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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.5: The Adventures of Mikhail Bakunin

We have spent the last three episodes focusing on Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and the revolutionary philosophy they developed together, first as young radicals and then as aging exiles. But if you go back to episode 10.1, on the founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, you will remember that there were a lot of other people in the room representing a lot of other different philosophies. And that was fine, because that was the whole idea. Sure, they might disagree about some details, but everyone shared a common enemy: the conservative rulers of Europe.

This early solidarity though, would not hold together. In just a few years, the International would be doomed by an irreconcilable difference of opinion about both means and the ends of revolutionary struggle, and more specifically, between the scientific socialists and the anarchists. And though he was not in the room in 1864, did not even join the International until 1868, the anarchist faction would be led by the subject of today’s episode, who also happens to be the founder of Russian anarchism: Mikhail Bakunin.

Mihail Bakunin was born in 1814 in what is today the Kuvshinovsky district of Russia and yes, of course, God help us with the Russian pronunciation. His father was a minor noble and diplomat in the Russian foreign service, who did his time in France and Italy and who indulged in liberal politics and who would be adjacent to the circles involved in the Decemberist revolt of 1825, which I promise we will talk about. Bakunin’s mother was 24 years younger than his father, and she had older relatives who were also involved in the Decemberist revolt.

Now, though his family pulled back from politics, especially after 1825, it was a liberal and literate household that Mikhail grew up in. And he was exposed at an early age to, for example, French enlightenment philosophy. He then followed the generic path of a son of minor nobility and spent his teen years as a cadet officer in training. But his heart was not in army life. Not only did Bakunin have a terminal aversion to being bossed around, he had an active searching and curious mind. This active searching and curious mind ignited that most dreadful of passions: an interest in philosophy. Defying his father’s wish that he either serve in the army or pursue a job in the civil service, Bakunin went to Moscow in search of the truth. Diving into German philosophy, he went from Kant to Fichte to Hegel and was entranced most especially by Hegel. At some point in here, he met and became friends with Alexander Herzen, who sometimes wears the title father of Russian socialism, and whose name I think is more properly in Russian something along the lines of Alexander Keert-zen, but I’m going to go with the anglicanized Herzen. Anyway at this point, neither of them are old enough to be the fathers of anything, they were unruly intemperate kids playing with very dangerous ideas.

In 1840, Bakunin received permission to move to Berlin, to continue his studies in philosophy, and like Marx and Engels, who were kicking around the city at the same time, he fell in with the more progressively radical young Hegelians. Bakunin became drawn to the negation side of the dialectics, and he famously said in an essay he wrote in 1842, that the desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire too. So he was a budding young revolutionary.

In 1842, he moved to Dresden where he went further down the revolutionary line. He became interested in socialism, but even more, he became interested in liberation nationalism, particularly in liberating the Slavic peoples from the tyrannical hand of the Holy Alliance powers, Russia and Austria and Prussia. Bakunin’s politics derailed his chances for a university job, as he had now been identified as a dangerous malcontent by the Russian foreign service. He then moved up to Switzerland, met some exiles connected with the League of the Just, and started referring to himself as a communist. The Russian ambassador to Switzerland ordered him to return to Russia and threatened to confiscate all his property back home, and facing potential arrest, he moved to Brussels where he fell in with a crowd of Polish nationalists trying to restart the revolutionary struggle for national liberation, a cause that as I said would be close to Bakunin’s heart for the rest of his life.

After a brief stint in Brussels, he moved on to Paris in 1844, arriving just a few months after Marx and his family, and they wound up in the same social circles. At that point, Marx was working with a mutual friend they had named Arnold Ruger on a journal called the German-French Annals, which was meant to create a political and intellectual bridge between French and German radicals, but the French took very little interest in it, and all the contributors wound up being German. This included an essay from Engels, which is how Marx and Engels became truly acquainted with each other. The only non-German author published in the journal before it folded was Bakunin.

And Bakunin also forged a personal and ideological bond with Proudhon, and so the seeds of his future anarchism were planted. And if we glance at the three pillars of Marxism, Bakunin is already sharing two of them: German Hegelian philosophy and utopian French socialism. But at this point, Bakunin did not get into the third pillar, which was English economics. Indeed. Bakunin later wrote of his first encounters with Marx, as far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy. I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations. He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right. I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty. And I also was right.

In December of 1844, the tsar made another move against the wayward Bakunin, formally stripping him of his noble privileges and sentencing him in absentia to exile in Siberia. But as Bakunin had yet broken no French laws, the French did not expel him from the country.

At least not yet.

In November of 1847, Bakunin took part in a meeting commemorating the Polish uprising of 1830. And at this party, he gave a speech brazenly denouncing the despotism of the tsar and calling openly for a people’s revolution. Now considered a very dangerous element, he finally received his expulsion order from Mr. Guizot. So he moved back to Brussels where Marx and Engels and a bunch of other radicals who had been booted out of Paris wound up.

So this puts Bakunin in Brussels when the revolution breaks out in Paris in 1848. And in case I haven’t emphasized this enough, the revolution of 1848 is the seminal event for this entire generation, for liberals, for conservatives, for democrats, for socialists. I mean, it’s just a footnote these days, but at the time it was the volcanic eruption they had all either been fearing or anticipating. And no less than Marx and Engels, Bakunin was convinced, right, this is it, this is our French Revolution.

Once the revolution really got going in the spring of 1848, Bakunin supported his friends Georg and Emma Herwegh in their attempt to raise a Legion in France to go join with Friedrich Hecker’s uprising in April of 1848, we talked all about this in episode 7.20. Bakunin’s supported this effort, while Marx thought the whole project suicidal folly. It led to a minor personal falling out that contributed to future enmity between the two. Bakunin later wrote, I must openly admit that in this controversy Marx and Engels were in the right. With characteristic insolence though, they attacked Herwegh personally when he was not there to defend himself. In a face to face confrontation with them, I heatedly defended Herwegh, and our mutual dislike began then.

Using connections he had to guys who were now in the French provisional government, Bakunin secured funds to advance a project of Slavic liberation in central and Eastern Europe. He tried to get to Poland, but Prussian officials stopped him in Posen and he was forced to bounce over to Prague, where he had heard things might be heating up. Bakunin arrived in Prague just in time for the Pan-Slavic Congress that we talked about in episode 7.24, and he inserted himself as a self appointed delegate representing Russia. This meant he was also there when the Prague uprising began, and when it was immediately crushed, forcing Bakunin to flee the city, and he ultimately settled in the town of Colton. In the fall of 1848, he wrote An Appeal to the Slavs, calling for a pan-Slavic uprising to join with Germans and Italians and Hungarians to overthrow the Hapsburg Empire and the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, to replace the tyrannical Holy Alliance with democratic nation states.

But of course we fast forward just a little bit, and where are we? That’s right. We’re at episode 7.31. It’s now May of 1849 and we’re at the final uprising in Dresden. Bakunin joined his acquaintance and comrade Richard Wagner in erecting barricades in the city and doing their best in a doomed effort to fend off the Prussian army. And though there is of course mutual dislike between Marx and Bakunin at this point, Marx does comment on events in Dresden by saying that in Bakunin, the people of Dresden had a cool and competent leader. It would however later become the stuff of intersectional backbiting that Bakunin had gone and fought on the front lines while Marx fled the scenes, just as it was time to mount the barricades.

So Wagner managed to escape the uprising and Dresden, but Bakunin was not so lucky. He was captured about 60 miles west of the city and taken into custody. He would not taste freedom again for 12 long years. Sentenced to death, the punishment was suspended and he sat in prison in Saxony for the next 13 months. In June of 1850, he was transferred to direct Austrian custody, they immediately re-sentenced him to death, but again, the sentence was not carried out. Instead, the Austrians are arranged to transfer him to Russian custody in May of 1851. And at that point Bakunin was moved to St. Petersburg and received yet another sentence of death, which was also not immediately carried out. Instead, he got something quite a bit worse. He spent the next six years in the dungeons of Imperial Russia. Life was intolerably difficult. He contracted scurvy and all his teeth fell out. Bakunin begged for his life. He also begged his brother to slip him some poison.

After eight total years in various prisons and dungeons, it looked like he might be coming due to have his sentence commuted. But Tsar Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator, explicitly struck Bakunin’s name from the amnesty list. Only after the tireless efforts of his mother was Bakunin finally led out of the dungeons in 1857 and sentenced to exile in Siberia, forever the dumping ground for whoever happens to be dissenting against whatever Russian government happens to be controlling Russia.

He landed first in a work camp in Tomsk and did what he could to make a life for himself. He met the daughter of a Polish merchant named Antonia, and they got married. Then his prospects brightened a bit more. Bakunin’s still had sympathetic, liberal relatives, people who favored leniency and reform generally and wanted to help their revolutionary cousin. They arranged to get him a commercial job working in Irkutsk, which gave him something resembling a regular daily life after so many years of just being in prison.

Upon arriving in Irkutsk, he came to find that many of the local officials did not like the domineering attitude of the central government back in St. Petersburg. And they themselves were quite sympathetic to critiques of the regime and everyone and everything that surrounded it. So they were very tolerant of the exiled radicals. Bakunin could pretty much read what he wanted and say what he wanted, he could send and receive correspondence, and though his resources were limited and his audience was small, he was able to restart his intellectual life. And I should mention, before we move on that this is the same group of tolerant officials in air quotes, who would play a role in Kropotkin’s advancement from socialism to anarchism just a few years later, but that is a story for another time.

Though Bakunin was tolerated and even got some special treatment, he was not interested in spending the rest of his life in isolated exile. In 1861, he managed to get himself a travel pass to leave Irkutsk and travel down the river to the coast as long as he promised to be back by the time the winter ice set in. This was not a promise Bakunin had any interest in keeping. So in June of 1861, he sailed away.

Down at the port of Olga, he talked his way onto an outbound American ship slipping out of Russian waters and landing in Japan in August. There, he was greeted by a small community of European political exiles, but Bakunin was also not going to spend the rest of his life as an isolated exile in Japan. Instead, he secured himself passage on a ship bound for California, which landed in San Francisco on October the 15th.

But is Bakunin going to settle down in San Francisco and go off and like pan for gold? No, sir, he is not.

First, he took a ship down to Panama. Then he tracked the Overland trail from Panama city to Cologne, where he caught a ship to New York. Upon arrival in New York, he spent a little bit of time meeting back up with former comrades, 48ers who had quit Europe and moved to the United States. Now some of these old 48ers still had an eye on Europe, but many more had given up on the old country. They had gotten into American politics, abolitionism, and were now in meshed in the just months old American Civil War.

So did Bakunin join up, was his destiny there among the other German officers who served in the union army? No, it was not.

He traveled up to Boston and then took a ship to sunny old England landing in Liverpool in late December, 1861. Then he went down to London where he quite literally just showed up on the doorstep of his old friend, Alexander Herzen, in the middle of their family dinner. Between his arrest in Saxony in May of 1849 and his arrival in England in December of 1861, Bakunin completed almost a complete circumnavigation of the globe.

So it has now been just shy of thirteen years since Bakunin had been a part of the revolutionary community in Europe, and he found it very different than when he left. He remade connections from the old days, but while he had been in prison and exile, they had spent the last decade under the banal but oppressive weight of conservative government. They had seen a series of last hopes die, one by one. They saw friends and comrades emigrate or give up or sell out. But Bakunin had been isolated in prison and then banished to the other side of the world. He had survived and fought his way back, and when he came back, he discovered that his own thinking had gone quite a bit beyond even the most radical of them. Marx himself famously commented on this in a letter to Engels, approvingly remarking that when he saw Bakunin in London, on the whole, he is one of the few people who might find not to have retrogressed after 16 years, but to have developed further.

Bakunin now had some pretty funky ideas about the nature of power and authority. Possibly thanks to his prolonged imprisonment, his socialism now had a distinctly libertarian flair. The liberation of the human spirit more than anything else was now the object of his revolutionary ambitions, but he was also still committed to his nationalism, and his belief that people deserved self-determination. And Bakunin saw nation in a fact as the individual of the world stage. He wrote, I feel myself, always the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands. Nationality is a historic local fact, which like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance. Nationality is not a principle, it is a legitimate fact just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or small has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principle of freedom. But that said, Bakunin was a believer in the liberating power of nationalism, and he was always on guard against the idea that one ascendant liberated nation should be able to turn around and use their new found self-determination and freedom to oppress members of minority nationalities. So this still at the forefront of his mind, when he returned to Europe, Bakunin reconnected with those liberation nationalist roots.

During his time in Siberia, he had, for example, heard about Garibaldi, the great Italian freedom fighter, and now send him admiring letters in London. He became friendly with the now aging Mazzini, no longer the spry young leader of young Italy and young Europe, but the doyenne of emigrate democratic Republican nationalists. But Bakunin’s particular cause was that of the Slavs generally, and Poland in particular, and so Bakunin was naturally thrilled when Poland went into revolt in January 1863. He immediately made his way to Copenhagen to try to travel to Poland to join the cause, but he was unable to pass through the lines. The blow of the setback though, was lessened by the fact that his wife Antonia was finally able to get out of Siberia and join him after nearly two years of separation.

By the end of 1863, Bakunin was making plans to go off and live in Northern Italy where he hoped to promote a Slavic Italian Alliance against the Habsburgs. And when he departed in November of 1863, he carried letters of introduction from Mazzini, though they would soon have an ideological falling out. Marx somewhat anticipated this falling out, and he bid a fond farewell to Bakunin, who had this massive intellect and was a powerful force for social revolution, and Marx saw Bakunin making a headquarters in Italy as the perfect way to counteract the narrow-minded limitations of  Mazzini’s mere political revolution.

So in January of 1864, Bakunin arrived in northern Italy in what was now officially the kingdom of Italy. And it was here that Bakunin really and truly started to advance his own distinct anarchist theories. Most of the ideas we’ll be talking about next week come from this final thirteen or so years of his life, between his arrival in Italy in 1864 and his death in 1876. We’re going to talk all about it next week, but just to cut to the chase, Bakunin is now opposed to all forms of authority and coercion wherever he finds them: capitalists, the state, the church, anything that claimed coercive power over free people was the enemy of the full development of full human life.

And just to give you some flavor of where his head is at now, Bakunin will say for example, the trouble lies not in any particular form of government, but in the very existence of government itself. He also flipped one of Voltaire’s old, witty aphorisms on its head: Voltaire had said, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Bakunin meanwhile said, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

Ultimately, what Bakunin wants to do is reconcile the apparent contradiction between liberty and equality, to transcend the dangers implied by both on their own and form them into a synthetic combination. As he famously wrote, liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

While in Italy, Bakunin founded his own organization to propagate his new anarchist principles. This group is sometimes called the International Brotherhood, the International Fraternity, or the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists. And it is the formation of this group that led to his break with Mazzini because it was from the old groups that Mazzini had cultivated that Bakunin’s started converting adherents from democratic republicanism to full-blown anarchism. In Mazzini’s eyes, Bakunin had just used the letters of introduction Mazzini had given him to steal all of Mazzini’s disciples.

The founding of this international organization is nearly simultaneous with the founding of the International Working Men’s Association up in London in September of 1864. Bakunin’s group had a more ideologically coherent program, though. It was meant to advance Bakunin’s anarchism, not be a catchall umbrella group. It was also purposefully more secretive and conspiratorial than the international. Bakunin was happy to tap into the tradition of secret societies in Italy that went back to the days of the Carbonari, and Bakunin’s program of collectivist anti-authoritarian anarchism started to find ready adherents in Italy and then across Southern Europe.

Bakunin sponsored a tour through Spain of an Italian comrade named Giuseppe Fanelli who spread this new anarchist gospel and found a ready audience, planting the seeds of what would become the largest flowering of European anarchism.

While this was all going on, tensions were rising between Napoleon the Third’s French empire and Otto Von Bismarck’s Prussia. War seemed imminent. And so a movement began to join together a bunch of different pacifist voices to try to diffuse tensions. And this became a group called the League of Peace and Freedom. The League was joined by liberals like John Stuart Mill, radical Democrats like Jules Favre, moderate socialists like old Louis Blanc and Alexander Herzen, and nationalist freedom fighters like Garibaldi. Bakunin and his anarchists answered the call and signed onto a petition by the League that was making the rounds in 1867.

Now the League of Peace and Freedom was hoping to get the International Working Men’s Association to sign up, but Marx guided the response of the central committee to say, of course, as individuals, you can go join up, and we in principle support the aims of the League of Peace and Freedom, but the whole point of the International is to be the top of all pyramids, and as an organization, we will not work in affiliated alliance with other international organizations. And Marx even said, if you really support peace and freedom, you will join us, not the other way around. But plenty of members of the International did join the League of Peace and Freedom, and there was a big congress in Geneva with many famous attendees among them, Bakunin and Garibaldi, now both legendary revolutionaries and they famously embraced each other to a thunderous standing ovation.

But though many of the radicals and socialists and anarchists who joined the league came in with high hopes, they found themselves outnumbered by more tepid political liberals and democrats who were not interested in letting this peace project be turned into a vehicle for social revolution

So disillusioned, Bakunin and his anarchists wound up seceding in 1868. And what they wanted to do now was take Marx’s advice and join the International Working Men’s Association. To do this, they formed a group called the Alliance of Socialist Democracy and petition to affiliate it with the Geneva section of the International. But the response from the central committee in London was in the same vein as their response towards the league of peace and freedom, we don’t associate with other international organizations, our whole point of being is to be the one great international organization. Everybody else joins us, that’s the whole point. And there’s actually a copy of the marginal notes Marx made when he read the organizing charter of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, where he’s written things like, what modesty! They establish themselves as the central authority, clever lads. And, they want to compromise us under their own patronage. And then bluntly, the international association does not admit any international branches. So the response was, if you guys want to join us, that’s fine, that’s awesome, let’s do it. But you have to dissolve this intermediary international committee that you’ve set up, and each section needs to join the international individually as an individual group. One central committee, one annual Congress, that’s the point.

Bakunin decided he could live with these terms and knew that the number of followers he was bringing in would give him plenty of weight to bargain about the direction, policies, and goals of the international. So in 1868, the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists dissolved almost as quickly as they had been formed, and all the national and local sections affiliated directly with the International. As too did Bakunin himself, who was now for the first time, officially a member. This meant that when you looked at the affiliated roles of the International, most of the Italian and Spanish sections were in collectivist anarchist groups operating under Bakunin’s intellectual and political auspices, rather than scientific socialists operating under Marx’s intellectual and political auspices.

So we’ll leave it off there for now with Bakunin joining the International. This also happens to be just when all those peace initiatives are failing, and the Franco-Prussian war is about to erupt. And the lightning run of events to follow — the defeat of France, the fall of the second empire, the founding of the third republic, the Paris Commune, and the Bloody Week — are going to ignite fierce debates inside the international about how to respond, what to do, who to support and why. And these years would ultimately crack the movement into and spell the end of the First International, who’s divergent and still combative heirs would have to pick up the baton in the next generation to carry the great work of social revolution forward.

But that will be in two weeks, because next week we are going to turn to the actual philosophy and programs of Bakunin’s anarcho collectivism, and Bakunin’s anarcho collectivism was different from the anarcho mutualism of Proudhon that preceded him, the scientific socialism of Marx that was contemporary with him, and the anarcho communism of his younger countrymen Kropotkin, which would be developed after Bakunin’s death. So next week it’s an anarcho collectivism, and then in two weeks, the showdown between the Red and the Black.