Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

of the Gotha Programme. To appreciate the extent of the misapplication
of Marx’s position this interpretation was to involve (this being a point
to which we shall have occasion to return) we need only remind our-
selves of the context in which Marx’s instructions were drawn up: a
context not only of an imminent struggle with Proudhonists who
believed that any concession wrested from any state would fatally
compromise and contaminate the workers’ movement, but also of a
parliamentary reform movement in England the International had
helped along and which by 1866 was actually up-staging the Inter-
national itself.⁵³ The situation was complicated, the balance needed
was difficult; Marx advocated extension of the suffrage without advo-
cating bourgeois parliamentarism as either a necessary or a sufficient
condition of working-class politics. Thus, while it is true that, in Fern-
bach’s words, Marx failed in his instructions to ‘make clear.. .to what
extent the working class could transform the existing government
power into [its] own agency’,⁵⁴ it is hard to see what else Marx, cross-
pressured as he was by the need to oppose Proudhonism with English
reformists, could have done. In the end, of course, the Paris Commune
had the effect of answering many of Marx’s questions for him - and for
us; but this is to anticipate.

The English reformists who were in large part Marx’s only available
weapon against the Proudhonists were also, however, trade unionists;
yet Marx, here as elsewhere in his advocacy of trade union activity,
does not simply applaud the forms it had taken and was taking. The
instructions insist, to the contrary, that while trade unions were both
legitimate and necessary, they ‘had not fully understood their power
of acting against the system of wage slavery itself and ‘must learn to
act deliberately as organizing centres of the working class in the broad




interest of its complete emancipation’. Indeed, trade unions ‘must aid
every social and political movement tending in that direction’. Legit-
imate trade union activity, in other words, is not simply a matter of the
improvement of working conditions at the level of the individual plant
or industry, and the raising of wage levels; it is also, and more import-
antly, expansive and educative in its scope, its scope being that of the
‘working classes’ as a whole. Narrow, sectional activity - particularly
that of the better-paid workers whose skills had not yet been eroded,
whose labour had not yet been homogenized - will not fit the bill.
The relatively privileged workers, Marx insists, must ‘consider them-
selves and act as the champions and representatives of the whole
working class’; they must ‘convince the world at large that their efforts,
far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the
downtrodden millions’. Merely sectional activities, of the kind, let it
be remembered, indulged in by most English Internationalists at the
time, would counteract and work at cross-purposes with ‘the whole
activity of the International Association which aims at generalizing
the till now disconnected efforts for emancipation by the working
classes in different countries’. The trade unions, which had grown
up as ‘centres of organization of the working class, as the medieval
municipalities and communes did for the middle class’, had for this
very reason nevertheless ‘kept too much aloof from general social and
political movements’; now, however, if ‘the Trades’ Unions are required
for the guerilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more
important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of
wages labour and capital rule’.

There remains the question of co-operative labour, which Marx
dealt with along the lines laid down in the ‘Inaugural Address’. He
acknowledges

the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces
of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great
merit is to practically show that the present pauperising
and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital
can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system
of the association of free and equal producers. . . Restricted,
however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wage
slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative
system will never transform capitalistic society. To convert
social production into one large and harmonious system of
free and co-operative labour, general social changes are
wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never
to be realized save by the transfer of the organized forces
of society, viz. the state power, from capitalists and landlords
to the producers themselves.




Marx took care to preface all these remarks about co-operation with a
disclaimer. Since it ‘is the business of the International Working Men’s
Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of
the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinaire
system whatever’, Marx insisted that the ‘Congress should, therefore,
proclaim no special system of co-operation, but limit itself to the
enunciation of a few general principles’. Marx, here at any rate, was not
the dogmatist dictator of policy Bakunin was to make of - and in a
sense to make - him.

The outcome of the Geneva Congress as well as Marx’s instructions
to the English delegates suggest that Marx (whatever his private com-
ments about them) wished to avoid further alienating the Proudhonists.
Questions about ‘credit’ and ‘religious questions’ were left up to them;
and Marx deliberately did not attempt to put the question of strikes on
the agenda, telling the London delegates not to discuss the usefulness
or otherwise of strikes but instead to emphasize ‘international assistance
for the struggle of labour with capital’ and, in particular, strikebreakers
(who tended in the 1860s to be foreign) - an emphasis that, it was
thought, would be harder for the Proudhonists to repudiate.

The Proudhonists’ position at the Congress of Geneva has been
admirably summarized by David Riazanov.^ss ‘The French delegation’,
he says,

presented a very painstaking report which was an exposition of
the economic ideas of Proudhon. They declared themselves to be
vigorously opposed to woman labour, claiming that nature herself
[sic] designated woman for a place near the family hearth, and
that a woman’s place is in the home, and not the factory. Declaring
themselves definitely opposed to strikes and to trade unions, they
propounded the ideas of co-operation and particularly the
organization of exchange on the principles of mutualism. The
first conditions were agreements entered into by separate
co-operatives and the establishment of free credit. They even
insisted that the Congress ratify an organization for international
credit, but all they succeeded in doing was to have a resolution
adopted which advised all the sections of the International to
take up the study of the question of credit [a victory for the
General Council delegates] ... They even objected to legislative
interference with the length of the working day,

an issue on which they were defeated. Another issue the Proudhonists
fought and lost concerned public education, which they opposed
because it implied state education and thereby an increase in the puis-
sance of the state. (Such characteristic lack of proportion has the effect
of making Marx and the Council delegates look relatively enlightened;


what the ‘Instructions’ have to say - and indeed, what The Critique of
the Gotha Programme⁵⁶ was to say - about child labour has rather the
opposite effect.) These were important ‘symbolic’ victories for the
General Council, since each of them committed Congress to political
action and the use of state power as a means of enforcing social reforms
-an implication by no means lost on the Proudhonists. In general,⁵⁷ the
Geneva Congress gave the International a constitution by ratifying
(with amendments) the draft constitution that had been adopted by
the Inaugural Congress in 1864; it approved the Rules of the IWMA (a
victory for the General Council); it adopted Marx’s ally Becker’s
resolution on Poland, and six of the nine points of Marx’s ‘Instructions’
(on standing armies, trade unions, co-operative labour, women’s and
child labour, working hours and international union). The Proudhonist
‘memoire’, which in many ways was better composed than Marx’s
‘Instructions’, and was certainly equally systematic, was defeated (with
minor concessions) largely by the Swiss delegates who, unsurprisingly,
held the balance of power.

They also held the balance of power at the Congress of Lausanne
the following year (1867); this was to prove important, since the Swiss,
unlike the French Proudhonists, had no objection in principle to the
presence in the International of non-manual workers. (There was a
danger that the International in Paris might fall into the hands of
radical republicans, Jacobins or Blanquists, which helps explain the
fears entertained by Tolain and others about ‘outside intellectuals’
and savants',⁵⁸ Tolain, however, had expressly included ‘citizen Marx’
among the ‘bourgeois intellectuals’ he had moved, at Geneva, to for-
mally exclude.) In other respects, however, the Proudhonists, at the
Congress of Lausanne (1867) and Brussels (1868), continued to step
in the footprints they had made at Geneva. They protested in the name
of ‘freedom of contract’ against any legally enforceable standards
governing hours and conditions of work on the grounds that it was
improper for an international congress to interfere in the relations
between an employer and a worker, and that legal standards would
in any case enhance the puissance of the state; they continued to
oppose the General Council’s defence of trade union activity; and they
continued to recommend that the workers concentrate instead on
developing co-operative and credit associations in which they would
enjoy the product rather than the wages of industry.

Even though the Geneva Congress had done nothing to commit the
International to Proudhonist principles, and indeed had ratified rules
for the Association he had drawn up, Marx remained adamant.

I consider it of the highest importance [he wrote in a letter]

to free the French from the false views in which Proudhon,

with his petty-bourgeoisness, has buried them. At the Geneva




Congress, as well as in the connections which I, as a member
of the General Council of the International Working Men’s
Association, have had with the French Branches, I have
repeatedly encountered the most repulsive consequences of
Proudhonism.^s9

He complained to Engels that ‘the worst is that we do not have a
single person in Paris who could make contact with anri-Proudhonist
sections among the workers’, adding in a parenthesis that these anti-
Proudhonists ‘are in the majority’.⁶⁰ Whether or not this is true, shifts
were beginning to take place within the Proudhonist ranks, where a
real split was emerging. While orthodox Proudhonists were to continue
to oppose all anti-capitalist measures and motions advanced within the
International, others (who still called themselves mutualists) began to
move in the direction of collectivism. The shift was away from Tolain
(who by 1871 was sufficiently isolated from the workers’ movement
to become, not a communard, but a senator in Thiers’s Assembly) and
towards people like Eugene Varlin, and, outside France, towards the
extraordinary Cesar de Paepe (an independent who was sometimes to
swing the Belgians behind Bakunin). Varlin, de Paepe and others, in
Max Nomad’s words,

combined Proudhon’s rejection of the state with the idea of
expropriation of the capitalists and collective ownership of
the means of production. They had arrived at these non-
Proudhonist heresies when they began to realize that the growth
of large-scale industry left the workers little hope of economic
independence, and that to defend their interests, the workers
would have to organize in labour unions and strike for higher
wages, two altogether non-Proudhonist concepts.⁶¹

Conditions in France (and French Switzerland) favoured the growth of
trade unionism - and with it the growth of the International - in the
later 1860s. That these were opportunities for trade union action
created real dissension in what had until then been a united Proudhonist
movement can readily be seen from the proceedings of the Congress of
Lausanne.⁶²

This Congress managed to pass a series of confused, contradictory
and face-saving resolutions. It resolved, for instance, that the state
should become ‘the proprietor of the means of transport and exchange’
without deciding whether the state should be considered ‘the strict
executor of the laws voted upon and recognized by the citizens’ or
‘the collectivity of the citizens’, and without adopting de Paepe’s
amendment calling for public ownership of land (which would have
alienated the Proudhonists). Whether ‘public’ ownership of monopolies




implied ‘state’ ownership (as the Proudhonists feared) was never really
decided; this and other obvious cracks were papered over with deliber-
ately ambiguous, inconclusive and innocuous ‘resolutions’, since neither
side appeared to anticipate any advantage in pressing the issue. It is
arguable, however, that the Proudhonists made a mistake in not doing
so, since their inaction in effect opened the floodgates: debates about
‘collectivism’, ‘collectivization’ and ‘collective ownership’, which were
bound by their very nature to compromise the Proudhonists, dominated
the proceedings of all subsequent Congresses. These debates served
effectively to isolate those who did not, like Varlin (who was to become
a martyr of the Commune) move leftwards.

The Lausanne Congress passed a resolution saying that ‘the social
emancipation of the workers is inseparable from their political emanci-
pation’ and that ‘the establishment of political liberties’ - Congress
had in mind pre-eminently those of the press and assembly, which in
France were still illegal - ‘is a measure of absolute necessity’,⁶³ an
essential first step. Even though these resolutions were in Cole’s words
‘too vaguely worded to divide the delegates’,⁶⁴ neither one strengthened
the Proudhonists, particularly as Congress insisted that each of them be
‘solemnly reaffirmed’ at every subsequent Congress. For the rest, there
were further gyrations - again inconclusive - around the questions of
co-operation and Proudhonian credit banks, and another face-saving
resolution on public education; and, last but not least, there was the
question of how the International should respond to the League of
Peace and Freedom’s invitation to the Geneva Peace Congress. Marx
had been opposed to any collaboration with those he called the ‘Peace
Windbags’,⁶⁵ a group of well-meaning bourgeois notables opposed in
principle to war; but Marx, who was engaged in 1867 in reading the
proofs for the first volume of Capital, this time had played little part
in committee work for the Lausanne Congress, and was overruled.
(All Marx did in the preparation for the Lausanne Congress was to edit
the French text that had been drafted by Lafargue of the General
Council’s ‘Address’, which came to differ radically from the English
language text, and to contain some characteristically Marxian senti-
ments.)⁶⁶ Even so, Marx in the end got his way, but by the unlikely
agency of Tolain, de Paepe and Guillaume, and with results he could
never have foreseen. The resolution Congress carried committed the
International ‘fully and entirely to the Peace Congress’ but ‘with a
view to arriving as speedily as possible at the emancipation of the
working class and at its liberation from the power and influence of
capital’, since peace ‘needs ... to be constituted by a new order of
things that will no longer know in society two classes, the one of which
is exploited by the other’. Once it was decided to send a delegation to
Geneva to present the address, Tolain, ever suspicious of collaboration
with non-workers, moved an amendment which was, in Cole’s words


‘meant to put the cat among the pigeons’ (or doves):

The [Lausanne] Congress, considering that war has as its first
and principal cause pauperism and the lack of economic
equilibrium, and that, to achieve the suppression of war. . .

[it is] necessary to modify social organization by ensuring
more equitable distribution of production, makes its adherence
[to the League of Peace and Freedom] subject to the acceptance
by the Peace Congress of the declaration set forth above.⁶⁷

The ultimate importance of Guillaume’s stand when he presented this
declaration of the International in Geneva, in a form that guaranteed
the League would not endorse it, is not so much that it pushed the
International in the direction of something Marx regarded as an absurdity,
a workers’ general strike for peace; it is that it had the effect of under-
cutting the position of Bakunin, who was already active in the League
as leader of its left wing. Bakunin’s quest to persuade the League to
take a stand on ‘the social question’ no doubt would have turned out
to be forlorn in any case; but the League’s entirely unpredictable
rebuff to Guillaume, which Tolain and de Paepe had, of course, engin-
eered in advance, was at least the proximate cause of Bakunin’s decision,
the following year (1868) to secede with his followers from the League
and throw in his lot, instead, with the International. The affairs of the
International at this point undergo a jolt, and in a sense it never returned
to the (relatively) even keel that had sustained its buoyancy up through
1868; before returning to its affairs, we must, by way of excursus,
attempt a sketch of this disruptive presence, Bakunin.

Bakuniniana

I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those
who are now possible remain possible.⁶⁸

M.A. Bakunin

Notre ami Bakounine est un homme impayable le jour de
la revolution, mais le lendemain il faut absolument le faire
fusilier.⁶⁹

Caussidiere

The life of Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-76)⁷⁰ is most con-
veniently divided into four periods. Although only the fourth is central
to his dispute with Marx in the International, it does not lend itself to




any hard-and-fast separation from the others. We have, first, Bakunin’s
youth in Russia, his imbibing of Fichte and Hegel, his membership in
the cenacle of Stankevich,⁷¹ his departure for Germany in 1840 and his
abandonment of philosophy (and byronisme) in 1842; second, the
period of Bakunin’s friendship with German radicals, of his earliest
revolutionary agitation, of consecutive expulsions from successive
countries, and of participation in serial uprisings - February 1848 in
Paris, June 1848 in Prague (Bakunin having embraced the Slav cause),
May 1849 in Dresden; third, the period from his capture and extradition
to Russia, through his imprisonment in the Peter and Paul fortress in
St Petersburg to his exile in Siberia; and fourth, the period of his
escape, his forays into Italy and Switzerland, his elaboration of anarchist
doctrine as an impetus to a burgeoning anarchist movement, there and
in Spain - and, as part of this enterprise, his dispute with Marx in the
International.

What this schematization conceals is a series of questions - questions
that cannot be answered here - about the relationship of early influences
to later positions. One bone of contention is whether the idea of
freedom in Russia was from the first bound up with anarchism more
tightly than in Western Europe; this would mean that the struggle
between Marx and Bakunin acquires fresh significance as one between
‘western’ and ‘eastern’ views of revolution, which is certainly what
Marx and Bakunin themselves thought. While this issue cannot yet be
joined, we do need to bear in mind what complicates it: on Bakunin’s
side, the fact that he was above all else a cosmopolitan revolutionary
who followed the star of revolution outside Russia, and the extent of
whose influence within Russia is disputed; and the existence inside
Russia of a veritable galaxy of politically radical positions (which
changed) during Bakunin’s lifetime. Yet at one level, Bakunin’s Russian-
ness is unmistakable. ‘We may argue’, he wrote in his Political Confession
(the one composed at Olmtitz), ‘about the case for revolution in various
countries, but in Russia there can be no doubt about it. In that country,
whose whole life is organized immorality, revolt must be a moral
action.’⁷² This sentiment was nothing if not shared. In the words of a
thinker whose hostility to Bakunin is a matter of record, Russians
held the institution of the state in particular hatred, since to them it
was at once the symbol, the result and the main source of injustice
and inequality - a weapon wielded by the governing class to defend its
privileges - and one that, in the face of increasing resistance from its
victims, grew progressively more brutal and blindly destructive’.⁷³
The defeat in 1848 of liberal as well as radical forces in the West
confirmed many such victims in their conviction that salvation could
not lie in politics, parties, parliaments, which now seemed as much of
a mockery to a brutalized Russian people as did the half-life of factories
and proletarianization that seemed in the West to accompany them.⁷⁴




The influence of these peculiarly, if not exclusively, Russian sentiments
on Bakunin was profound - profounder, perhaps, than his influence on
Russia; for while the Russian populists of the 1870s and 1880s looked
to Bakunin (as did so many others) as an exemplar, there was no
Bakuninist uprising of any kind in nineteenth-century Russia.

Our biographical sketch conceals more than one Confession of
Bakunin’s. The other one was that written in 1851 in the Peter and
Paul fortress for the eyes of the Tsar. This Confession, the one blot on
his record as a revolutionist, did not discredit Bakunin during his
lifetime; it remained undiscovered until the twentieth century, al-
though the existence of some such document proving complicity was
not unsuspected - and not unhoped for - during the years of the Inter-
national. The 1851 Confession would certainly have been grist to
Marx’s mill, had he but known about it. This document remains of
interest as evidence less of perfidy on Bakunin’s part than of the
almost childlike guilelessness involved in his belief that the weight of
past history and circumstance - his own, or that of civilization itself -
could be cast to the winds by an act of faith, be it only sufficiently
strong.⁷⁵ This in turn could be cast to the winds by another-as Baku-
nin’s subsequent career indicates.

This episode, like so many others, leads us to Bakunin’s extra-
ordinary, larger than life personality, by dint of which he succeeded
in talking his way across Siberia, the Pacific, the USA, the Atlantic,
to appear on Herzen’s doorstep in London. This is the stuff of which
myths are made. Herzen, here as ever, gives us priceless descriptions.
Bakunin, back in action,

argued, preached, gave orders, shouted, decided, arranged,
organized, exhorted, the whole day, the whole night, the
whole twenty-four hours on end. In the brief moments which
remained, he would throw himself down on his desk, sweep
a small space clear of tobacco ash, and begin to write ten,
fifteen letters to Semipalatinsk and Arad, to Belgrade,

Moldavia and White Russia. In the middle of a letter he would
throw down his pen in order to refute some reactionary
Dalmatian; then, without finishing his speech, he would
seize his pen and go on writing. . . His activity, his appetite,
like all his other characteristics - even his gigantic size and
continual sweat - were of superhuman proportions. . .

At the bottom of this man’s nature lies the seed of a
colossal activity, for which he could find no employment.

A Columbus without an America, without even a ship! He
has within himself the potentialities of an agitator, a tribune,
and apostle, a heretic priest, a tireless fighter. . ,⁷⁶




Bakunin’s personality matters greatly in his dispute with Marx, not
because the dispute can be reduced to a conflict of personalities, but
precisely because it cannot. Bakunin’s personality did not fit him to
become the leader of a movement in any accepted sense of the term
at all; as Herzen recognized, he was an exemplar, an embodiment and
a symbol of the needs and expectations of those who rallied to him,
and to men like him. Anarchism is too often treated as a product of
anarchist ‘leaders’; yet the cateogories we would use to account for
leadership rarely apply. In the case of Bakunin, his considerable personal
magnetism should be regarded not as an explanatory category in and of
itself but as a focus. The point about magnetic force is that it attracts
something. The sources of Bakunin’s appeal lie less in his psychological
make-up than in the felt needs of those who responded to it, for good
reasons of their own. The form taken by Bakunin’s dispute with Marx
does not always help us to remember this; Marx tended to see the
movement, Bakuninism, through the man, Bakunin, as though it were
simply an expression of his personality. We, at our remove, should
endeavour - with some difficulty - to avoid making the same mistake.
To Marx, Bakunin represented some old, pre-given bete noire - Proud-
honism in Russian clothing, or Russia itself. Yet in fact Bakunin repre-
sented much more than Marx’s old bugbears. The extraordinary thing
is that he could personify emancipation, revolt, revolution, that he
could be I’homme revolte even to the distinctly non-revolutionary
bourgeois of the League for Peace and Freedom, to those very people
his views were shortly thereafter to shock. An eyewitness account of
Bakunin’s appearance at the Geneva Congress of the League in 1867
makes this clear:

As with heavy, awkward gait he mounted the steps leading to
the platform where the bureau sat, dressed as carelessly as ever
in a sort of gray blouse, beneath which was visible not a shirt
but a flannel vest, the cry passed from mouth to mouth:

‘Bakunin!’ Garibaldi, who was in the chair, stood up, advanced
a few steps, and embraced him. This solemn meeting of two
old and tired warriors of revolution produced an astonishing
impression. . . Everyone rose, and there was prolonged and
enthusiastic applause. . ,⁷⁷

Bakunin’s reputation as hero of the barricades and, in Woodcock’s
words, as ‘energumen of revolutionary enthusiasm’⁷⁸ should not
mislead us, however. It was Thomas Masaryk who pointed out that
for all his undoubted volatility, if ‘the anarchists esteem Bakunin as
a man of action, they are mistaken; he was a dilettante of action.
His practical, like this theoretical, life was a patchwork of fragments’.⁷⁹
Bakunin lived for the moment. Revolutionary escapades and theoretical




treatises alike would be embarked upon fervently but seldom com-
pleted; a brief flare-up of intense devotion to the matter at hand
would give way soon enough to impatience, to unease at the prospect
of seeing through any project to its conclusion. Bakunin, who was
anything but introspective, admitted that

there was a capital defect in my nature: love of the fantastic, of
extraordinary and unheard-of adventures, of undertakings
revealing unlimited horizons... 1 suffocated in a calm and
ordinary existence, I felt ill at ease ... my mind was in a
continuous agitation, because it demanded life, action,
movement.

Proudhon once wrote that hell for him would be a world where he was
conservative; Lampert suggests that hell for Bakunin was to succeed so
well that nothing remained to be done.⁸⁰ One of the few writings
Bakunin did complete was the Confession, composed in the enforced
idleness of the Peter and Paul fortress, where even Nechaev was to
suffocate.

Bakunin, who was in Franco Venturi’s words ‘born for spontaneous
action’,⁸¹ thought ofhimselfas what would later be called a revolutionist
of the deed, ‘not a philosopher and not an inventor of systems like
Marx’.⁸² He rejected intellectual systems, theories, even constructs,
in principle. In a variety of ways he expressed his abiding belief that
men should be reduced to fit no Procrustean bed, no theoretical strait-
jacket, no causal treadmill explaining or purporting to explain their
actions. Men should be free to shape their own destinies; they should
not be squeezed or moulded into any set of rigid, abstract formulae.
There exist no ‘a priori ideals or preconceived, preordained laws’. In
particular, ‘no theory, no book that has ever been written, will save
the world. I cleave to no system,’ Bakunin added. ‘I am a true seeker.’
He dismissed, rejected in principle, what he called the ‘dictatorial’
concept of intellectual system. In Federalism, Socialism and Anti-
theologism he insisted that ‘metaphysics [acts] according to the principle
of centralized states’ and that ‘cloudy and congested thoughts must
totally dissolve, to take shape in large and exuberant deeds’.⁸³ What
lies behind and informs all such declamations - Bakunin’s writings are
peppered with them - is the belief, as basic as it is blunt, that theory
per se is to be opposed because it tells people what to do or how to
act. Any theory that is separate from action cannot but act as a brake
on action, which depends on spontaneity if it is to be action, properly
so-called, at all.

Bakunin’s words to Skuryevski in 1849 were words he was to
repeat, and act upon, many times during his career as a revolutionist:
‘Je renon$ai... la science transcendentale - denn grau ist alle Theorie -


et je me jettai tete baissee dans la vie pratique.’⁸⁴ The contrast between
a revolutionist like Bakunin (who turned into a revolutionary direction
the Napoleonic watchword, ‘on s’engage et puis. . .on voit’) and a
revolutionist like Marx could scarcely be more pronounced. Pavel
Annenkov’s Souvenirs litteraires recall a meeting in the 1840s at which
Wilhelm Weitling’s utopianism so exasperated Marx that he hurled at
Weitling the remonstrance that ‘to excite the workers without giving
them reasoned arguments is quite simply to deceive them. To awaken
fantastic hopes can lead only to disaster, not deliverance’.⁸⁵ Marx was
attacking the first militant revolutionary Bakunin encountered, who
took Bakunin to his first workers’ meeting, and whose combination
of messianism and conspiratorialism Bakunin was to reproduce on a
far more dramatic scale. Yet Bakunin, who was part of the milieu of
the Russo-German meeting Annenkov was to recall, became contempt-
uous even of Weitling. ‘This is not a free society,’ said Bakunin, ‘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.’⁸⁶ No German revolutionary was
exempt from Bakunin’s Teutophobia; yet the matter goes rather
deeper than this. For if Bakunin had no love for Weitling, he had even
less for theory. It is a point of some importance that ‘to excite the
workers without giving them reasoned arguments’ and ‘to awaken
fantastic hopes’ was precisely what Bakunin set out to do. Fantastic
hopes, not reasoned arguments, were to Bakunin the very breath of
revolution. Theory was in his eyes a ‘metaphysic’⁸⁷ which, by paralysing
‘fantastic hopes’, paralysed revolutionary action itself. It was a main-
stay of Bakunin’s revolutionism that where there was a doctrine, an
ideology, an intellectual construction of any kind, there lurked in the
wings centralization and the state. In 1872 Bakunin defended the
federes of the Paris Commune of 1871 on the grounds that they were
strong enough to dispense with theory altogether.

Contrary to authoritarian communist belief-in my opinion
wholly erroneous - that a social revolution can be decreed and
organized ... the socialists of Paris. . .believed that it could
be effected and fully developed only by means of the incessant
actions of the popular masses, groups and associations.

Our Paris friends were a thousand times right. In fact, what
mind, however brilliant or - if we want to consider a collective
dictatorship, even one consisting of several hundred individuals
endowed with superior faculties-what intellects are powerful
enough. . .to embrace the infinite multiplicity and diversity of
real interests, aspirations, wills, needs, whose sum constitutes the
collective will of a people? What intellects are powerful and
broad enough to invent a social organization capable of




satisfying everyone? Such an organization would only be a bed
of Procrustes on which violence more or less sanctioned by
the state would compel the unfortunate society to lie.⁸⁸

The agency for reducing all men to one standard, we should note, is not
violence (which, differently sanctioned, Bakunin defended) but theory
itself, theory that cannot avoid stifling the revolutionary ardour every
oppressed man possessed by virtue of his oppression. This contention,
an article of faith from which nothing could shake him, was the basis
of Bakunin’s belief that ‘Russian idealism’ (or something like it) could
and would rejuvenate the International, not despite but because of its
non-theoretical, anti-intellectual character. In this view, Marx’s stress
on the relationship of revolutionary theory to revolutionary practice -
or indeed the idea that they were related at all - was doctrinaire and
dictatorial because it was systematic. In 1873 we find Bakunin remi-
niscing that ‘the last nine years have seen a development within the
International of more ideas than are necessary for the salvation of the
world, if indeed the world can be saved by ideas. . . It is no longer a
time for ideas but a time for deeds and facts’.⁸⁹

Bakunin in 1848 said to Herwegh that he would restlessly, cease-
lessly preserve ‘the sacred spirit of revolt’; revolt to Bakunin had the
broadest of significations. ‘What I preach’, he wrote, ‘is a revolt of
life against science, science which is but a . . .victimization of fleeting
but real life on the altar of eternal abstractions.’⁹⁰ Bakunin declaimed
in The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution (written at
the height of his dispute with Marx, in 1870-1) that ‘the sole mission
of science is to light the way. Only life itself, freed from all govern-
mental and doctrinaire fetters and given the full liberty of spontaneous
action, is capable of creation’.⁹¹ Life, action, spontaneity and creation
lie on one side, then, of the great divide; theory, abstraction, ossified
dogma, authority, regimentation lie on the other. The two sides are
counterposed; each side can operate only at the expense of the other.
Because Bakunin was, above all else, a dualist in this Sense, we should
exercise caution in characterizing his own thought. Sir Isaiah Berlin,
whose sympathetic understanding of nineteenth-century Russian
intellectual history is generally cause for delight, has ventured the
opinion that

Bakunin had a considerable element of cynicism in his character,
and cared little what the exact effect of his sermons might be on
his friends - provided only that it was powerful enough; he did
not ask whether they excited or demoralized them, or ruined
their lives, or bored them, or turned them into fanatical zealots
for some wildly utopian scheme. Bakunin was a born agitator
with sufficient scepticism in his system not to be taken in himself


by his torrential eloquence. To dominate individuals and to
sway assemblies was his metier: he belonged to that odd,
fortunately not very numerous class of persons who contrive
to hypnotize others into throwing themselves into causes -
if need be, killing and dying for them - while themselves
remaining coldly, clearly and ironically aware of the effect
of the spells which they cast.⁹²

This unusually uncharitable (for its author) view, one which is shared
in its broadest outlines by E.H. Carr in his biography of Bakunin, has
in it some elements of truth but rests on a misconception. Bakunin had
no system with which he sought coldly and dispassionately to impress
others; he sought rather to teach others to reject all systems. To this
end, he was manipulative, in political and personal affairs alike; he
lived, in Venturi’s Words, ‘like a barin, whose easy-going and impractical
habits revealed the Russian provincial gentleman beneath the bohemian
and the revolutionary’⁹³ - this indeed being the aspect of Bakunin’s
character used by Turgenev in his depiction of Rudin. Yet the con-
sistency of private and public we find here is other than that for which
Berlin (or Turgenev)* allows. Bakunin did not think before he acted;
nor did he want anybody else to do so. Thoughts or words are either