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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.8: Red and the Black

So we come now finally to our last episode of this opening historical and philosophical prologue to the Russian Revolution. After today, I will take a two week break, and when I come back, we will commence with a history of Russia. But before we get going today, I do want to slip in a quick plug because we just did the Paris Commune, and I have to tell you that friend of the show and creators of fine role-playing games Aviatrix Games has designed a story card game where you can play out the course of the Paris Commune. It’s called  Red Carnations on a Black Grave . So, if you want you too can play out Louise Michel and demand that if the authorities aren’t cowards that they will kill you. The game was inspired in part by the Revolutions podcast, and I will be writing the introduction or the instructions. So if that’s your jam, there is a Kickstarter for an RPG story game called Red Carnations on a Black Grave. And I will post a link to it in the show notes.

So moving on: it was fitting that the Paris Commune interrupted our march to the Marx/Bakunin showdown because it interrupted their march as well. Ever since Bakunin had joined the International in 1868, he and Marx had been circling around each other, each wielding their own vision of what the International should be. Marx and Bakunin were both preparing for things to come to a head at the annual Congress, which was scheduled for September of 1870, but that Congress was canceled on account of the Franco-Prussian War.

But though we’re going to talk today about where Marx and Bakunin disagreed, I don’t necessarily want to oversell this because they agreed on a great deal. For example, Marx and Bakunin teamed up against the anarcho mutualists who wanted to peacefully grow the new utopia by word of mouth, by convincing everyone one individual at a time. Marx and Bakunin were both convinced that mass appeals to class interest and revolutionary attacks on existing power structures was imperative. Flowers can’t grow if they are trapped under a slab of concrete. There was also a grudging admiration that they shared, and a co-mingling of ideas. Bakunin was definitely building on a lot of Marx’s historical and economic analysis, and Marx seemed to agree with Bakunin on what a post-revolutionary communist society might look like.

And this last bit is an important point in the third address of what we now call The Civil War in France. Marx wrote a full throated defense of the commune, in which he declared that the commune was the first glorious harbinger of future communism, the first expression of the great utopia to come. This is partly what makes The Civil War in France so important, because Marx is usually very cagey about what he means by the communist mode of production and the social relations that might build up around it. He was cagey about this on purpose, because first of all, he opposed on principle those who concocted elaborate utopian schemes, especially when they were concocted using capital R Reason. The disciples of capital R reason are usually just self-important fabulists. Marx, meanwhile, rooted his analysis in science and economics and history. So in comparison to his detailed descriptions of the capitalist mode of production or the feudal mode of production, he only ever offered the barest hint of what the communist mode of production would look like. Marx believed that history and the people making history would just work it out, and it was not his place to paint some kind of detailed picture. Also, once you do that, you’ve committed yourself to a lifetime of being criticized for concocting, unworkable, utopian fantasies.

But in The Civil War in France, Marx says that what the commune tried to do was something like what he ultimately had in mind. Though in The Third Address, which was written in May of 1871, Marx reviews the political history of Europe, and he lays out the steps that created the modern state, and then he says that the commune was a break from all that. It was something brand new, that it was the cry of February 1848 finally realized, that all the old institutions of power were swept away, and a new style of radical working-class democracy was born. That the people were represented by leaders who were responsible to, and could be instantly recalled by, the people that they had taken control of the city and put its resources to work for the people. Marx had hoped that the Paris commune would then be used as a model for other cities to follow, who would then link together in voluntary federation. And Marx insisted this would not be merely decentralized national federalism, because in the new era, there would no longer be an overarching national government. The communes would not be smaller gears nested against a larger national gear. There would be no larger national gear at all. There would be no army, no national bureaucracy, no single ruler. With the people sharing in ownership of the means of production and working for themselves. Government by repression would be over, and government of emancipation will have arrived. Marx further believed that with labor emancipated, with no more exploiters, with every man a working man, class would disappear, and this would be the end of class conflict.

Now, Marx says all of this because he wants to laude the commune for what they did. But in putting this all down in black and white, his vision turns out to look a lot like Bakunin’s vision. So in many ways, Marx and Bakunin shared the same end. Their great dispute was over the means of getting there.

So we will now turn our attention to where Marx and Bakunin disagreed, and this is not meant to be a definitive and comprehensive accounting of where they disagreed, I just want to touch on some of the big points with an eye on what will be relevant to the Russian Revolution.

So the great faultline between them was of course over the matter of the state and state power. Marx’s revolutionary program required a step where the proletariat sees not just the economic means of production, but the political power of the state. Marx was convinced that there had to be a transition period where the workers would seize the state apparatus and install this thing he ominously and problematically dubbed the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was meant to be a temporary state of affairs, as seizing the means of production and altering the mode of production from capitalist to socialist and then onto communist would render state power an anachronistic relic, and it would simply wither away. But to be clear, when Marx calls for this dictatorship of the proletariat, he did not mean some small Jacobin style authoritarian committee of public safety. Marx believed that by the time the revolution came that the working class proletariat would be the vast majority of the population. That when they seized power, it would be a majority resting control of society from a tiny ruling class minority. So by dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx is envisioning something that we would call radically democratic socialism, government by the vast majority for the vast majority. And in fact, Marx believed that this would be the first time in history that society would not be ruled by a tiny self-anointed ruling class. Further, he believed that this dictatorship of the proletariat would be temporary. But that said Marx did believe that the reordering of society away from the capitalist mode of production would require the use of state power. So for Marx, seizing and wielding state power was an essential part of the revolutionary project.

Bakunin, as you might expect, was opposed to all of this. In his mind, the point of the revolution was not to seize the power of the state, but to smash the power of the state. To undermine it, overthrow it, destroy it, that was the point. And if that was not done, then it was no revolution at all, it was just meet the new boss, same as the old boss stuff. And this brings us to some of our juiciest Bakunin quotes, because Bakunin absolutely believed that institutional power corrupted anyone who tried to wield it, even if they started with the most generous and noble of intentions. Bakunin’s writings are full of denunciations of this temptation to seize state power. Bakunin says, for example, if you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year, he would be worse than the tsar himself. So Bakunin opposed all would be authoritarian revolutionaries, not just Marxists, who at least saw it as a mere step, but also Blanquists and Jacobins for whom seizing state power was an end unto itself. Bakunin says we are the natural enemies of such revolutionaries, the would be dictators, regulators and trustees of the revolution, who even before the existing monarchical, aristocratic and bourgeois states have been destroyed already dream of creating new revolutionary states, as fully centralized and even more despotic than the states we now have. He says that these revolutionaries dream of muzzling disorder by the act of some authority that will be revolutionary in name only, but will only be a new reaction because they will, again, condemn the masses to being governed by decrees, to obedience, to immobility, to death. In other words, to slavery and exploitation by a new pseudo revolutionary aristocracy. He says, it matters little to us if that authority is called church, monarchy, constitutional state, bourgeois republic, or even revolutionary dictatorship. We detest and reject all of them equally as the unfailing sources of exploitation and despotism. And then finally, when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the people’s stick.

So Bakunin’s big beef with Marx centers on Marx’s willingness to seize this thing called state power. Bakunin believes that once state power is seized, it will never be given up, that there will be no next step. And he scoffed at the logic of the Marxists, and he said, anarchism and freedom is the aim while state and dictatorship is the means. And so in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved. As for the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bakunin used the ambiguous term to great effect in his PR battles with Marx, especially because at the time, the proletariat was still a tiny numerical minority, and it was hard to believe that Marx was not calling for the authoritarian rule of a small minority of urban factory workers at the expense of everyone else.

So aside from this really big conceptual difference, there were a bunch of disputes over tactics between the Marxists and the anarchists. Going back to his early dealings with the Communist League, Marx was in favor of these working class revolutionary movements operating out in the open rather than as secret societies with clubhouses and handshakes and passwords. Marx was always a “let them tremble at our great numbers” kind of guy.

He also favored open union organizing and active participation in parliamentary politics as necessary steps to creating proletarian revolutionary consciousness. He was totally on board with the creation of some kind of labor party to run for seat in the government. And in many ways Marx saw the International as becoming an association that would be the international nucleus of this European labor party.

Bakunin meanwhile was much happier working in the shadowy world of secret revolutionary societies who would be poised to bring down the whole system the minute the time was right. And as for his work in Italy and Spain, this was not just abstract ideology. This was about practical reality. It was illegal to organize out in the open to form political parties or labor unions, so secret societies were essential, and all the Italian and Spanish sections of the international resented the call for them to come out of hiding. This was very easy to say from behind a desk in London, much harder when you’re actually working on the ground in Madrid.

Bakunin also thought that participation in respectable parliamentary politics was an unforgivable compromise, that it bought into the bourgeois power structure when that bourgeois power structure needed to be rejected, root and branch. As for union organizing and strikes, Bakunin supported all that, but not because higher wages or better conditions were good in and of themselves. He believed that mere union negotiations accepted the premise of unequal economic power structures, which he also wanted to reject root and branch. But Bakunin liked strikes and direct labor action, because when a bunch of workers are masked together and their anger and outrage is running high, that’s the perfect time to explain to them about this wonderful thing called anarchism, where we just overthrow all the bosses.

Then there’s this question of who is going to carry out the revolution. As I talked about at length last week, purposefully, because it’s going to be so important to the story of the Russian Revolution, Marx and Bakunin disagreed about who the people were who could make the revolution. Marx believed that thanks to their position in relation to the means of production that everything was going to have to be done by the urban proletariat, that the sack of potatoes out in the rural country would just have to be dragged into the future. Though I must say that in Marx’s conception, by the time the revolution comes to fruition, he expects that most of the rural population will have already been transformed by the inescapable power of urban industrial capitalism into wage workers. So he never actually saw the proletariat as representing some special minority. He expected them to be the vast majority by the time the revolution came.

Bakunin of course said, no, the revolution must be by and for everyone. Now he agreed that the urban workers would probably be the most ideologically advanced, but he believed the peasant absolutely had revolutionary potential and that they must be brought on board. Bakunin was dealing with the world as it was right then, when the urban workers were still in the minority. He did not believe that history had to wait for capitalism to turn all the rural peasants into urban wage workers before humanity could be liberated.

So those are a few of the key ideological differences that led to the split between the Marxists and the anarchists. But we can’t really do this without also talking about personality, that Marx and Bakunin just didn’t like each other. Marx and Engels and Bakunin were all expert level grudge holders and shit talkers; they all were. Marx and Engels, as we’ve seen, attacked just about anyone who disagreed with them about, just about anything. It’s why they had so few friends and allies in the 1850s and 1860s. Bakunin meanwhile was as sharp tongued.as anyone, and he questioned the motivations and sincerity of anyone who disagreed with him. He also loved mentioning to people that in 1848, he had fought on the barricades while Marx had run and hid, that in 1870 he had gone to Lyonne to start a revolution while Marx had stayed behind his desk. And then both sides believed the other was a lying hypocrite, up to some sinister plot to take over the International for their own devices. So it is impossible to map this conflict between the Marxists and the anarchists, without talking about the fact that at this point, on a personal level, Marx and Bakunin just didn’t like each other.

And it is by way of this personal fighting, backbiting, and rumormongering that we get to take a little tangent to talk about everyone’s latent antisemitism, which does need to be addressed before we move on. Now I will preface this by saying that 19th century Europe was awash in anti-Semitism. All sides of every political and economic conflict were absolutely swimming in antisemitism. Reactionary monarchists, Catholic and Protestant theologians, philosophers of every stripe, liberal democrats, socialists, anarchists, communist nationalists; all of them were perfectly comfortable identifying the alien jew as the principal source and scapegoat of all their problems. And all these European leaders and thinkers were starting to combine ancient prejudice with new forms of pseudo-scientific race science that quote unquote proved all the most vicious stereotypes about Jews were actually biological traits. It’s really nasty stuff, very gross. European civilization then and now has major issues with antisemitism.

So Bakunin’s antisemitism rears its ugly head in this fight with Marx as the fight got really heated and really personal. In the 1870s, Bakunin let fly with some pretty deep seated antisemitic rage aimed at the ethnically Jewish Marx. Bakunin says this whole Jewish world comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion. This world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand and of Rothchilds on the other.

And then he reiterate more: Marx is a jew and is surrounded by a crowd of little more or less intelligent scheming, agile, speculating jews just as jews are everywhere. Now this entire Jewish world which constitutes an exploiting sect, a people of leeches, a voracious parasite closely and intimately connected with one another, regardless not only of frontiers, but of political differences as well. This Jewish world is today largely at the disposal of Marx and Rothschild.

So this is all pretty despicable. It’s racist paranoia. And what do modern anarchists say about it? Well, first of all, they say it’s despicable racist paranoia, and thank god we don’t do hero worship over here because we’re happy to keep what we like while denouncing the disgusting views of some scruffy Russian who’s been dead for 150 years. Sympathetic biographers will point out that the sum total of Bakunin’s anti-Semitic writings come to about five total pages among the thousands upon thousands he produced during his lifetime. So hatred of the Jews was something lurking in the background, not something he obsessively organized his philosophy around.

Some will also say that all of this only comes out when Marx is trying to destroy him personally and politically, like he only said this stuff because he was really mad. But, folks, when racial slurs come erupting out of your mouth when you are angry, if you say, well, I’m not really an anti-Semite, I just rail against the Jews when I’m really mad, that’s not a great argument. So in summary, by any definition of the term, Mikhail Bakunin was an anti-Semite.

Now Marxists loved to make hay of Bakunin’s antisemitism, but they’re kind of in a similar boat. In letters to each other and in various attacks on rivals and the revolutionary left, Marx and Engels both leaned heavily into antisemitic tropes when it suited them. And I’ll just grab a few examples: in his 1844 work On the Jewish Question, Marx says, what is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man, and it turns them into commodities. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. In an 1856 article on money lending Marx wrote, thus we find every tyrant backed by a jew as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicality of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets. He says, the real work is done by the jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loan mongering mysteries, by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade insecurities. Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment there is ever one of these little jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. Then in personal correspondence with Engels, when they were engaged in a bitter feud with this guy Ferdinand Lassalle, they called him the Jewish N-word and they did not write N-word. There’s more where that came from, but this is just a small sampling.

Now Marxists have answers about why Marx isn’t really antisemitic the way we understand the term today, particularly because there was no ethnic component to it and he supported Jewish political emancipation. But mostly the argument comes down to the fact that Marx was deploying Jewish stereotypes that were common currency, and he was in no way especially centrally antisemitic like true anti-semites of the 19th century of which there were plenty. And there is a little something to that. Marx and Bakunin said anti-Semitic things, they did, both in the heat of the moment and after much contemplation, there’s no getting around it. And it would be unfair to move on without pointing it out. But it would also be unfair to move on without pointing out that this kind of anti-Semitism did not make them unique, it made them utterly, depressingly ordinary. European civilization has antisemitism built into its DNA, and if you want to dismiss Marx and Bakunin, or marxism and anarchism because of this latent antisemitism, I would remind you that conservatives, liberals, monarchists, democrats, christian theologians, natural philosophers, and anyone who might call themselves a nationalist, read what they actually wrote. You’re going to find a lot of antisemitism. It’s gross. It’s everywhere. Nobody is free of sin.

So moving back to the final act of this prologue, the ultimate showdown for control of the International was triggered by a declaration from the central committee in September of 1871. It was allegedly a restatement and clarification of the aims of the International, but it included a now infamous Resolution 9, that said the formation of the working class into a political party is indispensable. This set off alarm bells among the anarchists because this is all Marx. Bakunin and the anarchists fundamentally disagree with this point. They thought embracing respectable politics would be their ruin, not their salvation. And they not only disagreed with the resolution, they believed the manner in which it was being put forth coming from a closed committee, rather than an open congress was further proof that Marx was trying to take the purposefully de-centralized structure of the International and make it a more centralized and hierarchical political structure.

Bakunin himself further stoked these fears, and was now openly warning his followers that Marx and his authoritarian communists were taking over. In September of 1872, the International met in the Hague for its first open congress since the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war. Bakunin himself was not present for the Congress, but his close associate and fellow anarchist James Guillaume was.

The majority of the Congress were aligned with Marx, and in early sessions, they resolved that the political plan, that is, having a political plan, was good, and it was now policy. The anarchists in the room objected, and they objected so strenuously that the Marxists got fed up and voted to expel the anarchists from the Congress. And then they expelled Bakunin in absentia from the International entirely.

So this is clearly a power move to consolidate the Marxist position within the International. The anarchist aligned sections of the International were appalled when they got the news about all this, as it violated the fundamentally decentralized nature of the charter, which promised local autonomy. The central committee and the congress were now trying to dictate uniform policy to everyone. These anarchist sections hastily convened a rival congress a few weeks later in St. Imier Switzerland, where they said we are the real International and it’s those guys over there, Marx and his authoritarian cronies who are expelled.

So now we have two internationals that we can distinguish by the color flags that define their movements: the red international, and the black international. Now the black flag did not become the symbol of anarchism until the 1880s, but still, the black international is far more poetic and evocative than calling it the anarchist international of St. Imier.

But it’s hardly worth caring about what we call them, because neither is going to last. The whole idea of the International was to unify everyone under a single banner. And when you’ve splintered into rival congresses issuing mutual excommunications, you’ve kind of lost the plot. Over in Germany, Otto Von Bismarck, breathed a sigh of relief when he read intelligence reports about all this. And he would later say that he trembled at the idea of the red and the black ever again joining forces. So 1872 was a pyrrhic victory for Marx. It sapped all the energy out of the movement. The red international he now led lost practically all its affiliated sections in southern Europe. So they held another Congress in September of 1873, that was very little attended, and lacked any kind of energy. Then the association lapsed into increasing dormancy as the International itself ceased to be of any real importance. For example, in Germany, it was the growing social democratic workers party that was grabbing energy and attention and funds.

The men of the red international tried one last time to hold an international congress in Philadelphia in 1876, but they were so much a ghost of their former selves, that at the end of this congress they simply voted to disband.

Meanwhile, Bakunin’s black international similarly passed into dormant irrelevancy. These anarchist revolutionaries didn’t stop organizing or writing or anything, they just became more focused on local and national issues without caring much about maintaining a strong international structure. And with Bakunin himself withdrawing to Switzerland and his health deteriorating, the black international also fell into the dustbin of history in 1877.

So it was that the first attempt to join all the working class energy of Europe under one banner failed.

The fracturing and collapse of the International closes our prologue on the Russian revolution. And we will end this by ending the lives of the guys we’ve been talking about. Mikhail Bakunin had lived a very hard life and after the breakdown of the International, his individual influence waned, and he withdrew to Switzerland with his family. There, he finally sat down to write his longer works, not just pamphlets and articles, and he produced in this period, Statism and Anarchy and God and the State. He died in Switzerland in 1876.

Marx had lived not quite as hard a life as Bakunin, but with similarly plagued by health problems near the end, both natural and of his own making — too many cigars, too much drinking and too little interest in a healthy diet. When the International fell apart, he too lost much of his active political influence and so he just kept writing and writing. He produced enough material to fill three more volumes of his series on Capital, but they were all left unfinished when he finally died in March of 1883. His old friend Friedrich Engels spent the next decade dedicated to organizing Marx’s writings, editing them, publishing collections, and generally being the elder statesman of the revolutionary left and a steward of Marx’s brand of scientific socialism. During this period, Engels exercised a great deal of editorial discretion and offered up his own interpretations of what quote unquote Marxism was, which makes Engels’s protestations that he was really just the steward of his genius friend ring a bit hollow. Engels was an active collaborator and contributor to the project of Marxism. He died in London in 1895.

So with that, we will wrap things up. We know some Marxism, we know the difference between the means of production and the forces of production and the relations of production. We know some anarchism, down with the bosses. We know that this generation of revolutionaries was appalled at the human cost of the capitalist industrial revolution. We know that they were personally stamped by the unfulfilled promise of the French Revolution, and their own dashed hopes from 1848 and then the Paris Commune. All of this would in turn shape the next generation of revolutionaries, who will aim us first at the Russian Revolution of 1905 and then the Russian Revolution of 1917. But before we can do that, we have to understand what we are aiming at. So when I come back in two weeks, we will embark on a general history of tsarist Russia.