CONCLUSION

Bakunin had fewer than three years to live when he announced his retirement from the struggle. How to live, however, was still an issue, and he was still scrabbling. When an Italian comrade, Carlo Cafiero, came into a substantial inheritance, he and Bakunin devised a plan they hoped would give him some financial security. They purchased a villa near Locarno, or more accurately, Cafiero purchased it, and transferred the title to Bakunin. The villa, named Baronata, had once been a monastery, and the anarchists relished the opportunity to turn it into something more useful. Its land would make it self-sustaining, through harvesting timber, growing crops, and raising livestock, and Baronata would become a refuge for radicals on the run and for superannuated revolutionaries too old to pursue their trade, providing a pension for Bakunin and stability for his wife and the children. The financial improvement was matched with a familial one. Antonia returned from Russia to Switzerland in July 1873, with her sister, her parents, and a third child. Bakunin greeted them with an impressive fireworks display, which, oddly enough, has not been widely cited by historians as evidence of his apocalyptic pyromania. But Baronata failed miserably. Extensive renovations drove up the cost, nearly bankrupting Cafiero, and the fiasco drove apart the two friends. It had further consequences for Bakunin. He had led Antonia to believe that he had bought Baronata with a legacy from Priamukhino and that their future was secure. Now he was forced to sign the villa over to Cafiero, and the family would be homeless. The entire episode left him utterly despondent. Unable to face Antonia with the truth, he set out for Bologna in July 1874 to take part in a final insurrection, undoubtedly hoping to find there a heroic death on the barricades in an attempt to have life imitate the art of Rudin.

It would have been a fitting end. But the insurrection quickly failed, and there was nothing left to do but return to Baronata and confess. Angry and without resources or money, Antonia moved to another Swiss town, Lugano, though she soon wrote to Bakunin asking him to join her. He set off as quickly as he could in September 1874, and resumed his old patterns as best he could: long discussions in the cafes, reading, writing, surviving through borrowing money when he could, depending on the kindness of strangers and comrades alike, his health steadily worsening. Perhaps most disconcerting to one who had, for better or worse, made his life from words, he was becoming deaf. His letters increasingly concentrated not on politics but on money and medical matters as each became more dire.

The aftermath of the Paris Commune did as much to dampen his spirit as his ailments and poverty. The social revolution was as necessary as ever to save humanity from the “sewer,” but there was no “thought, hope, or revolutionary passion to be found in the masses.” European reaction had never been “so formidably armed against any movement of the people,” while “repression was a new science taught systematically to lieutenants in military schools of all nations. And what do we have to attack this impregnable fortress? The unorganized masses.” The “revolution has for the moment returned to its bed, and we have relapsed into a period of evolution, that is, one in which revolution is underground, invisible, and often even imperceptible,” he wrote to his friend and fellow anarchist Elisee Reclus. “Poor humanity!” he exclaimed. It was, however, necessary to keep the revolutionary work going. Propaganda was “something, without doubt,” though he admitted that he was “too old, too sick, and, I must tell you, too disillusioned” to fight on. The comrades in Jura and Belgium, the “last Mohicans of the International,” who plugged away in the face of reaction and apathy, even though they would not see the results, were a small source of hope. “Their labor will not be wasted,” he explained, for “drops of water may be invisible, but they form the ocean nonetheless.” But if that were all that could be done, “humanity would rot ten times over before being saved.” There remained, however, another even grimmer possibility, he concluded: “world war. These immense military states must destroy each other and devour each other sooner or later. But what a prospect!” His despairing prediction would of course be fulfilled within forty years.[359]

Bakunin then turned to more prosaic matters. He wrote to his family in Russia, expressing his desire to see them and their children and imploring them to come and visit. His last chance for financial security remained the legacy he believed due him from Priamukhino, and he asked his brothers and sisters to sell his portion of the estate and forward the money as quickly as possible. He used the promise of the legacy to borrow enough money to purchase another house, Villa Bresso, and once again, the plan was to make it self-sufficient. Cafiero cheerfully forgave him and continued to lend him money, and Bakunin turned as energetically as possible to planting. This venture too flopped, and when the money from Priamukhino finally arrived, it was too little too late. In the summer of 1876, he and Antonia left the villa before they were evicted. They planned to go to Naples, perhaps to live with Gambuzzi, who was still advancing them funds, and Antonia headed to Italy to make the arrangements while Bakunin detoured to Berne to meet up with his friend and doctor, Adolf Vogt. Bakunin had known Vogt, then a child, from the days when his father hung with Weitling, and now he hoped the doctor could find some relief from his ailments. But when Bakunin arrived on 14 June 1876, Vogt checked him out and then immediately checked him into a hospital.

The old anarchist could fight the laws of capital and the state, but the inexorable laws of nature ground away. A few friends visited regularly, including Vogt and Adolf Reichel, a musician Bakunin had known since the Berlin days of the early 1840s. Reichel wrote to Gambuzzi at length about Bakunin’s last days. The two talked philosophy, and Bakunin read Schopenhauer in his hospital bed. He showed some of the old spirit when he remarked to Reichel that “all of our philosophy starts from a false premise. It always begins by taking man as an individual, rather than a being who is part of a community. That’s where most of the philosophical errors that lead to either pie in the sky [literally, happiness in the clouds] or the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartman come from.” As he declined, however, they abandoned philosophy for reminiscences. “It’s a pity, Bakunin, you never found time to write your memoirs,” Reichel gently chided one day. “Why would you want me to write them?” he responded. “It is not worth wasting the breath. Today, the people of all nations have lost the instinct of revolution. They are all too content with their situation and the fear of losing what they have makes them harmless and inert. No, if I regained some of my health, I would write an ethic based on the principles of collectivism, without reference to philosophical or religious phrases.” They spoke of music, and Bakunin expressed his preference still for Beethoven, opining that Wagner, whom he remembered from the Dresden barricades, was deficient in both character and musical taste. At the end, he slept more and more; even his famous appetites left him. The man who had once looked as though he could devour the world could now manage only some spoonfuls of kasha, or groats, prepared in the Russian manner by Reichel’s wife, Maria. He refused bouillon, murmuring without opening his eyes, “I have no need; I have finished my task.” At noon 1 July 1876, Bakunin died an ordinary death in stark counterpoint to an extraordinary life.[360]

About forty mourners attended the funeral service at the Berne cemetery two days later. As he had in life, in death Bakunin pulled a bigger crowd than Marx would when he died six years later, and no doubt the anarchist would have liked that. A final small irony linked the two men, and probably would have amused them both, or at least confirmed the suspicion that the other was irredeemably petit bourgeois. The two sworn enemies of capital were each described in their death certificates as “rentier,” that is, someone who lived off investments. If only! they might have muttered. Lack of money had never kept the anarchist fixed in place, and he remained restless even after his interment: The cemetery was made into a park, and Bakunin’s remains were transferred to a plot in Friedhof Bremgarten outside the city center. Undoubtedly the inscription, REMEMBER ONE WHO SACRIFICED EVERYTHING FOR HIS COUNTRY,

would set him off on a ferocious argument, though the stone itself, large and rough-hewn, plain and striking, seems apt enough.

Bakunin had failed to make or even see the social revolution, though hardly for lack of trying. Most of his writings were never published in his lifetime; much of what did see print after his death was circulated only in small anarchist circles. He was never much appreciated by intellectuals in the academy, who found much more to argue about in hermeneutic readings of Marx and Engels. His impact, however, is more profound than many have acknowledged. In Russia, succeeding generations of radicals—ranging from student radicals who went “to the people” in the manner advocated by Bakunin, to a new Land and Liberty group, to Narodnaya Volya, or “The People’s Will,” to the social revolutionaries—were not anarchists, but they owed many of their ideas to Bakunin. The anarchist movement itself continued to grow as it was developed by a new generation of thinkers and activists including Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta. That generation lived to see many of Bakunin’s predictions and theories prove correct: 1914 brought the world war he had feared and with it, the destruction of empires; 1917 saw Russian peasants and workers make the social revolution. They built on the peasant commune and created workers’ associations, or Soviets, and without waiting for the full development of the material forces of production, overthrew the tsar’s regime. Bakunin’s more dire predictions came to pass too. The reactionaries caused more bloodshed than the revolution as they launched a civil war, and foreign troops landed on Russian soil to, as Winston Churchill put it, strangle the baby of socialism in its cradle. Bakunin was largely correct in his warnings about authoritarian or state socialism as well. The social revolution was quickly turned into a political one, with new red rulers at the head of a new state. Bakunin’s warnings of the nature of the state, even the revolutionary state, were soon proved correct. Like Marx, the Bolsheviks had little sense of or respect for the peasantry, and their clumsy attempts to force them to produce food for the cities quickly backfired. Through a policy of repression and reform, the stubborn resistance of the peasants was worn down, but at a terrible cost. Radical workers too soon discovered that they did not control the state that acted in their name. The Bolshevik state found it expedient to turn their secret police, the Cheka, against anarchists soon after they came to power, shutting down their newspapers, breaking up their meetings, and throwing them into some of the same prisons the tsar had used for them. The events at Kronstadt in 1921, when the Red Army was ordered to turn its guns on revolutionary workers, were as disillusioning to radicals of that day as the tanks sent in to Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Tiananmen Square were to later generations.[361] Marx and Engels soon had the status of prophets of a state religion and their writings took on an importance they had not had during Marx’s life. But the new god was a jealous god, and other revolutionary figures were soon deemed false. Soon after Boris Korolev was commissioned in 1918 to create a Cubo-Futurist sculpture commemorating Bakunin, the statue fell afoul of political and artistic orthodoxy and was destroyed a few months after it was unveiled in Moscow.[362] When later Soviet scholars undertook to publish the collected works of Bakunin, the project was halted before the collection made it past 1861. While other attempts were made by anarchists and sympathizers, not until 2000 would a definitive, complete edition appear, on CD-ROM.

In the United States, France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium, anarchism, in its individualist, terrorist phase and, more important, as a tendency in labor movements, was much more significant than Marxism until the early twentieth century. Ten years after Bakunin’s death, anarchists played a crucial role in the fight for the eight-hour day in the U.S.; four were rewarded for their efforts by a show trial and the hangman’s noose in the aftermath of Chicago’s Haymarket affair. One of the four hanged on 11 November 1887 left a young widow, Lucy Parsons, who helped found the most important American expression of anarchism, the Industrial Workers of the World, in 1905. In their call for the general strike, their insistence that it would be the poorest workers who would become the most radical, and their rejection of political action, the Wobblies drew heavily on anarchist ideas pioneered by Bakunin. A different strand of anarchism, represented in the United States by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, was less influential in the labor movement but was significant enough that the American government had to use its secret police, the fledgling FBI, to shut down their newspapers, break up their meetings, throw them in jail, and deport them in 1919.

As the left regrouped and reorganized in the 1920s, communism, or whatever one prefers to call the Bolshevik state, and social democracy overshadowed anarchism, as it appeared that pursuing state power could be an effective stand-in for the social revolution. Anarchism did not disappear, but survived largely as a philosophy that offered a moral and political critique rather than an alternative. It appeared to be largely irrelevant as a political or social force, so much so that Alexander Berkman committed suicide in 1936, made despondent by illness and by the apparent futility of remaining an anarchist in a world dominated by fascism, Bolshevism, and militarism. But only a few weeks after his death, anarchism again asserted itself as a powerful social movement. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, anarchists quickly formed militias to fend off the fascists, phalangists, Catholics, and assorted reactionaries who threatened the Republic. Without the anarchist militias, Madrid would have fallen in the first months of the war. The anarchists did more. In the regions where they had some strength, they took over factories and ran them according to anarchist principles. They collectivized the land and abolished rent, rank, and religion. Servers in restaurants still did their jobs, but without a trace of the stroking and servility that marks the trade even to this day. Spain provided a clear, living example of anarchism in action as workers and peasants ran industries, agriculture, and armies as collective, free associations. But the experiment was smashed as Spain was abandoned by the democratic nations that preferred fascism to revolution and by Stalin’s Soviet Union, which sought to treat with the Western powers. Reaction won in Spain, as it had won in Germany and Italy, and again anarchists, along with communists, socialists, and liberals, were rounded up, imprisoned, and executed. Shortly after the Spanish Civil War, capital and states once more formally expressed their preference for world war over the social revolution.

In the wake of World War II—and in particular the working-class pressure for reform that accompanied it, with liberalism, relative prosperity, and state intervention in the capitalist democracies—radicalism, the pundits claimed, was no longer relevant. It was the “end of ideology,” they claimed, except of course for the Cold War, the new imperialisms, and the anticolonialism that opposed them. But as Bakunin had pointed out, the fight for anarchism was not just a fight for more; it was a fight for justice, for equality, for freedom. If capitalism had provided better paying jobs for part of its workforce in some nations, this was the result of struggle, not generosity, and still had not addressed the very real problems of a social system based on exploitation. For that reason, the “end of ideology” was just a prelude for what has become known as “the Sixties,” when again students, workers, and intellectuals demanded revolution. It is chiefly remembered as a cultural movement, sometimes as little more than a fashion statement; even blue-tinted eyeglasses made a comeback. But the core of “the Sixties” was revolt, and the radicalism of the period owed as much to Bakunin as it did to Marx, both directly, in the case of the avowed anarchists, situationists, and yippies, and indirectly, among those whose revolt was more “instinctive” than learned but no less expressive or important for that. Paris in May 1968 looked more like an anarchist movement than anything else as workers seized factories and students seized the streets. If the feminist movement owed nothing directly to Bakunin, surely he would have counted himself as a supporter. Anarchism even got some attention in academia. One anarchist theorist has argued that the liberal Isaiah Berlin borrowed from Bakunin, noting that Berlin’s famous notion of “negative” and “positive” freedom may be found in the anarchist’s writings, though they are not so credited.[363] Philosophers such as Paul Goodman and Robert-Paul Wolff gave anarchism serious thought; literary figures and historians such as George Woodcock and James Joll treated it as an important movement. Its libertarian ethos inspired educators ranging from A. S. Neill and his Summerhill School to Neil Postman. One can find traces of Bakunin in the thought of Herbert Marcuse and E. P. Thompson, the first in his argument that other groups along with workers could be revolutionary agents, the second in his understanding that workers have class experiences and so class consciousness, even though these may not resemble an official party program. As Marxism sought to reinvent itself in the academy and sought to correct for the reformism of social democracy, the calamity of Soviet Marxism and its derivatives, the oversimplifications of strict economism, and the sterility of orthodox communism, it moved closer to Bakunin than many Marxists suspected. Intellectuals such as Michel Foucault talked about power and floated over ground first trod by Bakunin, though the anarchist would have scoffed at the rejection of materialism, class, and political action often adopted by postmodernists and post-Marxists.

Does Bakunin have any relevance today? He certainly reappeared as a bogeyman after September 11, but his casting as the grandfather of terrorism was an exercise of mystification rather than explanation. Of more credence is the claim that he has been one of the inspirations of the movement against “globalization,” better rendered as the protest against “global capitalism.” Bakunin’s critique of capitalism and the state has lost none of its force. After all, these institutions took on their modern shape during his life. If they have changed dramatically since then, their essential character as methods of exploitation has not. Anarchists have garnered much of the attention at the large protests around the world, and Bakunin would undoubtedly approve of their sentiments, if not always of their tactics. As contemporary anarchists grapple with questions of tactics and strategy, a reexamination of Bakunin may be useful, for his arguments against “spontaneity” and random violence, and his arguments for organization and class struggle still need to be addressed by those who are serious about building a mass movement. There is something instructive for all on the left in Bakunin’s observation that workers and peasants understand, viscerally and fundamentally, that they are oppressed. If they do not react in the way intellectuals and activists hope they will or expect they should, the answer is not to blame them for their own oppression but to seek to understand their experience and build on it. Marxists too may find there is less to quarrel over with anarchists than they think. Both sides have focused on and exaggerated the narrow, if sharp, differences between them. But with the main protagonists now long dead, it may be possible to consider the similarities and find ways to pose the differences as a progressive, dynamic, and creative tension as we confront the problems of the twenty-first century.

For those who are less interested in the questions of political change, Bakunin still remains of some interest and importance as a historical political thinker and actor whose ideas continue to influence world events. His ideas also have considerable utility in daily life. Ernest Hemingway once remarked that every writer needs a “built-in shock-proof shit detector.” So do we all. Bakunin reminds us that shit runs downhill. It comes from those who rule, lead, employ, and manipulate us. He reminds us that our anger and protest must be linked with others and directed upward. Today as much as ever Bakunin holds out a vision of a world of freedom and equality against which the present reality may be measured and found wanting.

[359] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Elisee Reclus, 15 February 1875.

[360] Adolf Reichel to Carlo Gambuzzi, Bakounine et les autres, pages 380–7.

[361] No book on anarchism is complete without a reference to the events of Kronstadt in 1921, where the Red Army, led by Trotsky, destroyed the left-wing resistance to the Bolsheviks. I tend to follow the line on Kronstadt set out by my friend Charles Demers, which is, “My line on Kronstadt is, if you have a line on Kronstadt, I don’t want to hear it.”

[362] See John E. Bowlt, “A Monument to Bakunin’ Korolev’s Cubo-Futurist Statue of 1919,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 10, no. 4 (winter 1976), pages 577–90.

[363] McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin.