Michael Bakunin

BAKUNIN (1814-1876) : The most systematic and thorough going anarchist doctrines in modern times appear in the writings of Michael Bakunin ( 1814-1876) and Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). These high-born cultivated writers sought to show the orderly, evolutionary scientific aspects of their anarchist creeds; they recommended violence, but only in a carefully organized revolution, not in isolated and irresponsible acts of assassination and destruction; and they outlined systematic schemes of organization for a society without political control. Their arguments are thoroughly permeated by the familiar socialist criticisms of private property but they add other criticisms, and in their programme of social reconstruction they are radically different from the socialists. They condemn the centralized control in the Marxian system and would eliminate collective as well as private ownership of industrial property. Although there is much in common between these two brilliant Russians, they are also significant points of difference in their criticisms, in their programmers and in their general spirit of their social philosophy.

Both Bakunin and Kropotkin were born of old families of distinctions among the Russian nobility Both were trained for military life and as young men served as officers in the army. Their experiences gave them first hand observation of the despotic and terrorist policies of the Russian civil and military administration in their day. Their reactions turned them to socialist and revolutionary, and soon to anarchist views. Their writings and their direct participation in surrectionary movements in various European states brought them conflict with the political authorities on several occasions; both served several terms in prison and spent most of their later years in exile- Bakumin in Switzerland, Kropotkin in France for several years and then for the last years of his life, in England.

Bakunin, the son of a diplomat, was born into a prosperous aristocratic family. He renounced a military career and after philosophical studies, was drawn into political activism by the 1848 revolutions. He is regarded as the founder of an extensive movement of anarchism among proletarian groups of Europe in the later 19th century. His activities were predominantly in the field of practical agitation and organization. By the 1860s he had renounced slave nationalism for anarchism and spent there of his life as an agitator and propagandist, famous for his interest in secret societies and his endless appetite for political intrigue.

Bakunin's anarchism was based on a belief in human sociability, expressed in the desire for freedom within a community of equals and in the sacred instinct of revolt. He embraced a view of collectivism as self governing communities of free individuals, which put him at odds with Marx and his followers. Bakunin founded his doctrine of anarchism upon what he described as a scientific basis. According

to him, the whole evolution of man is from a condition in which animal impulses and physical restraints control his conduct toward a condition in which ideal ends and sanctions predominate. He believed that human history consists in the progressive negation of man's original bestiality, the evolution of his humanity' Political authority, private property, and religion are natural institutions for the lower stages of man's development, for they are associated in one way or another with physical desires and fears: private property cultivates man's interest in material goods, the state supports private property through its physical compulsions'; religion sustains both state and property and it also appeals to main's desire for physical comfort and to his fear of physical suffering after his death. These institutions characteristic expressions of man's primitive nature, are under the natural laws of human evolution, destined to disappear.

Bakunin is explicit and uncompromising in rejecting all institutions of political control even those resting on universal suffrage. Despotism, he holds, lies not in the form of the state but in its essence, and the most democratic devices are of no avail whatever in modifying this essential characteristics of the state. The ignorance and inexperience of the masses make them helpless against the intrigues of the economically powerful classes who can mold any form of political machinery to their own advantage. In this sense Bakunin's repudiation of the state has an economic basis. The system of private property in the means of production keeps the masses of man in subjection to the owners of capital; the state rests upon and perpetuates this system. The object of every political system is to confirm and organize the exploitation of workers by property - owners.

According to Bakunin, the state is morally debasing to all members of a civilized community- to those who govern as well as those who are governed, for it acts by compulsions rather than by enlightenment and persuasion. In every act of the state, the judgment and will of the private citizen is displaced by a command of a public agency. Morality and intelligence in human conduct consist slowly in performing good and reasonable acts that are approved as good or recognized and reasonable by the doer. An act done under dictation is wholly lacking in moral or rational quality. Thus the inevitable tendency of state action is to degrade the moral or intellectual levels of those subject to its authority. Political authority also demoralizes those who participate in its exercise. To occupy a position of political power engenders attitudes of superiority quite out of relation to any actual distinction in merit. Among those who exercise the power natural sentiments of cooperation and fraternity are supplanted by traditions of prerogative, class differentiation and sacrifice of individual welfare to the interest of public office. Thus the state makes tyrants or egoists out of the few or servants or dependents out of the many.

According to Bakunin, private property which is both the ground of existence and the consequence of the state , creates physical and moral evils of all kinds to the millions of workers, it brings economic dependence laborious toil, ignorance and social and spiritual immobility, for the few wealthy, it provides superfluous luxury and special opportunities for physical pleasure and artistic and intellectual enjoyment. Religion, is an evil both because it sanctions evil institutions ad because it is incompatible with man's better nature. It is consciously used by the possessors of economic and political privilege to sanctify their unnatural superiority. It diverts mans interest and effort from important affairs in the actual world of humanity, develops his fancy superstition, and aborts his reason and insight. Religious faith should be displaced by science and knowledge. The fiction of future divine justice by the actuality of present human justice.

According to Bakunin, the goal of anarchism is to be attained both through evolution and revolution. Anarchism has both a scientific and an insurrectionary technique. The current of events and facts flows automatically towards the anarchist goal. The task of anarchists is to eliminate the impediments to that current both by removing ignorance of the natural laws of social evolution and by demolishing the institutions which interfere with the evolution. An anarchist revolution means the destruction of all that is commonly understood in the expression 'public order'. The destruction will require some measures of violence. It cannot be effected through the ballot and inevitably there well be some bloodshed, as a result both of the stupidity of those who will stubbornly attempt to resist and of the natural feelings of revenge which many in the first moments of their uprising will feel towards their former oppressors. Although Bakunin deprecated such acts of personal vengeance he did not minimize the severity and thoroughness of the anarchist revolution: it will involve the forcible dissolution of churches, the army, courts, police, legislative assemblies and administrative offices and the invalidation of all titles to property.

Bakunin argued that an anarchist revolution is to be organized by barricades. The barricades will sent representatives instructed and reliable to a council for a whole city which, in turn, will create out of its membership committees for the various functions of revolutionary administration. The task of this revolutionary organization will be on the one hand to execute thoroughly the programme of distinction: the prompt suppression of all political institutions; the immediate distribution, among worker’s societies, of all productive property and the initiation of measures to guarantee that no new authoritative organization of any sort-not even a proletarian or socialist dictatorship will be set up. On the other hand, in order to consolidate the revolution on a national scale, the council will send agents, as propagandists and agitators, to the provincial and rural communities in order to secure their participation by informing them as to the actual ends and achievements of the revolution.

Bakunin did not maintain that the whole problem of human welfare would be solved by eliminating political authority and private property. It is true that he put emphasis upon the destructive phases of anarchism. But he had full appreciation of the social aspects of human life and recognized the need for a regular organization of human relations. Every advance in human evolution, he said, has come about through the sympathetic collaboration of man with his fellows. Human freedom has no meaning apart from society. For freedom is not a merely negative concept, It denotes more than the mere absence of external restriction of one’s faculties; it means the ability to act in response to the characteristic impulses of a rational being. The true liberty of a human individual postulates, on the other hand, an equal respect on his part for the freedom of others. According to Bakunin, liberty is not a matter of isolation, but of mutuality not of separation, but of combination; for every man, it is only the mirroring of his humanity in the consciousness of his brothers. Bakunin calls this the principle of ‘ solidarity’ by virtue of which an man feels himself as fully free only when he sees about him others enjoying the same freedom. In place of state, there fore, Bakunin would establish a free society, from which all classes and all relations of authority have disappeared and in which every one without distinction of race, color, nationality or belief is permitted to labor and enjoy the fruits of his labor on equal terms. The basis of this free society will be contract and voluntary association, instead of law and compulsive allegiance. The new society will operate on these basic economic principles: society itself will own the land and will materials and instruments of production; it will permit them to be taken into possession by those person, acting individually or in freely formed associations who are willing to use them productively every individual will then be permitted to share freely in the enjoyment of the products as to extent of his needs subject only to the condition that he has to the best that he has, to the best of his ability, contributed his labours to the productive efforts. Local associations may combine into larger territorial combinations, provided that at every stage there is no compulsion about it. The abolition of the state will mean the end of political boundaries. There will be a free union of individuals into communes, of communes into province, of provinces into nations and finaly of nations into the United States of Europe and later of the whole world. The associations will have a system of law that needs no penal sanctions, for it is made up of rules which the members perceive to be necessary in keeping society going.

Bakunin conceived this order of society not as an inspiring ideal for the remote future but as a goal to been soon achieved probably before the close of the 19th century. The immediate task of those who forsee the course of evolutions is he said, to organize and expedite the revolution. This is to be done by both education and other peaceful means.