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Bakunin for Beginners

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Bakunin for Beginners All these shocking things happening now are carefully orchestrated to confuse, disorient, demoralize, and generally make us more emotionally and psychologically vulnerable to what is yet to come. Anyone who isn't taking this really fucking seriously is on the wrong side of history and humanity. I really wish I had prescriptions for how to build, organize, prepare, and fight. But I think the two most important things right now are to do whatever we each feel most moved to do—fight however you can as hard as you can as smart and strategically as you can. And however it is that you choose to fight, do not undercut or sabotage or denounce the fight that others are also waging. This struggle is going to take all of us, all our creativity, anger, passion, ferocity, and even then I'm not sure it will be enough. But if you think that you can be part of the resistance while denouncing the tactics and ideologies and efforts of others, prescribing the "one to path" for resistance, and collaborating with the state either actively or passively in repressing other resisters, you are dead wrong, and no comrade of mine. And if you think that we can win this fight without welcoming new people into the resistance and patiently helping them build their capacities then you are also mistaken. And if you can't be bothered to join this resistance somehow, get out of the fucking way. March 2017 Bakunin and Violence He was born Mikhail Alexandrovic Bakunin in 1814 to At the end of the 19th century, the strategy of the Left was spread along a a cultured and distinguished spectrum on the question of: a) tempo, i.e., revolution now or later, and b) land-owning family. The eldest means. At at one end of the means spectrum were those concerned with the of 10 children, he proved to be degree of force or violence to be applied and to what targets: edifices, rebellious and defiant, often symbols or property and/or people, e.g., despots, monarchs, dictators, leading his brothers and sisters industrial barons or fill-in-the-blank, and at the other end of the spectrum against their father—at one were those who prioritized the open and progressive education of the point even locking “Da” in the masses. As members of the latter group were subject to increasing cellar for two days and repression, the pendulum swung in favor of violence, namely, terror and presenting him with a manifesto assassination, a strategy of which some claim Bakunin was the arch-apostle. of liberation. This repute (and the stereotype which emerged is exemplified in the cartoon At the age of 14, Bakunin is below) was likely do to Bakunin’s brief acquaintance with the ruthless nihilist enrolled at a military school in Nechaev who was the most extreme exponent of this philosophy (and whose St. Petersburg; he chafes at the arbitrary discipline and the narrow ill-fated activities inspired Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed). curriculum. In short order, he is expelled, ostensibly for poor grades, and is assigned to barracks on the Polish frontier. Eventually, he is commissioned as There is no doubt that Bakunin regarded force as the indispensible a junior officer with the Russian Imperial Guard in Lithuania, but in 1835, midwife of social regeneration, but in reality he was neither a nihilist nor a when he is 21, objecting to the way Russians were treating the Polish people, demon. His goal was to deliver people from the oppressive institutions of he quits. From that thereon, the fate of Slavic national liberation struggles government and ill-compensated labor, to create a society that would be became a constant interest. collectivist in economic structure. Unfortunately, the coups with which he was associated between 1848 and 1876 failed. Bakunin makes his way to Moscow with the intention of preparing himself for a professorship in philosophy or history; he moves to Berlin to continue Revolutionary terrorism was his studies, and there, is introduced to the “fertile content of German carried on and perpetuated in Russia metaphysics”—Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, the most influential thinker by relatively large, organized groups; among German intellectuals at the time. He becomes enthralled with the in France and southern Europe, it was work of Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and in 1844 travels to Paris, typically the work of individuals or establishing contact with both political philosophers. He abandons his small circles, and in a few notorious academic career and devotes more and more time to speaking, writing, and cases was inflicted on random civilians organizing opposition to imperialism in east and central Europe by Russia by rogue anarchists who had lost and other powers. patience with the masses whose apathy and servility they felt rendered In December 1844, Emperor Nicholas, informed of Bakunin’s work, issues them accomplices of the tyrannical a decree that strips Bakunin of his privileges as a noble, confiscates his land social system—a state Bakunin once in Russia, and condemns him to lifelong exile in Siberia. He responds with a described as an “immense cemetery where all the real aspirations and living long letter to La Réforme, denouncing the Emperor as a despot and calls for forces of a country generously and blissfully allow themselves to be . buried democracy in Russia and Poland. As a result, he’s expelled from France. in the name of that abstraction.” But in general violence was largely directed against symbols of state power. The record was statistically impressive: several Russian governors were shot in the late 1870s, the Tsar assassinated in 1881, the French President in 1894, the Empress of Austria in 1898, the King of Italy in 1900, and the President of the U.S. in 1901. 1 6 There is no doubt that Bakunin was a superb speaker, writer, and tireless revolutionary propagandist. The power of Bakunin’s personality and intellect Between 1846 and 1849 Bakunin travels was legendary. He did more than any other revolutionary in the mid 19th around Europe (with one set of clothes, century to reveal how the state is an anti-social machine that controls society three trunks of books and other though political repression and violence for the benefit elites. He had a major propaganda). He works to build alliances, influence on labor, peasant and leftwing movements of his time; and although becomes embroiled in at least six attempted these movements were overshadowed in the 1920s by the rise of Marxist revolutions in east and central Europe, and regimes, the collapse of those regimes just decades later, and the growing collects a number of death sentences from awareness of how closely those regimes corresponded to the one-party at least 3 nations. Saxon authorities finally dictatorships Bakunin predicted, exhibited the perils of Marxist doctrine. catch up with him in 1849. He spends the Bakunin’s ideas had a significant influence on later activists and thinkers, next few years imprisoned in the most ranging from Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Emma Goldman to the oppressive states in Eastern Europe: Wobblies and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Also inspired by Bakunin Saxony, Prussia, Austria, and finally, in 1851 were Herbert Marcuse, E.P. Thompson, Neil Postman, A.S. Neill, Noam is handed over to Russian authorities. Chomsky, the anarchists gathered under the banner of ‘anti-globalization’, the unrest in Greece, the Occupy movements, and . the future is uncertain. After three years in the underground dungeons of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, he spends another four years in the infamous fortress of FURTHER READING Shlisselburg (9 months of which he is kept chained to a wall). By this time, he suffers from scurvy, his teeth have fallen out, and he has lost a left testicle There are two main compilations of (crushed with a hammer). Bakunin’s works: Bakunin on Anarchy edited by S. Dolgoff In February 1857, his mother's The Political Philosophy of Bakunin edited by G.P. Maximoff pleas to the Tsar are finally heeded and he is allowed to go Also worth looking at are: into permanent exile in the The Basic Bakunin – Writings 1869-1871 western Siberian city of Tomsk. edited by R.M. Cutler Mikhail Bakunin –From Out of the Dustbin There he meets the love of his edited by R. M. Cutler life, a young Polish working girl and fellow revolutionary, Antonia For an understanding of the potentiality of Kwiatkowski; they are married Bakunin’s ideas there is nothing to match The Social and Political Thought of Michael within a year. Bakunin by R.B. Saltman. In 1861, Bakunin makes a daring escape from Siberia by stowing away on a ship to Japan, then working his way to San Francisco, New York (via Panama), and finally, arriving in London. Bakunin immediately immerses himself in insurrectionary work. In 1863, he leaves to join an uprising in Poland, but fails to reach his destination. He continues south to Switzerland, Italy and then north to Stockholm (where he is reunited with his wife), west to London, finally settling in Italy in 1864. 5 2 Bakunin spends the next years of his life continuing to expand an In summary, the fundamental contradiction for Bakunin was that while underground organization of revolutionaries in Europe to carry on Marxists accepted that the creation of a free, egalitarian society without propaganda work and direct actions.* Bakunin publishes hundreds of social classes and government, i.e., anarchism, was the objective, they pamphlets—he speaks and writes in 6 languages fluently—and eventually, believed a dictatorship/state provided the means to achieve that end.
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