Mikhail Bakunin
Russian anarchist revolutionary and theorist (1814–1876), born into a noble family in Tver, a Russian army officer who abandoned his military career for Hegelian philosophy in Moscow and later Berlin, ultimately becoming the most active and peripatetic professional revolutionary of the nineteenth century: he took part in uprisings in Paris, Prague and Dresden between 1848 and 1849, was twice condemned to death, extradited to Russia, and spent over ten years imprisoned in tsarist fortresses —losing all his teeth to scurvy there— and exiled to Siberia, from which he escaped in a spectacular odyssey crossing the Pacific, the United States and the Atlantic to return to Europe. A fierce rival of Marx within the First International, where he championed anti-authoritarian federalism against Marxist centralism, his expulsion from that organisation in 1872, engineered by Marx at the Hague Congress, crystallised the lasting rift between Marxism and anarchism within the international workers' movement. His best-known work, God and the State (posthumous and unfinished), sets out with extraordinary rhetorical force the fundamental principles of collectivist anarchism: a radical rejection of all authority imposed from above, whether divine or statist —'if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him'—, a denunciation that the state, even in the 'workers' form proposed by Marx, would always end up generating a new ruling class of bureaucrats replacing the old aristocracy, and a defence of spontaneous social revolution from below, organised into free federations of workers and self-managed communities, without any party or dictatorship of the proletariat as intermediaries. His prophecy that the Marxist 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would inevitably degenerate into a new bureaucratic tyranny was fulfilled with chilling historical precision in the twentieth century, making Bakunin, more than any other thinker of his time, a prescient and lucid critic of the state totalitarianism that would later claim the mantle of socialism.
4 works
- Fédéralisme, socialisme et antithéologisme
- God and the State
- L'Empire knouto-germanique et la Révolution sociale
- Государственность и анархия (Statism and Anarchy)