Mikhail Bakunin (1814 - 1876) was a Russian revolutionary and political philosopher, and the principal founder of collectivist anarchism. [1] He argued that the abolition of capitalism required the simultaneous abolition of the state, and warned that a revolutionary dictatorship would produce a new ruling class. His conflict with Karl Marx divided the International Workingmen's Association and set anarchism and Marxism on separate paths. [2]
Early life
Bakunin was born on 30 May 1814 at Priamukhino, his family's estate in Tver province, into the Russian nobility. [1] He was sent to the Mikhailovsky Artillery School in St Petersburg and commissioned into the imperial army, but abandoned military service and moved to Moscow, where he immersed himself in German idealist philosophy in the circles around Nikolai Stankevich and Alexander Herzen.
In 1840 he left Russia for Berlin, studying at the university there and joining the Young Hegelians. [2] His essay "The Reaction in Germany", published in 1842, closed with the line that the passion for destruction is also a creative passion. Refusing an order to return home, he was sentenced in absentia to exile in Siberia and stripped of his noble status.
Revolutions, prison and escape
Bakunin took part in the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, fighting at the Dresden uprising alongside Richard Wagner, and was captured. [1] He was sentenced to death twice before being handed over to Russia in 1851, spent six years in the Peter and Paul Fortress and Shlisselburg, and was then exiled to Siberia.
In 1861 he escaped, travelling by way of Japan and the United States to London, where he rejoined Herzen and resumed revolutionary activity. [2] He took part in attempts to support the Polish insurrection of 1863 and afterwards settled in Italy and then Switzerland, where his mature anarchist politics took shape.
Anarchist theory
Bakunin held that the state, in every form, is an instrument of domination, and that a socialism achieved through state power would replace the old rulers with a bureaucracy of former revolutionaries. [3] Against Marx's transitional dictatorship of the proletariat he proposed a federation of self-governing communes and workers' associations, built from the bottom upward, with the means of production held collectively while distribution rewarded labour.
He placed greater revolutionary weight than Marx on the peasantry and the dispossessed of the countryside, and was hostile to religion, developing an atheist argument in God and the State, written in the early 1870s and published after his death. [1]
The First International
Bakunin joined the International Workingmen's Association in 1868 and rapidly built support among sections in Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Belgium. [2] His disputes with Marx over authority, centralisation and political action dominated the organisation for four years. At the Hague Congress of 1872 Bakunin and his ally James Guillaume were expelled, and the International's headquarters were transferred to New York; the anti-authoritarian sections reconstituted themselves separately at Saint-Imier.
Later life and legacy
Bakunin withdrew from active politics after a failed insurrection at Bologna in 1874. He died in Bern on 1 July 1876. [1]
His ideas became the foundation of the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements that were strongest in Spain, Italy, France and Latin America, and his critique of revolutionary state power was widely revisited after the course taken by the Soviet Union. [4] He remains, with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, one of the central figures of classical anarchist thought.
