Bakunin, Mikhail

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BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL

BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL (1814–1876), Russian anarchist.

Born a Russian nobleman, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin became a revolutionary and died one of his century's most charismatic and controversial men. He is most famous for leading the anarchist opposition to Karl Marx within the International Workingmen's Association. Their rivalry caused a split within the International and hastened its demise. Bakunin's anarchist criticism of modern life also stimulated theories of "creative destruction" across a range of disciplines, from art to economics. His hairy, bearded image remains a radical icon.

Bakunin lived an adventure-filled life. He was born on his family's serf estate in the province of Tver on 30 May (18 May, old style) 1814; completed the Imperial Artillery School and served briefly as a lieutenant; and then spent the years from 1835 to 1840 studying German idealism and preparing to become a scholar. After traveling to Germany in 1840, however, he abandoned his hopes for a university career and declared himself done with all philosophizing. In 1842 he published a blistering critique of contemporary society titled "The Reaction in Germany: A Fragment by a Frenchman." The essay ended with Bakunin's most famous pronouncement: "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge."

Living in Paris in the 1840s, Bakunin met other radicals, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, George Sand, Louis Blanc, and Marx. During the revolutions of 1848, Bakunin sought to upend the Habsburg and Russian Empires by sparking a pan-Slavic revolutionary movement—but the spark failed to catch. Arrested in Saxony in 1849, Bakunin spent much of the next decade in Austrian and Russian prisons, before being exiled to Siberia by the tsar. Escaping his exile, Bakunin crossed the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and returned to London, where he was taken in by his fellow Russian émigré, Alexander Herzen.

This began the final and most active phase of Bakunin's life as a revolutionary. First, in 1863, he sought to rally Russian support for the Polish Uprising (a stance that alienated many of his countrymen). Then, in 1869, Bakunin led a group of his Geneva supporters into the International (Marx later accused Bakunin of planning a conspiratorial takeover of the organization). Bakunin's popularity among radicals in Spain, France, and Italy soared, as the Paris Commune made his vision of immediate revolution seem feasible. His ideas also found enthusiastic reception in his native Russia, where university students went out "to the people" inspired by Bakunin's vision of "revolution from below." The Commune's defeat, however, and Bakunin's collaboration with a particularly blood-thirsty revolutionary named Sergei Nechayev gave Marx an excuse to exclude his rival from the International (1872). Bakunin's health declined thereafter, and he died in Bern, Switzerland, on 1 July (19 June, old style) 1876.

Historians agree that the rivalry between Marx and Bakunin was in part caused by their outsized egos and temperaments. But their antipathy also reflected profound philosophical differences over the nature of revolution, and revolutionary tactics. Marx held that the revolution would be made by the most advanced elements of the working class, who would organize to seize political power. Bakunin, by contrast, believed that Europe's most exploited individuals—its unskilled laborers and peasants—were its most radical revolutionary force. Having no stake in contemporary society, Bakunin argued, the dispossessed masses were also the least corrupted by it. Bakunin also believed that the goal of revolution must be to smash the state, rather than seize it. He held that humanity's future was to live in free federations of small, egalitarian communities. While Marx derided Bakunin as hopelessly naive, Bakunin declared that Marx's vanguard, having seized the state, would inevitably become despotic.

Marx and Bakunin also differed on tactics. While Marx believed the working class must organize politically, Bakunin argued that the role of the revolutionary was merely to strike the spark that unleashed "revolution from below." Attempting to organize or control the revolution would only dampen its progressive energy, he felt, and corrupt radical democracy with the seeds of new political oppression.

Bakunin has passionate critics as well as supporters. His critics see him as an oddly abstract and domineering personality, unwilling and perhaps incapable of imagining the human consequences of his ideas. For his admirers, Bakunin remains an acute critic of modern politics, and an uncompromising symbol of revolution. A gifted polemicist and orator, Bakunin never had the patience for sustained theoretical activity. Most of his effort went into personal letters, journalism, and a few, unfinished longer projects.