Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (62 page)

Among the most disconcerting of the contradictions which characterized Bakunin as man and writer was that while he called for the equality of all humanity, he remained sufficiently nationalist and racist to see Germans and Jews as authoritarian, and Slavs as spontaneous and freedom-loving. His call for absolute liberty is counterbalanced by his authoritarian desire to lead and control other people in his secret societies. His eloquent advocacy of social harmony and peace was matched by his ferocious celebration of ‘evil passions’, ‘blood and fire’, ‘complete annihilation’, ‘storm of destruction’, the ‘furious avalanche, devouring, destroying everything’ and so on.
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It comes as no surprise to learn that he advised Wagner to repeat in his music the same text in various melodies: ‘Struggle and Destruction’.
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It is difficult not to conclude that Bakunin’s apocalyptic fantasies owed something to his sexual impotence.

Although he did not have a belief in the virtue of violence for its own sake, and ‘a confidence in the technique of terrorism’, there is something profoundly sinister in his celebration of the ‘poetry of destruction’.
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Bakunin stands at the fountainhead of a minor tradition of destructive and violent anarchism which prefers the gun to reason, coercion to persuasion. He confirms the popular view of anarchy as tumult and violent disorder in his indiscriminate use of the term ‘anarchy’ to describe both the violent and chaotic process of revolt and the goal of an ordered society without government. Indeed, by identifying anarchy with civil war and destruction, Bakunin is the shadow behind the later bomb-throwers and assassins who shook bourgeois society towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Bakunin’s call for an invisible dictatorship and his belief in the importance of secret societies and small vanguard groups of militants are inescapably fraught with authoritarian and oppressive dangers. There is a fundamental contradiction between his awareness that ‘Freedom can be created only by freedom’ and his readiness to use a dictatorship in order to achieve ‘absolute liberty’.
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He dismally failed to realize that only libertarian
means can be used to achieve libertarian ends. That the ‘passionate seeker after Truth’ and the ‘fanatical lover of Liberty’ should resort to dissimulation and fraud rather than reasoned argument and free choice in open association inevitably undermines his personal authenticity and moral example.
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He was so thoroughly corrupted by the love of power that he singularly failed to see that the dangers he described in Marx’s revolutionary dictatorship were equally applicable in his own.
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Although his aim was to transform the instincts of people into conscious demands, there is no reason to think that his vanguard would wither away any more than Marx’s.

Although not a great political philosopher, Bakunin nevertheless made a major contribution to anarchist and socialist theory. Far from being ‘intellectually shallow and built on clichés’, Bakunin’s anarchism broke new ground and pointed the way for others to follow.
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He was the first Russian to preach social revolution in international terms. In his analysis of the State, he anticipated Max Weber who saw bureaucracy as an inevitable consequence of the modern division of labour, and Robert Michels, whose ‘iron law of oligarchy’ asserts that an elite of technical experts will emerge from any political organization. In his concept of class, his stress on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry has been confirmed by all the major revolutions this century in Russia, Spain, China, and Cuba. His faith in the revolutionary potential of the ‘lumpenproletariat’ has become an essential part of the ideological baggage of the New Left. His critique of the authoritarian dangers of science and of scientific elites has been further developed by the Frankfurt School, notably Herbert Marcuse. During the 1968 rebellion in Paris, Bakuninist slogans reappeared on city walls: ‘The urge to destroy is a creative urge.’ It is Bakunin, not Marx, who was the true prophet of modern revolution.
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In the long run, the best image of Bakunin is not that of the revolutionary on the barricades calling for the bloody overthrow of Church and State, but the penetrating thinker who elaborated reasoned arguments for a free society based on voluntary federation of autonomous communes. His message, the message of the First International, was that the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves. His historical importance was to have helped spread the ideas of anarchism amongst the working-class movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century. His influence, especially in France, Italy, Spain and Latin America, ensured that anarchism became a significant, if not dominating, influence amongst their labour movements well into the following century. The ideological roots of the Spanish Revolution reach deeply in Bakuninian soil, both in the libertarian aspirations of the anarchists as well as in the readiness of some to resort to aggressive vanguard organizations.

Since the Second World War, there has been a renewed interest in
Bakunin, not only from the students’ movements in the sixties but from intellectuals like Noam Chomsky. Bakunin’s cult of spontaneity, his celebration of revolutionary will and instinctive rebellion, his advocacy of workers’ control, his faith in the creative energies of the people, his critique of science — all have appealed to the rebellious young in modern technological States. Even Che Guevara was hailed as the ‘new Bakunin’. Bakunin’s search for wholeness in a divided society is not merely the product of a diseased form of romanticism or an unbalanced psyche, but rather a bold and inspiring attempt to reclaim one’s humanity in an alienated world.

K
ROPOTKIN
IS
BEST
KNOWN
as a geographer, the author
of Mutual Aid
, and one of the leading Russian revolutionaries. He is the most systematic and profound anarchist thinker of the nineteenth century. He attempted to ground anarchism in science and argued that it was in keeping with existing tendencies within nature and society. Above all, he developed anarchist theory in a communist direction and gave it a philosophical respectability at a time when it was increasingly being associated in the popular press with mindless terrorism.

Peter Kropotkin was born in 1842 into a family in the highest rank of Russian aristocracy under the autocratic tsarship of Nicholas I. His father was an officer in the imperial army, and the owner of a large house in Moscow and an estate with twelve hundred serfs in the province of Kaluga some one hundred and sixty miles away. Peter had little time for his father who ordered his serfs to be flogged, married them against their will, and sent them away into the army as a punishment; he even questioned whether the serfs were really ‘people’.
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According to his closest brother Alexander, their father was ‘nasty, revengeful, obstinate and mean’, and a cheat to boot.
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They greatly preferred their mother whose romantic tastes they imbibed. She may well have encouraged Peter’s optimistic frame of mind which at times could be almost fatalistic in its confidence in progress. She might also have been responsible for his later exaggerated reverence for women. Unfortunately, she died young, and her son never got on well with his ‘cursed stepmother’.
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Peter found solace in the countryside which fired his ambition to become a geographer. He was fortunate enough to have a good tutor who encouraged his enquiring mind. Attending a Muscovite ball Nicholas I noticed the young Kropotkin and had him enrolled at the Corps of Pages, the most select military academy in Russia. He read widely in his spare time in literature and philosophy, including Voltaire and Kant, and his interest
in science, especially astronomy, led him to find inspiration not in God but in nature:

At this time he also visited different factories in Moscow and appreciated the ‘poetry of the machine’ and the pleasure a person may derive from their use.

Kropotkin did so well at the military academy that he was nominated sergeant of the Corps of Pages, and became the personal
page de chambre
of the new Tsar Alexander II. At first, Kropotkin was deeply impressed by the Emperor and regarded him as a sort of hero for liberating the serfs in 1861, but the growing brutality of his regime, especially his crushing of the Polish rebellion of 1863, eventually made him distrust court politics and governments in general. At the same, he had also been impressed by Alexander Herzen’s magazine
The Pole Star
, whose cover represented the heads of the five ‘Decembrists’ whom Nicholas I had hanged after the rebellion of 14 December 1825, and whose contents brought Kropotkin into contact with the powerful radical tradition in Russia. Soon after he began editing for his classmates his first revolutionary paper which advocated a liberal constitution for Russia.

On leaving the military academy, Kropotkin spent the next five years in a Cossack regiment as a military administrator in eastern Siberia. The post allowed him to explore the region which he did with great alacrity. It taught him how little a person really needs as soon as he leaves the circle of conventional civilization. His researches formed the foundation of his later reputation as a geographer and enabled him eventually to elaborate his major contribution to the subject: that the structural lines of Asia run diagonally. His close observations of the behaviour of animals led him to revise Darwin’s theory and insist that co-operation is the most important factor in evolution. Above all, his contact with the peasants and their communities gave him a lasting faith in the solidarity and the creative spontaneity of the people. He enjoyed the feeling of simplicity and natural relations of equality, as well as of ‘hearty goodwill’ amongst the peasants.
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The years in Siberia were crucial for Kropotkin in other ways. They taught him the impossibility of doing anything really useful for the mass of the people by means of the ‘administrative machine’. He came to share Tolstoy’s view about leaders and masses and began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and that
of common understanding. Living with the peasants and seeing at work the complex forms of their social organization stored up ‘floods of light’ illuminated by his subsequent reading. In short, as he wrote later in his memoirs, ‘I lost in Siberia whatever faith in State discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist.’
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Kropotkin returned to the capital St Petersburg in 1867 to study mathematics whilst acting as a secretary to the Geographical Society. He continued his scientific researches, but in 1871, he received news of the Paris Commune. For all its defects, its example inspired his hopes for European revolution, and he later called the Commune the ‘precursor of a great social revolution — the starting-point for future revolutions’.
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But while Paris was in flames, Kropotkin set off again to explore the glacial deposits in Sweden and Finland. He concluded correctly that the ice cap had once covered the whole of Northern Europe and that Eurasia had undergone a long process of desertification.

In the following year, he visited Western Europe for the first time. In Switzerland, he met amongst the watchmakers of the Jura members of the libertarian wing of the First International (called federalists at the time). He became particularly friendly with James Guillaume, Bakunin’s friend, the uncompromising editor of the
Bulletin of the Jurassian Federation.
Guillaume saw in the Paris Commune a ‘federalist revolution’, opening the way to ‘a true state of anarchy, in the proper sense of the word’.
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The Jurassian federation was inspired by Bakunin who was felt not so much as an intellectual authority but as a moral personality. Kropotkin later recognized that Bakunin had established the leading principles of modern anarchism by proclaiming the abolition of the State and despite his collectivist statements was ‘at heart a communist’.
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Bakunin and the libertarian delegates were deeply involved in a dispute with the general council controlled by Marx. The council was not content to be merely a correspondence bureau but wanted to direct the movement and participate in parliamentary elections. Kropotkin later claimed that the dispute fired the ‘first spark of anarchism’ since it set people thinking about the evils of government, however democratic in origin.
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He recalled later: ‘when I came away from the mountains, after a week’s stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.’
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