Background

Born in Pryamukhino, Russia, Mikhail Bakunin was a famous Russian Anarchist and revolutionary. Bakunin spent his younger years as a junior officer in the Russian Army but resigned in 1835 to study philosophy in Moscow. In 1842 he left Russia for the German city of Dresden, then eventually Paris, collaborating with several socialists and anarchists, including Karl Marx and Pierre Joseph Proudhon. After being deported from Paris for critisim of Russia's oppression of Poland, and then Dresden for his participation in the revolts of 1848, he was imprisoned in St Petersburg, Russia where he stayed until 1857 when he was exiled to a labor camp. In 1868, Bakunin joined the International Working Men's Association, a federation of radical and trade union organizations with sections in most European countries. The 1872 Congress was dominated by a fight between a faction around Marx who argued for participation in parliamentary elections and a faction around Bakunin who opposed such participation. The faction around Bakunin lost the vote on this issue, but at the end of the congress Bakunin and several of his faction were expelled for supposedly maintaining a secret organisation within the international. The anarchists insisted the congress was rigged and so held their own conference of the International at Saint-Imier in Switzerland in 1872. Bakunin continued to be very active in this and the European socialist movement. In the years between 1870 and 1876 he wrote much of his seminal work such as Statism and Anarchy and God and the State. Despite his declining health he attempted to take part in an insurrection in Bologna, but was forced to return to Switzerland in disguise and settled in Lugano. Bakunin remained active in the Radical movement of Europe until further health problems caused him to be moved to a hospital in Berne, where he died in 1876. * Bakunin’s political beliefs rejected governing systems in every name and shape, from the idea of God downwards, and every form of external authority, whether emanating from the will of a sovereign or from universal suffrage.

Professional Positions

Primary figure in the First International

Accomplishments

Essays and Fragments

• Power Corrupts the Best (1867) Why power and the habit of command become for even the most intelligent and virtuous men, a source of aberration, both intellectual and moral
• Bakunin to Nechayev on the role of secret revolutionary societies (1870) from the early 1870's, looks at how revolutionaries should organise and what their relationship with the people should be
• Socialism, the state and revolutionary tactics (1871?)
• Mikhail Bakunin on what socialists should be fighting for and the correct tactics during a revolution.
• Ethics: Morality of the State Why the triumph of humanity can be realised only through the destruction of the state
• The capitalist system Michael Bakunin on how workers are exploited under the capitalist system, he also praise Das Kapital in a footnote
• Equal Opportunity in Education (1869) Why access to education for all is essential for liberation
• Manual labour, intellectual labour, equality and diversity (1869) Mikhail Bakunin on the need for equality in education and how this will still result in diversity
• Revolutionary Catechism (1866)
• Founding of the First International Rules and Program of Bakunin's International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (1864 Oct) What is Authority? God and the State Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871)
• The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871) Appeal to my Russian Brothers (1867?) On Rousseau Letters Letter to Herzen and Ogareff, from San Francisco, October 3, 1861 Letter to Herzen and Ogareff, August 17, 1863 Fragment of a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1861 Letter to Herzen, (1862) Letter To Herzen (Oct 3, 1862) Polish Declaration (186?) The Workers Path To Freedom (1867) The Class War (1870) The German Crisis (1870) Workers and the Sphinx (1867) Policy of Council (1869) Where I stand God or Labor The Social Upheaval (1870) Politics and the State (1871) The Commune, The Church & The State Assorted quotes from Mikhail Bakunin quotes from one of the founders of modern anarchism

Criticism

Bakunin has been accused of being a closet authoritarian. In his letter to Albert Richard, he wrote that

“ [t]here is only one power and one dictatorship whose organisation is salutary and feasible: it is that collective, invisible dictatorship of those who are allied in the name of our principle. ”

However, Bakunin's supporters argue that this "invisible dictatorship" is not a dictatorship in any conventional sense of the word, as Bakunin was careful to point out that its members would not exercise any official political power:

“ this dictatorship will be all the more salutary and effective for not being dressed up in any official power or extrinsic character.[40] ”

Charles A. Madison claimed that

“ He [Bakunin] rejected political action as a means of abolishing the state and developed the doctrine of revolutionary conspiracy under autocratic leadership ' disregarding the conflict of this principle with his philosophy of anarchism. Madison contended that it was Bakunin's scheming for control of the First International that brought about his rivalry with Karl Marx and his expulsion from it in 1872. His approval of violence as a weapon against the agents of oppression led to nihilism in Russia and to individual acts of terrorism elsewhere ' with the result that anarchism became generally synonymous with assassination and chaos.[41] ”

Others reject this analysis, arguing that Bakunin never sought to take personal control over the International, the secret societies he organized were not subject to his autocratic power, and that he condemned terrorism as counter-revolutionary.[42]

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