as they had earlier in Geneva. The group included Michael Sazhin, better known as Armand Ross, and Zamfiri Ralli, better known as Zamfiri Ralli, though his original name was Arbore. Both had worked with Nechaev, and both had broken with him; Ross, one of many inspired by Chernyshevsky, had been a founder of Land and Liberty, and had taken part in the Paris Commune. Both men were active in the Jura Federation and soon became close, if temporary, political allies and friends of Bakunin.

For the old anarchist still had the power to compel attention and interest. “Everyone fell silent and turned their eyes to him” when Bakunin strode through the door of the inn, recalled Elizabeth Litvinova, a Russian student in Zurich. Followed by a revolutionary entourage, Bakunin swept through the room, completely at ease with the stares he attracted, some awed and some challenging. As he took his place at the table, one woman was so intimidated by the presence of the famous revolutionary that her shaking set all the glasses clinking until Bakunin addressed her with “I say, my good mother!” and the room broke out in laughter. Litvinova was impressed with Bakunin’s “thick lion’s mane of hair, his handsome face,” his red cheeks, and his piercing yet somehow guileless eyes. Admittedly, Litvinova, twenty-two years old that Zurich summer, suffered from myopia, but the presence of the anarchist stirred her deeply as he spoke of the International and reminisced about Russia. After dinner, Bakunin borrowed a cigarette and lit up. When one of the women took a glass of wine, he wrinkled his brows and announced that he did not really approve of women drinking. This triggered a discussion on the rights of women, and Litvinova recalled that “certainly Bakunin acknowledged these rights, but ... he did not like to see women drinking or smoking.” Every idol has feet of clay, though Litvinova seems to have forgiven Bakunin his old-fashioned lapse, perhaps because she observed that he retained another old habit, that of handing out money freely to others in need. He became well-known in the city, easily spotted by his size, his penurious generosity, a large, broadminded group of colleagues, and a large, broadbrimmed straw hat complete with a red—naturally—ribbon.[356] The summer seems to have been pleasant enough, but there and at Locarno, where Bakunin moved in October 1872, much of his time was spent on petty squabbles. The big debate in Zurich was over Bakunin’s ideas and those of Peter Lavrov, an exiled Russian, formerly a mathematician in an artillery college, whose approach to politics was as introverted, careful, and precise as Bakunin’s was extroverted, imprudent, and sweeping. The two did not much like each other. Their attempts to form an alliance quickly failed, and each became further isolated from the Russian revolutionary movement. The group Bakunin had formed with Ross, Ralli, and others foundered as well, largely due to personal disputes between Ross and the others, who accused him of acting as an authoritarian. He seemed to prove the allegation when he resolved a dispute over a printing press, the chief material and strategic asset of any radical group, by the simple, direct action tactic of locking everyone else out of the building. Though most of the anarchists refused to work any further with Ross, Bakunin sided with him and so alienated the others. The incessant bickering left Bakunin exhausted, and his health was degenerating quickly. He was terribly overweight, and he needed to reduce the eating, drinking, and smoking. This he refused to do. Unlike many of those today who work so hard on their bodies and neglect their brains, Bakunin actually had something important to say, and his poor health cut this short. A visitor to Locarno noted that Bakunin “smoked like a locomotive,” and the floor of his home was “covered with ash and cigar butts.” While he took his medications, including the strychnine prescribed by his doctor, observed a diet that avoided flour, and carefully trimmed the fat from the meat, he would then augment the regime with enormous quantities of risotto and macaroni served with butter, washed down with brandy, tea, or black coffee at home and in the cafes where many of the political discussions took place.[357] Between the asthma that made it difficult to breathe and a swollen prostate gland that had him up twenty times a night to urinate, he was unable to get much sleep, and congestive heart disease left him breathless with any physical exertion.

His condition was greatly aggravated by the publication in September 1873 of a pamphlet put together by Marx, Engels, and Lafargue. Titled “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association,” it was little more than a rehash of the accusations, exaggerations, and outright fabrications outlined by Marx in his “Confidential Communication” to Kugelman and those compiled by Utin for the International. It was a tawdry effort that blew back on its creators, for even Marx’s supporters and biographers have winced with embarrassment at the lies and unprincipled personal attacks. There was nothing new or surprising in the pamphlet. Bakunin’s reaction to the latest outrage, however, was remarkably restrained and made no political statement. It simply pointed out that the offensive pamphlet contained many errors and lies, and was just the latest in a string of slanders that dated back to the 1840s.

Bakunin did throw a bomb in at the end, and it was an entirely unexpected one. “I admit that I am profoundly disgusted with public life,” he wrote. “I have had enough of it, and having spent my entire life in struggle, I am tired of it.” Age and heart disease made life “more and more difficult,” and it was now time for a younger generation “to take up the work.” He was no longer able to “push the rock of Sisyphus against the reaction that is triumphant everywhere,” and asked his comrades for only one thing: that they forget him. He followed this declaration with another to his comrades of the Jura Federation, announcing his resignation from it and the anarchist International. There were several reasons to retire from the fray, but the most important one was political. “By birth and personal position, though not by sympathies or inclinations, I am only a bourgeois,” he wrote. “As such, the only thing I can do among you is theoretical propaganda. But I am convinced that the time for grand theoretical discourse, in print or in speeches, is past ... The most important task today is to organize the forces of the proletariat. But this organization must be the work of the proletariat itself.” If he were young, he ventured, he would join the workers as one of them and take up the struggle to organize. His age and health, however, made this impossible; he was now “an obstacle, not an aid, in the camp of the proletariat,” and there was, and rightly so, no room in the movement for “sinecures or honorary positions.” He warned of the danger he believed both Marx and Bismarck represented to anarchism, and urged the comrades to “hold firm to the idea of popular liberty and to continue to organize the workers in all trade and in all countries.” Above all, he concluded, “remember that however infinitely weak you may be as individuals, in isolated communities or nations, you will be an immense, irresistible force as a worldwide community.”[358]

[338] Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, reprint, Glencoe: Free Press, 1962, pages 283–4.

[339] Marx, “Instructions for Delegates to the Geneva Congress,” 1877, in The First International and After, David Fernback, ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, page 89.

[340] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Gambuzzi, 16 November 1870; letter to Ceretti, 13–27 March 1872; see also Dolgoff, pages 218–9.

[341] Engels to Theodore Cuno, 24 January 1872, Selected Correspondence, page 257. This, together with the charges that anarchists paid no attention to material, economic development, dumped the working class in favor of criminals, and were petit bourgeois, became a Marxist mantra, repeated most viciously perhaps by Georgy Plekhanov, the “father of Russian Marxism,” in a nasty little book, Anarchism and Socialism, translated into English and prefaced in nasty sectarian prose by Marx’s daughter Eleanor. Thanks to Todd McCallum for a splendid copy of the 1907 Charles H. Kerr edition and for much help with this project.

[342] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Revolution Sociale. Suite. Dieu et l’Etat. 4,” November 1870-April 1871.

[343] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “La science et la question vitale de la revolution,” March 1870.

[344] Engels to Theodore Cuno, 24 January 1872, Selected Correspondence, pages 257–8.

[345] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Lettre a mes amis d’ltalie,” 19–28 October 1871.

[346] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Anselmo Lorenzo, 7 May 1872.

[347] Michael Bakunin, God and the State, New York: Dover, 1970, page 9.

[348] Bakunin, God and State, pages 9–12.

[349] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “L’Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Revolution Sociale. Manuscrit qui precedait le manuscript de l’appendice,” November 1870.

[350] Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz, ed., trans., page xxiv. The quotations from Statism and Anarchy that follow are taken from this translation.

[351] Kenafick, page 306, makes this observation.

[352] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Ecrit contre Marx,” November-December 1872.

[353] Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, pages 132–7 and 178–84. These ideas on the class position and politics of intellectuals were taken up later in greater detail by the Polish radical Jan Waclaw Machajski. See Marshall Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

[354] Marx, “From Comments on Bakunin’s Book, Statehood [sic] and Anarchy,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, volume 2, pages 411–2; “On Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” Karl Marx: Selected Writings, McLellan, ed., pages 606–9.

[355] Cited in Carr, page 444.

[356] Elizaveta Litvinova, in Bakounine et les autres, pages 304–6.

[357] Nicolaj Sokolov, in Bakounine et les autres, pages 325–8.

[358] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to the Journal de Geneve, second fortnight of September 1873; letter to the compagnons de la Jederation jurasienne, first fortnight of October 1873. Engels made reference to the “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association” pamphlet in a series of newspaper articles that attacked the Bakuninists in Spain. The articles largely repeated the old charges made against anarchists and anarchism, especially the complaint that “Spain is such a backward country industrially that there can be no question there of immediate complete emancipation of the working. Spain will first have to pass through various preliminary states of development and remove quite a number of obstacles from its path.” See Marx and Engels, Revolution in Spain, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1939.