Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

part of action, or they are rfyeaningless. This has two immediate impli-
cations. First, despite the considerable element of fantasy that tended
to inhabit Bakunin’s bombast, he was in fact the first to be taken in by,
and to act upon, his own words - and for that matter upon the words
of others (provided that they were words, and these were others, of the
right kind). His bamboozlement by Nechaev indicates how easily led,
how impressionable, Bakunin could be, how easily the victim of the
right kind of make-believe; in Pyziifr’s words,⁹⁴ ‘parallel to his own
talent for mystification was his inability to see through the abracadabra
of others’ - not all others, to be sure, but certainly those, like Nechaev,
that Bakunin was predisposed to believt Second, and perhaps more
important, Bakunin did not believe that Iris frequent clarion-calls to
insurrection embodied any causal force, In and of themselves. No
‘theory’ could. He regarded his calls to arms as no more than catalysts,
acting upon the innate, if inchoate stirrings of the masses (taken singly
or collectively). The latent fury of the masses - and the more inchoate
this was, the more powerful - was not at all to be channelled by Baku-
nin’s words but simply charged by them. (It is not fanciful to suppose
that the faith Bakunin had in the masses, which was to all intents and

*A noteworthy feature of Rudin, which may be Turgenev’s least political novel
(in its original form), is the final page Turgenev tacked on, after it, was first
published; it depicts Rudin (who is based on Bakunin) dying on the Paris barri-
cades in 1 848. His heroism is wasted. If in his life Rudin is manipulative and
empty, Turgenev - who was not without vindictiveness - makes his death (and
his revolutionism) futile.




purposes unlimited, accounts in large measure for his appeal ind
influence over them, which did of course have its limits.)

Bakunin distrusted intellection, his own or anybody’s else’?/; but
we cannot simply take his consistent distrust of reason, dcyctrine,
system, or theory, label it as mindless ‘anti-intellectualism’, and then
move on. To do so would be to pass over how deep-seated and fervent
his revolt - and that of those who listened to him - really was. One
pointed illustration must suffice. The principle of reason in history,
so precious to Hegel and Marx (and in different ways important to
Proudhon and Stirner too), suggested to Bakunin something he could
not abide: any notion of balance or harmonization that is said to be
immanent or implicit in nature or in history seemed to him to be no
more than religious providentialism in statu seculari. History to Baku-
nin had in common with nature only its dissonance,, its oppression, its
inherent violence (the contrast with the anti-Bakuninist communist
anarchism of Kropotkin, who wrote about naturg to disprove Thomas
Henry Huxley,⁹⁵ could not be more marked). Neither history nor
nature corresponds to the various providentialisms men use to make
them palatable; history in particular provides no consolation, but is
quite simply an unreasonable, irrational, unsystematic and potentially
explosive set of events, just one thing aftej another, without rhyme or
reason. Elemental forces always come to the fore or rise to the surface,
prominent among them power and oppression (which legitimate them-
selves as authority, justice and the like); and the whole sorry story of
human suffering, injustice and oppression could be redeemed only by
the blind destructiveness which Bakunin, unlike most revolutionaries,
never attempted to minimize or argue away. Nor indeed did he see any
real need to justify revolutionary violence; he constantly celebrated the
most ruthless, indiscriminate violence as a deliverance, as the only real
deliverance from bourgeois society and from all the injustices, false-
hoods and hypocrisies sustaining it. Without such explosions of indig-
nation, as Bakunin put it in a letter to Herzen in 1867, ‘one would
despair of the human race’./⁶

Bakunin’s espousal of violence went beyond individual acts of
terror; he believed in the necessity of liquidation sociale, of the root
and branch extermination of the prevailing society with its good and
its bad and its civilization. The Appeal to the Slavs contains an ex-
hortation that is in po way untypical.

/

We must overthrow from top to bottom this effete social world
which has become impotent and sterile. . . we must first purify
our atmosphere and transform completely the milieu in which
we live; for it corrupts our instincts and our wills and contracts
our heart and our intelligence. The social question takes the
form primarily of the overthrow of society.⁹⁷


Because what Bakunin called ‘positive anarchy’ could result only from
the nihilisme du combat, destruction takes on the capacity to invert
itself and to become an immanent life-force. Such an inversion is not
dialectical but dualistic, Manichaean; as against even Proudhon’s wish
to embody synthesis, Bakunin above all wished to personify antithesis,
negation, destruction. Berlin has pointed out that Russian revolutionaries
of the same period other than Bakunin shared

one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once the reign of evil,
autocracy, exploitation, inequality, is consumed in the fire of
the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out
of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the
gentle guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain its
proper perfection. . ,⁹⁸

Anarchists other than Bakunin, indeed, often issue the dualistic injunc-
tion ‘to change our false, filthy, boring, hideous life into a just, clean,
gay and beautiful life’.⁹⁹ Yet Bakunin succeeded in giving this more or
less familiar dualism a twist all of his own. The article, ‘The Reaction
in Germany’, which he wrote (under a pseudonym) for the Deutsche
Jahrbucher in 1842 contains what might be his best-known exhortation:

Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and
annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally
creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative
urge [Die Lust der Zerstorung ist zugleich eine schaffende
Lust].¹⁰⁰

The form Bakunin gives this defence of the aspect of revolution that
most other revolutionaries, less sanguine and obsessive than Bakunin,
tend to de-emphasize, is one that brings to mind not so much Stirner
(who advocated violence but whose extreme individualism prevented
real revolutionism) as Russian nihilists like Pisarev.¹⁰¹ ‘What can be
broken, should be broken,’ Pisarev had said. ‘What can be struck down,
must be struck down unceasingly: whatever resists the onslaught, is
fit for existence; whatever flies to pieces, is fit for the rubbish heap.
Hew your way vigorously, for you can do no harm.’ What was in the
offing, to Pisarev and Bakunin alike, was the unconditional end of a
compulsory and servile world, which needed cauterizing; ‘our task’,
said Bakunin, ‘is terrible: total, inexorable and universal destruction’.¹⁰²
Nothing less drastic, thorough and ultimate would do. In his Letter to
a Frenchman, Bakunin exhorted his readers to ‘unbridle that popular
anarchy ... let it loose in all its breadth, so that it may flow like a
furious lava, scorching and destroying everything in its path. . . I know
that this is a dangerous and barbarous way’, he added, ‘but without it


there is no salvation. It is essential that [revolutionaries] should be pos-
sessed by a demon, and nothing but the anarchy of revolution can fill
their bodies with this demon’.¹⁰³ What is noteworthy here is that any
joy is the demonic glee of destruction; whenever Bakunin portrays
future society - which, in truth, he does but rarely - he does so in
sombre, pessimistic colours. Never do we find an emphasis on future
joy; the only joy is in breaking the idols. This aspect of Bakunin’s
thought - which we cannot go into here - places him at the opposite
end of the spectrum to Fourier; even Proudhon, in this respect, is
much closer to Fourier than to Bakunin. Albert Camus claimed that
his conception of revolution as ‘une fete sans commencement et sans
fin’ is taken from Bakunin; it needs to be balanced against Nechaev’s
‘Revolutionary Catechism’, which Bakunin at least approved, and
which proclaims in its first sentence that ‘the revolutionary is a doomed
man’.¹⁰⁴ ₍

There remains the propensity to destroy; and it is their propensity
to destroy that led Bakunin to espouse first the Russian, then the
Southern European peasants as agents of revolution. Much nonsense
has been written about Bakunin’s view of the Russian peasantry.
Bakunin did say that ‘if the workers of the West delay too long it will
be the Russian peasant who will set them an example’;¹⁰⁵ but to infer
from this, as Lichtheim does, that Bakunin’s collectivism was based
upon ‘the Slavophil worship of the village commune he shared with
Herzen’,¹⁰⁶ is to commit an egregious error. Bakunin was pan-Slav,
not Slavophile; he advocated the complete destruction of the rural
commune, the mir, and broke with Herzen largely on this issue.¹⁰⁷ He
would have agreed with Herzen that ‘centralization is contrary to the
Slav genius. . . The historical form of the state has never answered to
the national ideal of the Slavs’,¹⁰⁸ but not because of the mir and its
‘absolute slavery of custom, thought, feeling and will’. (Ironically,
it was Marx, who detested Herzen’s idea that Russia could rejuvenate
the West, who came around to a view of the mir as a possible agent of
Russian regeneration.)¹⁰⁹ Bakunin’s views on the mir should be sharply
distinguished not only from those of Herzen but also from those of
Lavrov,¹¹⁰ not least because Bakunin transferred his revolutionary
hopes, as no Lavrist or Populist or Slavophile would have done, to
Italy and to Spain.¹¹¹

Bakunin entertained illusions about peasant communal institutions
like the mir for only a brief period; it was not in his nature to pin his
hopes on any institution, and what really attracted him to the peasants
was their propensity toPougatovchtchina, to unorganized, indiscriminate
violence. Bakunin in this respect was close not to the Russian populists
but to Weitling, who on one memorable occasion had horrified his
listeners by advocating that the ‘thieving proletariat’ be turned loose on
society ‘to found the kingdom of heaven by unleashing the furies of


hell’.¹¹² Bakunin considered the proletariat to be the least ‘thieving’
and least revolutionary of all oppressed groups, yet his sentiments were
similar to Weitling’s: his toast, ‘I drink to the destruction of public
order and the unleashing of evil passions’,¹¹³ is legendary. He believed
that

the ‘evil passions’ will [in turn] unleash the peasants’ war, and
this cheers me, because I am not afraid of anarchy but long
for it with all my heart. Only this can uproot us from the
accursed mediocrity in which we have been vegetating for so
long.¹¹⁴

Bakunin, early in his career, did not discount the proletariat and the
peasants. ‘There will be a terrible revolution, a real flood of barbarians,
which will wipe the ruins of the old world off the face of the earth.
Then the fortunes of the good, amiable Burger will be bad, terrible.’¹¹⁵
The real trouble with the proletariat was that of all potentially revol-
utionary classes it was most likely to imbibe science and doctrine of
the kind that would stifle its revolutionary will, and keep submerged
whatever vestiges of anger and ‘fantastic hopes’ that remained in its
memory. During his dispute with Marx in the International, Bakunin
insisted that

the great mass of the working class. . . is ignorant and wretched.
Whatever political and religious prejudices people have tried to
implant and even partly succeeded in implanting in its conscious-
ness, it remains socialist without knowing it; it is basically and
instinctively and by the very force of its position more seriously
and more really socialist than all the bourgeois and scientific
socialists put together. It is socialist through all the conditions
of its material existence, through all the needs of its being,
while the others are only socialists through the needs of their
thoughts; and in real life, the needs of a man’s being always
exert a much stronger influence than those of his thought.

Thought being here, as everywhere and always, the expression
of being, the reflections of its successive developments, but
never its moving principle.¹¹⁶

It is for this reason that Bakunin turned away from the proletariat
and its scientific socialism and fixed his hopes on the ‘socialisme
primitif, naturel et beaucoup plus sauvage des campagnes’,¹¹⁷ of the
peasant, the rural brigand and the bandit. As he himself put it,

Brigandage is one of the most honoured aspects of the people’s
life in Russia. At the time when the state of Moscow was being




founded, brigandage represented the desperate protest of the
people against the horrible social order of the time which was not
yet perfected or transformed according to Western models. . . the
brigand is always the defender, the avenger of the people, the
irreconcilable enemy of the entire state regime, both in its civil
and in its solid aspects, the life-and-death fighter against our
statist-aristocratic, official-clerical civilisation. . . The brigand,
in Russia, is the true and only revolutionary - the revolutionary
without phrase-making and without bookish rhetoric. Popular
revolution is born from the merging of the revolt of the brigand
with that of the peasant. . . Such were the revolts of Stenka
Razin and Pugachev. . . and even today this is still the world of
the Russian revolution ; the world of brigands and the world of
brigands alone has always been in harmony with the revolution.

The man who wants to make a serious conspiracy in Russia, who
wants a popular revolution, must turn to that world and fling
himself into it.¹¹⁸

Bakunin’s views are of course exaggerated. Rural banditry has nothing
automatically revolutionary about it, and the brigand is often the
sheerest mercenary (Bakunin himself in his Confessions quotes the
adage ‘point d’argent, point de Suisse’,¹¹⁹ although he never thought
of applying it to Russian bandits).

Bakunin’s Russian brigands have little enough in common with the
romantic Rauber of the young Schiller, and much more in common
with the traditional (and legendary) Russian homo viator, homeless,
outcast, adrift and senselessly destructive. Bakunin believed that the
socially outcast, the marginal, the outlaw and the criminal shared with
the oppressed an exemplary victimization and an exemplary desire for
vengeance and propensity for violence. All these groups shared and
embodied a more or less latent, more or less potentially explosive
revolutionary demiurge that sought only an outlet and needed only
the right spark. Bankunin accepted the notion of class war as a revol-
utionary strategy only in the light of the rebellious surge that he
thought was somehow endemic, instinctive to all oppressed strata of
the population. It is for this reason that he assigned a major role to
disaffected students and marginal intellectuals, ‘fervent energetic
youths, totally declasse, with no career or way out’¹²⁰ - to people,
in fact, like Nechaev - who had nothing to lose. These alone, he insisted,
could escape the fate of becoming ‘slaves, playthings and victims of a
new group of ambitious men’ during and after the revolution, but
could do so only by making their revolution themselves - ruthless,
chaotic, unrestrained.

Bakunin’s commitment to real and potential outlaws calls to mind
Stirner’s invocation of criminals and paupers as iconoclastic egoists-in-




the-making; but such an obvious, and tempting, comparison has its
immediate limits. The Nechaev episode* shows that Bakunin’s pre-
occupation with reckless, marginal, declasse elements in society was no
mere abstract, doctrinaire commitment but one which he actually
tried to put into practice, with dire and sinister results that did much
to discredit Bakuninism in the International. Nechaev, who was made
famous by Bakunin, himself practised what he preached, thus catching
Bakunin short; he is best regarded, perhaps, as Bakunin’s Bakunin - the
protege or disciple who becomes plus royaliste que le roi and reveals
to his mentor the unwelcome logic of his own position. As such,
Nechaev might serve as the nemesis for Bakunin and Stirner alike.

The more immediately relevant comparison is, however, that of
Bakunin and Proudhon, the founders of the two anarchist movements
that played such important parts in the International. By the time of
the Bakuninist flare-up, Proudhonism had largely burned itself out
within the International;yet Bakuninism was to fan many of its embers.
The two movements, which were geographically distinct, had much in
common. The links between Proudhon, the first theorist to call himself
an anarchist, and Bakunin, the creator of anarchism as an expansive,
internationalist doctrine, were quite clear to Bakunin himself. He
revered ‘the illustrious and heroic socialist Proudhon, the only one who
had the courage [in 1848] to defy and expose [the] rabid herd of bour-
geois conservatives, liberals and radicals’¹²² for what they were. Bakunin
felt proud to be associated with Proudhon; and associated he was, by
Marx and others. Marx’s every attempt to dismiss Bakunin as a warmed-
up Proudhonist - however wrongheaded they may finally have been -
had the effect of making Bakunin more certain than ever of the correct-
ness of his views, which he himself described as ‘Proudhonism, greatly
developed and taken to its ultimate conclusion by the proletariat of the
Latin countries’¹²³ - an extension which implies the limits of the
comparison, since Proudhon himself had entertained very little interest
in the Latin countries. During Proudhon’s lifetime, however, he and
Bakunin (circumstances permitting) were, from all accounts, personally
close; Bakunin, indeed, was one of the few to have been spared the
force of Proudhon’s verbal wrath. Of influence, there can be no doubt;
Franco Venturi claims that it was reciprocal.¹²⁴ Bakunin described his

‘Sergei Nechaev, having collaborated as a student in Moscow with Tkachev and
incurred the suspicion of the authorities, left in 1869 for Geneva, where his
ruthlessness and braggadocio won over Bakunin; the two collaborated,¹²¹ and
created a Secret Alliance, the Narodnaya Rasprava (People’s Summary Justice).
Nechaev, who was literal-minded as well as unscrupulous, once back in Moscow
murdered a student, Ivanov -pour encourager les autres -who had threatened to
quit the Alliance (this incident was used by Dostoevsky in The Possessed); and,
having fled to Geneva, implicated Bakunin still further by threatening the Russian
publisher of Marx’s Capital (which Bakunin was to have translated) with a similar
fate. Bakunin disowned him, but not before discovery of Nechaev’s activities
had provided his enemies with evidence galore linking the two, evidence that was
used against Bakunin at The Hague Congress of the International in 1872.




own anarchism as ‘Proudhon’s system enlarged, developed and freed
from all its metaphysical, idealist and doctrinaire decoration’;¹²⁵ this
characterization is significant, not because it provides anything like an
accurate account of the differences that really did obtain between
Bakuninism and Proudhonism, but because it indicates Bakunin’s
perception of what Proudhonism would need in order to become
more appealing and effective. Bakunin was indeed quite perceptive
about Proudhon’s weaknesses and strengths.

As I told him a few months before his death, Proudhon, in
spite of all his efforts to shake off the tradition of classical
idealism, remained all his life an incorrigible idealist, immersed
in the Bible, in Roman law and metaphysics. His great mis-
fortune was that he had never studied the natural sciences or
appropriated their method. He had the instincts of a genius
and he glimpsed the right road, but, hindered by his idealistic
thinking patterns, he fell always into the old errors. Proudhon
was a perpetual contradiction; a vigorous genius, a revolutionary
thinker arguing against idealistic phantoms, and yet never able
to surmount them himself. . ,¹²⁶

Bakunin’s presentation of them gives us a pointer to what his differences
from Proudhon were, and how they were expressed. Proudhonism was
indeed metaphysical, idealistic and doctrinaire in a way Bakuninism was
never to be; it was also rearguard, backward looking and exclusively
French, whereas Bakuninism was expansive, forward looking and
internationalist in its (and in its founder’s) application. Yet beneath
these, and other differences and discontinuities there are similarities
and continuities which are not hard to find. The most important of
these links is the most obvious. Bakunin’s attitude towards political
power and the state was of a piece with Proudhon’s. In the ‘Socialism’
chapter of his Federalism, Socialism and Anti-theologism, Bakunin
indicates that while

in general, regulation was the common passion of all the socialists
of the 1848 era... [who] were all more or less authoritarian ...

[the] exception is Proudhon. The son of a peasant, and thus
instinctively a hundred times more revolutionary than all the
doctrinaire and bourgeois socialists, Proudhon armed himself
with a critique as profound and penetrating as it was merciless,
in order to destroy their systems. Resisting authority with
liberty, against those state socialists, he boldly proclaimed
himself an anarchist; defying their deism and their pantheism,
he had the courage to call himself an atheist.. .

His own socialism was based upon liberty, both individual




and collective, and on the spontaneous action of free
associations obeying no laws other than the general laws
of social economy, already known and yet to be discovered
by social science, free from all government regulation and
state protection. This socialism subordinated politics to the
economic, intellectual and moral interests of society. It
subsequently, by its own logic, culminated in federalism.. ,¹²⁷

Bakunin, when he insisted that ‘it is necessary to abolish completely, in
principle and in practice, everything that might be called political
power, for so long as political power exists, there will always be rulers
and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited’¹²⁸ - Bakunin in
\ these frequent insistences was speaking in the authentic idiom of
Proudhon, as he himself frequently and gratefully acknowledged. The
implication that followed, that of political abstentionism, was equally
Proudhonian.

I \

"fihe epoch of parliamentary life, of constituent and National
Assemblies, is over. Anyone who squarely asks himself the
question must confess that he no longer feels any interest, any
forced and unreal interest, in these ancient forms. I do not
believe in constitutions and laws; the best constitution in the
world would not be able to satisfy me. We need something
different: inspiration, life, a new, lawless and therefore free
world.¹²⁹

Bakunin, in constantly reiterating that political activity inevitably
compromises the actor, and that the revolutionary movement should
not set out to capture the state by political means, but should instead
undermine and overthrow it, was treading in Proudhon’s footprints.
The revolutionary movement, Bakunin argued just as fervently as
Proudhon, should not contaminate itself, should not impugn its own
integrity and revolutionary authenticity by using the machinery or
requiring the recognition of the state. This broad area of agreement,
however, is just the tip of the iceberg. What Bakunin and Proudhon
shared was a hard and fast opposition not only to the state but also
to religion, capitalism, social hierarchy, parliamentarism, and state
socialism (‘the vilest and most formidable lie which our century has
engendered’,¹³⁰ according to Bakunin, who here even sounds like
Proudhon); they shared a pronounced hostility to intellectual hier-
archy in the form of congealed doctrine or dogma (particularly Marx’s);
and they shared what was not so much a readiness to countenance
as an eagerness to embrace non-proletarians, pre-capitalist workers
and peasants as the revolutionary agents par excellence. All these
shared features can be reduced to a mutual sentiment about freedom.




Proudhon, in the words of Bakunin, ‘understood and had a far greater
feeling for freedom’ than Marx;

Proudhon, when he was not obsessed with metaphysical doctrine,
was a revolutionary by instinct;he adored Satan and proclaimed
Anarchy. It is likely that Marx could construct a more rational
theory of freedom, but he lacks the instinctive feeling for it.

As a German and a Jew he is authoritarian from head to foot.¹³¹

Yet the very fact that Bakunin, in this and other passages, would see
fit to compare Proudhon and Marx might give us pause. Proudhon, who
did not readily admit the influence of anyone, and who generally
mentioned others by name only to attack them, would have been
incapable of any such gesture. The point here is not to applaud Bakunin’s
generosity, however - Proudhon would make almost anyone else look
warm-hearted - but to indicate that Proudhon and Bakunin (who were
both very anti-Semitic) had very different views of Marx. Bakunin
discusses Marx’s ideas with remarkable frequency; Proudhon hardly
mentioned his name. Bakunin fully recognized, and frequently acknow-
ledged, the intellectual stature of Marx; Proudhon had regarded Marx as
unimportant because he was foreign. Bakunin frequently took issue
with Marx’s ideas; Proudhon, who regarded Marx’s attacks oh his ideas
as of little consequence, and as capable of doing him little damage,
never bothered to respond, publicly, to Marx’s attacks at all. Any such
response he would have regarded as an irksome waste of effort. Baku-
nin’s attitude towards Marx was, for want of a better/term, more
complicated. He commonly opened attacks on Marx by publicly
paying homage to his ‘scientific’ achievements, a douole-edged com-
pliment if ever there was one, coming from Bakunin; and he constantly
admitted Marx’s superior standing as a theorist - again, a way (for
Bakunin) of damning with faint praise - and responded to it with a
mixture of envy and admiration. That this mixture was laced with
a certain spiteful hostility does not mean that Bakunin’s admiration
was insincere; it is one of the paradoxes of their dispute that Baku-
nin’s thought was actually influenced by that of Marx. He recalled
in 1871 that during the 1840s

as far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is,
incomparably more advanced than I. . . Although younger
than I, he was already an atheist, a conscious) materialist,
and an informed socialist. It was at that time that he was
elaborating the foundations of his system as it stands today.

We saw each other often. I greatly respected him for his
learning and for his passionate devotion to the cause of the
proletariat - though it was always mixed with vanity. I




eagerly sought his conversation, which was always instructive
and witty when it was not inspired by petty hate, which, alas,
was only too often the case. He called me a sentimental idealist,
and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious and cunning, and
I was right too.¹³²

Bakunin’s words-elsewhere he says of Marx that he had

established the principle that juridical evolution in history is
not the cause but the effect of economic development, and this
is a great and fruitful concept. . . to Marx belongs the credit for
establishing it as the basis for an economic system¹³³

- serve to remind us that he and Marx did have some basic points in
common. Both believed in the primacy of economic ‘base’ over political
‘superstructure’; both wished to overthrow capitalism and were engaged
upon working as active revolutionists to this end; both were socialists
and collectivists, opposed to bourgeois individualism; both were bitterly
at odds with religion; and both had a veneration for natural science.
Bakunin, for his part, freely allowed for Marx’s superiority as a theorist,
an attribute he could recognize without in any way valuing it; unlike
Proudhon, he was unconcerned with questions about his own intellectual
originality; and, most important, Bakunin was not the man to occupy
himself with queries about the provenance, origin or credentials of any
idea, provided it was grist to his mill. He cared only whether it could be
put to good use in the spread of Bakuninism.

For these reasons, it should not surprise us that Bakunin, who quite
freely borrowed what suited him from Marx’s doctrine, had a rather
higher estimation of Marx than Proudhon had had. This difference
between Proudhon and Bakunin is symptomatic of many others. To
begin with, there is the question of violence. Proudhon, as we have
seen, favoured gradualist, incremental, institutional change from below,
the slow, peaceful growth and imperceptible accretion of counter-
institutions behind and within existing institutions. He tended to stand
back from violent revolutionary action, since he associated violence with
the state; he was refractory even about strikes, which he thought were
violent enough to sully the mutualist movement and to contaminate it
politically. Bakunin had no such inhibitions. He never concealed his
taste for violence in his life or in his writings; he never associated
violence exclusively with the state; and he never stopped agitating for
sudden, violent elemental change. To this end, he threw himself with
an almost unparalleled temerity into any convenient, or available, fray.
This fundamental difference points to another - a difference in tempera-
ment. Unlike Bakunin, Proudhon was famous and revered because of
the books he wrote, but always shunned the limelight; he disliked the




public forum, and cut and thrust of open debate. He tended not only to
recoil from violence but also to stand back from the kind of socialism
that (in Oscar Wilde’s words) takes up too many evenings. He was not a
participant; he made converts from afar. Bakunin was always a partici-
pant, who made converts in person.

Proudhon’s attachments were more limited, more distanced. He
believed in labour as a redemptive agency, and this belief was the basis
of his agencies for the peaceable reconstitution of society from below
- the workshop (I’atelier) as an educative institution, proletarian self-
help and Bildung (what Proudhon called demopedie), and class purity
(ouvrierisme). While all these Proudhonian themes were to feed into
later anarcho-syndicalism, Bakunin’s influence on anarcho-syndicalism,
which was to be just as pronounced as Proudhon’s, took the form of a
belief not in labour but in violence as the redemptive agency. Bakunin
agreed with Proudhon that suffering and oppression were exemplary
and ennobling, but parted company from Proudhon in insisting that
only violence redeems oppression and suffering. Proudhon was obsessed
with order, aisance, a modest sufficiency and quiet life for all; Bakunin,
who was anything but a theorist of order like Proudhon, was obsessed
with the kind of pan-destruction and nihilisme du combat that made
Proudhon (and others) shudder. Proudhon defended the patriarchal
family, the hearth and home; Bakunin did not. Proudhon finally
defended private property (he wanted everyone to have some); Bakunin
worked for its destruction. Even in the case of the hostility to religion
the two anarchists shared, Bakunin’s railings, which varied between the
Promethean and the demonic, make Proudhon’s sparrings look palely
anticlerical by comparison.

These are differences of some substance; as so often happens, it was
the heretical disciple, Bakunin, who carried on and transmitted the
main body of the master’s ideas into the rough and tumble of political
life. They did not survive unshaken. Proudhon’s permission had been
needed for his followers - those who had composed the Manifeste des
60 largely in order to obtain it - to participate in the International.
Proudhon’s permission was forthcoming, but with some reluctance; it
involved modification of the doctrine of political abstentionism, which
Proudhon somewhat grudgingly reformulated in his last book, De la
Capacite politique des classes ouvrieres. Bakunin shared none of Proud-
hon’s aloofness, none of his reluctance to have his followers participate
in a movement for many of whose principles he held no brief. Any
movement was grist to Bakunin’s mill - not only the International, but
even, earlier, the unlikely forum of the bourgeois League for Peace and
Freedom; any movement pointed in the direction of liberation of any
kind - including the Italian and Polish movements the Proudhonists
continued to oppose¹³⁴ - was good enough for Bakunin. As to the
International, Bakunin was more than anxious to get his foot in the




door; as E.H. Carr neatly puts it, ‘the spirit in which Bakunin made
this momentous move was one not of hostility but of patronage. Far
from wishing ill to the International, he would take it under his wing’.¹³⁵

There is one more characteristic difference between Proudhon and
Bakunin. It has often been pointed out, more or less uncharitably,
that

for every ‘anarchist’ statement in Proudhon’s voluminous writings,
one can find an ‘authoritarian’ utterance, just as one can find
him simultaneously on the side of revolutionary workers, con-
servative peasants, Louis Bonaparte. . .and the slave-holders of
the American South, whose vile cause he espoused because they
were fighting against ‘centralization.’¹³⁶

On this score, Bakunin’s record is untarnished - with the possible
exception of the Confession read by the Tsar. Yet the ambivalent
relationship between anarchism and authoritarianism, which can
almost always be found in an anarchist theorist, comes out in Bakunin’s
case. It comes out not so much in his Confession but in his obsessive
conspiratorialism, a conspiratorialism Proudhon would certainly have
abhorred. Proudhon’s idea of a revolutionary conspirator was Louis-
Auguste Blanqui, whom he detested; Bakunin’s idea of a revolutionary
conspirator was Sergei Nechaev, whose flattery threw him entirely off
balance. Far from refusing to have anything to do with him - in the
manner of Proudhon’s aloofness from Blanqui - Bakunin adopted this
urchin of the revolution. The difference can tell us a great deal. It can
be exaggerated; the claim that Bakunin helped author Nechaev’s chilling
‘Catechism’ has been disproved.¹³⁷ Yet Nechaev’s paradox of demanding
in the name of freedom a Jesuitical obedience ac cadavar from members
of a revolutionary cell - the organization of which is the very antithesis
of freedom - is a paradox that was familiar to Bakunin himself. It has
often been pointed out that Bakunin would commonly argue the
impossible: ‘a spontaneous countryside rebellion, based on the people
of the “lower depths,” under the control of a secret society that was
somehow not to be the kind of organization that consistent Jacobins
like Tkachev favoured’; and that Bakunin, who was

in theory a protagonist of absolute liberty, and ready to denounce
in the bitterest terms the rigid discipline of communism.. .
resorted, in organizing his revolutionary activities, to methods
which were not only the precise contradiction of his own
principles, but went far beyond the most extreme ambitions
of the dogmatic and dictatorial Marx.¹³⁸

Bakunin would commonly set up separate revolutionary cells, or even




rival networks of cells, to spy on one another, keeping (or pretending
to keep) the threads of conspiracy and control in his own hands. The
web of alliances, bureaux, brotherhoods and directorates which Bakunin
had set up by 1868 in order to worm his way into the International
is of a complexity that all but defies description. No attempt will be
made here to disentangle the web, which would be a forlorn quest.
That the organizations in question seem often to have existed only in
Bakunin’s fertile imagination ought to give pause to those (Leninists
included) who fondly imagine parallels between Bakunin - or even
Nechaev - and Lenin.¹³⁹ Bakunin’s successive schemes were generously
larded with fantasy, and this is as true of his manipulations within the
International as of any others. He was not a particularly successful
conspirator, as the following sketch of his machinations in and around
the International is about to show. He was, however, the kind of
conspirator who is so adept (or maladroit) at weaving webs of intrigue
that he succeeds in concealing the ineffectuality of his schemes not
only from others but also from himself. His continuous inventions of
competing but nebulous cabals should remind us that Bakunin’s obses-
sion was, finally, less with power than with personal influence; he
simply could not tolerate rivals, and would prefer to command a small,
select group which he could dominate by virtue of his considerable
personal magnetism than to be prominent, but not predominant, in a
larger, more impersonal organization - an organization, that is to say,
like the International itself by 1868, the year of his entry.

Brotherhood, League and Alliance

I will lay counter-mines against Mazzini in
Florence through Bakunin.

Marx to Engels, 1865¹⁴⁰

Bakunin might seem a curious choice as Marx’s longa manus in Italy,
yet Marx renewed his acquaintance with him to this end in 1864.
Few meetings can have augured less favourably. Bakunin’s penchant
for the violence of the lower depths, his taste for conspiratorialism, and
his instability of temperament were, like Marx’s Russophobia, well
enough known; all of these were to be amplified as their dispute ran its
course. Even apart from these there was a more particular bone of
contention. Marx in 1848 had reported in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
the existence of documents proving that Bakunin, in his capacity as
a Tsarist agent, had denounced some Polish insurgents who were subse-
quently executed by the Russian authorities. Even though Marx publicly
retracted this irresponsible accusation,¹⁴¹ the incident still rankled when


Bakunin wrote his Confession; and Marx, in making amends, seems not
lo have modified his private misgivings about Bakunin, who remained
in his opinion as little to be trusted as any Russian with pan-Slav
leanings. By 1864, however, Marx and Bakunin shared an interest in
the character assassination of Mazzini, who still posed a threat to the
fledgling International; and the meeting between the two passed off
surprisingly amicably. Marx reported in a letter to Engels that would
have its place in any compendium of famous last words that Bakunin
‘will now take part only in socialist movements. . . I must say that I
like him much better than before ... he is one of the few people
whom. . . I find directed not towards the past but the future’.¹⁴²
Bakunin, for his part, emphasized that Marx had taken the initiative
toward reconciliation.

He [Marx] swore that he had never acted against me, either
in words or in deeds; that, on the contrary, he had always
nurtured a sincere friendship towards me and a great respect
for me. I knew he was not telling the truth, but I had never
really harboured any resentment. I knew he had played a big