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Episode 10.6: True Liberty, True Equality and True Fraternity

Last time we did the life of Mikhail Bakunin, the professional Russian revolutionary who began his career as a pretty standard issue socialist and nationalist, but who then returned from a long period of confinement, and one circumnavigation of the globe, as a committed anarchist. Today, we are going to discuss the basic tenants of Bakunin’s anarchism, how he came to hold these ideas, the end state he was working towards, and the means by which he hoped to achieve it, leaving off for next week the main compare and contrast session between Bakunin’s anarcho-collectivism and Marx’s scientific socialism.

Okay. So the first thing we need to do is establish what we mean by anarchism and anarchy. Well, it is a word constructed using some good old fashioned Greek, which is what we always love to do when it comes to political terms. Where monarchy is rule of the one, and oligarchy is rule of the few, anarchy is rule of the none. It can be literally translated as the absence of a ruler.

Now because anarchy means absence of a ruler, it is common to use the term as a synonym for chaos or disorder, but this is not what anarchists mean by anarchy. And they will tell you, frankly, that if you think absence of a ruler necessarily means violent chaos, then that means that you have been brainwashed by the ideological heirs of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that absent the iron hand of Leviathan, life will be nasty, brutish and short.

Anarchism does not mean disorder and chaos. Anarchists are not opposed to associations or organizations or administrations, quite the opposite. They just don’t want any more rulers. No more hierarchies, no more inequality, no more exploitation, no more bosses.

Anarchism emerged from the attempt to answer the social question in the wake of the French Revolution. Running from the early utopian socialists through Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was the first to call himself an anarchist, these early anarchists believed that the real problem was coercive hierarchies, whether political, economic, or social. That the unequal distribution of wealth and power led to a few being masters while everyone else was a slave.

So they wanted to create new forms of economic and political organization that stressed voluntary association and mutual cooperation, where all the members would be free and equal. No one person could own all the means of production or claim the lion’s share of the produce; instead, everyone would share equally in the bounty of their collective labor.

Now there’s a branch of anarchism that runs from this guy Max Sterner through Benjamin Tucker that is called individualist or egoist anarchism, but that’s not the branch we’re going to be talking about today. We will instead be dealing with the communitarian branch of anarchism that Bakunin was a part of.

Though these guys stressed the fundamental sovereignty of the individual, they believed that the proper place of humans was in a group, mutually cooperative and sharing in the burdens of producing and distributing the necessities of life. And Bakunin’s version of anarchism designated as anarcho-collectivism, is going to be a major influence on all the anarchists who are active in the Russian Revolution. And that is why we are focusing so much on him in particular.

So to open this up, I want to go back to the French Revolution. The failures and disappointments of the French Revolution pop up repeatedly in Bakunin’s writings, and especially the failure to truly realize the mythical triad of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And so I want to start here by framing his theories as an earnest attempt to reconcile the contradictions and unfulfilled ambitions of this mythical triad.

Bakunin’s diagnosis of what went wrong in the French Revolution is very similar to Karl Marx’s: that the rising capitalist bourgeoisie had engaged in a great revolution in pursuit of their own political liberty, but that when they achieve this political liberty for themselves, the quote unquote equality that followed came only in the form of equal political rights and the equal application of the laws, that is, no more feudal privileges. Then they dusted their hands and said, right, we’ve done it, everyone is now free.

But by ignoring the social and economic relations of society, these bourgeois revolutionaries made liberty and equality impossible for the vast majority of the population. Because where was liberty to be found in a world of economic exploitation? Where was equality to be found in a world where so few had so much and so many had so little? This in turn made a mockery of fraternity, which Bakunin calls a naked lie. He says, I ask you whether fraternity is possible between the exploiters and the exploited, between oppressors and oppressed. What is this? I make you sweat and suffer all day and night, and when I have reaped the fruit of your sufferings and your sweat, leaving you only a small portion of it so that you may survive, that is, so that you may sweat and suffer a new for my benefit tomorrow, at night, I will say to you, let us embrace, we are brothers?

But Bakunin still wanted Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. He just wanted it for everybody, and was serious about trying to figure out how to get it. And one of his most basic principles is that true liberty is only possible if everyone is free, that if only a few people have liberty, then liberty does not exist, only privilege exists. He expresses the sentiment all over the place and it was central to his whole philosophy.

He says, “If there be a human being freer than I, than inevitably, I become his slave. If I be freer than he, than he will be mine.” He also said that, “Man is truly free only among equally free men, that slavery of even one human being violates humanity and negates the freedom of all.” So this is a fundamental condition of liberty: that it must be shared and equally. Even one unfree person negates the freedom of the rest.

To achieve this universal liberty, you thus need some measure of equality. For Bakunin, mere political equality was not enough to guarantee true liberty only economic equality could do that. Because for Bakunin, poverty is slavery. A hungry person is not a free person. He believed people must realize that and I’m quoting now, “the first condition of their real emancipation or of their humanization is above all a radical change in their economic situation. The question of daily bread is to them justly the first question. For as it was noted by Aristotle, man, in order to think, in order to feel himself free, in order to become man, must be freed from the material cares of daily life.”

So it becomes essential to guarantee equality of economic means, to liberate people from the slavery implicit in a life lived on the knife’s edge of poverty, where all manner of degradation and enslavement must be endured to acquire simple bread and shelter.

So to create equally free individuals, to create universal liberty, you must eradicate the unequal distribution of wealth. For Bakunin, the connection between liberty and equality, and the thing that would guarantee both of them was the third part of the triad: fraternity. To achieve universal liberty and economic equality, communal fellowship cannot be paper thin lies that cover up exploitation and injustice, but the real cement that guarantees our healthy, free and equal flourishing. He says this solution, which is so greatly desired, our ideal for all, is liberty, morality, intelligence and the welfare of each through the solidarity of all; in short, human fraternity.

About this fraternity, Bakunin agrees with Marx that going back to the dawn of time, humans have been fundamentally social and cooperative creatures, always working in groups. Bakunin despised Rousseau, who he called the most malevolent writer of the past century in part for helping popularize the insane notion that a free person in the state of nature was just all by themselves. Bakunin believed arguments that idealized and lauded egocentric individualism were ignorant of nature and history. For Bakunin, Rousseau’s idea that the act of coming together in a social group was the moment humans lost their liberty was preposterous. Bakunin says society, far from decreasing their freedom on the contrary, creates the individual freedom of all human beings. He says, society is the root, the tree, and liberty is the fruit.

But how can this be? Surely in coming together, we limit some measure of our own individual autonomy. Well, Bakunin says, imagine a person endowed with the most inspired powers by nature, cast out from all human society into a desert since infancy. If they do not miserably perish, which is the most probable result, they will become nothing but a bore, an ape lacking speech and thought.

So the individual outside of society is not living a life of free liberty, they are most likely already dead, and if not, they are ignorant brutes slaves to mere instinct and hunger, without the ability to form complex thoughts. Bakunin says only in society can they become a human being, that is, a thinking, speaking, loving, and willful animal.

So to wrap up this section, Bakunin says, what we demand now is the proclaiming anew of the great principles of the French revolution, that every human being should have the material and moral means to develop all their humanity. And that what he wants is to, and I’m quoting here again, to organize society in such a manner that every individual, man or woman, should find upon entering life, approximately equal means for the development of his or her diverse faculties and their utilization in his or her work.

So Bakunin has no problem with the unequal distribution of talent or intelligence or gifts. He does not expect or want people to become hive insects. I mean, he’s an anarchist, that’s not what he wants at all. He in fact wants to eliminate political, economic and social inequality because those things tend to prohibit the free exercise of all those individual talents and gifts. So what Bakunin wants for every individual person is to live in a society of universal liberty, made possible by economic equality, working in a spirit of human fraternity. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. This is the essence of his anarcho-collectivism.

So we move now to how Bakunin hopes to bring this about. What needs to happen, what needs to be torn down, and what needs to be built up in its place? To start this discussion, we need to go back to Bakunin’s early student days, and his initiation into the mysteries of German philosophy. As I said last week, Bakunin discovered Hegel while he was still a student in Moscow. And he was so taken, that he was the first person to translate some of Hegel into Russian. Then Bakunin went off to Berlin in the early 1840s to dive even deeper into the mysteries of German philosophy, but he wound up, like his slightly younger contemporaries Marx and Engels, following the more progressive and radical path of the young Hegelians.

Now there’s just too much to say about all this, but I want to draw out two main points: first, again like Marx and Engels, Bakunin was specifically influenced by their slightly older, philosophical, contemporary Ludwig Feuerbach, and came away a convinced materialist atheist. He believed the material world and its physical and social manifestations were the key to understanding everything. So Bakunin is a materialist.

The other point is that like Marx and Engels, Bakunin also emerged strongly influenced by dialectical reasoning, but he was mostly fascinated with the second step of the process: the negative, the negation, the antithesis. And he came to associate the existing conservative states of Europe with the positive thesis, and revolutionary, such as himself with the negative antithesis.

He also disagreed with Hegel and Marx on one critical point: both Hegel and Marx presumed that the concluding synthesis would retain elements of the conflicting thesis and antithesis, that there would be some measure of preservation. Bakunin did not. He believed there conflict would result in the mutual destruction of both with something wholly new emerging from the aftermath.

So his was a dialectical process of mutual destruction, allowing for the emergence of a transcended novelty that preserved nothing of either. For Bakunin the process of destroying the inert immobile and oppressive political and economic regimes of Europe must be total. As long as any detritus or fragment of the old world remained, the new world could not be born. And he assigned to himself and his followers, the historical task of being this all obliterating antithesis.

So part of Bakunin’s desire to wipe the world clean of all existing political, economic and social structures comes from this early Hegelian philosophy, but it also comes from his materialist and proto sociological understanding of society.

He believes that quote, every human individual is the involuntary product of a natural and social environment within which they are born. And Bakunin very much believes that the existing social environment within which humans are currently born is very bad. See, Bakunin has this optimistic view of humans. He did not believe that humans were inherently wicked. He saw wickedness, such as it existed, as being the result of the unjust, hierarchical, and oppressive social institutions within which we are forced to live. And on this one very specific point, he agrees with Rousseau’s famous declaration that man is born free, and everywhere is in chains. Though for Bakunin, the problem was not society, which he viewed as natural and necessary, but structural inequalities of wealth and power. He is in fact, so generous with his understanding of the plight of individuals within these oppressive institutions that he doesn’t even blame the oppressors for what they do.

He says all the revolutionaries, the oppressed, the sufferers, victims of the existing social organization, whose hearts are naturally filled with hatred and a desire for vengeance, should bear in mind that the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are evildoers who are not guilty. Since they too are involuntary products of the present social order.

So this is very hate the sin, not the sinner stuff. And the sin is power, inequality, the state, the church, and the institutions that support them.

So this puts Bakunin in an interesting place, because as he has made this diagnosis, that humans are basically good, but the social hierarchies are evil, he aimed all of his revolutionary energy at the social institutions that bound everyone together in an unjust system, not the people who benefited from those systems. And he was actually critical of those who wanted to aim their revolutionary energy at people, not institutions. He saw this as immoral, unfair, counterproductive, and not even historically sound. In a discussion of the violence in the course of the French Revolution, he says, in general, we can say that carnage was never an effective means to exterminate political parties. It was proved particularly ineffective against the privileged classes since power resides less in men, themselves than in the circumstances created for men of privilege by the organization of material goods. And then he says further, the dreadful guillotine of 1793, which cannot be reproached with having been idle or slow, nevertheless did not succeed in destroying the French aristocracy. The nobility was indeed shaken to its roots, though not completely destroyed, but this was not the work of the guillotine. It was achieved by the confiscation of their properties. And I don’t think he’s wrong about this. The confiscation and redistribution of the national land, which became such an issue after the Restoration, did far more to undermine the feudal aristocracy than the guillotine, which we must also remember was usually used against peasant and middle-class rebels, not the high nobility.

So Bakunin concludes from this, to make a successful revolution, it is necessary to attack conditions and material goods, to destroy property and the state. It will then become unnecessary to destroy men.

So this means there are a lot of institutions that need to be destroyed. And he lists them in various manifestos and programs. And I’ll just give you a full stream blast of all of this, and then pull out two particular points for special attention. So when the revolutionaries begin their run of institutional destruction, Bakunin says we must tear down all governments, all existing criminal, civil, and legal codes, any centralized bureaucracy, all permanent armies and state police. We must put an end to established religion in all forms, and if churches exist, they ought not have political rights, tax exemptions, nor be given control of education. Bakunin called for the abolition of what he called the legal family, which was built around oppressive and unjust systems of marriage and inheritance.

He called for the mass cancellation of private debt, the abolition of all taxes, he wanted to burn all property titles and deeds of inheritance. He wanted to confiscate the means of production, all church property, all state property, and any precious metal held by individuals and families and hold all of that together in common ownership. Anything that contained any seed of coercive hierarchical relations had to be destroyed.

So that’s uh quite a list. But I want to highlight two things, one economic and the other political. On the economic front, a big thing that Bakunin harps on is the necessity of abolishing inheritance. He says, quote for so long as inheritance exists, there will be hereditary economic inequality, not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes. And the ladder will always beget hereditary inequality in the development and shaping of mind, continuing to be the source and consecration of all political and social inequalities.

So for Bakunin, if there was a critical moment in history that undermined the natural equality of humans, it was surely that moment in misty prehistory when some stronger or more ruthless families started not just hoarding a disproportionate share of the wealth, but passing it down to their offspring intact. This created perpetual states of generational inequality. And I think if you ask Bakunin, look, you can’t have everything all at once, just pick one thing you would do that would do the most to accomplish your ultimate goals, he would say: abolish inheritance. This one simple change would negate the possibility of generationally entrenched economic inequality, and go the furthest towards realizing his dream of true liberty, true equality, and true fraternity.

Politically, I must point out that Bakunin bore a special hatred for this thing called the state, which he saw as the abstracted political power structure that pretends to be simply an expression of communal society, but is in fact a thing unto itself with its own interests. He saw all presently existing states in Europe as a form of monarchy, that is, rule by the one, because the state itself, whether an authoritarian, dictatorship, or a liberal parliamentary democracy holds all power and course of authority, and then ruthlessly steamrolled everyone in pursuit of its own interests.

Bakunin says there is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been, or is not daily being perpetrated by, the representatives of the states. Under no other pretexts than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible, for reasons of state.

For Bakunin, states were criminal enterprises, they were founded by crimes. They were perpetuated by still more crimes. And even a post French Revolution society that had created the concept of citizens and civil rights, that was still no good, because Bakunin saw citizenship as an artificial designation that negated true humanity. He called it mere citizenship. By forming itself only of citizens and caring only about its obligation to people as citizens, the state denied its duty to people as human beings, and certainly took no moral interest in them at all, if they were not citizens. So for Bakunin, the state, therefore is the most flagrant, the most cynical and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on earth and bring some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving the rest. So Bakunin hates the state. He hates state power. It’s why an alternative name for his program is stateless socialism. And it’s part of the crux of his coming beef with Marx, who Bakunin believed was a proponent of state socialism.

So we’ll end today with what Bakunin thought the alternative to all this was. What an anarcho collectivist stateless socialism would look like, once all the old systems of power had been destroyed. And he did have a number of thoughts about this, most succinctly sketched out in the revolutionary catechism and the program of the international brotherhood, which were both written in Italy in the 1860s.

To begin with, because top down authoritarian structures were the problem, the new order must be built from the bottom up from, summit to base. So the core unit of an anarcho collectivism was the autonomous commune, formed voluntarily by the capital P People. These anarchic communes, really just the existing cities of Europe, would cease to recognize all existing authority and law and reform themselves on the basis of collective ownership, collective labor, and collective decision-making.

Bakunin believed these anarchist communes would have direct elections of functionaries by universal sufferage from both sexes. And as you can imagine, Bakunin was very, very excited about the Paris Commune, which we’ll talk about next week, because Bakunin was a very involved in revolutionary events in France in 1870 and 1871.

Bakunin thought these autonomous and anarchist communes would then federate with each other into larger networks, but all the while recognizing no higher authority than themselves. And eventually. They would federate all the way to a national and international level though those terms would become meaningless. What would emerge from these voluntary linkages and alliances would be an inverted pyramid power structure where power rested not with a minority ruling class ensconced in some far off capital, but, with the individuals in their local communities. Anyone to sent off to work on these larger connections and alliances would be trusted servants, never powerful authorities.

These communes though, could not operate properly if they did not respect individual liberty, nor if they did not provide equally for all its members. Remember, liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. So there would be a vast array of social and political rights, for example: the right of every man and woman to upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, and education.

Since Bakunin is naturally an enemy of patriarchy and the subjugation of women by men, he emphasized all the time that there would be equal political, social, and economic rights as well as equal obligation for women. He also hated the tyranny of adults over children and believed in equal rights for adolescents, though they would be naturally guided while children. There of course must be freedom of movement, association, press, speech, morality, conscience, with no coercive prohibitions beyond public approbation and condemnation. So he says, for example, to combat charlatans who spouted lies or pernicious associations that might threaten the commune, that would be the special affair of public opinion.

Most importantly, a member of the commune would have the right to leave or secede at any time. No part of the new federation of anarchist communes could keep or hold or prevent a person’s desire to remove themselves and depart if they were dissatisfied with how things were being run. Economically, these new anarchist communes would have already seized the means of production and property and held them collectively, hence the name, anarcho collectivism. The commune would be required to, as I say, provide upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, and education to its members. But, and this is really important, these rights would only be available to those who provided labor. An individual member would only be able to enjoy the fruits of the community’s labor only in so far as they contributed to the creation of those fruits. This was a measure aimed at non laboring landlords and aristocrats and capitalists who sat around doing nothing while the wealth created by other people’s labor piled up in their coffers.

But this sets Bakunin up for a contrast with the later anarcho communism of Kropotkin. Kropotkin does not agree with Bakunin’s formula to each according to their labor. Kropotkin believes, in to each according to their needs. This labor requirement also opened up all kinds of problematic questions about how to quantify and evaluate the amount and type of labor being provided. Bakunin thought that a new system of labor notes, replacements for bourgeois money, would be issued that could then be converted in some market of exchange for the necessities of life.

But this raises a bunch of other issues. Who gets to decide the quality and quantity of labor necessary to acquire access to their rights as members of the commune, or determine what the value of different types of labor are? Digging a ditch is quite a bit different from being an astrophysicist. So Bakunin suggests maybe some democratic committee would be in charge of those decisions, except whoops, now you’re vesting authoritative power in some small group who is deciding who is worth what. This is the kind of thing anarchists are still arguing about to this very day.

Now, everything I just said raises a million and one objections. Every one of Bakunin’s suggestions have sparked debate, mockery and argument from the moment they were proposed. And I am here just trying to give you a very brief and very imperfect summary of what Bakunin thought came next when theory was put into practice. The devil was always in the detail in these things, and Bakunin is always a bit better when he’s giving the object towards which everyone should aim, rather than some detailed schematic they needed to follow. Especially because in the end Bakunin’s own philosophy was so much based on people working out solutions to problems in mutually satisfactory ways, rather than slavish following a list of suggestions from some bushy headed Russian revolutionary. But Bakunin definitely envisioned a network of voluntarily linked autonomous communes built from the bottom up and rejecting the authority of anyone over anyone else. Then they would share in the collective fruits of their collective labor.

And we can sum this up by asking Bakunin what he wants. And he says, first of all, the end of want, the end of poverty, and the full satisfaction of all material needs by means of collective labor, equal and obligatory for all. And then, as the end of domination and the free organization of the people’s lives in accordance with their needs, not from the top down as we have with the state, but from the bottom up, an organization formed by the people themselves, apart from all governments and parliaments, a free union of associations of agricultural and factory workers, of communes, regions, and nations, and finally, in the more remote future, the universal human brotherhood triumphing over the ruins of all states. That is the dream that Bakunin dreamed.

Next week, we will close out this little prologue section of the Russian Revolution with Marx and Bakunin both in the International Working Men’s Association, where they were both dreaming the same dream, but arguing, fiercely over strategy and tactics, methods, organizations, and then ultimately, personalities.

It was an argument they would still be having right up to the moment of their deaths. Their dreams never realized, but also not dying with them.