Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (54 page)

Whilst in Moscow, Bakunin came under the spell of Fichte, who believed that freedom is the highest expression of the moral law and saw the unlimited Ego as striving towards consciousness of its own freedom. He translated in 1836 Fichte’s
Lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar
, his first publication. He was also intoxicated by Hegel who argued that the real is the rational and presented history as the unfolding and realization of Spirit in a dialectical reconciliation of opposites. He translated in 1838 Hegel’s
Gymnasial Lectures
with an introduction: this was the first of Hegel’s works to appear in Russian. Overwhelmed by their visions of wholeness, Bakunin began to swing from self-assertion and self-surrender: ‘One must live and breathe only for the Absolute, through the Absolute …’, he wrote to his sister Varvara.
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Like many of his generation, it was natural for Bakunin to search for enlightenment in Europe. After five years in Moscow, he decided in 1840 to go to Berlin to study Hegelianism at first hand. He made friends there with the radical poet Georg Herwegh and the publicist Arnold Ruge. Young intellectuals like Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner were also involved in developing a left-wing critique of Hegel, rejecting his idealism and religion in favour of materialism and atheism. Bakunin was particularly impressed by Feuerbach’s anthropological naturalism, and adopted his materialist and progressive view of history in which the human species gradually grows in consciousness and freedom. For many years thereafter, he apparently
planned to write a book on Feuerbach, whom he called the ‘disciple and demolisher of Hegel’.
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The Left-Hegelians also found the existing State a principle which had to be negated in order to realize the higher synthesis of a free society. Bakunin, like Marx, was deeply influenced, and a reading of
Politics for the Use of the People
(1837) by the French religious socialist Lamennais further directed his energies towards the improvement of the human condition.

But it was not all study in Berlin. Bakunin moved in Russian
emigré
circles, and met Turgenev who later modelled the hero of his novel
Rudin
(1856) on the young Bakunin; and Belinsky, who believed in universal revolution and saw the young Bakunin as a bizarre mixture of comic poseur and vampire.

Bakunin also began to formulate his own ideas. In 1842, he went to Dresden in Saxony and published in April in Arnold Ruge’s
Deutsche Jahrbücher
an article on ‘The Reaction in Germany’. It advocated the negation of the abstract dialectic and rejected any reconciliation between opposing forces. It also called for revolutionary practice, ending with the famous lines:

The article launched Bakunin on his revolutionary career. From now on he began to preach revolution to the people rather than universal love to his sisters. He experienced the period of 1841–2 as a watershed in his life: ‘I finally rejected transcendental knowledge’, he later wrote, ‘and threw myself headlong into life.’
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He saw it as marking an irreversible transition from abstract theory to practice: ‘To know truth’, he wrote to his family at the time, ‘is not only to think but to live; and life is more than a process of thought: life is a miraculous realization of thought.’
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Bakunin in fact did not abandon philosophy for mere action, but rather began to develop a new philosophy of action. And far from recovering from the disease of German metaphysics, he retained much of its influence, particularly its dialectical movement and search for wholeness. The longing to become one with the Absolute was transformed into a desire to merge with the people. His yearning to be a complete human being and save himself now combined with a drive to help others. At the end of 1842, he characteristically had a discussion with Ruge about ‘how we must liberate ourselves and begin a new life, in order to liberate others and pour new life into them’.
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The need for movement and excitement was the same, only the object changed. As he wrote later in his
Confessions
:

Bakunin left Saxony in 1843 and went to Zürich in Switzerland, where he met and was deeply impressed by Wilhelm Weitling. A self-educated German communist, Weitling preached a form of primitive Christianity which predicted the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. He had written in 1838 the first communist programme for a secret German organization called the ‘League of the Just’. Bakunin wrote to Ruge about his ‘really remarkable book’
Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom
, quoting the passage: ‘The perfect society has no government, but only an administration, no laws but only obligations, no punishments, but means of correction.’
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Coupled with a reading of the ‘immortal Rousseau’, Welding helped Bakunin stride towards anarchism.

In an unfinished article on
Communism
, written in 1843, Bakunin was already laying the foundations of his future political philosophy with its faith in the people: ‘Communism derives not from theory, but from practical instinct, from popular instinct, and the latter is never mistaken.’ By the people, he understood ‘the majority, the broadest masses, of the poor and oppressed’.
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But he was not entirely under Weitling’s sway for he criticized his ideal society as ‘not a free society, a really live union of free people, but a herd of animals, intolerably coerced and united by force, following only material ends utterly ignorant of the spiritual side of life’.
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The relation between the ardent aristocrat and tailor was cut short when Weiding was imprisoned. Hearing of their connection, the Tsarist government called Bakunin back to Russia. He refused to comply, and after a short stay in Brussels, made his way to Paris early in 1844.

It proved a crucial period in his development. He met Proudhon, still basking in the notoriety of
What is Property?
(1840) and putting the finishing touches to his
Economic Contradictions, or Philosophy of Poverty
(1844). He exclaimed to an Italian friend while reading Proudhon: ‘This is the right thing!’
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They engaged in passionate discussions, talking all night about Hegel’s dialectic. Bakunin was impressed by his critique of government and property, and Proudhon no doubt also stressed the authoritarian dangers of communism and the need for anarchy. But it was Proudhon’s celebration of freedom which most fired Bakunin’s overheated imagination. By May 1845, Bakunin was writing home: ‘My … unconditional faith in the proud
greatness of man, in his holy purpose, in freedom as the sole source and sole aim of his life, has remained unshaken, has not only not diminished but grown, strengthened …’
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An equally important meeting for the subsequent history of socialism was with Marx in March 1844. Although Marx was four years younger, Bakunin was impressed by his intellect, his grasp of political economy and his revolutionary energy. By comparison, he admitted his own socialism was ‘purely instinctive’. But he also recognized that from the beginning they were temperamentally incompatible: Marx accused him of being a ‘sentimental idealist’, while Bakunin found him vain, morose, and devious.
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Between Proudhon and Marx, it was the libertarian Frenchman that Bakunin preferred. He thought that Proudhon had understood and felt freedom much better than Marx: ‘It is possible that Marx can rise theoretically to a system of liberty more rational than Proudhon, but he lacks Proudhon’s instinct. As a German and as a Jew, he is from head to foot an authoritarian.’
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Bakunin’s enduring anti-Semitism and his anti-German feeling were among his most repellent characteristics for he wrongly believed that Jews and Germans were both by nature opposed to freedom. In the last years of his life, Bakunin described his own thought to his Spanish followers as a development of Proudhon’s anarchism, but without his idealism, for which he had substituted a materialist view of history and economic processes.
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Indeed, Bakunin’s philosophy consists largely of Proudhonian politics and Marxian economics.

The cause which first appealed to Bakunin’s burning desire to serve the people was the liberation of the Slavs. Hegel believed that each people had a historic mission; Bakunin now thought it was time for the Slavs to destroy the old world. Moreover with all their freshness and spontaneity, the Slavs appeared to Bakunin the very opposite of German pedantry and coldness. He anticipated a grand cataclysm in Europe. In September 1847, he wrote to the poet Georg Herwegh and his wife in mystical and sexual terms: ‘I await my … fiancée, revolution. We will be really happy — that is, we will become ourselves, only when the whole world is engulfed in fire.’
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Bakunin’s visions of an apocalyptic holocaust is the underside of his eloquent and familiar defence of freedom, harmony, peace and brotherhood. After delivering a speech towards the end of 1847 which called for the independence of Poland from Russia, he was expelled from Paris as a result of Russian diplomatic pressure on the French government. But it did not cool his enthusiasm: the Slavo-Polish cause remained a ruling passion for many years.

Bakunin at first went to Brussels, but when the Revolution broke out in France several months later in February 1848, he returned immediately to Paris. He saw it as an opportunity to create at last a new society, and
hoped that the revolution would end only when Europe, together with Russia, formed a federated democratic republic. It was his first real contact with the working class, and he was ecstatic about their innate nobility. On the barricades he preached communism, permanent revolution and war until the defeat of the last enemy. Bakunin was in his element — his dream of revolution was being realized, and he was able to divert his colossal energy into the orchestration of the downfall of the bourgeois State. At last, it was no longer a case of drawing-room chatter, but bloody action on the streets. Serving in the barracks with the Workers’ National Guard, his inspiring example drew from the Prefect of Police the famous verdict: ‘What a man! The first day of the revolution he is a perfect treasure; but on the next day he ought to be shot.’
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The Prefect was no doubt aware that his own position would eventually be in jeopardy if the social revolution à la Bakunin triumphed!

The revolution spread to Germany in a few weeks, but Bakunin looked towards central Europe, hoping to start a Russian Revolution in Poland. He was intoxicated by the revolutionary turmoil in Europe and exulted in the destruction of the old world it seemed to presage. He wrote to Herwegh: ‘Evil passions will bring about a peasant war, and that delights me because I do not fear anarchy, but desire it with all my heart.’
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At this stage, Bakunin was still not an anarchist, and used the term ‘anarchy’ in its negative sense of disorder and tumult; his urge to destroy was still stronger than his creative urge. The days of parliaments and constitutions were over, he wrote to Herwegh: ‘We need something different: passion and life and a new world, lawless and thereby free.’
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Hoping to incite a Panslavic revolution, Bakunin attended the Slav Congress in Prague in June 1848. In his fiery
Appeal to the Slavs
written in the autumn, he not only celebrated the ‘admirable instinct of the masses’ but called for a federation of all Slav peoples headed by a council which would settle internal disputes and decide on foreign policy. Bakunin was still primarily interested in encouraging nationalist independence movements, but already he had espoused the cult of popular spontaneity. In addition, by calling for the first time for the destruction of the Austrian Empire his
Appeal to the Slavs
is a landmark in European history.

At the same time, he developed during the Prague Congress and during the following year a project for a revolutionary dictatorship based on a secret society. It was the first of several such organizations which Bakunin tried to establish, a move which sits ill with his publicly avowed libertarian beliefs and opposition to revolutionary government. The aim of the society was to direct the revolution, extend it to all Europe and Russia, and overthrow the Austrian Empire. As he wrote later in his
Confessions
to Nicholas I, it would consist of three separate groups for the youth, peasantry and townspeople
entirely unknown to each other. These groups would be organized ‘on strict hierarchical lines, and under absolute discipline’, enforced by a central committee of three or four members who could draw on the support of a battalion of three to five hundred men.
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The secret society as a whole would act on the masses as an ‘invisible force’, and if successful would set up a government after the revolution with unlimited powers to wipe out ‘all clubs and journals, all manifestations of garrulous anarchy’. Bakunin intended to be its ‘secret director’ and if his plan had been carried out ‘all the main threads of the movement would have been concentrated in my hands’ and the projected revolution in Bohemia would not have strayed from the course he had laid down for it.
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