Mikhail Bakunin Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), who popularized the term anarchy and whose work was instrumental in the early development of the anarchist movement, was born in Tver, Russia, to an established noble family. He was primarily a person of action who participated in numerous uprisings in Europe, most notably the Lyon uprising of 1870. A proponent of pan-Slavism in his youth, Bakunin turned to anarchism through his contact with the working-class movements.

In his writings, Bakunin argues that external legislation and authority lead to the enslavement of society. All civic and political organizations are founded on violence exercised from the top down as systematized exploitation. Political law is understood by Bakunin, who served many years in prison and exile, as an expression of privilege. He rejects all legislation, convinced that it must turn to the advantage of powerful minorities against the interests of subjected majorities. Laws, inasmuch as they impose an external will, must be despotic in character. For Bakunin, political rights and democratic states are flagrant contradictions in terms. States and laws only denote power and domination, presupposing inequality. Where all govern, he once suggested, no one is governed. Where all equally enjoy human rights, the need for political rights dissolves. In such instances the state as such becomes nonexistent.

Like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Bakunin envisions future social organizations as economic rather than political. He sees society as organized around free federations of producers, both rural and urban. Any coordination of efforts must be voluntary and reasoned. For example, Bakunin viewed trade unions not merely as economic institutions but as the “embryo of the administration of the future,” and he argued that workers should pursue cooperatives rather than strikes. Recognizing the impossibility of competing with capitalist enterprises, he called for the pooling of all private property as the collective property of freely federated workers’ associations. These ideas would serve as the intellectual impetus for anarcho-syndicalism and its vision of the industrial syndicate as the seed of the future society.

Bakunin’s famous disagreements with Karl Marx over the role of the state in the transition to socialism initiated a rift within the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), or First International, which led to the eventual expulsion of the anarchists and IWMA’s dissolution by Marx’s supporters, partly as a means to keep it out of anarchist hands. Bakunin’s central conflict with Marx was that an authoritarian revolutionary movement, as Marx espoused, would inevitably initiate an authoritarian society after the revolution. For Bakunin, if the new society is to be nonauthoritarian, then it can only be founded upon the experience of nonauthoritarian social relations. During his battle with Marx in 1871, Bakunin’s supporters in the IWMA asked, How can an egalitarian and free society be expected to emerge from an authoritarian organization? His concerns were vindicated by the direction taken decades later following the Russian Revolution (1917).

Bakunin’s tireless work within the First International laid the groundwork for the development of flourishing anarchist movements in Italy, Spain, and several countries of Latin America, including the syndicalist movements that contributed to the Spanish Revolution (1936).

Bibliography:

Mendeel, Arthur P. Roots of Apocalypse. New York: Praeger, 1981.
Saltman, Richard P. Social and Political Thought of Michael Bakunin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983.