VOL. IX, NO. 3, MAY 1914
Michael Bakunin (1814–1914)
By Max Baginski
Max Baginski marked the birth centennial of Mikhail Bakunin with an appreciation that reflected the awe in which one of anarchism’s most heroic founding figures was held. A large man of huge and restless appetites, Michael Bakunin (as Baginski called him) was among that new breed of international, peripatetic revolutionaries that emerged during the European uprisings of 1848. He is perhaps best known for his terrifying words, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion,” which ever since has alarmed both antianarchist revolutionaries and antirevolutionists alike. The force of Bakunin’s personality was manifest in the fatal factionalism that split the International Workingmen’s Association of 1864–76 (the “First International”) between his followers and those of his greatest rival, Karl Marx, who engineered his expulsion from the organization in 1872. Bakunin died in 1876, the same year the First International dissolved.
IN THE SPRING OF 1861 THERE ARRIVED IN San Francisco a man who had a long and eventful journey behind him. He came all the way from Siberia, where he had passed four years in exile. Previous to that he was imprisoned in the dungeons of Saxony, Austria, and Russia. In Saxony he had been sentenced to death because of his participation in the Dresden uprising. Extradited to Austria, he was again condemned to die. Then followed his extradition to Russia, where he was kept six years in the Petro-Pavlov Fortress. Transferred to the dreaded Schlüsselburg casemates, he was subsequently doomed to lifelong exile in Siberia.
Twelve years of this persecution and torture passed before he succeeded in finding his way to liberty. Under many difficulties he escaped from Siberia, crossed Japan, and thence reached the United States. Soon he was in London, where he immediately renewed his revolutionary connections and threw himself into his former work with an energy and enthusiasm as if all the persecution he had suffered merely served to rejuvenate him.
The name of this refugee was Michael Bakunin. Born May 20th (May 8th, according to the Russian calendar), 1814, he enjoyed all the advantages of a child of a wealthy family that belonged to the oldest Russian nobility. Young Bakunin might have easily attained to something “great” in the official circles of Russia, after he graduated from the Imperial Artillery School and became an army officer. But his rebellious temperament, his passionate love of liberty, and his rich mental endowments all combined to alienate him from the world of bureaucracy, and made him one of the great, significant personalities whose name will for all time be associated with the noblest struggles of humanity to break its fetters.
In the personality of Bakunin was incarnate the spirit of the Social Revolution. He was the very reverse of the genus politician who cunningly builds up his party and becomes absorbed therein. He gave himself fully, abandoned himself completely to his ideal, while the politician carefully calculates the steps he must climb to reach his goal. ’Tis the eternal contrast between the idealist and the politician: the one espouses liberty as wide as the world, the other awaits a favorable opportunity for advancement; the one devotes himself entirely to revolution, the other adapts himself to circumstances. It is because of this contrast that the politician wins momentary triumph, the real value of which soon shrinks, while the revolutionist achieves little success during his lifetime and personally often suffers a tragic fate—but the fire of his being, the directness and oneness of his purpose continue to inspire the hearts and minds of mankind long after his death.
No doubt Karl Marx, Bakunin’s antagonist in the International Workingmen’s Association—organized fifty years ago—is still held in high esteem. But one thinks of him as a scholastic, a theoretician, the founder of a system that began with the claim of infallibility, but which is now doomed to disintegration, its very foundations crumbling to dust. No such musty chill breathes from Bakunin. His lifework is not an appeal to mere intellectuality; he speaks to the whole man, the most precious part of whom is still his strong will, his instincts and passions.
Young Bakunin worked his way through the abstruse books of the German philosophers and later became active in the conspiratory and revolutionary uprisings of almost every country in Europe. In all these struggles his efforts were directed towards the demolition of every form of tyranny: God, State, capitalism, every metaphysical as well as physical despotism was to be destroyed before justice and liberty could triumph. His manifold activities brought him in personal contact with most of the thinkers and propagandists of the social revolutionary movement of his time. He carried on long discussions of social problems with Proudhon; he was in close touch with Nechayev, the most zealous and reckless of Russian revolutionists, as well as with Alexander Herzen. Common ideas made Richard Wagner kin to him in the days of the Dresden uprising, and he was an intimate friend of the poet-revolutionist Georg Herwegh. There was hardly any individual type of revolutionist that Bakunin failed to meet in his stormy career. From the wealth of his experience—with individuals, events, theories, principles—there crystallized in his later years the conviction that the proletariat can never hope for liberation except through its own efforts. In a letter to the members of the Jura Federation, with whom he had worked and struggled and who stood by him in spite of all the slanders of the Marx clique, he left a sort of testament that is of especial significance at the present time, when the workers throughout the world are beginning to see the emptiness of political phrases. In this letter—the last greeting to his former comrades—he says:
“By birth and personal position I am a bourgeois, and as such I could carry on only theoretical propaganda amongst you. But I have come to the conclusion that the time for theoretical work, written or spoken, is past.... This is not a time for ideas; it is the time for action, for deeds. And first of all it is necessary to organize the power of the proletariat. But this organization must be the work of the proletariat itself. If I were young I would go into the midst of the workers and by taking part in the daily life and struggles of my brothers, I would aid in this most important work of organization. But neither my age nor my health permit it now. Organize, constantly organize the international militant solidarity of the workers, in every trade and country, and remember that however weak you are as isolated individuals or districts, you will constitute a tremendous, invincible power by means of universal coöperation.”
This is the same militant spirit that breathes now in the best expressions of the Syndicalist and I. W W movements. Indeed, the 100th anniversary of Michael Bakunin comes at a time of a strong worldwide revival of the ideas for which Bakunin labored throughout his life with such wonderful devotion, perseverance, and courage.