INTRODUCTION

The war was supposed to be over. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was torn down and with it went the fabled evil empire of the Soviet Union. For many observers, this meant more than the collapse of a rival power and the end of the Cold War; it was the end of history itself. They didn’t mean that the past had ceased to exist or that societies would cease to change. Their point was both more metaphysical and more banal. Simply put, history was a heroic struggle between capitalism and communism. Locked in mortal combat, the two opposing systems used ideas, ballots, bullets, even the threat of nuclear Armageddon, to seek the winning advantage. The struggle, on the high plane of ideals and literature, in steaming jungles and on dark, rain-slicked streets, sometimes open, sometimes hidden, propelled change over time—history—as humanity lurched desperately from left to right to an uncertain future. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West had won, using, in the words of G. B. Trudeau in his comic strip, Doonesbury, “the basics: hard currency, cheap wheat, and good rock ’n’ roll.”[1] History as cataclysmic clash was over. There was some mopping up to be done in the hinterlands, but soon they too would be quiet. At long last the business of business could proceed smoothly, without interference or distraction, because there was no alternative to capitalism.

That illusion was shattered on the streets of Seattle in November 1999. Five days of protest against the World Trade Organization showed that dissent was possible and that resistance was not futile. Students, trade unionists, environmentalists, indigenous people, farmers, and consumers raised their fists and voices against globalization, the surveillance state, and business as usual. Seattle was a symbol that the struggle continued, and that history had begun again.

The five days that shook the world were led by a movement many thought had vanished with the flip of the switch that electrocuted Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston in 1927.[2] For the first time in years, anarchism was a political force that rallied thousands under its black flag. As protest flashed around the globe, from Melbourne to Mexico City to Prague to Quebec City to Nice to Genoa to Miami, the anarchist “Black Bloc” and “White Overalls” groups generated a frisson of fear and shock. Anarchism made the six o’clock news. It even invaded American prime time as Toby Ziegler deplored “anarchist wannabes” on The West Wing and Tony explained Sacco and Vanzetti to the rest of The Sopranos. The media rushed to explore the phenomenon, and articles on anarchism appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, The Wall Street fournal, The New York Times, National Post, Harper’s, and Time. The Utne Reader, a sort of Reader’s Digest for New Agers, even warned its readers that “You may be an anarchist—and not even know it.”[3]

The media, however, did more to obscure anarchism than to explain it. Focusing on the street fighting and confrontations with police, mainstream commentators were unable to understand what anarchism was or why a philosophy with roots in the nineteenth century resurfaced with such power at the dawn of the new millennium. Their inability to understand anarchism is not surprising. It is often misunderstood by its opponents and even by its advocates. The word itself has long been separated from its real meaning of “rule by no one.” A check of “anarchism” and its cognates in thesauruses from the 1935 Roget’s to the one in Microsoft Word 2000 reveals misleading synonyms such as “evildoer,” “destroyer,” “disobedience,” “disorder,” and “mayhem.” High and popular cultures alike have contributed to the misunderstanding. W. B. Yeats, appalled at the post-apocalyptic world of the Great War and the popular demand for sweeping social change that followed, whined that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Since the nineteenth century, the anarchist has been pictured as a wild-eyed bohemian, clothed in a wide-brimmed, pointed felt hat and a long black cape that concealed a round bomb with a sputtering fuse. Bertram Lamb and A. B. Payne’s popular comic strip in the British Daily Mirror newspaper of the 1920s and 1930s, Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred, featured such a character, named “Popski”—read foreigner, Bolshevik, evil—and the strip and the animated short films that followed popularized the portrait. Robin Williams gave a dynamite—and dynamited—performance of just such a figure in the 1996 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. The old image has been updated, with anarchists now portrayed clad in black fatigues, their faces hidden by woolen balaclavas, as they trash the storefronts of McDonald’s and Starbucks outlets and fight with police. Such inaccurate stereotypes persist, even in contemporary fiction. [4]

Other events, however, soon diverted attention away from demonstrations and street protests. After 11 September 2001, the experts now looked to anarchism for explanations of terrorism. David Ignatius, in a widely reprinted editorial, wrote that while “bin Laden’s texts are couched in the language of Islam, they read like the flowery manifestos of the elitist bomb throwers of the nineteenth century like Prince Peter Kropotkin or Mikhail Bakunin.” Lewis Lapham drew a straight line from Bakunin to bin Laden via Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, and Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. John le Carre, in an otherwise extremely thoughtful and insightful article, concluded that “Mr. Bakunin in his grave and Mr. bin Laden in his cave must be rubbing their hands in glee” as security forces were expanded and civil liberties were curtailed in the panic that ensued in the aftermath of the WTC bombing. In Canada, the mild-tempered Ian Brown concluded in the pages of the Globe and Mail newspaper that Bakunin “ended up demanding terror for terror’s sake, terror as spectacle, death as spectacle” and was the direct ancestor of cults such as the Solar Temple and the Kool-Aid-swilling minions of Jim Jones.[5]

Michael Bakunin[6] is now of keen interest in the twenty-first century, though the attention paid to him continues to obscure the man and his ideas. Certainly Bakunin was no pacifist, but he was no mad bomber or assassin. Typically that sort of violence has been the prerogative of the state. Two world wars, the Holocaust, Communist purges and famines, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo, Chechnya, and four wars for Middle East oil since 1948 should remind us it is not the anarchists who are primarily responsible for terror and violence in the world.

If an “expert” is someone who has read one more book on the subject than you have, then many writers became instant experts on anarchism by flipping through the relevant chapter in Barbara Tuchman’s 1966 book, The Proud Tower. It is a fine book, but it is not primarily about anarchism or even the years between 1814 and 1876 in which Bakunin lived. The would-be experts who dug a little deeper turned to some of the standard books on the subject, but these are dated. The best of them, E. H. Carr’s biography, was published in 1937, and the two most influential books published in English in the 1980s are deeply flawed. Much of the newer scholarship on Bakunin is not easily accessible to the general researcher, for it is to be found in theses and scholarly journals rather than widely available books.

More important, most of the authors of the standard histories of Bakunin were interested not in understanding anarchism but in burying it. They wrote to discredit the radicalism of their own generations, using Bakunin as a stand-in for their contemporaries; they wrote to make it plain which side they were on during the Cold War; they wrote to promote orthodoxy and order, and to oppose critical thinking and protest. Their tactics were often unscrupulous: the misquote, the lack of context, the repetition of groundless stories, the impugning of motives without evidence, and most of all, the unexamined assumption that no reasonable person could take anarchism seriously. These interpretations, because they are accessible, continue to distort our understanding of anarchism and anarchists. Even when Bakunin trod the London stage in 2002 as a character in Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, it was as a caricature, his ideas reduced to attitudes and platitudes.

Determined to root anarchism in individual pathology, many historians have examined Bakunin as an exercise in psychohistory. One plainly states that Bakunin’s anarchism is of interest only for “what it reveals of the Utopian psychology.” Several argue, without any evidence, that Bakunin’s commitment to revolution was the result of sexual impotence, essentially arguing that men who can’t get it up want to blow it up. There is, unfortunately, only a very short dash between a “psychohistorian” and a “psycho historian.” Psychohistory has its uses, but it is rarely helpful in understanding politics or political movements. If we wish to understand anarchism and its enduring appeal, we need to go beyond the psychology of a single man, especially as it is understood by his enemies.[7]

Because of his radical critique of state socialism, some of the worst smears on Bakunin have come from the left. Sadly, Marxists have used the same shoddy tools on Bakunin that liberals and conservatives have used on Marx: innuendo, inappropriate literalism, willful misinterpretation, ad hominem arguments, and special pleading. Marx himself falsely accused Bakunin of being a police spy and spent much of his later career attacking anarchism. Generations of Marxists have continued to hurl abuse at Bakunin, usually without bothering to read him. Francis Wheen, in his recent delightful biography of Marx, repeats all the old canards and dismisses Bakunin as the “hairy Russian giant,” an odd and particularly ironic complaint given Marx’s own hirsute appearance. In an otherwise excellent and insightful play, Marx in Soho, left-wing historian Howard Zinn has Marx and Bakunin in a heated debate that sees the anarchist spit on the floor, urinate out the window, then fall to the floor in a drunken stupor while Marx gets most of the good lines. It makes for gripping drama, but it fails to take Bakunin’s trenchant critique of Marxism seriously. Eric Hobsbawm, undoubtedly the finest historian of our time, has written sympathetically and critically about anarchism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but surely is mistaken in his conclusion that anarchism has no significant contribution to make to socialist theory. By now, the Lenin Harangue Pie is pretty stale.[8]

This book starts from a different premise. I offer an interpretation of Bakunin’s life and ideas of use to those interested in understanding anarchism and social change. This is a biography that stresses the evolution of his ideas as much as the details of his life. The emphasis is less on his personality, usually described as generous, or his appetites for tobacco, food, and alcohol, inevitably described as voluminous. Carr’s biography does that about as well as it can be done, right down to the color and style of the jackets Bakunin and Ivan Turgenev sported on a Berlin outing: the anarchist wore purple, the novelist green. Bakunin took part in some of the most important and exciting debates and events of the nineteenth century and his anarchism is a reflective response, rooted in philosophy and reality. For that reason, this book provides some background on the context in which Bakunin formulated his ideas.

At the same time, it does not explore and defend Bakunin’s every action and idea. Some of these, such as the anti-Semitism that surfaces in some of his writing, are indefensible. But as the historian E. P. Thompson remarked of Karl Marx, the point is that Bakunin is on our side; we are not on the side of Bakunin.[9] He still has much to say to us, for the current interest in anarchism is not misplaced or irrelevant. To understand anarchism, it is necessary to go beyond the caricature presented by the media. It is a sophisticated political and ethical theory that has attracted thinkers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Orwell, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Noam Chomsky. It is worth understanding because it is again a force in current events, and because it tells us something about our past and, possibly, our future.

The fundamental point of anarchism is critique. Anarchists have tried to show what is wrong with the world and why, but their message has been buried and distorted. Its resurgence at the “end of history” is not surprising, for anarchism has often renewed precisely when we are told that this is as good as it gets and that happiness lies in adapting ourselves to the new horrors. When the lid of the box gets screwed down tight, people start to think and act outside the box.

The blunt fact is that while our modern world has, as Karl Marx put it, “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals,” it has also accomplished horrors far surpassing any the world has seen before. Anarchism remains the most optimistic and hopeful of alternatives. It is worth understanding because it continues to be a political force able to inspire. It is also worth understanding because we are a long way from Utopia. If we are to do better, we need to think creatively. But the tendency in recent years has been to close off debate, to limit possibilities, to declare Utopia out of bounds. The anarchists put dreams back on the negotiating table. The anarchist critique of the state, of capital, of power, is a compelling one, and the lesson of anarchism is constantly relearned through experience: people who do not benefit from the system will organize to create alternatives.

Thus Bakunin’s life and ideas are worth a thorough reexamination. He spent a great deal of time thinking about tactics and strategy, and his ruminations and actions may still be instructive, for their failures as well as their successes. He was present at the birth and early adolescence of industrial capitalism and the modern state, and thus he had a unique vantage point from which to observe these creations. Despite all their changes, the state and capital still look and function much as they did in the nineteenth century, and so by studying Bakunin we can learn a great deal about our own time. Our ability to examine the world critically has been impaired by 150 years of propaganda and practice. We often mistake technology for capitalism, profit for freedom, parliamentary procedure for democracy. Too often we assume blindly that modernization is good and that economic growth is progress. The effect is to push us to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds and to shrink our dreams about what is possible and desirable. Clearly this benefits some while harming most. The practitioners of power, of pragmatism and practicality, have had their chance, and it is difficult not to conclude that they have botched it. In examining Michael Bakunin, we begin to recover a world of possibility and promise.

[1] G. B. Trudeau, Doonesbury, 16 June 1988.

[2] Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, 5 Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, London and New York: Verso, 2000.

[3] Utne Reader, May-June 2001, page 49.

[4] See, for example, Donald Harstad, Eleven Days, New York: Doubleday, 1998, pages 239- 40, where the only thing worse than anarchists in the Iowa countryside must be the local Satanists. Anarchism has fared a little better in the comic books. Batman was confronted by a new foe, Anarky, in 1989. Unlike the protector of Gotham City, Anarky took on corporations and governments that destroyed the environment and displaced the homeless to build bank towers. The Caped Crusader vanquished him, naturally, but admitted that Anarky’s “cause was just” and “he only wanted to set the world straight.” Detective Comics, nos. 608 and 609, 1989. Anarky appeared in other comics and had his own for a time. The original two-part series owed much to a British graphic novel of the early 1980s, V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, set in a bleak fascist Britain of the 1990s. The protagonist, V, announces to a statue of Justice that it was her infidelity, her “little fling” with “a man in uniform ... with his armbands and jackboots,” that drove him into the arms of Anarchy. V for Vendetta was republished in the U.S. in a ten-part series in 1989 and has been published more recently in book form. It has been made into a movie.

[5] Lewis Lapham, “Drums Along the Potomac: NewT War, Old Music,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2001, pages 35–41. John le Carre, “We Have Already Lost,” Globe and Mail, 13 October 2001. The article by David Ignatius, perhaps the most egregious, may be found in the International Herald Tribune, 29 October 2001; like le Carre’s article, it was widely reprinted. Ian Brown, “The Next Step Is This: What Goes On in the Mind of a Terrorist?” Globe and Mail, 22 September 2001.

[6] The contemporary transliteration of his full name is Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. Russian custom is to give children a patronymic, or father’s name, as a middle name. Michael’s father was Aleksander, thus Mikhail Aleksandrovich; Aleksander’s patronymic was Mikhailovich, after his father, Mikhail. Each of Michael’s brothers, including Aleksander, had Aleksandrovich as a middle name. His sisters had the patronymic Aleksandrovna and used the feminine form Bakunina as their surname. I have Anglicized common names such as Mikhail and Aleksander throughout, while using Russian forms for names that are less common to the English reader, such as Sergei or Vassily. I would like to thank my colleagues Ilya Vinkovetsky and Jerry Zaslove for their helpful suggestions on usage and Russian history. I have also changed the capitalization of nouns such as “state” and “revolution” used by Bakunin and sometimes his translators, for consistency and to reflect modern usage.

[7] E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin, 1937, New York: Vintage Books, 1961; Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism, London: Oxford University Press, 1982, page 3. Arthur P. Mendel, Michael Bakunin: Roots of Apocalypse, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981. The most recent incarnation of what must be considered an historical urban legend is Shlomo Barer in The Doctors of Revolution: 19 th -century Thinkers Who Changed the World, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. It is worth repeating that this myth has never had any evidence to support it and was thoroughly debunked by Marshall S. Shatz in “Michael Bakunin and His Biographers: The Question of Bakunin’s Sexual Impotence,” in Imperial Russia 1700–1917: State, Society, Opposition, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988. It is hard to get rid of the suspicion that this story is repeated as a cautionary tale to warn off potential anarchists from reading those dirty books. For the cautious reader, let me state unequivocally that there is no medical evidence to suggest a causal connection between anarchism and impotence.

[8] Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho, Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1999, pages 31–41. E. J. Hobsbawm, “Reflections on Anarchism,” in Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays, 1973, reprint, London: Quartet Books, 1977, pages 82–94. His conclusion is on page 84. Despite my criticism of his point, this is a fascinating and thoughtful article.

[9] E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin, 1978, page 192.