8. GAY PARIS
Could there have been a better time to be young and in Paris? Workers and intellectuals from all of Europe spilled out from the workshops, factories, cafes, and universities to discuss the most important political and social questions humanity has ever raised. But they were not content to debate. They met across the lines of ethnicity, status, and class to plan protests, strikes, and revolution. Posters, printed by volunteers who learned the rudiments of the craft on the run from police, were blazoned with slogans that combined the sophistication of the seminar with the heartfelt passion of the sweatshop. The tyrant trembled in his palace and the world watched with rapt attention and anticipation. Yes, Paris in 1968 was the place to be.
It paled, however, beside the Paris Bakunin entered in 1844. He brought with him only a trunk of clothing, a field cot, a washbasin, and a strong desire to join in the revolutionary movement. He would stay nearly four years in this city where emigre thinkers and political exiles met with migrant artisans, peasants, domestic servants, and factory hands who were beginning to understand themselves as a working class. The intellectual climate was headier even than that created by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre as Bakunin met authors and activists he had been reading from and about for years, including George Sand and Lamennais. Old friends and foes such as Ruge, Herzen, Belinsky, Turgenev, and Herwegh came. He encountered representatives from the spectrum of left-wing thought, from the Saint-Simonist Pierre Leroux to the Fourierist Victor Considerant, from the Utopian colonist Etienne Cabet to Karl Marx and Louis Blanc, who penned in 1839 perhaps the best short description of socialism ever: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
But the most important influence on Bakunin’s political thought in this period was the controversial and contrarian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The first to use the words “anarchy” and “anarchist” not as equivalents for “chaos” and “bogeyman” but as positive descriptions of his politics, he nonetheless ran for and was elected to a seat in the French National Assembly. Once there he reverted to his anarchist principles and voted against the adoption of a new constitution “not because it contains things of which I disapprove and does not contain things of which I approve. I vote against the constitution because it is a constitution.”[159] An advocate for the working class, he deplored strikes. His passion for liberty did not prevent him from defending capital punishment or torture, and his definition of humanity did not always include women. An avowed revolutionary, he remained aloof from much of the political struggle of his day and was a reluctant participant in the revolts of 1848; a fierce atheist, he loved to quote the Bible and to draw upon religious motifs and ethics in his writings and speeches.
His apparently contradictory ideas reflected the peculiarities of his class position. Proudhon’s family was poor and he wore to school the peasant’s wooden clogs, or sabots, whence the word “sabotage” may be derived, rather than leather shoes. But his family were independent peasants and self-employed artisans rather than wage workers. His father was unsuccessful at several small businesses, most notably a brewery, but still, he was a businessman. Proudhon himself worked as a printer and journalist, usually self-employed or in partnerships. His politics were consistent with this position somewhere between capital and labor. He regarded the state with animosity and despised big capital, and while he was sympathetic to workers, he was wary that unions would make it difficult for small employers such as himself to manage their workshops. His views were simultaneously progressive and reactionary as he hoped the world could go back to the future of an economy of small independent producers and a rough equality of all who toiled. His vision of the new society was one that retained the moral values and politics of an age that industrial capitalism was destroying and that dispensed with the new state apparatus that taxed and regulated and meddled. It was an ideology that reflected the vanishing world of the independent commodity producer, now increasingly squeezed between the capitalist class and the working class.
Yet it is too easy to dismiss his views as the narrow outcome of an ambiguous class position. He was, unquestionably, sometimes contradictory. Largely self-educated, his analysis often lacked rigor. He glossed over gaping holes and inconsistencies in his arguments that were immediately apparent to those well versed in philosophy and political economy. Still, if Proudhon was not a member of the industrial working class, his ideals of justice and equality spoke powerfully to artisans and laborers alike. He drew less on systematic analysis than upon older, ingrained traditions of liberty, of a moral economy, of a just price, and of rights, all expressed in language that was grasped immediately and intuitively by his audience. His arguments were less science than art, as they were intended to evoke an emotional response and to reflect back in more articulate form the aspirations and hopes of working people. He spoke of justice, not ratios of fixed and variable capital; neither he nor his audience needed intricate complex mathematic formulae or complex distinctions between labor and labor power to understand that capitalism robbed them of their land, their labor, and their dignity. The opening sentences of his most important book, What Is Property?, demonstrate the power of his ideas and passion:
If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is theft. [160]
Those who fear that Proudhon’s call to abolish private property means they would have to share their underpants may relax. He, like other socialists, distinguished between simple possessions and property that was used to exploit others. Proudhon believed that people were entitled only to that property, including land and machinery, that they could use employing only their own labor. Landlords and capitalists were parasites who used property to profit not from their own work but from that of others. It was, after all, the farm worker, not the landlord, who made the land productive. It was the factory worker, not the employer, who produced the goods. The landlord did not create the land; the capitalist did not build the factory or the machinery. They may have purchased land and machinery, but their money represented nothing more than the expropriated labor of others. Capitalists and landlords had no moral claim to property, for property was a legal fiction maintained by a state they had created of themselves, by themselves, and for themselves.
From property Proudhon turned to examine that state. His experience in the National Assembly reaffirmed his anarchist convictions; as he put it, “As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses; because I was absorbed by my legislative work, I entirely lost sight of the current of events ... The men who are most completely ignorant of the state of a country are almost always those who represent it ... Fear of the people is the sickness of all those who belong to authority; the people, for those in power, are the enemy.”[161] His observations on government may speak to readers today, when states that proclaim themselves to be freedom-loving democracies regularly erect surveillance cameras on public streets and send in masked, armored troops against their citizens, all in the name of liberty. “To be governed,” Proudhon wrote,
is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue, to do so ... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.[162]
Bakunin saw both the strengths and the weaknesses of Proudhon’s ideas. Unlike Bakunin and Marx, Proudhon was never a materialist or a realist. Instead, as Bakunin observed, Proudhon “remained all of his life an incorrigible idealist, drawing his inspiration sometimes from the Bible, sometimes from Roman law, and always from metaphysics. His great misfortune was that he had never studied the natural sciences, or taken up their methods.” Proudhon remained a “perpetual contradiction: a vigorous genius and revolutionary thinker who struggled against the phantoms of idealism yet was never able to overcome them.” What saved him were the “instincts of a genius that let him catch a glimpse of the right path.” He “understood and felt liberty” and “when he was not creating metaphysical doctrines,” Proudhon had “the true instinct of the revolutionary—he loved Satan and proclaimed anarchv.”[163] This instinct for revolt made Proudhon distinct from his fellow socialists. Cabet, Blanc, the Fourierists, the Saint-Simonians—and Bakunin might have added Weitling—all shared a “passion for regulation.” They sought to “indoctrinate and organize the future according to their ideas; they were, more or less, authoritarians.” But this “son of a peasant” was “in fact and in instinct a hundred times more revolutionarv than all these authoritarian and doctrinaire socialists. He armed himself with a profound, penetrating, unrelenting critique in order to destroy all their systems. Opposing liberty to authority, he boldly proclaimed himself an anarchist.” For Proudhon, and later Bakunin, socialism had to be founded on “individual as well as collective freedom” and on the “voluntary action of free associations,” without government regulation or sanction of the state, “subordinating politics to the economic, intellectual, and moral interests of the society.”[164]
Proudhon both shaped and echoed Bakunin’s own developing ideas on revolution. Socialism, or democracy, or communism—the words had less definite meanings at this time—had to ensure the rights of the community without sacrificing those of the individual. Capitalism, based on private property and exploitation, made a mockery of equality, while the state made a mockery of liberty. Taken together, the two institutions reinforced each other. The revolution had to make an end to both. What would replace them? It would be ridiculous to design the future in detail. Certainly it could be done; many earlier socialists were full of ambitious, intricate schemes, right down to the clothing people would wear. But such plans were repugnant to Proudhon and Bakunin. What mattered was that people should be free to design their own future, free from the compulsion of the state, free from the demands of capital, free from the manipulation of religion, and free even from the schematic designs of well-meaning socialists.
At the same time, by the fall of 1844, Bakunin, unlike Proudhon, and contrary to his critique of Weitling made the previous year, was now convinced that he was “a communist with all my heart.”[165] Despite this political difference, Bakunin genuinely liked Proudhon and they remained friends until the printer’s death in 1865. But while Proudhon usually did not to want to belong to any political club that would accept him, Bakunin understood the necessity of organizing and working with others, and in 1844, he took up the fight for Slavic independence from Russia. To strike at Nicholas I was to strike at the heart of reaction. The tsar repressed his own people as well as those nations under the yoke of empire, and through treaties and alliances, propped up autocrats across Europe. At the same time, the regime was creaking under its own weight; if one nation could be freed, would not others, conceivably even Russia itself, follow?
Poland provided the impetus. It had been contested terrain for centuries as its native inhabitants tried to carve out an independent existence from the competing empires of Russia, Austria, and Prussia while extending their own hegemony over Lithuania, Ukraine, and Sweden. Constantly invaded, it was divided up between its powerful neighbors three times between 1772 and 1795. The final partition wiped independent Poland off the map, placing the bulk of the country under the benighted tutelage of the tsar. Still the Poles fought on. No less than the rest of Europe, Poland was swept up by the waves of nationalism and Romanticism, and in November 1830 it launched an insurrection to free itself from Russia. At first an ill-planned attempt at a coup d’etat by Warsaw officer cadets, similar to the Decembrist revolt of 1825, it turned into a full-fledged revolt when workers and rank-and-file soldiers drawn from the peasantry broke into the arsenal and passed out weapons to the people. Suddenly the handful of conspirators found themselves at the head of a spontaneous militia of thirty thousand. Soon after, Poland declared itself independent.
The reaction of the tsar was fierce and resolute. Nicholas I sent in the Russian army with orders to crush the revolt decisively. But plagued metaphorically by incompetent officers, uninspired troops, and a resourceful Polish resistance, and literally by cholera that claimed among its victims the tsar’s brother Konstantin, the army took nine months to put down the insurrection. The brutal aftermath shocked much of Europe and confirmed Nicholas I as the leader of reaction and destroyer of nationalities, roughly analogous, some argue, to George W. Bush at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Bv the 1840s, Poland had a symbolic importance to democrats, republicans, nationalists, and revolutionaries, just as Spain would have in the 1930s and Poland would again in 1939 and 1980. Its failed revolutionaries made their way to Paris to continue to agitate and work for the liberation of their homeland, and in 1844 Bakunin threw himself into the struggle. He was, after all, no stranger to the iron hand of the tsar, who had sentenced him to Siberia and forced him out of Switzerland. He had some firsthand experience of the Russian repression of Poland as well, from his military exile to the frontiers. At the time, he had shown no sympathy to the Polish cause. He wrote to his cousin Sergei Muraviev that the company of the “good and simple Russian peasant” was infinitely preferable to that of the “noisy, silly chatter of the stupid Polish nobles,” and argued that the cruelty of the Russian government that had so outraged them while comfortably settled in St. Petersburg was absolutely necessary.[166] A decade later, the petulant, disgruntled young officer was now the thoughtful critic whose earlier experience gave him sympathetic insight into “the Polish question.”
His first act of solidarity was a short letter attacking the tsar, published in Louis Blanc’s radical newspaper La Reforme. Bakunin outlined the repressive nature of the regime. He pointed out that, contrary to popular belief, even nobles in Russia had no rights before the tsar. His own case, where he was sentenced without trial for relatively minor offenses on foreign soil, was evidence of that. While there was a senate of nobles, it was powerless against the tsar, who often intervened and overruled its decisions. In Russia, he thundered, “the law is nothing but the whim of the tsar.” As a result, the nobility was demoralized and apathetic, reduced to meaningless court intrigues and gossiping. While the rest of Europe engaged with the grand social questions of the epoch, the Russian nobility was occupied with wringing meaning out of every gesture made by a member of the royal family and laughing at the puns of the Grand Duke Michael. In truth, he observed, “there were no aristocrats, only servants, in St. Petersburg.”
Despite the ennui of the nobility, Bakunin held that there was hope for Russia. Democracy was possible; indeed, it was the only solution for both Russia and Poland. Certain members of the nobility, especially the younger generation, increasingly sought each other out to make sense of politics and work to end the repressive regime. More importantly, “the Russian people,” despite the terrible slavery and the policeman’s club, were “in [their] instincts and ways entirely democratic.” If the masses were uncivilized, they had an abundance of spirit and passion that proved they had “some great mission to realize in the world.” The hope of Russia lay in “that innumerable and imposing mass of humanity” that was advancing despite the efforts of the tsar. The insurrections of serfs against their lords were ill-formed and incomplete, it was true, but they were serious and growing. If the revolts could be organized and coordinated, it was not too much to hope that Russia would see either a great revolution or significant reforms.[167]
His observations were largely correct. New circles among the intellectuals had sprung up in Russia. The founder of the Petrashevsky circle in St. Petersburg was explicitly interested in Fourier and Proudhon, and there Fyodor Dostoevsky learned about politics. He learned too about repression: in 1849, the young novelist and other members of the circle were arrested and sentenced to death. Dressed in the white execution shirt and tied to the post against which he was to be shot, he was pardoned at the last moment. Another writer, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, traveled on the fringes of the Petrashevsky circle. Unlike Dostoevsky, he became more committed to the revolutionary ideal over time, writing his most famous work, the revolutionary, if exceedingly dull, novel What Is To Be Done? in the tsar’s prison. Bakunin was correct too about the volatility of the peasantry. By 1834, the secret police was forced to report that “every year, the idea of freedom spreads and grows stronger among the peasants owned by the nobles.” Acts of insubordination were on the rise, and most alarming, these increasingly stemmed not from “ill-treatment or abuses, but purely from the idea of obtaining the right to freedom.” The uprisings were localized and ill-planned, but Benckendorff, the head of the Third Section, warned that a crisis, such as famine, war, or the ever-popular outside agitator, could “easily provoke grave disturbances.” Admittedly, spies are noted for overcounting dissenters, for the spy who reports “all quiet” is soon out of a job. But the reported acts of insubordination more than doubled from 1834 to 1844, and peasants increasingly turned to violence: more than four hundred were deported to Siberia for the crime of attempted murder over the same period. Bakunin understood that this unrest was not a unified, conscious revolution, but it was cause for hope that all the tsar’s horses and all the tsar’s men could not completely extinguish the spark of rebellion.[168]
The following year, the Poles again raised the flags of revolt, national independence, and democracy in Cracow against the Austrian empire and in Poznan against the Prussian. Peasants attacked landlords and seized land while urban workers and miners set their sights on nobles and capitalists. But the revolt was not well coordinated and counterattacks by the armies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia put it down by early March.
The events in Poland galvanized Paris, not least because it was home to many refugees from the 1831 revolt. Bakunin recalled that “for two or three days the whole population lived on the streets; stranger spoke with stranger, everyone asked for news, and all awaited reports from Poland with anxious impatience.” The “common movement of passions and minds,” as he called it, “also seized me with its wave.” In a letter in the Paris newspaper Le Constitutionnel, he labeled the oppression of Poland a “disgrace,” and hoped that the insurrection would both liberate the Poles and point the way forward for Russia. Pointing out that the tsar had long been dedicated to destroying Poland as a country and as a nation, he assured readers that the stories of atrocities that were surfacing were completely in keeping with the tsar’s aims and past practices.[169]
While he volunteered his services to the exiled Polish community in Versailles and supported the local agitation, the defeat of the uprising threw the movement into chaos and recriminations. It was difficult enough for Poles to trust each other, let alone a Russian noble. Bakunin’s revolutionary democracy was of less interest to emigre Polish nobles, many of whom saw in revolution only their opportunity to replace the Russian nobility. Furthermore, national liberation was, for Bakunin, about liberation, not nationalism, but the Poles were “narrow, limited, exclusive. They saw nothing but Poland.”[170]
Despite his misgivings, when asked to speak at a banquet to commemorate the 1831 uprising, he responded enthusiastically. This was more than an opportunity to give an amusing after-dinner talk on the rubber chicken circuit. Banquets had long been a customary forum for revolutionary organizing where other forms of political activity were banned. They bridged the gap between secret meetings and open-air rallies and provided an admirable pretext for assembling hundreds of people without alarming the authorities. They performed a valuable cultural function as well. Solidarity is about more than agreeing on common ideas. It is about building trust and support between people, and sharing food is one way humans begin that process.
Bakunin’s prepared talk ran to ten pages and he delivered it with power and conviction. He started by reminding his audience that their very presence at the banquet, some fifteen hundred strong, was itself an act of defiance “thrown into the face of all the oppressors of Poland.” He understood, as they did, that Russia was one of the “principal causes of all their misfortunes,” yet he stood before them as a Russian, and one who proclaimed his pride in being Russian. He explained this apparent paradox by making the important distinction between the Russian government and the Russian people. The government was rightly condemned as “an ever-growing danger to the liberty of peoples,” a virtual synonym for “brutal oppression” and “shameful oppression.” But the Russian people were no less victims than the Poles and other repressed nationalities. For that reason, the struggle for Poland was also a struggle for Russia. For that reason, Russians too could honor the memory of the struggle of 1831 and celebrate the spirit of freedom that it represented, just as all could revere the Decembrists who met their death in the cause of liberty.
He was a Russian repentant of the crimes of his government, but one who dared to proclaim his love and respect for Poland and who dared to urge the Poles to ally themselves with the people of Russia against the government that oppressed them all. It was precisely because the Poles were the enemy of the tsar that they were the friends of the Russian people. The people, he continued, were oppressed but not corrupted. Despite their suffering, they remained vigorous, powerful, and vibrant. Peasants, progressives from all classes, the generation of nobility that was coming of age, even soldiers in the tsar’s army, were alive to the need for reform and change. Despite its apparent strength, the regime was hollow. It had no popular support and depended instead on lies and brutality to preserve the myth of omnipotence and control. Its most powerful weapon was the disarray among the Russian people and the lack of unity between Russians and Poles. If that unity could be forged, with Russian and Pole “united by the same ideas, fighting for the same cause against a common enemy,” it would mean “the emancipation of sixty million people, the liberation of all the Slav people who groan under a foreign yoke, finally, the fall, the ultimate fall, of despotism in Europe.”[171]
The crowd went wild as the fifteen hundred rebels, exiles, and radicals jumped to their feet to cheer and applaud. The enthusiastic response showed Bakunin that the cause of Slavic liberation was a window of opportunity. But his speech also opened a door. The Russian authorities soon learned of Bakunin’s remarks and their overwhelming reception. Indeed, since they undoubtedly had spies in the audience, the Third Section probably knew about it before the banquet plates were cleared away. When the Russian ambassador pressured the French government to expel Bakunin, the minister of the interior showed him the exit within a fortnight. Bakunin headed to Brussels. It was a revolutionary backwater compared to Paris. The Polish community was riven and squabbling, and Bakunin soon sought out other political groups. Chief among these was the Democratic Federation, a loose organization of workers and intellectuals bound not by nationality or craft but by left-wing ideas. The leading figure in the Federation was Karl Marx, who, like Bakunin, had recently been thrown out of France. They had the potential to be a dream team of the left. The one synthesized complex arguments and delivered them with power to crowds of workers and peasants; the other sat in undershorts of iron to produce voluminous research and turn dry debates and facts into revolutionary ideas. Bakunin’s writings were always dashed off, often left unfinished, always left unedited, yet still had the power to move the reader; Marx polished and edited and elaborated, making brilliant deductions and beautiful analyses that took years to craft. Every political movement, like any other collective endeavor, requires different skills and abilities. It needs educators, popularizers, theorists, organizers, dreamers, pragmatists, logicians, rebels, lovers, and fighters. Though each of us may have some of these qualities at different stages in our lives, no one has all of them, and it is impossible to know the correct configuration and balance needed at any particular moment. Too often rebels think pragmatists to be cowards while the pragmatists see the rebels as crazy adventurists who will wreck the movement with their hormone-laced politics; the popularizers get bored by the academic theorists, the theorists are embarrassed by the simplistic formulations of the popularizers, and so on. With luck, different individuals with different attributes come together and find a healthy, dynamic tension. If the strengths of Bakunin and Marx could have been combined, they would have made the hottest duo until Jimi Hendrix met Leo Fender.
They had much in common, including a physical resemblance, though Bakunin towered over Marx. Both came from privilege. Marx’s father was a prosperous Trier lawyer who sent his son to the best schools and universities. Marx himself would marry into the German aristocracy; his brother-in-law would become the Prussian minister of the interior in charge of the police. Like Bakunin, Marx drove his father mad with his insistence on studying philosophy rather than something practical, his reckless spending and borrowing, and his refusal to take up an orthodox career. Marx studied under some of the same instructors at the University of Berlin, though unlike Bakunin he would receive his doctorate, from the University of Jena, notable for being a bit of a diploma mill. The two made similar treks through German idealism, Hegel, and Europe, propelled across the continent by the police. They published in the same journals, had many of the same friends, acquaintances, enemies, and intellectual interests, and even used similar metaphors and tropes in their writing. Their politics, until 1848, were roughly similar, as both could be classified as radical democrats who looked to workers and elements of the middle class to lead revolutions to secure political gains such as suffrage and constitutions and to redress economic grievances. While both spoke of the importance of the developing working class, neither had much acquaintance with it, for both traveled in the circles of artisans and intellectuals and emigres rather than the proletariat. Their politics were more alike than not, though some important differences would develop over time; both remained dedicated revolutionaries who grappled creatively with some of the most important questions humanity has faced. Each shaped the ideas of the other, yet over a relationship that spanned thirty years they went from nodding acquaintance to grudging respect to academic disagreement to personal and political loathing.[172]
Bakunin respected Marx’s intellectual abilities and frequently found himself in agreement with him. In particular, he quickly understood that Marx’s development of historical materialism as a way of understanding history and revolutionary change was essentially correct. While Marx rarely acknowledged intellectual debts, his mature ideas owed much to his engagement with anarchism and anarchists, from Stirner to Proudhon to Bakunin, for Marx usually developed his ideas through criticizing others, in the best dialectical fashion. But he and Bakunin never really liked each other, and it is hard to separate their personal animosity from their political differences. Some of their hostility was undoubtedly due to their very different personalities. Bakunin summed it up frankly, admitting that while in Paris in the 1840s, “we were friendly enough ... we were never really close. Our temperaments did not allow it. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I called him vain, treacherous, and cunning, and I too was right.”[173] Where Bakunin was expansive and personable, Marx tended to be confrontational and belligerent. Bakunin preferred the bold, insightful overstatement to the precise, diligent layered arguments Marx crafted; quickly grasping and sketching the essence of an idea, Bakunin had little patience for the extended, detailed research and careful elaboration that occupied much of Marx’s life.
Each liked to argue, each liked to be right, and each had a competitive nature, though they competed on different fields. Bakunin was on good terms with leading activists such as Weitling and Proudhon, while Marx was not. Marx’s work as a writer and editor had brought him some attention, but none of it had had the impact of Bakunin’s “Reaction in Germany.” Even Marx’s most famous work, the Communist Manifesto, first published in 1848, was virtually ignored outside of small circles of German artisans and intellectuals until the 1870s. It was Bakunin, not Marx, who brought the crowd to its feet. Marx, with his high, nasal, academic delivery might impress with his logic, but rarely with his sheer presence. Bakunin fashioned an effective speaking style aimed at convincing people through the forceful expression of his ideas rather than careful exposition. Nonetheless, he realized and graciously conceded Marx’s talent and ability. Nearly thirty years later, in the middle of a foul confrontation with Marx, Bakunin recalled that when they first met in 1844, Marx “was much more advanced than I was, as he remains more advanced and incomparably more learned than I today. I knew nothing then about political economy, I had not given up metaphysical abstractions, and my socialism was only instinctive.” In contrast, Marx, four years younger, was already a “well-informed materialist and a reflective socialist.” Bakunin respected Marx for his “learning and for his passionate and serious devotion ... to the cause of the proletariat,” and enjoyed their “instructive and lively” conversations. Nonetheless, he was aware of the “vanity, spitefulness, and gossip” that characterized Marx’s work with the Democratic Federation in the 1840s.[174]
Their prejudices too played a role in their quarrels. Marx was quick to denounce Slavs as a backward, reactionary people; unlike “civilized Germanv,” Russia had “nonsensical prophets and nonsensical followers,” and he often included Bakunin in that characterization. But both men had an ample share of the racial ideas and racism of their age, and these escaped from their leaky ids in the heat of polemics with each other. They were also quick to indulge in class prejudices when they fought. Marx was dismissive of Bakunin’s aristocratic roots and Bakunin was sardonic about Marx’s bourgeois behavior and hypocrisy. Engels and Marx—especially Marx, Bakunin complained—labeled everyone who disagreed with them “bourgeois,” though the two remained “more bourgeois than anyone in a provincial city.” Worse, their engagement with the Democratic Alliance amounted to little more than a “disgusting flirtation” with workers.[175]
This last criticism of Marx and Engels, however, had some substance to it. Stripped of its class prejudice, it reflected a fundamental political difference centered on the role of intellectuals in workers’ movements. The question surfaced in the practical political questions of the 1840s and would continue to frame the conflict between Bakunin and Marx, anarchists and communists, for decades.
Intellectuals and workers formed an uneasy alliance in the 1840s, and important differences divided the left and labor movements. Intellectuals, including Bakunin, Marx, and Engels, were not from the working class, however much they pledged to serve the working class. This prompted an important question: how could non-workers understand and speak for workers? Certainly they could empathize with the plight of workers; they could offer useful analyses, and they could put their skills at the service of working-class organizations. But they did not share the same experiences of work, culture, and class. This was not a problem for earlier socialist theorists such as Robert Owen or Saint-Simon who believed that workers were unable to understand the real nature of political and economic problems and so would have to have the solutions imposed upon them. But thinkers such as Bakunin and Marx believed that ideas were not created in a vacuum and were not just the product of speculation and contemplation: they stemmed from specific economic and political conditions, and they in large part reflected the material interests of the people who held them. That monarchs believed in the divine right of kings told you nothing about God or rights, but did tell you something important about the self-interest of kings. That capitalists insisted on the rights of property told you nothing about natural justice but did indicate fairly clearly how they profited from the system. That workers organized around principles of justice and liberty that they defined differently than kings and employers did suggested that they too knew on which side their bread was buttered and that class experience and class interests influenced ideas as much as pure thought.
Marx and Engels emphatically set out the argument that ideas came from the material, economic, and real world in “The German Ideology.” Written in 1846, but not published until 1932, the manuscript summed up their powerful critique of idealism. To those who believed that ideas had an independent existence or were the result of independent cogitation, they responded fiercely:
The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are, i.e., as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these ...
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process ... Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. [176]
“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” This was the crucial insight developed by Marx and Engels, and it was one that Bakunin enthusiastically shared. Indeed, it expressed more forcefully and concretely ideas he had been developing in his writings of the 1830s and early 1840s. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” This was the lever needed to pry off centuries of mystification and ideology; it was the tool Weitling and Proudhon reached for but could not quite take hold of as they struggled to understand and change the world.
It was, however, a tool that could bark the knuckles of those who applied it. If consciousness—ideas—were determined by life, how could intellectuals speak for workers? Weren’t the ideas of intellectuals formed by their material existence, which was different from that of workers? After all, Marx was quick to label Feuerbach’s ideas as “bourgeois,” Proudhon’s as “petit bourgeois sentimentality,” and Proudhon himself as “from head to foot ... the philosopher and economist of the lower middle class.” For his part, Proudhon was content to reply that “Marx is the tapeworm of socialism,” but the question still arose: by the logic of his own argument, how could Marx’s political program transcend his own class interest? After all, kings and capitalists and politicians all insisted that they were really acting in the interests of everyone, even when it was pretty obvious that they weren’t. Why should workers regard Marx differently? What made him immune from his materialist explanation? [177]
Marx’s answer was not altogether convincing. While workers learned only from their own experience, Marx held that the “communist consciousness ... may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation” of the working class. As the proletarian revolution approached, “a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole,” would go “over to the proletariat.” That is to say, intellectuals could form the correct consciousness not from their own class experience but from contemplation and understanding, theoretically, the movement of history.[178]
This was, however, not an answer that would satisfy the artisans and workers. To many of them, it appeared to be merely a way of exempting intellectuals such as Marx and Engels from their own theory of materialist history. This was pointed out rather firmly by thinkers such as Weitling and Proudhon who noted that it was certainly an interesting coincidence that Herr Doktor Marx was willing to grant a special dispensation to people like himself. In contrast, they insisted that the job of liberating workers had to fall to the workers themselves, and that included developing social and political theory. Where Marx insisted that theoretical knowledge was the key, they argued instead that political will was more important, and workers, not intellectuals, had that by virtue of their oppression.
Nonetheless, Marx’s argument that other groups could comprehend the movement of history was an important insight, for it suggested that ideology could not simply be reduced to class experience. One could not know someone’s ideas merely by calculating their class position; ideas could not be simply reduced to class. Nor did Marx insist they could. Historical materialism was not a precise mathematical equation but rather a method of analysis that introduced material interests into the realm of ideas. But this was an insight that cut both ways. If bourgeois thinkers and ideologists such as he and Engels could make the leap to understand the ideas necessary for other classes, why couldn’t artisans such as Weitling and Proudhon? They were, after all, much closer to the experience of workers than Marx and Engels. What prevented former aristocrats such as Bakunin from understanding the path of history? For that matter, why couldn’t peasants extrapolate from their experience and thought to contribute to the debate over freedom and equality? Why should intellectuals assume the role of spokesperson for the working class? On what grounds could they claim to lead workers, either politically or theoretically? One of course could argue that time would tell who was correct and that many of the issues could be resolved empirically. But this was not a scientific experiment that could be run and run again to duplicate results; it was a social movement that had to proceed very differently. And as a social movement, it was also comprised of human beings who jostled and competed to be heard. Undoubtedly some too wished to be followed. Each side used their best arguments to make their case. Marx claimed theoretical rigor and precision. Workers and worker-intellectuals such as Proudhon and Weitling explicitly denied that academic intellectuals should be privileged. They argued instead that experience and firsthand knowledge justified their positions as the leaders and theoreticians of working-class movements, and the debate continues to this day.
Marx responded to their challenge in two ways. First, he took on Weitling and Proudhon directly. Marx had little contact with workers’ organizations but in 1845 he helped create a new body that would become the Communist League. Engels, Marx’s wife, Jenny, one of her brothers, and Weitling were the most significant members of the tiny, clandestine group. In Brussels on 30 March 1846, at a meeting called, chaired, and stacked by Marx, Weitling was subjected to a verbal assault by the good doctor. “Tell us, Weitling,” he thundered, “you people who have made such a rumpus in Germany with your communist preachings and have won over so many workers, causing them to lose their jobs and their crust of bread, with what fundamental principles do you justify your revolutionary and social activity and on what basis do you intend affirming it in the future?” He then demanded that Weitling tell the group “what are the arguments with which you defend your social-revolutionary agitation and on what do you intend to base it in the future?”
Weitling was visibly taken aback by the unprovoked attack. His interrogator was, after all, the same man who had earlier praised his work as a writer and a leader and who had sought him out to take part in the new organization. He started to answer, pointing out that his aim was not to devise new socioeconomic theories but to “open the workers’ eyes” to the horrors and injustices and to teach them to trust not in governments or messiahs but in themselves. Marx cut him off and blistered him with sarcasm. What workers needed, Marx interjected, was not fantastic hopes but “a rigorous scientific idea” and a “positive doctrine.” Anything else was merely an “empty and dishonest game,” appropriate perhaps for barbaric Russia but not for a “civilized country like Germany.” Weitling responded by pointing out that he had mobilized thousands of workers, that he had inspired and educated them, not through preaching theories but by making sense of their experience. This work was, he suggested, more use than the philosophy and theory generated in ivory towers. He pointed to his own relative success as an author. Weitling had, after all, published three books, while Marx had produced little more than some newspaper articles. At that moment, Marx pounded the table and shouted, “Ignorance has never yet helped anybody,” and the meeting broke up. Marx and Engels followed up on this ritual humiliation by slandering Weitling among other groups, intimating that someone else had written his books, denouncing his ideas to anyone who would listen, and attacking his supporters. Soon after, Weitling left Europe for the United States.[179]
Proudhon avoided a direct confrontation with Marx, largely because he declined Marx’s offer to join with him in the Communist League. He had some intimation of what was up and may well have heard of Weitling’s humiliating experience. In answer to Marx’s invitation, Proudhon professed “an almost total anti-dogmatism in economics ... For God’s sake ... do not let us think of indoctrinating the people in our turn.” He was concerned that socialist thinkers should avoid “your compatriot Martin Luther’s inconsistency,” that is, of smashing Catholicism only to institute the “shambles” of Protestantism. “Let us set the world an example of wise and farsighted tolerance, but simply because we are leaders of a movement let us not instigate a new intolerance. Let us not set ourselves up as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic or of reason. Let us welcome and encourage all protests, let us get rid of all exclusiveness and all mysticism ... On this condition I will join your association with pleasure, otherwise I will not.”[180]
The letter went unanswered. Instead, Marx devoted himself to a lengthy critique of Proudhon’s new book, System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty. Entitled The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx’s review ran to over 160 pages. A brilliant polemic in which Marx developed further his ideas of historical materialism, it was nonetheless widely interpreted as a sneak attack on a thinker who had contributed much to the left-wing movement and to Marx’s own ideas. For many, it reinforced the suspicion that Marx privileged academic intellectuals over workers, and they could point to some of his earlier work to buttress their argument. In 1844, for example, in a critique of Weitling and others, he had written that “we do not then set ourselves opposite the world with a doctrinaire principle, saying: ‘Here is the truth, kneel down here!’ It is out of the world’s own principles that we develop for it new principles. We do not say to her, ‘Stop your battles, they are stupid stuff. We want to preach the true slogans of battle to you.’ We merely show it what it is actually fighting about, and this realization is a thing that it must make its own even though it may not wish to.” This passage may sound liberating, but the skeptic may interpret this to mean that while Marx insists he is not laying down doctrine, he is saying that intellectuals divine the real nature of struggle and history.[181] In the same year, he wrote, “As philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning of thought has struck deep into the virgin soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be completed.” However much one might agree with the idea that philosophers and workers should unite, one does not have to be Freud, Fellini, or a psychohistorian to raise an eyebrow at that metaphor. But if there was any doubt about who was going to get their virginity electrocuted by whom, Marx removed it when he concluded that “The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat.” Naturally, the head is to rule the heart, or so many workers and others believed Marx intended.[182]
Marx’s second response was less violent and less sectarian. Politics was one thing, and he had jousted successfully with the best the workers’ movement could throw at him. However, the real proof of his ideas lay not in political squabbles but in research. He would soon abandon active politics for the archives. He would continue to write philosophy, history, and political economy, but would largely curtail political activism for several years, working instead, as one writer has suggested, as a consultant to the labor and left movements, though often an ill-tempered and prickly one.[183]
Bakunin resolved the issue of the relationship of workers and intellectuals differently. Certainly he believed in education and criticism; he did not believe that experience alone yielded all the answers, and he was often critical of Proudhon and Weitling. Aware of their very real limits as thinkers and theorists, still Bakunin understood that their experience both limited and enhanced their insights, and he preferred not to savage them but to appreciate their strengths. For him, the answer to the revolutionary question “What is to be done?” lay in the blending of experience and theory, of action and ideas. Following Fichte’s insight, Bakunin continued to believe that everyone, including intellectuals who learned life’s lessons in the academy, could learn from everyone. Furthermore, Bakunin held that it was less important to get one’s metaphysics together than to act. Unlike Marx, Bakunin was inclined to believe it was more valuable to reach thousands with a message that was a little less clear than to reach scores with the tightly argued results of years of research. Furthermore, he believed that actions spoke louder than words in the revolutionary Europe of 1845–1848. Where Marx was busy trying to “make workers into logicians,” Bakunin threw himself into the tumult of 1848.[184] What mattered as much as theory was actively supporting movements of liberation. Marx too understood the necessity of uniting theory and action. After all, in 1845, he had proclaimed in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” While both might agree on the answer, each was drawn, through personality, experience, and analysis, to assign a different value to each of the factors.[185]
Even at the level of theory, however, the two differed in a substantial and meaningful way by 1848. Bakunin had, in “The Reaction in Germany,” argued for a two-part dialectic, in which revolution would smash the existing social relations and replace them with a new, if vaguely sketched, political and economic structure. Such an argument reflected the Russian experience, where any attempts at progressive discussion, let alone political reform, resulted in sudden and severe repression. There could be no hope of gradual change and progress; the Third Section saw to that. In the tsar’s empire, it could be only revolution or nothing; a middle path was an invitation to suicide. In the 1840s, Marx, reflecting the greater possibility for reform in the West, tended to argue in a more traditional Hegelian mode that social change would build on existing structures and move in stages through the triadic formula. In particular, it would evolve in response to the expansion of society’s “productive forces,” that is, the development of humanity’s ability to create more goods, from foodstuffs to luxury goods. The revolution could not be accomplished until an appropriate level of production had been reached. Ironically, this meant that Marx, later respected and reviled as the archrevolutionary, came under fire in the 1840s for not being revolutionary enough. After all, it was Marx who told “the workers and petit bourgeois” in 1849 that “it is better to suffer in the contemporary bourgeois society, whose industry creates the means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you, than to revert to a bygone society, which, on the pretext of saving your classes, thrusts the entire nation back into medieval barbarism.” This was hardly Marx’s last word on revolution. In the previous sentence, he had been careful to assure his readers that “we are certainly the last people to desire the rule of the bourgeoisie.” But coming at the end of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, neither was it a clear call to action. As a result, Marx’s article was widely interpreted as a rejection of proletarian revolution until certain economic and political conditions had developed sufficiently.[186]
This may seem a rather esoteric point on which even unreasonable minds might cheerfully agree to differ. Yet it had some very practical and immediate consequences. It meant that Bakunin supported open revolt wherever it appeared, believing that successful revolution did not depend solely on society reaching an appropriate stage of development. Tyranny had to be opposed and rebellion supported, if only to maintain the habit of resistance so later generations had precedents to point to and draw upon. It was easy to sit back and preach that socialism could only be reached after capitalism had developed the means of production to a sufficient level, but how could one tell when that level had been reached? In the meantime, what did one tell starving workers? For that matter, if socialism had to build on capitalism, did that mean peasants, indigenous people, and slaves were supposed to ... to what? Fight to create capitalism so they could be exploited as workers? Was the revolutionary supposed to fight only for the next stage of Marx’s dialectic? How was that supposed to motivate anyone? Workers might not grasp the intricacies of economic theory, but they understood where the shoe pinched and when the stomach grumbled. Revolt was a response to existing conditions, not a meta-historical process known only to professors and aimed at fulfilling their predictions. If Marx could afford to wait for the appropriate level of material production, starving workers and those under the lash of empire could not, and Bakunin believed his place was with them, even if it was clear that mass revolution was unlikely or impossible.
Of course, Marx did not simply advocate that workers should wait passively for the productive relations to develop. He made many different arguments at different times on the nature of revolution. Historians still debate which was the “real” Marx, and in the volumes of his work one can find evidence to support nearly every political position. In 1850, for example, he theorized on the possibility of “permanent revolution,” an idea Bakunin developed independently later. Marx suggested that it was possible for workers to fight alongside the middle class against the aristocracy to establish capitalism, then, once that battle was won, immediately take up the struggle for socialism against their erstwhile allies. Even here, however, he was careful to insist this was a strategy applicable only in Germany, where the productive forces were well developed. His idea of permanent revolution was not a prescription for workers to go beyond stages of economic development so much as an acknowledgment that one nation might already be sufficiently developed. In any case, he would quickly reject the permanent revolution even for Germany.[187]
More consistently, Marx argued against Weitling, Proudhon, Bakunin, and others that while revolution was inevitable it required the development of productive forces, the transition from earlier forms of production to capitalism, and the development of capitalism to the point where the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were the two significant classes. Thus in 1842, when Bakunin was calling for revolution, Marx warned of the “crisis of conscience caused by the rebellion of man’s subjective desires against the objective insights of his own reason ... Ideas that have overcome our intellect and conquered our conviction, ideas to which reason has riveted our conscience, are chains from which one cannot break loose without breaking one’s heart.” It was theoretical error he sought to eradicate even then.[188] Two years later Marx warned that “revolutionary energy and intellectual self-confidence alone are not enough to gain this position of self-emancipation. Revolutions need a passive element, a material base ... It is not enough that thought should tend toward reality, reality must also tend toward thought.” What did that material base consist of? In Germany, it meant that for “one class [to] appear as the class of liberation, another class must inversely be the manifest class of oppression.” The class of liberation was to be the proletariat, but as Marx admitted, the proletariat was just beginning to form in Germany. Sixty-five percent of the population still lived on the land and faced poverty in near-feudal conditions. Marx’s prescription in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 was for workers to join with the bourgeoisie to secure the bourgeois revolution.[189] True, he hoped that immediately after that revolution workers would move straight on to a proletarian one, but the crucial message was one of fighting for the development of capitalism. Marx’s logic was clear enough: Socialism required the full development of capitalism and classes before it could succeed.
It is an argument he would continue to develop throughout his life. In 1859, it was summed up nicely: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.” In Capital, first published in 1867, he insisted that it was not until “the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production,” not until “centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument” that “the knell of capitalist private property sounds.”[190]
Again his critics asked, what precisely did this mean for displaced artisans and proletarians? How long was one supposed to wait? One Marxist cheerfully would argue 156 years after the Communist Manifesto that capitalism still had a long life ahead of it and that Marx would still be cautioning us to hold off on that socialist project a little longer.[191] What, for that matter, did it mean to Eastern Europe, which was just beginning to industrialize and where the vast majority of the population were peasants? Were they supposed to give up being exploited peasants to become exploited proletarians, buoyed by the appreciation that this new form of oppression was another example of the universe unfolding as it should? Marx gave a hint in the Communist Manifesto, where he declared that one of the great virtues of capitalism was that it had “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” As capitalism spread, it would make “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”[192] Marx’s thinking in the 1840s was less an appreciation of the plight of serfs than a wordy elaboration of King Arthur’s dismissal of Dennis—”Bloody peasant!”—in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Bakunin, on the other hand, argued that peasants and workers had much to teach intellectuals. He believed that the peasants of Russia were further advanced than Marx held, for they understood that the formal, political freedom represented by the bourgeois revolutions in the West meant little without economic freedom. For the peasant, that meant possession and ownership of the land, not as private property but on the basis of the peasant commune. “The peasants reason very clearly on this subject,” he wrote in 1849. “They do not say ‘the land of our master,’ but ‘our land.’ The social character of the Russian revolution is already set out, already bound up in the nature of the people and their communal organization.” That suggested that they did not need to go through the same historical stages of capitalism to create socialism. Furthermore, the peasants had the revolutionary tradition and memory of Pugachev. Folklore and memory reminded them how the peasantry had torched the castles and piled high the corpses of nobles and functionaries, how even Catherine the Great had “trembled on her throne” until Pugachev had been captured. “The memory of these popular heroes continues to live,” he reminded his readers,” and still “the people speak with pride of the era of the Pugachev uprising.” Peasants, far from being an immovable object, had reason to revolt and traditions of social, collective production and resistance that were as empowering as the full development of the productive forces. They need not wait until Russia became capitalist before embarking on revolution. In 1848, he believed that it was time for workers and peasants to take revolutionary action on their own behalf. His evidence for this was the fact that they were taking such action.[193]
The point is not that Bakunin was right and Marx was wrong, or vice versa. Bakunin admitted later that he had been “carried awav bv the intoxication of the revolutionary movement” of 1848 and had been “much more concerned with the negative than the positive side of the revolution.” Marx, he conceded, had largely been right in arguing that the time was not appropriate. [194] For his part, Marx would fundamentally rethink his positions on revolution, Russia, and peasants. Furthermore, it is easy to overstate their differences. Those who argue, for example, that Marx was essentially a liberal democrat in this period are surely mistaken. Those who insist that he was a technological determinist, that is, someone who believed that history was essentially a process of technological change in which human activity mattered little, depend on a reading that is too narrow and selective to be persuasive. At the same time, Bakunin’s position has often been parodied as an idealist belief in willpower, that one could make the revolution no matter what the objective reality. This was a position he emphatically denied repeatedly throughout his life. Nor is it fair to conclude that Bakunin was the man of action while Marx was the man of theory, or as has been recently suggested, that Bakunin was the “heart,” Marx the “head” of the revolution. Such a conclusion underestimates the contributions each made to theory and practice and simultaneously undercuts the fact that social struggles are about collective action, not individual effort.
What is apparent is that the two had taken on different, if overlapping, revolutionary projects. Marx’s primary concern was to analyze the structural causes of revolution and historical change. The Communist Manifesto is a brilliant example of this, as relevant today as in 1848. Bakunin, on the other hand, was chiefly concerned with revolutionary methods and tactics. He would support revolt wherever it broke out, believing that the example of rebellion would inspire others, that workers and peasants understood from the conditions of their lives that freedom meant struggle, that resistance might be doomed but it was never futile. The two projects were not necessarily antithetical. Ideally, each could have contributed creatively to the other. In practice, they more often led to misinterpretation and suspicion that lasted until Bakunin’s death in 1876 and continues between anarchists and Marxists to the present day.[195]
In 1848, their differences of theory, personality, and philosophy took them in very different directions. As Europe roiled, Bakunin threw himself on the barricades of Paris and Dresden while Marx would begin his long trek through the British Museum.
[159] Cited in Carr, page 130.
[160] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, Benjamin Tucker, trans., reprint, Dover: New York, 1970. Tucker translates Proudhon’s vol as “robbery”; I have substituted “theft,” the more usual translation.
[161] Cited in George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Life and Work, New York: Schocken Books, 1972, page 129.
[162] Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, John Beverly Robinson, trans., London: Pluto Press, 1989, page 294.
[163] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Freres de 1’Alliance en Espagne,” 12–13 June 1872. Weirdly enough, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx have each been accused of Satanism. In an otherwise insightful article, Eric Voegelin states confidently, though without evidence, that Bakunin openly embraced Satanism. An entire book has been written to “prove” that Marx worshipped the devil. Voeglin’s remark is in “Bakunin’s Confession,” Journal of Politics, 8, no. 1 (February 1946), page 38. Marx’s alleged obeisance to His Satanic Majesty is explored fully, if crazily, by Pastor Richard Wurmbrand in Was Marx a Satanist? Glendale, Cal.: Diane Books, 1977. Among Wurmbrand’s evidence is the fact that Marx had a beard. Radicals often spoke of Old Nick as the first rebel, appreciating the spirit of revolt in his insistence that it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. Bakunin’s reference to Proudhon and Satan is a literary, not a literal, one.
[164] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Federalisme, socialisme, et antitheologisme,” 1867–1868. I have translated spontanee not as “spontaneous” but as “voluntary.” The French word conveys both meanings, depending on context, as does the English word. Bakunin’s critics have often criticized him for believing in the “spontaneous” rise of the masses. Since he insisted on the role of education, propaganda, and experience in creating revolutionary consciousness, it is clear that he did not believe that a “spontaneous” revolt would be one without external incitement. Thus “voluntary” is a much more accurate translation.
[165] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Rienold Solger, 18 October 1844.
[166] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Sergei N. Muraviev, end of January 1835.
[167] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to La R forme, January 1845.
[168] Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966, pages 64–6.
[169] Bakunin, Confession, pages 50–1; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Le Constitutional, 6 February 1846.
[170] Bakunin, Confession, page 52.
[171] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Discours: 17th anniversaire de la revolution polonaise,” 29 November 1847.
[172] For interesting discussions of the relationship of anarchist and Marxist thought, see Anthony D’Agostino, Marxism and the Russian Anarchists, San Francisco: Germinal Press, 1977; and Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. These books are rather more favorable to Marx than Bakunin. K. J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx, Melbourne: A. Mailer, 1948, presents Bakunin in a more sympathetic and thoughtful light. Alvin Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, offers an insightful discussion on this subject, arguing that Bakunin was the first post-Marxist.
[173] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Rapports personnels avec Marx. Pieces justicatives,” 1871.
[174] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Rapports personnels avec Marx: Pieces justicatives,” 1871; letter to Georg Herwegh, end of December 1847.
[175] Marx cited in P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs, Irwin R. Titunik, trans., Arthur P. Mendel, ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968, page 169. For other examples see Stephen Porter Halbrook, “The Marx-Bakunin Controversy: Intellectual Origins, 1844–1870,” Ph.D. thesis, Florida State University College, 1972. Marx’s works contain numerous unflattering references to Russia and Russians. Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Georg Herwegh, end of December 1847.
[176] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology,” Karl Marx: Selected Writings, second edition, David McLellan, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pages 180–1. Emphasis added.
[177] Marx to P. V. Annenkov, 28 December 1846, in The Poverty of Theory: Answer to the “Philosophy of Poverty” by M. Proudhon, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pages 177–8. Proudhon cited in Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, page 102.
[178] “German Ideology,” page 195; Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, London: Verso, 1998, page 47. Alvin Gouldner makes this argument in greater length in Against Fragmentation. He also develops the argument that follows about the competition between artisans and intellectuals in the 1840s.
[179] Annenkov, pages 168–79; Gouldner, pages 93–100; Wittke, pages 104–20.
[180] Proudhon to Marx, 17 May 1846, in Selected Writings of P. J. Proudhon, Stewart Edwards, ed., Elizabeth Fraser, trans., Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967, pages 150–1.
[181] Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing,” Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, 1844, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition, New York: Norton, 1978, pages 14–5.
[182] Marx, “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” McLellan, pages 80–1.
[183] Gouldner, Against Fragmentation, page 139.
[184] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to P. A. Annenkov, 28 December 1847.
[185] Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” Selected Works, volume 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, page 15.
[186] Marx, Montesquieu LVI, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, pages 21–2, January 1849, in Marx and Engels, Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848–49, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972, page 225.
[187] Marx and Engels, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” in Selected Works, volume 1, 1977, pages 175–85. See Gouldner, Against Fragmentation, pages 126–37.
[188] Marx, “Communism and the Augsburger AUegemeine Zeitung,” in McLellan, pages 25–6.
[189] Marx, “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” McLellan, 81; Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pages 76–7.
[190] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970, page 21; Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1, 1867, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983, chapter 22, “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,” page 715.
[191] Meghnad Desai, Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism, New York: Verso, 2004.
[192] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, page 40.
[193] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “La situation en Russe—le people,” April 1849.
[194] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Rapports personnels avec Marx.”
[195] For a contemporary observation of the two different projects of anarchists and Marxists, see David Graeber, Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.
