Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
K. Steven Vincent
often shows through in these passages: Bakunin passes beyond common
stereotypes in his vitriolic characterisations of Germans and Jews.
Bakunin’s anti-statist attitude contributed greatly to the division between
Bakunin and Marx – and more generally between anti-authoritarians and
Marxists – within the First International Working Men’s Association (IWA)
during the late 1860sand1870s. Marxists supported a strong central structure
for the International, in this case the General Council in London that by
the early 1870s was controlled by Marx himself. Non-authoritarians – or
‘collectivists’, as they called themselves at this time – argued for a federal
structure that would leave the greatest possible degree of autonomy to local
sections, many of which were controlled by Marx’s mutualist and anarchist
opponents. Bakunin strongly opposed the personal ascendancy of Marx
and also the statist ideal for which he stood, an opposition that led to
his expulsion from the IWA at the Hague Congress in 1872.InStatism
and Anarchy, published in 1873, Bakunin bitterly attacked Marx’s theory of
proletarian government as a new authoritarianism – a ‘despotic government
of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended
scholars’. He could only lament that ‘we see the doctrinaire revolutionaries
under Marx’s leadership everywhere taking the side of the state and its
supporters against popular revolution’ (Bakunin 1990,pp.178–9).
The only difference between revolutionary dictatorship and the state is in external
appearances. Essentially, they both represent the same government of the majority by a
minority in the name of the presumed stupidity of the one and the presumed intelligence
of the other. Therefore they are equally reactionary. (Bakunin 1990,p.137)
Bakunin’s dislike of all forms of authority was balanced by his belief in
a deep-seated social and communal instinct in people. The creation of a
new and better society required only that artificial structures like the state
be eliminated so that the natural social energies of the people could be
released. This is what insurrection would allow, the emergence of a new
society organised from the bottom up – what he often called the universal
federation. ‘The time will come’, he claimed,
when on the ruins of political states there will be created, in complete freedom and
organised from below upwards, a voluntary fraternal union of voluntary productive
associations, communes, and provincial federations, embracing without distinction,
because they embrace freely, people of every language and nationality. (Bakunin 1990,
p. 90)
This would provide ‘the sole condition for real as opposed to fictitious
freedom’ (Bakunin 1990,p.13). Perhaps the most curious and disturbing
464
Visions of stateless society
element of Bakunin’s thought is the residue of an authoritarianism that
he himself would probably have denied. It was certainly in conflict with
his self-proclaimed libertarianism.
33
Throughout his life, Bakunin seems to
have been constitutionally dependent on tightly knit groups in which he
was the recognised leader. After his escape from Siberia to Italy in 1861,
he constructed a network of secret associations, and he believed that the
realisation of liberty through the destruction of the existing order justified
a revolutionary conspiratorial society in order to direct the revolution and
to guard the new post-revolutionary society against any revival of state
authority. His brief partnership with the Russian terrorist Nechaev is an
indication of how susceptible Bakunin was to revolutionary dreams that
entailed authoritarian elements (Avrich 1988,pp.32–52; Confino 1973).
It raises the troubling issue of Bakunin’s willingness to countenance the
transferal of coercive revolutionary power to a secret organisation – this in
spite of his criticisms of Marx’s notion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
There remained a tension in Bakunin’s thought. On the one hand, he
expected that the new federal social organisation would be a ‘spontaneous
and self-generated development’ emerging from ‘the masses [that] bear all
the elements of their future organisational norms in their own more or less
historically evolved instincts, in their everyday needs, and in their conscious
and unconscious desires’. On the other hand, he was convinced that the
masses needed ‘some intelligent and honest leadership’ (Bakunin 1990,pp.
135, 146). Some contemporaries were suspicious of Bakunin because they
believed that his own utopian tendencies overshadowed his belief in the
virtues of popular spontaneity, and that ultimately he wished to impose his
own categorical ideals on the people. The French socialist Beno
ˆ
ıt Malon, for
example, concluded in the late 1860s that ‘instead of examining the people,
as Proudhon wanted’, Bakunin had ‘himself formulated a preconceived
ideal...thathe[would]neverforfeit’(Vincent1992,p.13).
34
Some of Bakunin’s most loyal followers were in Italy, where Bakunin
spent the years 1864–7, and where Italian revolutionary traditions and aspi-
rations became linked with Bakunin’s libertarian ideals and conspiratorial
33 In 1851, Bakunin called for a ‘strong dictatorial government’ for Russia, and indicated that in
1848–9 he had hoped for a ‘revolutionary government with unlimited dictatorial power’ in a post-
revolutionary Bohemia (Bakunin 1977,pp.91, 112, 118–19).
34 Aileen Kelly points out that Herzen and Turgenev also believed that Bakunin suffered from an
excessive attachment to theoretical consistency, that ‘he strove with undeviating persistence to
interpret and order complex historical events according to the demands of a crude dialectic to which
he was faithful all his life’ (Kelly 1982,p.3).
465
K. Steven Vincent
agenda. Proudhonian mutualism had already led a few radical members
of the Risorgimento like Carlo Pisacane (1818–57) to call for ‘liberty and
association’, but it was during the late 1860s and early 1870s, when young
Italian radicals became dissatisfied with Mazzini’s increasingly conservative
stances on social change and with his denunciations of materialism and the
Paris Commune, that Italian anarchism gained its first articulate defenders.
Italian anarchists initially worked within the structure of the IWA, organ-
ising workers and siding with the ‘non-authoritarians’ against Marx and
the London General Council. Their dominance was such that at a meeting
of twenty-one Italian sections of the IWA in Rimini in August 1872,a
month before the showdown between Bakunin and Marx at the Hague
Congress in September, they passed anarchist-inspired resolutions against
political action, against participation in the Hague Congress (controlled by
the authoritarians of the General Council), and for the creation of an anti-
authoritarian International. In the following months, anarchists also made
clear that organisation and propaganda needed to be supplemented with
action – with insurrection and with what became known as ‘propaganda by
the deed’.
The rapid growth of the IWA in Italy during the early 1870swasdue
to the activities of young militants like Carlo Cafiero (1846–92), Andrea
Costa (1852–1910) and Errico Malatesta (1853–1932). These men were
enchanted by Bakunin, and won over by his writings that extolled the vir-
tues of labour, attacked the capitalists, defended atheism, proposed the social
revolution and denounced the state. Malatesta recounted in 1876 that ‘it is
to him [Bakunin], more than all others, that we owe the foundation and
the early progress of the International in Italy, [and] it is to him that we
owe our early revolutionary education’ (quoted in Pernicone 1993,p.106).
Cafiero, following his embrace of a Bakuninist position in mid-1872,even
began supporting Bakunin and his family with his inherited wealth; in
1873, he frittered away most of his inheritance with the purchase, repair
and expansion of a villa near Locarno called the Baronata, initially conceived
as a residence for the ageing Russian revolutionary.
The Italian anarchists placed great faith in Bakunin’s vision of small
conspiratorial organisations initiating revolutionar y actions that, in turn,
would precipitate widespread popular insurrection and bring down the
state. In August 1874, they made plans for a co-ordinated series of uprisings
in Bologna, Rome, Florence and other cities, but lack of popular support
and early detection by the authorities led to the easy suppression of the
uprisings and the quick arrest of most of the anarchist leaders. Three years
466
Visions of stateless society
later, in April 1877, there was a second attempt in the mountain villages near
Benevento in the Campania; again it failed and led to a wave of government
repression.
Continuing government persecution led to a fracturing of the Italian
movement. Many adopted a self-defeating aversion to any organisational
structure, which led to a movement with little unity or co-ordinated action.
Costa converted to ‘legalitarian’ socialism in 1879, depriving the movement
of one of its most popular leaders and effective spokesmen. Cafiero, his
inheritance squandered, spent the last decade of his life (1882–92) insanely
paranoid. Malatesta continued to attempt to revitalise the Italian anarchist
movement into a revolutionary force, but he spent most of his years after
the 1870s in exile (in such places as Argentina and London), and he never
succeeded in overcoming internal dissension, government repression or the
growing strength of the socialists committed to electoral activity.
Bakunin and ‘collectivist anarchism’ also exer ted a strong influence in
Spain. Anarchism was formally introduced on the Iberian peninsula by rep-
resentatives of the non-authoritarian wing of the IWA in the late 1860s,
especially in the years following the September revolutions of 1868 that over-
threw Queen Isabella II. Until the Bourbon restoration of 1875, there was
intense social turmoil in Spain, which allowed radicals of various coloura-
tions – republican federalists, Proudhonian mutualists and Bakuninist col-
lectivists – to bid for influence among disaffected rural and urban workers.
The repression that accompanied the restoration forced anarchist groups
underground, giving proponents of insurrection and terrorism a stronger
voice. With the establishment of the right of association in 1881, syndical-
ist forces within the anarchist movement became stronger, controlling the
Federaci
´
on de Trabajadores de la Regi
´
on Espa
˜
nola (FTRE) and its paper
La Revista Social, edited by Juan Serrano y Oteiza (1837–86).
During the late 1880sandthe1890s, the ‘collectivist anarchists’ were
challenged by ‘communist anarchists’ who called for a communal system
of economic distribution, as opposed to the collectivist ideal of a worker’s
entitlement to the integral product of his labour. The communists also
tended to support terrorism and organised violence. But the most vocal and
visible anarchists – writers like Fernando Tarrida del M
´
armol (1861–1915)
and Ricardo Mella (1861–1925) – embraced an anarchism that appealed
to the strong Spanish tradition of working-class associations, unions, cir-
culos, ateneos and similar organisations. Their so-called ‘anarchism without
adjectives’ attempted to transcend the bitter debates between individualists,
mutualists, collectivists and communists within the anarchist movement,
467
K. Steven Vincent
calling for greater tolerance regarding economic questions. Their rejection
of rigid economic theory appealed during the 1890s to a wide group of
prominent anarchists who hoped such an ecumenical position would help
unify the movement – writers like Reclus, Malatesta and Max Nettlau (the
historian of anarchism, 1865–1944) in Europe; and Voltairine de Cleyre
in America (Avrich 1978,pp.144–70). In Spain, anarquismo sin adjetivos
converged with ideas of the general strike to form the anarcho-syndicalist
ideology of the Confederaci
´
on Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), founded in
1910.
A similar alternation between competing anarchist stances occurred in
Argentina. Made up largely of immigrant labourers from Italy and Spain,
the Argentine anarchist movement reflected its European origins. The first
organisations were an outgrowth of a Bakuninist Centro, formed to dissem-
inate the anti-Marxist message of the anti-authoritarian wing of the IWA.
By the 1880s, visiting Italian anarchists like Errico Malatesta were spread-
ing the collectivist gospel in rapidly growing urban centres like Buenos
Aires and Rosario. The first significant working-class support emerged
during the economic crisis of the 1890s; by 1901, when the Federaci
´
on
Obrera de Argentina was founded, there existed an organised, militant
and rapidly expanding movement dedicated to libertarian ideals. Prag-
matic and activist in orientation, Argentine anarchism was a m
´
elange of
individualist and more communitarian anarchism – ‘almost a stance...as
much a symbol of outrage as an inter pretation’ (Yoast 1975,p.327). It
shared a federalist and revolutionary orientation with militant anarchists in
Europe.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, this mass working-
class anarchist movement assumed a more militant posture, leading to a
Buenos Aires rent strike in 1907 and a Rosario labour strike in 1909.
Escalating confrontations with industrialists and the state culminated in the
uprisings and strikes of 1910 during the Centenary celebrations. Subsequent
repression – a combination of legal sanctions, police and troop forces and
deportations – crushed the worker-anarchist organisations and the left-wing
press. This ended the golden age of Argentine anarchism, though conflicts,
like the so-called Semana Tr
´
agica in 1919, indicated anarchism’s enduring
prestige and influence.
Mexican anarchism, to mention another important example, went
through a similar developmental pattern. During the 1860sand1870s, anar-
chist organisations grew, benefiting from the influx of European anarchist
immigrants, especially from Spain, and the wide circulation of literature
468
Visions of stateless society
propagating the views of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and others. Sup-
pressed by the government between 1880 and 1900, anarchist organisations
re-emerged in a more syndicalist guise in the first decade of the twentieth
century, especially in the ranks of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led
by Ricardo Flores Mag
´
on (1873–1922) and his brother Enrique. Important
during the revolutionary period, anarchism survived to influence the stance
of the Confederaci
´
on General de Trabajadores, founded in 1921.
In England, the split between parliamentary and anti-parliamentary forces
on the left occurred in 1884, when William Morris (1834–96) and others
broke away from the Social Democratic Federation led by Henry M. Hynd-
man (1842–1921) to form the Socialist League. For the next five years, Mor-
ris and his close associates advocated a radical change of the economy and
society through education and revolution. In Commonweal, the paper of the
Socialist League, workers were warned against compromising with con-
temptible politics and advised to put their faith in militant trade unionism.
The battles of ‘Bloody Sunday’ between police and demonstrators at Trafal-
gar Square on 13 November 1887, and the success of the great dock strike
of 1889 led some British militants to imagine that revolutionary change
could be achieved through a ‘universal strike’.
In the United States, finally, similar strains of working-class anarchism
and syndicalism emerged, especially among workers on the docks and in
the lumber mills and mines of the West. Syndicalist anarchists like Dyer D.
Lum (1839–93) had insisted that violent struggle was necessary to establish
worker control of factories. Communist anarchists like Emma Goldman –
closer to the ideas of Kropotkin than Bakunin – had a vision of shared labour
and remuneration based on need. The most visible organisation advocating
direct action was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded
in 1905. The most prominent exponent of such views was the chief of
the Western Federation of Miners, ‘Big Bill’ Haywood (1869–1928). The
IWW was especially active in labour disputes during the decade before
the First World War. With entry into the war in 1917, ‘subversive’ voices
were silenced by the government – Haywood, for example, was sentenced to
twenty years’ imprisonment for his activities opposing the war; disillusioned,
he jumped bail and went into exile in Russia.
8 Peter Kropotkin and communist anarchism
Peter Kropotkin embraced anarchism after his exposure in 1872 to the non-
authoritarian ideas within the International articulated by the followers
469
K. Steven Vincent
of Bakunin in the Jura Federation (Kropotkin 1930,p.287).
35
But if he
proclaimed himself an anarchist only at the age of thirty, he drew from
earlier experiences, including sympathies for his father’s serfs, whom he
knew during his childhood, and for Siberian miners, whom he observed
during his military service in the 1860s. Like Bakunin, Kropotkin came
from a wealthy Russian gentry family, and as a youth he was even chosen to
be a page to the Tsar. When he graduated from the military academy in St
Petersburg in 1862, Kropotkin obtained permission to be commissioned as
an army officer in Amur in Siberia rather than take an assignment more likely
to lead to professional advancement. This reflected his conviction that one
should be useful to society, especially if one had the luxury, as he did, of
belonging to the privileged class. He quickly became disenchanted with
official service to the state, however, and was appalled at the deplorable
conditions he observed miners enduring in Siberia. Though at this stage
of his life he opposed recourse to revolution,
36
he came to the conclusion
that the reform of Russian society through the autocracy was hopeless. It
is ironic that Kropotkin’s service to the state became a prelude to a lifetime
devoted to opposition to all states.
Kropotkin’s frustrations led him to scientific and geographical studies,
including exploratory expeditions to areas of Manchuria. These occasioned
his first publications and established his reputation as a geographer. In 1867,
Kropotkin resigned his military service and retur ned to European Rus-
sia, where he devoted himself to studies in mathematics and continued
to publish articles on his expeditions and on the geographical configura-
tion of the mountains of Asia. He continued, however, to feel morally
compelled to work for the liberation of the masses, a conviction that his
wide-ranging reading encouraged (Kropotkin 1930,p.240). He read, for
example, Proudhon and Quinet, who convinced him that a reform of social
conditions required the creation of workers’ associations. When his father
died in 1871, he decided to learn first-hand about workers’ organisations in
Western Europe. He travelled to Zurich, where he joined the First Inter-
national, then visited Geneva, Neuch
ˆ
atel and Brussels. It was his exposure
to non-authoritarian ideas in the Jura that crystallised into anarchism his
ambivalence towards authority and his frustrations with the Russian regime.
35 Biographical details may be found in Cahm 1989;Kropotkin1930; Miller 1976; Woodcock and
Avakumovic 1971.
36 In a letter (4 June 1866) to his brother, Alexander Kropotkin, Kropotkin cautioned against commit-
ment to revolution without a careful consideration of the likely benefits and harms for the majority
(Miller 1976,p.68).
470
Visions of stateless society
He returned to Russia, became a member of the radical Chaikovskii
Circle (under the pseudonym of Borodin), composed a popular book on
Pugachev, and advocated focusing on workers in the countryside rather than
in the urban centres. He composed a manifesto in 1873 that recommended
transforming capital and the means of production into common prop-
erty, called for the elimination of government in favour of a federation of
agrarian communes, and advocated popular revolt as the appropriate means
(Kropotkin 1970a, pp. 46–116). Because of this activity, he was arrested by
the tsarist police on 8 April 1874, and sent to the Peter and Paul fortress.
Fourteen months later, on 30 June 1876, he escaped and made his way to
Britain, settling first in Edinburgh and then in London. He was to remain
in exile for the next forty years.
In January 1877, Kropotkin moved to Switzerland, where he re-
established his contacts with the non-authoritarians of the Jura Federation.
The Libertarian International was almost extinct by this time, however, and
even the Bulletin of the Federation ceased publication in 1877.Kropotkin
responded by co-operating briefly with Paul Brousse on the short-lived
paper L’Avant Garde and then, in 1879, founding his own anarchist paper,
Le R
´
evolt
´
e. He actively advocated popular revolutionary action – mass revolt
and, even, individual acts of violence if these were informed by a clear revo-
lutionary commitment – and was closely associated with anarchists like Paul
Brousse and Elis
´
ee Reclus. In 1880, at a meeting of the Jura Federation at La
Chaux-de-Fonds, he became a vocal proponent of ‘anarchist communism’
which called not only for the elimination of all governments, but for the
common ownership of the means of production and for distribution based
on need.
37
As a consequence of his revolutionary activity, he was expelled by the
Swiss authorities in 1881. After another stay in England in 1881–2,hetried
living in France, but in December 1882 he was arrested and, in January 1883
brought to trial in Lyon for expressing sympathy for the mine bombings
in central France and for his active involvement with the International. He
was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison at Clairvaux, but after
serving three years he was pardoned and expelled from the country. He
then made his way to London where he spent the next thirty years. This
marked the beginning of the period when he wrote most of his books and
37 ‘Anarchist communism’ needs to be distinguished, according to Kropotkin, from ‘anarchist collec-
tivism’, which posits that remuneration should be in proportion to hours worked. This latter position
was supported by James Guillaume, among others.
471
K. Steven Vincent
became an internationally renowned anarchist theorist. After the February
revolution of 1917, he returned to his native Russia, where he opposed
Russian withdrawal from the First World War as well as the rising power of
the Bolsheviks. He was frustrated on both counts, and after the Bolshevik
Revolution in October, he focused his attention on the formation of the
Dmetrov anarchist commune in the village near Moscow where Lenin had
banished him. He died there in 1921.
Kropotkin shared the belief in the limitless possibilities of scientific
enquiry which we have already noted of earlier anarchists. Anarchism was
not just a theory, according to Kropotkin, it was a form of scientific truth
based on obser vation and analysis. It was a science, moreover, that provided
the principle for positive social interaction – mutual aid – and the basis for
an optimistic belief in secular change. Kropotkin believed that people, prop-
erly enlightened through education and inspired by the action and vision of
revolutionary minorities, would recognise the truth of anarchist ideals and
break free from the demoralising effects of contemporary society to build
a society based on these ideals. With education and leadership, Kropotkin
believed that popular creative tendencies could prevail over the divisive
authoritarian tendencies which animated, and unfortunately dominated,
modern industrial societies.
Throughout his mature years, Kropotkin insisted that co-operation and
mutual aid were the norms in both the natural and social worlds. In Mutual
Aid (1902), he attacked the Social Darwinists for arguing that the evolution
of nature and human society was driven by competition. In fact, spon-
taneous co-operation was more important than ferocious competition in
the struggle for existence, and evolution was accurately characterised as an
associated struggle by the species as a whole against the environment. In
this struggle as it applied to humans, mutual aid was the foundation out
of which morality would emerge. Society, in the absence of state or reli-
gious authority, would not become a community of warring individuals. It
would become a community within which human solidarity would grow,
and out of which higher ideals of justice and equity would evolve. Mutual
aid was the principle and the therapy that would overcome egoism in favour
of an altruistic morality, and it would provide the framework for concrete
socio-economic advances.
In spite of Kropotkin’s scientific self-consciousness, therefore, he must
be seen, first and foremost, as a moralist. Even his final book, incomplete
at the time of his death, dealt with ethical doctrines (Kropotkin 1924).
Moral imperatives were what impelled him to call for socio-economic
472
Visions of stateless society
change. In books like The Conquest of Bread (1892)andFields, Factories and
Workshops (1898), he outlined a social organisation based on a free federation
of autonomous communes. One of the themes of these works is that the
instruments of production are the inheritance from the common labour
of humanity, and therefore ought not to be considered the property of a
few. ‘Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human
riches’, he writes, ‘owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the
past and present’ (Kropotkin 1972,p.46). This makes it impossible to assess
accurately the productive contribution of any single individual, a judgement
which led Kropotkin to two conclusions: all social wealth must be viewed
as the common inheritance of humanity and distribution of goods should
be based on need.
Kropotkin was convinced that the popularity of this stance – which he
called ‘anarchist communism’ – was spreading; he believed that, little by
little, authoritarian governmental principles were yielding to voluntary co-
operation in a multiplicity of organisations such as trade associations, learned
societies and communes. These small communities were the appropriate
context for the instincts of solidarity and mutual aid to flourish. And they
were the appropriate foci for education and personal growth. Assumed here
was the evil nature of the state, which Kropotkin spelled out explicitly in
such works as ‘The State: Its Historic Role’.
38
Here, Kropotkin argued that
the state had emerged victorious over free towns and communes during
the sixteenth century, a victory that represented an unfortunate advance of
tyranny over liberty.
We see in [the state] the institution . . . to prevent direct association among men, to
shackle the development of local and individual initiative, to crush existing liber ties,
to prevent their blossoming – all this in order to subject the masses to the will of the
minorities. (Kropotkin 1970a, p. 259)
The state favoured ‘pyramidal authoritarian organisations’ and was ani-
mated by ‘the spirit of discipline’; it destroyed ‘the spir it of initiative and
free association’ that was the essence of ‘the federalist spirit which had cre-
ated the free commune’ (Kropotkin 1970a, p. 241). Fortunately, according
to Kropotkin, technological advances were making possible regional self-
sufficiency which, combined with education, would support the human
tendencies towards solidarity and mutual aid. The future victory of the
38 Originally a lecture delivered on 7 March 1896,itwaspublishedinLes Temps nouveaux (19 December
1896). There is an English translation in Kropotkin 1970a, pp. 211–64.
473