7. THE PASSION FOR DESTRUCTION IS A CREATIVE PASSION
After several days at sea—”the first time I had seen the real sea, without shore”—and bone-jarring carriage trips, Michael Bakunin arrived in Berlin, the capital of the kingdom of Prussia, on 25 July 1840. His first impressions of Germany were generally positive. “Here I will attain my goal,” he wrote the Beyer sisters. “It will give me what I need.” The Germans were “charming,” he reported, but they did have an obsequious habit of exclaiming “Jawohl!” at every turn.[139]
The sense of excitement and purpose, however, was tempered by the news of Stankevich’s death. This was devastating, not just for Bakunin but for his generation of scholars, rebels, and friends. But at least Michael and Varvara were reunited and could offer each other some consolation. Varvara’s decision to stay in Berlin with her young son eased Michael’s adjustment to the new city.
He soon found other comrades. There was a significant colony of Russian students and emigres in Berlin, and they gathered in the cafes, especially Spargniapani’s on Unter den Linden to discuss literature, history, and politics, to read newspapers and journals from around the world, and to argue. Bakunin quickly found another large, imposing Russian, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the two became fast friends, even living across the hall from each other for a time. Turgenev, four years younger than Bakunin and the beneficiary of a university education at St. Petersburg, was deeply affected by their friendship. He looked forward to learning from Bakunin, who after all was the acknowledged Russian expert on Hegel. “Stankevich brought us together,” Turgenev exclaimed, “and death shall not part us.” In his copy of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, he wrote, “Stankevich died June 24, 1840. I met Bakunin July 20, 1840. I want to keep no other memories from my previous life.” For his part, Bakunin noted that Turgenev was “the one person with whom I have really hit it off.”[140]
Turgenev would later turn their friendship into material for his novel Rudin. Published in 1856, while Bakunin was entombed in the tsar’s prison and long after Turgenev had abandoned radical politics, the book’s title character superficially resembled Bakunin. The book was set in the 1840s, and Rudin was “tall, somewhat round-shouldered, curly-haired, swarthy of complexion, with an irregular but expressive and clever face, with a faint gleam in the quick, dark blue eyes, a straight, broad nose, and finely chiseled lips.” Like Bakunin, Rudin was a retired military officer from “T[ver] province,” who depended on the kindness of strangers and friends for financial support. The character was a clever debater who insisted that greatness sprang from man, not heaven. However, the overall characterization of Rudin is of an ineffectual, cold, intellectually smug, and petty blowhard, unable to love or to act decisively. While several historians have seized upon this as a useful portrait of Bakunin and his politics, we must be more careful in drawing any conclusions from the novel.
It is true that Turgenev claimed several years after the novel’s appearance that Rudin was “rather an accurate portrayal” of Bakunin. Alexander Herzen, however, sniffed that in fact “Turgenev, carried away by the biblical custom of God, created Rudin in his own image.”[141] Turgenev’s Rudin, like the characters in his later, more famous novel, Fathers and Sons, was less an accurate portrayal of an individual than a caricature of a philosophical and political position for which the author had little taste. Furthermore, Turgenev had carried on a romance with Bakunin’s sister Tatiana that ended badly, and later was interrogated by the Russian authorities about his connection with Bakunin. To the degree that the author intended Rudin to resemble the young Bakunin, it is a highly personal and colored sketch, and one largely based on Belinsky’s distorted version at that. Whatever the art of Turgenev, the thoughtful historian must agree with Marshall Shatz that while Turgenev borrowed some physical attributes and habits from Bakunin, his Rudin is “by no means a reliable picture of Mikhail Bakunin, and it should not be regarded by historians as a key that helps to unlock the mysteries of Bakunin’s character.”[142]
But Rudin was fifteen years in the future. In 1840, Bakunin and Turgenev were inseparable as they took classes at the university, studied, dined, attended concerts, and entered the world of the Berlin salon. Both were keen to hear the lectures of Karl Werder, a Hegelian and colleague of Stankevich’s, but Bakunin soon found his other classes shallow and stultifying. The great Schelling was now a dull conservative, brought to Berlin to block the radical trail blazed by Hegel. History too must have been a disappointment. Bakunin had looked forward to the lectures of the celebrated historian Leopold von Ranke. But von Ranke, still today a staple in courses on historiography, declaimed that historians should only present history wie es eigentlich gewesen, “as it actually happened.” His motto may sound straightforward and sensible, but it was highly misleading. No historian has ever advocated presenting the past as it actually wasn’t, and von Ranke’s belief that historians should not judge the past or instruct the present was camouflage for his own ideological use of history. For all his alleged objectivity and historical neutrality, von Ranke was extremely conservative in his politics. He would become an energetic supporter of Bismarck, and for all his protestations that history had no ultimate purpose, his writings supported the monarchy and strongly implied that existing institutions were essentially following God’s divine plan. For these reasons, von Ranke, like Schelling, had been brought to Berlin not as an objective seeker of fact but to deliver a counterattack to Hegel’s progressive thought. Bakunin of course had already delivered a sophisticated attack on history as the collection of dry facts pressed into the service of reaction, and presumably had little interest in von Ranke’s approach. More to his taste were the radical works of the Catholic humanist Felicite Robert de Lamennais and the German economist Lorenz von Stein. Stein’s Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France presented readers with a radical reinterpretation of history and politics and introduced the ideas of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Proudhon to a receptive audience with an impact similar to that of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States today.
The circles in which Bakunin traveled included students, bohemians, artists, and increasingly political thinkers and activists. Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Engels attended some of Werder’s lectures, and Engels recalled years later that he had sat a few seats behind Bakunin and his group of fellow Russians. The two even lived on the same street, Dorotheenstrasse, at the same time. Among Bakunin’s acquaintances was Bettina von Arnim, friend of Beethoven and Goethe, whose Romantic works Bakunin had read in Russia. By the 1840s, she was keenly involved in political issues. She took up her pen to defend Silesian linen weavers in the northeast of Prussia who rioted as their handicraft industry was destroyed by mechanization, and lobbied the king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, to install the Grimm brothers at the University of Berlin when they were dismissed from their posts at Gottingen. Another member of this diverse group was the poet Georg Herwegh, the “Iron Lark,” who called upon poets to decide to “be a man: for or against? And your slogan: slave or free?” His radical poetry savaged the Prussian state and eventually led to his expulsion, but it captured the mood of many in Germany.
In particular, Herwegh’s cry to “Tear the crosses out of the earth! / Turn them all into swords!” echoed the evolution of the Left Hegelians and Bakunin himself. While Hegel himself remained a Christian of some sort, the Left Hegelians ruthlessly applied his methodology to religion itself, concluding that the only rational position on the nature of God was an unyielding atheism. In 1835, David Strauss’s book The Life of Jesus insisted that Jesus had to be understood as a historical—that is, human—figure, not a divine one. It was a radical, revolutionary argument, just as it is today, and others soon joined in. Ludwig Feuerbach, writing in 1839, argued that all religion had to be seen in its historical context, rather than as divine truth, for “what yesterday was still religion is no longer such today; and what today is atheism, tomorrow will be religion.” Bruno Bauer, who almost alone among the Left Hegelians had studied with Hegel himself, proclaimed that the “core,” the “center point” of Hegelian philosophy was the “destruction of religion.”[143]
This was as alarming in the Prussia of the 1840s as it would be in the United States of the twenty-first century. As it did in Russia, as it does in the U.S. today, religion functioned as one of the pillars of German autocracy. Since there was no question of a mandate from the masses, divine right was left as the only grounds on which the rule of kings could be justified. If Jesus were human, if religion were little more than a folktale, autocracy could not be defended on any rational grounds; it would have to rely solely on force to compel obedience. But the ruler who must constantly use force has an unwieldy, treacherous, and expensive reign. It is far better over the long run to create founding myths and to wrap the population in shrouds of false beliefs. Questioning something as fundamental as the nature and existence of God put everything up for grabs, and rulers everywhere understood that the critique of religion was simultaneously a critique of politics, for its fundamental question, asked implicitly and explicitly, was this: Who should rule? It was an argument Bakunin anticipated in his 1838 preface to Hegel, where he observed that “Where there is no religion, there can be no state ... religion is the substance, the essence of the life of any state.” Religion bound people together; that is the original meaning of the world. If religion was displaced, what could take its place? What would bind humanity and give it common cause? For the Left Hegelians, the answer was obvious: politics. Bakunin expressed it pithily in a note to his sister Varvara and brother Paul: “Politics is religion and religion is politics.”[144]
Politics, however, took thinkers from the realm of mysticism and theory to the practical world. That of course was the intention of the Left Hegelians, who were not content merely to philosophize. Hegel’s “theory is praxis,” thundered Bauer, “it is the revolution itself.” While he framed his article as a nearly hysterical rant by an anti-Hegelian, one did not need the secret decoder ring to understand that Bauer was not engaging in parody or irony when he insisted that “philosophy must be active in politics” and that “servitude, tutelage, is unbearable to the free spirit.” It was left to another Left Hegelian, Arnold Ruge, to sum up their position clearly and without cumbersome rhetorical device in 1842, in his newspaper, the Deutsche Jahrbücher: “Our times are political, and our politics intend the freedom of this world. No longer do we lay the ground for the ecclesiastical state, but for the secular state, and the interest in the public issue of freedom in the state grows with every breath that humans take.”[145]
While Engels and other writers have suggested that Bakunin was influenced by another Hegelian, the fiercely individualist Max Stirner, there is no evidence of this. Stirner denounced the state in language that seemed to foreshadow anarchism, but his polemics on individuality failed to comprehend that humans were social beings who only developed and progressed in community. Where Stirner insisted that freedom meant having no responsibility to or for others, Bakunin had long understood that humanity could be free only in society. Stirner boldly proclaimed that there was no good or evil, only the ego, and rejected any constraints on human behavior. It followed that he rejected political action, for it was by definition collective action concerned with society rather than the individual. For all his fiery pronouncements, Stirner was rather colorless and boring in person; his real name, Johann Kaspar Schmidt, more accurately reflected his personality and importance. Bakunin mentions Stirner precisely once in his collected works, and then only in passing. Stirner’s exaggerated individualism, expressed most passionately in his book The Ego and Its Own, had little appeal for Bakunin or his fellow Hegelians. Indeed, it was Marx and Engels who devoted considerable space to Stirner, albeit very critical space, in The German Ideology and The Holy Family; as far as can be determined, Bakunin had no interest, even a negative one, in Stirner’s ideas. The individualist was out of step with his times and with his fellow Hegelians who saw political action as the necessary expression of their era.[146]
For if the particular ideas of the Left Hegelians were not widespread, the call for freedom and justice and change resounded throughout the German states, principalities, kingdoms, and duchies. While there was little unanimity about what was to be done, people pressed for political reform ranging from constitutions that would abolish or limit the monarchy to representative legislatures to German unification.
Different groups turned to politics—the state—for different reasons. Industrialists wanted a stronger, unified state to protect their claim to property rights, to shelter their fledgling industries from competitive goods from other nations, to build modern infrastructures, and to expand their markets. Workers wanted an interventionist state that would protect them from the depredations of employers and regulate terms of trade and employment. A growing class of educated professionals, from scientists to doctors to lawyers to journalists, and of course students, wanted their freedom to inquire into the nature of the physical world and the intellectual world protected, and believed that their expertise entitled them to participate more fully in the affairs of state. An expanding bureaucracy, now necessary to run an efficient regime, preferred the rule of parliamentary law and written regulation to the whim of the sovereign, and sought to harness those elites who believed themselves exempt from directives and equal treatment. Independent farmers needed protection from and compensation for cheap competition and bad harvests. Peasants who were transformed by fiat overnight from serfs to agricultural laborers were forced to compensate landowners with either money or property, and often lost both; they sought protection, redress, and land. Nearly everyone would benefit from legally constituted freedom of speech and trial by jury. If appeals to the ruler were unsuccessful—and with so many competing interests, including especially his own, even the most enlightened ruler could never decide any issue in a manner that would make everyone happy—then “the people,” however they might be defined for the immediate purpose, understood that “they” would have to become the state if they were to be free or were to use the state for their own purposes. If the ruler would agree to stand down, fine; if not, well, everyone now understood that history was about change made by the people. Petitions, protests, and pikes could all be pressed into service. The issues were particularly grating in Prussia, where many had hoped for liberal reforms when Friedrich Wilhelm IV took the throne in 1840. His subsequent reaction did not quell the call for change. Instead, it intensified it and caused it to reverberate throughout Prussia.
Bakunin thrived in this swirl of philosophy, politics, and protest. Events in Germany paralleled his own evolution over the past several years: the rejection of official ideology whether of state or parent, the transition from Romantic themes of individual discontent to social analysis, the realization that theory alone was insufficient, and finally the connecting of criticism with action and theory with practice, to go beyond understanding the world to changing it. In 1842, now living in Dresden to escape the repressive atmosphere of Prussia, Bakunin pulled these personal and political themes together in an essay for Ruge’s October issue of the Deutsche Jahrbücher. The essay’s sophisticated analysis put his own ideas in the context of the turmoil of the 1840s and roughly outlined the political ideas that he would develop throughout his life. Here Bakunin voiced his most famous, and least understood, adage: “The passion for destruction is at the same time a creative passion.”
Sadly, for those of us who might wish return to the chemistry sets of our youth to find a creative spark, and for those who wish to turn Bakunin into the fifth rider of the apocalypse, he did not mean that the political was pyrotechnical. No one accused the poet E. E. Cummings of advocating a holocaust when he wrote, “To destroy is always the first step in any creation,” or suspected the economist Joseph Schumpeter of pyromania when he observed approvingly that capitalism is a “process of creative destruction.” [147] So too must Bakunin’s phrase be understood not as a simple desire for destruction but as an analysis of the power and necessity of revolutionary change.
The article, entitled “The Reaction in Germany: A Fragment from a Frenchman,” was published under the pseudonym Jules Elysard. The nom de guerre both protected Bakunin from unwanted attention from the authorities and highlighted his interest in French political philosophy. Unlike German and Russian thought, French theory was more concerned with practical politics and economics than speculative philosophy. Even French Utopians such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon grappled with concrete issues and questions rather than metaphysics and discussions of spirit and species-being and Zeitgeist. In adopting a French pen name, Bakunin demonstrated his own conviction, one that was at once personal and political, that it was time for action. Even the writing style made this clear. No one would mistake it for Hemingway, but the writing was tighter and more concrete than the baroque and abstract language Bakunin had polished in Russia. So too were the ideas more practical and forceful, even if they did not form an electoral platform or manifesto.
The first sentence flatly declared his politics. Who could deny, he asked, that freedom “today stands at the head of the agenda of history?” Even those who worked to destroy it had to cover their politics with the rhetoric of freedom to be taken seriously. But, Bakunin pointed out, language was not reality, and the fact remained that many rulers would use any means to crush the popular movements for democracy and liberty. The first job of the democrat then was to blow away the fog of language and understand the different groups who wished to obstruct the progress of humanity.
The first group was made up of a type satirized eighty years later by Sin-clair Lewis in his novel Babbitt. Bakunin characterized them as those “high-placed, aged” people who in their youth had been “dilettantes in political freedom.” Never truly committed to the movement, they had taken a “piquant pleasure in speaking about freedom and equality,” largely because it had made them “twice as interesting in business.” Now that they were older, they claimed also to be wiser, hiding behind “that much abused word, experience,” to justify their conservative politics. The species Bakunin described may be recognized today by its mating call, “a person who is not a socialist before thirty has no heart, and a person who is a socialist after thirty has no head.” Variously ascribed to Francois Guizot, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, assorted kings, and the U.S. 1936 Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon, it is the motto of those Bakunin identified as the “prudent and aged” who were “never serious about freedom” and with whom “there is no profit in speaking.”
More depressing than the tired old conservatives were the “many young people” in business, commerce, aristocracy, and the military “who share the same convictions or, rather, lack of any conviction.” “Completely involved in their paltry, vain, or monetary interests, and completely occupied by their commonplace concerns,” oblivious to the wider world and the momentous struggle that surrounded them, they were “colorless, ghostly beings,” and they too could be safely ignored.
The real threats to freedom and democracy were the active “reactionaries.” They were “everywhere the ruling party,” and through the media, education systems, the church and other avenues, they exerted a more subtle power that today would be called “hegemony.” In politics, Bakunin observed, their ideology was “conservatism”; in jurisprudence, the “historical school”; and in philosophy, in a jab at Schelling, “positive philosophy.” Their success, Bakunin cautioned, was not due to accident, contingency, or chance. If revolutionaries had history on their side, reaction too had been the result of historical necessity, and it was important to calculate accurately its present strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise, “we must either wholly lose our courage, depressed by the dreary picture of daily drudgery, or—and this is perhaps still worse—since a vital human being cannot long tolerate despair, there comes upon us a groundless, boyish, and fruitless exuberance.” “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci put it nearly a century later; for both thinkers, realistic analysis made it possible to steer between resignation and recklessness.
It was also necessary to assess realistically the side that fought for freedom. Bakunin acknowledged that the chief strength of the “Democratic party” was that its founding principle—”the equality of man realizing itself in freedom”—was in harmony with the most fundamental desires of humanity. It had, however, to remake itself if it were to succeed in negating the positive and overcoming reaction. It had to step “out of the uncertainty of fantasy and into the reality,” for the “fullness and totality of human nature” could never be understood only through “abstract theoretical propositions.” Its principles had to be implemented “not only in thought and reasoning” but “also in real life down to life’s smallest manifestations.” In other words, the movement had to move beyond theory into action.
The key to effective action was understanding that the democratic movement was not a reformist movement, but a revolutionary one. It “not only stands in opposition to the government and is not only a particular constitutional or politicoeconomic change, but a total transformation of that world condition and a herald of an original new life which has not yet existed in history.” Real democracy meant much more than regime change or new elections or legal frameworks that restricted the power of the monarch.
The revolution he called for would not seek a “synthesis” of the old with the new. Instead, Bakunin argued, “the whole significance and the irrepressible power of the negative is the annihilation of the positive.” But since democracy did not yet exist independently, but only as “the denial of the positive ... it too must be destroyed along with the positive, so that from its free ground it may spring forth again in a newborn state, as its own living fullness.”
While the reader may be forgiven for thinking that as rallying cries go, this is not as compelling as “Workers of the world unite,” “I like Ike,” or “God is great,” Bakunin made two important advances here. First he demonstrated that Hegel, the dominant philosopher of the period, could be interpreted to support not just progressive historical change but revolutionary change. Historical change could happen abruptly and radically. We might compare this with Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium. Gould suggests that while evolution usually takes eons, a meteor striking the earth or other catastrophic events could introduce a period of rapid change, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs and the subsequent flourishing of mammals.[148] Bakunin’s argument lent the power and authority of Hegel to radical, revolutionary politics.
Second, Bakunin introduced a new idea into Hegel’s dialectical model of historical change. If Hegel’s process view was essentially triadic, or three-part, simply put as “thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” Bakunin proposed a dyadic, or two-part dialectic, where the negative did not merge with the positive but destroyed it and created a new positive that owed nothing to the old. This too was of interest to more than speculative philosophers, for it was a political argument against reformism. Because the “positive and the negative are once and for all incompatible,” it was pointless to conceive of the role of the Democratic party as “an eternal mediation with the positive.” Its purpose was not to reform or improve the positive, but to replace it.
For all the talk of the “annihilation” and “destruction” of the positive, it is clear this was about overturning and overcoming the old world order, not the apocalyptic obliteration that Bakunin is usually accused of desiring. In “The Reaction in Germany,” he firmly rejected the argument that the revolution was justified in using any and all means to its end. While reactionaries believed “every means is permitted” to maintain their rule, revolutionaries could not “repay them with the same coin,” for that “would be unworthy of us and of the great cause whose agents we are.” Indeed, the greatest advantage the revolutionaries possessed was that their principle allowed them to be “just and impartial, without, by so being, harming our cause.” Certainly in their fight against reaction, “all evil passions are awakened also in us ... we are also very often partial and unjust.” But this was a temptation to overcome, not embrace. Unlike the reactionaries, revolutionaries had “to remain true, even contrary to our self-preservation, to our principle as the only ground of our power and of our life.” For revolutionaries were “justified only through our principle,” the principle of “freedom of which the one true expression is justice and love.” Ironically, this meant that it was the revolutionaries, accused by their enemies of atheism, and not the reactionaries who claimed God was on their side, who had “really to exercise love, this highest commandment of Christ and this only way of true Christianity.”
Having established the broad principles necessary for the democratic movement to develop its strategy and tactics, Bakunin returned to the Reactionary party. It was, he held, divided into two camps: the consistent reactionaries and the compromising reactionaries. The first, like Bakunin, understood that the positive could only be “maintained through a complete suppression of the negative”; there could be no negotiation or conciliation. Determined and ruthless, they employed every weapon at their disposal. Their positions in institutions of church and state let them use language to label freedom and progress as “heresy” and thus cut off real discussion and debate. They did not hesitate to use all the violence of the state, and “if it were possible they would perhaps even call out of the arsenal of history the subterranean power of the Inquisition in order to use it against us.”
For all their ferocity, the consistent reactionaries were morally superior to the compromising reactionaries, for they were at least sincere. The compromisers were “the clever men, the theorists par excellence,” and they, not the consistent reactionaries, were “the chief representatives of the present time.” Their chief characteristic was “theoretical dishonesty,” for unlike the consistent reactionaries, they held no solid convictions or moral principles, and their slipperiness of language and tactics made them more difficult to pin down. They did not reject democracy and the negative out of hand. Unlike the consistent reactionaries, they often agreed that the Democratic party raised important questions and identified real abuses. But the compromisers refused to accept its radical solutions and instead claimed that truth lay somewhere between the left and the right. Bakunin acknowledged that their approach had some appeal. After all, everyone sought to “reconcile the positive and the negative,” and this seemed a workable approach. But this apparent reasonableness was an illusion, Bakunin insisted. If the negative and the positive were truly in opposition, compromise could not resolve the struggle.
The obvious retort to this argument against reform, Bakunin admitted, sounded plausible enough. Surely the compromisers further progress “far more than you do yourself, for they go to work prudently and not excessively as do the democrats who want to blast the whole world to pieces.” But the soothing words of the compromisers disguised their real agenda, for they played a complicated game. They had to open the door for reform to topple the old order of the consistent reactionaries, then slam the door shut to prevent the masses from creating real democracy and equality. Bakunin pointed out that the constant refrain of the compromiser, “To a certain extent you are right, but, yet ...” was a tactic calculated to let them play left against right for their own benefit. A path midway between right and left was not neutral or objective. The middle way too represented a particular, narrow political interest, not the interests of the overwhelming mass of humanity.
And while everyone could agree, in principle, that peace was preferable to conflict and struggle, the peace sought by the compromisers was the peace imposed by the conqueror on the conquered, the peace of the slave owner imposed on the slave. Such a peace could not end conflict. It could only suppress it for a time. That time, Bakunin suggested, was now running out. Signs of revolt were everywhere, as orthodox ideas and politics were being challenged. Putting a more radical spin on his 1838 observation on the connection between state and religion, he observed that “the state is currently in the throes of the deepest internal conflict, for without religion, without a powerful universal conviction, the state is impossible.” “Visible appearances are stirring around us,” he continued, “indicating that the spirit, this old mole, has brought its underground work to completion and that it will soon come again to pass judgment.”[149]
Though the spirit may have been that of the “old mole,” it had a new agent. The revolt now was led not by intellectuals or nobles or industrialists, but by “the people, the poor class, which without doubt constitutes the greatest part of humanity.” The rights of the poor had been acknowledged in theory, of course. The Declaration of Rights of Man, after all, did not contain fine print indicating the offer was void where prohibited by insufficient income. In practice, however, the working class was “still condemned by its birth, by its ties with poverty and ignorance, as well, indeed, as with actual slavery.” But now, “this class, which constitutes the true people, is everywhere assuming a threatening attitude” and was demanding “the actualization of the rights already conceded” in theory. Germany and France were obvious examples of proletarian revolt; so too was England, where workers were organizing and fighting for political and economic freedom under the radical banners of the Chartist movement. “Even in Russia,” Bakunin prophesied, “dark clouds are gathering, heralding storms.”
The old road was rapidly fading. It was confronted not only by philosophers but by proletarians, and it was time for all to choose sides. Bakunin made it clear which side he was on. “Let us therefore trust the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life,” he concluded. “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.”[150]
The article was hot. Bakunin urged a political platform of no compromise and no reform. Hegel was acknowledged as the springboard for revolt, but he was interpreted in a forceful, dynamic way. The people, now defined more closely as the poor, the working class, and those in bondage, rather than as a broad, vaguely mythical force, were identified as the new revolutionary force. These were the ideas Bakunin threw into the political mix. If none of them was strictly original, the synthesis was bold and energizing and both summed up the leading work of the age and indicated the way forward. As a result, “The Reaction in Germany” was circulated throughout revolutionary and avant-garde circles throughout Europe. In Russia, Herzen, Belinksy, and Botkin all forgave Bakunin his trespasses and debts both intellectual and monetary.
The authorities could be expected to express an equally fervent but rather different interest. The climate throughout Germany was becoming less hospitable. The Deutsche Jahrbücher was shut down by the government, and Ruge beat feet for Paris to start another newspaper, the Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbücher, with another exiled German editor, Karl Marx. When Georg Herwegh was expelled from Berlin, Bakunin, probably overestimating his own notoriety, assumed he might be next and decided to join the poet in Zurich. He quickly found himself at home with Switzerland’s radical and literary circle. It included the theologian Karl Vogt and his sons, Karl Jr., who would be an activist in the revolutions of 1848, and Adolf, who would remain close to Bakunin until the anarchist’s death. It also included Louis Agassiz, who later held a professorship in zoology and geology at Harvard; the chair in zoology Stephen Jay Gould held until his death in 2002 was named after his son.
This intellectual and social life, however pleasant, did little to develop Bakunin’s political thought. “The Reaction in Germany” called for revolt and for the proletariat to play the leading role. But Bakunin was short on practical suggestions. His radical connections were far removed from the working class; indeed, in some of his first uses of the word “proletariat,” it is obviously a condition he hoped to avoid, not experience.[151] Nonetheless, while Bakunin’s foes and contemporary conservatives are quick to accuse leftist intellectuals of studying the working class to avoid being part of it, it is not clear what their accusation amounts to. If anything, it is an acknowledgment that class exists and is a system that often leaves workers exhausted and unable to pursue intellectual work at the same level as the academic. Intellectual work does not require genius; it requires time and training, and workers in capitalist societies are denied both. It makes more sense to attack the sons and daughters of privilege who seek to maintain such a world than those who struggle to fix it.
In any case, Bakunin soon had his lofty view of struggle and justice tempered by the earthy realism of the proletariat. As he left for Zurich, he obtained an exciting new book of radical social commentary, Wilhelm Weitling’s Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom. [152] Unlike Bakunin, Marx, and many other left-wing writers of the day, Weitling was a son of toil. His father was a French military officer garrisoned in the German city of Magdeburg, his mother a maid. The two lived together without benefit of clergy, and in 1808 produced their son. Four years later, however, the father received orders to march with Napoleon into Russia and became another victim of the ill-fated campaign. Mother and son lived in extreme poverty, made worse by the ravages of war as French, Prussian, and Russian troops alternately besieged and held the city. Yet Wilhelm was a gifted child. Though he received only a very elementary formal education, he read voraciously and taught himself several languages. He was apprenticed to a tailor and became a journeyman at eighteen.
While tailoring was a skilled trade, by the late 1820s it was no longer a lucrative one. The Industrial Revolution began in the textile industries with the express aim of reducing the cost of goods, which primarily meant reducing the wages paid to labor. Machines replaced humans; mass-produced clothing replaced the handmade garment and the bespoke suit. Weitling possessed a skill that was rarely able to fetch a price much above that of unskilled labor and offered him only jobs for which many others competed. He walked across much of Europe seeking regular employment and living the desperate life the poets, philosophers, and politicians of the day described in such dire terms.
If there was any benefit to his trade, it was that tailoring, unlike factory work, was quiet. Tailors and other workers such as cobblers and cigarmakers arranged to have newspapers, books, and journals read aloud as they labored and thus were well versed in the politics and news of the day. Weitling was particularly drawn to economics and politics, and despite his twelve-hour workday read Strauss’s Life of Jesus and the work of Lamennais. Unlike the Young Hegelians, he had no difficulty in combining theory with action. Skilled workers drew on the traditions and their common experience of the craft to form educational, recreational, and self-help societies, cooperatives, and secret societies for mutual protection. Weitling took part in these throughout the continent. In Paris, he joined the Society of Exiles, an underground organization of German emigre workers, then, in 1837, the League of the Just, a more radical offshoot. When the League joined other Parisian workers and took to the streets in angry protest and fighting in 1839, Weitling was already well-known as a working-class activist, speaker, and writer, his pamphlets and books financed by his fellow workers, printed by volunteer labor and distributed by wandering journeymen. His first book, Mankind As It Is and As It Should Be, was a powerful critique of capitalism, drawn from his experience and his interpretation of Christian values. His Christ, however, was not the Jesus who turned the other cheek, but he who scourged the money changers from the temple. The new money changers, the capitalists and industrialists, were to be driven out by revolution in Weitling’s recasting of biblical myth. For him, revolution was not a dialectical construction or a rhetorical device. It was to be a violent uprising that would unleash the fury of the oppressed as they tore down private property and privilege. In the new world workers would create, all would be equally educated and rewarded. Work too would be shared without the rigid division of labor that misshaped bodies and starved intellects.
Tailor that he was, Weitling laid out intricate patterns for what he called communism in Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom, down to the shape of buildings, the styles of clothing, and the sounds of a universal language. It was a plan that spoke to the deepest aspirations of a bright man denied opportunity for the crime of being born into poverty, who saw his trade devalued and his labor exploited. An industrial army composed of youths trained in different trades and skills would be set to work building infrastructure and colonizing other lands. Goods and services would be valued and exchanged according to the labor time it took to create them, and production and consumption would be carefully monitored, with resources shifted according to need and demand. The system required able administrators and overseers. These could not be selected through elections, Weitling believed, for elections tended to reward those with oratorical skills. Instead he devised a complicated scheme that would ensure those with technical skills and abilities were selected impartially by those deemed best able to judge.
It was far from a democratic system, and many suspected Weitling had penciled himself in for the top job, but it was a sincere attempt to provide an alternative to capitalism that insisted on equality and justice over poverty and on freedom and harmony over exploitation. The book impressed workers and radicals and philosophers alike. It was widely reviewed in journals and newspapers across Europe, including the imperious London Times. Ludwig Feuerbach thought the work established Weitling as the “prophet of his class,” and Bruno Bauer commented favorably. Even Karl Marx praised the “unbounded brilliance of the literary debut of the German worker.”[153]
Weitling’s solid prose was the broom needed to clear out abstract Hegelian cobwebs. Bakunin found Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom “truly remarkable” for its “just and profound ... concrete consciousness of the present epoch.” He was particularly struck by Weitling’s ability to develop revolutionary ideas not from “idle theory” but as an “expression of a new practice” springing from his life as a proletarian.[154] Here Bakunin’s own thoughts on the necessity of revolution were reinforced by a worker with real revolutionary experience. Their common aim, he realized, was “to free the people ... the majority, the masses of the poor and the oppressed ... from the tutelage of the rich and powerful.” Intellectuals had a crucial role to play. The chief obstacle workers faced was not their “weakness,” for they made up the vast majority of society. It was their “intellectual enslavement” engineered by state and church. Philosophers had torn down religion and the false beliefs in god and king and had restored to the people their “sense of their own value, the consciousness of their dignity and their inalienable and sacred rights.” Nonetheless, it was not from theory but from the people that sprang “all the great acts of history, all liberating revolutions.” What this proved was the necessity for the practical proletarians and the far-sighted philosophers to join forces. Each was stumbling toward the same goal of a free society, and each needed to learn from the other. “Thought and action; truth and morality; theory and practice”: these needed to be united to forward humanity’s progress. And they were agreed on what that progress should be. Weitling had poetically summed up the broad principle on which the new world would be based. “In the perfect society,” Bakunin quoted enthusiastically, “there is no government, only administration; no laws, only obligations; no punishments, only remedies.”[155]
Weitling’s intricate plans for the future society, however, were cause for concern. In language that foreshadowed his criticism of Marx, Bakunin warned that Weitling’s communism was both “a very important and an extremely dangerous phenomenon.” It spoke vibrantly to the plight of workers and was drawn from their dire needs, but, Bakunin declared, “we are not communists ... we could not live in a society organized according to Weitling’s design.” Such a society was not a “genuine, living community of free men,” but an “oppressive regime” comparable to a “herd of animals brought together by coercion,” concerned only with “material satisfaction” and ignorant of humanity’s deeper needs.[156]
Despite this, the two found much to admire in each other when they met in Zurich in May 1843. Bakunin later recalled Weitling as possessing “much natural keenwittedness, a quick mind, much energy, and especially much wild fanaticism, noble pride, and faith in the liberation and future of the enslaved majority”—a man, one might conclude, much like himself, despite the vast differences in class, education, and experience.[157]
Through Weitling, Bakunin received a thorough introduction to practical politics, though in an unexpected fashion. In his new book, The Gospel of a Poor Sinner, Weitling built on Strauss’s theme of Christ as human, all too human, emphasized his bastard birth into poverty, and claimed him as the first insurgent communist. This would remain a popular theme for rebels of all sorts; the Wobblies of the twentieth century would often refer to Christ as that carpenter, Jerusalem Slim, but it allowed the Swiss authorities to charge Weitling with sedition and heresy. He was arrested, jailed, and expelled from the country. From his papers and correspondence, the Swiss police learned of his association with Bakunin. They had already investigated the young Russian soon after his arrival, and upon their request, Count Benckendorff and the Third Section opened a file and dispatched agents to investigate the family. [158] When the Swiss authorities made public the connection between Bakunin and Weitling, the Russians took action. In February 1844, they requested Bakunin to present himself to the Russian Legation in Berne, where he in turn was presented with an order to return to Russia. What little desire he had to return home was killed by the thought that whatever the authorities had planned would not be pleasant.
Instead of home, Bakunin headed first to Brussels and then to Paris. Evading Russian justice, however, was not so easy. For the crime of refusing the order to return, he was stripped of his noble rank. His property, such as it was, was forfeited, and he sentenced to an indefinite period of hard labor in exile in Siberia. Practicalpolitics came with a high price indeed.
[139] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Beyer sisters, 25 July 1840.
[140] Turgenev cited in Bakounine et les autres, page 82; Bakunin cited in Shatz, “Bakunin, Turgenev, and Rudin,” page 104.
[141] Ivan Turgenev, “Letter to M. A. Markovich,” 16 and 28 September 1862, Letters, volume 1, letter 158, page 217, David Lowe, ed., Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, volume 3, page 1357.
[142] Shatz, “Bakunin, Turgenev, and Rudin,” page 112.
[143] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, chapter 1, section 2, “The Essence of Religion Considered Generally,” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, Lawrence S. Stepelvich, ed., Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997, page 155. Bruno Bauer, “The Trumpet of the Last Judgement,” in The Young Hegelians, page 179.
[144] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara and Paul Bakunin, 27 October 1841.
[145] Bauer, “The Trumpet of the Last judgement,” chapter 4, in The Young Hegelians, page 183. Arnold Ruge, “Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ and the Politics of Our Times,” in The Young Hegelians, page 211.
[146] Engels erroneously claims Bakunin took “a great deal from Stirner,” and that Bakunin “blended [Stirnerl with Proudhon and labeled the blend anarchism,” in “Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” 1886, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, volume 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, pages 343 and 360.
[147] E. E. Cummings, Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings, letter to his sister, 3 May 1922, F. W. Dupee, George Stade, eds., New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969, page 84. I am indebted to Professor Norman Friedman for this citation. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, reprint, New York: Harper, 1975, pages 82–5.
[148] Paul McLaughlin suggests that Thomas Kuhn’s model of “paradigm shift” is also appropriate to describe Bakunin’s view of revolutionary change in Mikhail Bakunin, pages 42–5.
[149] The reference to the “old mole” is from Hamlet, act 1, scene five. Likely it comes to Bakunin by way of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, section three, “Recent German Philosophy,” where the master writes, “For in this lengthened period, the Notion of Spirit, invested with its entire concrete development, its external subsistence, its wealth, is striving to bring spirit to perfection, to make progress itself and to develop from spirit. It goes ever on and on, because spirit is progress alone. Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, ‘Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the ground so fast?’) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such a time, when the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away, and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted.” Or, “Shit happens, even when you don’t think there’s much going on.” Marx makes a similar reference to the old mole in 1852, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.”
[150] The quote has been rendered in several ways. In this chapter, I draw from “The Reaction in Germany: A Fragment from a Frenchman,” Mary-Barbara Zeldin, trans., in Russian Philosophy, volume 1, James M. Edie et al., eds., Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965. Other English translations render it as “The urge for destruction is a creative urge,” “The desire to destroy is also a creative desire,” and variations thereon. In Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, the French translation is given as “La volupte de detruire est en meme temps une volupte creatrice.” The original German version is given there as “Die Lust der Zerstorung ist zugleich eine schaffende Lust.”
[151] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Arnold Ruge, 11 and 19 March 1843.
[152] The standard English biography of Weitling is Carl Wittke, The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950.
[153] Marx, “Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Revolution, by a Prussian, ’ Vorwarts 7–10 August 1844,” cited in Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, reprint, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1983, page 83.
[154] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Ruge, 19 January 1843.
[155] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Der Kommunismus” (Le Communisme), Der Schweizerischer Republikaner, 2, 6, and 13 June 1843. Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Ruge, 19 January 1843.
[156] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Der Kommunismus” (Le Communisme).
[157] Michael Bakunin, The Confession of Mikhail Bakunin, Robert C. Howes, trans., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, page 38.
[158] Randolph, page 356.
