BAKUNIN’S WRITINGS

Anarchists have rarely been considered good commercial risks by mainstream publishers. Nor have there been friendly states eager to subsidize the production of their collected works, as was the case with Marx and Engels. As a result, several attempts to publish the collected works of Bakunin were begun and abandoned over the years. The complete works of Bakunin were finally made available on CD-ROM in Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 2000. This is a wonderful research tool that contains all of Bakunin’s writings in all languages, and has translated everything into French where that was not the original language. Many manuscript versions are reproduced, and the collection will make possible continued study and revision of Bakunin’s life and ideas. Of the English collections, none is complete. Robert M. Cutler’s The Basic Bakunin: Writings, 1869–1871, first published as From Out of the Dustbin, offers Bakunin’s short journalism, which contains some of his most engaging work. Bakunin on Anarchism, Sam Dolgoff, trans., ed., Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980, has a useful introduction and a biographical sketch by James Guillaume. The translations vary in accuracy, and the pieces are often edited and added to in order to increase their polemical value. Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, Arthur Lehning, ed., London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, is a sympathetic collection designed to show Bakunin at his best. The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, G. P. Maximoff, ed., New York: The Free Press, 1953, is a labor of love. The biographical sketch by Max Nettlau, along with Lehning, the most important of Bakunin’s European biographers, is useful, but the collection itself is an odd project. Maximoff cut and pasted together thematic sections based on paragraphs from all of Bakunin’s work. Thus a section on any particular theme may be composed of material written at very different times and with very different emphases in the original. The strength of the book is Maximoff’s detailed knowledge of Bakunin’s writings and his use of sources that until the publication of Bakounine: Oeuvres completes were obscure, but the result is a tricky pastiche that must be sorted through cautiously to avoid errors of consistency and chronology. The best translation of Bakunin’s final work is Michael Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz, trans., ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

A similar misconception surrounds the Luddites. The term is still used to label someone who is afraid of new technology, who cannot adapt to progress, revealed by the telltale blinking “12:00” on their VCR or DVD player. The Luddites who smashed machinery in Britain between 1811 and 1816 were not afraid of new technology. They were textile workers who used the most sophisticated machinery of the day to give Britain its industrial revolution and create the wealth of empire. They understood technology better than their employers, and unlike their employers were not afraid or unable to use it. The Luddite rebellion was about unemployment. Employers brought in new equipment that enabled them to replace workers with machines. Attempts to negotiate the change failed; savvy workers then smashed the new looms to keep their jobs. They were defending their livelihood and their lives; what they feared was unemployment and starvation, not machinery. In response to their attack on property, many were hunted by the army and machine-breaking was made a capital offense. Lord Byron’s first speech in the House of Lords, on 27 February 1812, was a spirited, damning indictment of the government and the employers who were responsible for the plight of the Luddites.