SOURCE: "Social Philosophy" and "Theory of Social Revolution," in Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom, Black Rose Books, 1993, pp. 85-95, and 136-51.

[In the following chapters from his book, Morris considers Bakunin's writings in-depth in order to recuperate them from the condemnation of previous criticism, which he also reviews in detail.]

Social Philosophy

For Bakunin, human beings, like everything else in nature, are entirely material beings, and the mind, the thinking faculty with the power to receive and reflect on different external and internal sensation, is the property of an animal body. As with all animals, humans, Bakunin writes, have two essential instincts or drives: egoism, the instinct for self-preservation, and the social instinct which is ultimately concerned with the preservation of the species.² What is called society or the human world has no other creator that the human species who is impelled, as are other living creatures, by a force or instinctive will within the organism. Bakunin refers to this as the "universal life current" and associates it with "universal causality"—thus suggesting that by natural laws, Bakunin meant something closer to Freud's libido or Tao, rather than "mechanistic laws."³ Bakunin's writings on the will, clearly derived from Schopenhauer (whom he read with interest in his last years though he was critical of the philosopher's individualism) have a biological rather than a moral import (as with Kant) and, as with Nietzsche, evidently anticipate Freud.

Bakunin also stresses the fundamental importance of work in the constitution of the human subject:

Every animal works; or lives by working Man as a living being, which is the supreme law of life. He must work in order to maintain existence, in order to develop in the fullness of his being.⁴

And Bakunin emphasizes that human work has a progressive quality.

Bakunin goes on to suggest that three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all human development: 1) human animality, the "material" aspects of the human subject discussed above; 2) human thought, which represents a "new element" in the historical process, and 3) rebellion. Thought and rebellion are seen as two faculties that combine the "progressive action throughout the history of mankind and consequently create all which constitutes humanity in man."⁵ Bakunin recounts the Genesis myth where Jehovah expressly forbids Adam and Eve from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. "But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience, he emancipates him and stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat the fruit of knowledge."⁶ Thus, rebellion, human emancipation and knowledge are seen as intrinsically linked by Bakunin. In his study "Beyond the Chains of Illusion," Erich Fromm notes how in Greek and Hebrew myths the capacity for disobedience constituted the beginning of human history,⁷ yet he makes no mention of Bakunin.

But the most important insights of Bakunin relate to his discussions on the essential social nature of the human subject, and on his postulate that human freedom and rationality are intrinsically bound-up in society. These discussion are closely linked to his critique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a critique that has been lost on many liberal scholars who still largely continue to see the subject in asocial terms.

In his address to the League for Peace and Freedom, entitled Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism (1867), Bakunin concluded the proposal with a long diatribe against Rousseau's theory of the State. He was concerned that Rousseau's democratic theory was not only a justification for the State, but made human freedom and sociality into rigid antithetical concepts. We can trace his argument against Rousseau's "social contract" theory by quoting some relevant extracts. Bakunin writes:

Man is not only the most individual being on earth, but also the most social. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was surely mistaken in his belief that primitive society was established by a free contract, effected by savages. But Rousseau is not alone in his assertion. The majority of modern jurists and publicists, whether of the Kantian or any other individualist liberal school . . . take the tacit contract as their point of departure. A tacit contract.. . What terrible nonsense! An absurd and, worse, a pernicious fiction!

The implications of the social contract are in fact fatal, because they culminate in the absolute domination of the State. And yet the principle seems extremely liberal at first sight. Before arranging their contract, individuals are assumed to have enjoyed absolute liberty, because this theory holds that only man in his natural, wild State is totally free . . .

So here we have primitive men, each one totally free . . . enjoying his freedom only as long as he does not come into contact with another and remains immersed in absolute individual isolation . . . In order not to utterly destroy one another, they form an explicit or tacit contract by which they relinquish a part of themselves so as to safeguard the rest. This contract becomes the basis of society, or rather of the State, for it must be noted that there is no room in the theory for society, only for the State, or rather that society is totally absorbed by the State.

And Bakunin continues by making an important distinction between society and State, earlier made by both Tom Paine and Godwin:

Society is the natural medium of the human collectivity, regardless of contracts. It progresses slowly, through the momentum imparted by individual initiatives, not through the mind and will of the legislator. There may be many unarticulated laws that rule it, but these are natural laws, inherent in the social body .. . If it follows that they are not to be confused with the judicial and political laws proclaimed by some legislative authority.⁹

Bakunin goes on to suggest that individual liberty ends where the State begins, and that it is "the most flagrant, the most cynical, the most complete negation of humanity."¹⁰ He then develops a critique of the State, which we will discuss further in a later section.

In his study The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution Bakunin takes up again the critique of those he calls "doctrinaire liberals" and the "individualist, egoist, base and fraudulent liberty extolled by the school of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and every other bourgeois liberalism."¹¹ According to these liberals—who don't hesitate to support a coercive State when it serves their interests—

. . . the freedom of the individual is not a creation, an historical product of society. They claim that it is previous to any society, and that every man bears it from birth onwards, together with his immortal soul, as a divine gift. It follows that only outside of society is man complete . . .

What emerges from this theory is that our society proper does not exist; it utterly ignores natural human society, the real starting point of all human civilization and the only medium in which the personality and liberty of man can really be born and grow. All it acknowledges is, at one extreme, the individual... and at the other the State. (Liberals are well aware that no historic State has ever been based on a contract, and that they have all been founded by violence and conquest. But they need this fiction of the free contract as the basis of the State, so they grasp it without further ado.¹²

Against this liberal conception of the individual, which sees a fundamental antithesis between the free individual and society (State)—which Bakunin suggests is essentially an idealist theory—Bakunin outlines his own materialist theory. This he postulates in ways much more enlightening than either Hegel or Marx, or the later Durkheim, that is, he stresses the fundamentally social nature of the human subject. Bakunin writes:

Society, preceding in time any development of humanity constitutes the very essence of human existence. Man is born into society, just as an ant is born into an ant-hill or a bee into its hive; man is born into society from the very moment that he becomes a human being, that is, a being possessing to a greater or lesser extent the power of speech and thought. Man does not choose society; on the contrary he is the product of the latter. . . ¹³

Society is the basis and natural starting point of man's human existence, and it follows that he only realizes his individual liberty or personality by integration with all the individuals around him and by virtue of the collective power of society. According to the materialist theory . . . instead of diminishing or constricting the freedom of the individual, society creates it. Society is the root and branch, liberty the fruit. Therefore, in every era man must find his liberty, not at the beginning, but at the ends of history, and it may be said that the real and total emancipation of every human individual is the true great objective and ultimate goal of history.¹⁴

And Bakunin continues:

The materialist . . . definition of liberty flatly contradicts the idealists. It is as follows: Man does not become man, nor does he achieve awareness or realization of his humanity, other than in society and in the collective movement of the whole society; he only shakes off the yoke of internal nature through collective or social labour . . . and without his material emancipation there can be no intellectual or moral emancipation for anyone . . . man in isolation can have no awareness of his liberty. Being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man, and by all the men around him. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection . . . I myself am human and free only to the extent that I acknowledge the humanity and liberty of all my fellows . . . I am properly free when all the men and women about me are equally free. Far from being a limitation or a denial of my liberty, the liberty of another is its necessary condition and confirmation.¹⁵

Isaiah Berlin refers to all this as "glib Hegelian claptrap" and one of his devotees concurs, referring to Bakunin's "extraordinary abstract ideal of liberty."¹⁶ But Bakunin's concept of liberty is not abstract at all, rather concrete, suggesting that human freedom only has meaning within a social context and, moreover, as we shall see, can be meaningful only in a society which not only acknowledges personal freedom but has as a degree of economic equity that makes such liberty possible. Bakunin's critique of Rousseau has gone unheeded by most liberals, who themselves have a far more abstract conception of liberty, happily acknowledging it even in the context of the State and rampant economic exploitation.

A number of interesting points emerge from Bakunin's discussion. First, Bakunin makes it clear that the religious idea that one can achieve freedom or salvation outside society—as with mystics or anchorite saints—is misconceived. The notion of a solitary and abstract individual is just as much an abstraction as is God, he writes, and to become concerned with the liberty inherent in the divine soul is to become anti-social. Life outside of society, outside of all known influences," a life of absolute isolation, is tantamount to intellectual, moral and material death."¹⁷

Second, Bakunin postulated not only a negative conception of liberty—consisting of rebellion against all forms of authority—but also a positive conception of liberty. (Berlin and Fromm also wrote about two forms of liberty without ever acknowledging Bakunin.) The positive concept of liberty, which Bakunin conceived as "an eminently social matter," he defined as follows: "It is the full development and full enjoyment of all human faculties and powers in every man, through upbringing, scientific education, and material prosperity."¹⁸ He speaks too of the only freedom truly worthy of the name—"the freedom which consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral power which are found in the form of latent capabilities in every individual. I mean that freedom which recognizes only those restrictions which are laid down for us by the laws of our own nature . . . Thus, instead of trying to find a limit for them, we should consider them as the real conditions of and the real reason for our freedom"¹⁹ —this in response to Rousseau. Elsewhere he writes of the need to proclaim anew the great principles of the French revolution; that every person should have the material and moral means to develop his whole humanity. The principle he suggests must be translated into a problem:

To organize society, in such a manner that every individual, man or woman, should, at birth, find almost equal means for the development of his or her various faculties and the full utilization of his or her work.²⁰

Aileen Kelly suggests that Bakunin's "own need to achieve self-realization as a real or integrated personality" was the key to his personality,²¹ but completely ignores the fact that self-actualization—the full development of the individual—was Bakunin's own conception of positive liberty. Other writers from Jung to Maslow have posited "self-actualization" as a crucial need or drive of the human personality, although this has largely been theorized, as Russell Jacoby (1975) notes, within a context of "social amnesia." Bakunin, unlike these humanistic psychologists, was fully aware that positive liberty—"self-realization"—was only possible in a society where people were not subject to coercive constraints and economic exploitation. Kelly's suggestion²² that "freedom" and "equality" for Bakunin were simply "fine-sounding ethical categories" and that his writings lack any "serious analysis of social and political questions" (she accepts the warped opinion of Engels), is just perverse. Her own study is somewhat pathetic in that she nowhere seriously engages herself in Bakunin's own critique of liberal ideology, the State, capitalism, and Marxism—all real social and political issues.

Third, Bakunin argues that while the State is in a sense artificial and can be eliminated, society is the natural medium for the human subject and cannot be rebelled against. He writes:

Society antedates and at the same time survives every human individual, beings in this respect like Nature itself. It's eternal like Nature, or rather, having been born upon our earth, it will last as long as the earth. A radical revolt against society would therefore be just as impossible for man as a revolt against nature, human society being nothing else but the last great manifestation or creation of Nature upon this earth. And an individual who would want to rebel against society . . . would play himself beyond the pole of existence.²³

And Bakunin suggests that while an individual may well react against society, especially when influenced "by feelings coming from outside and especially from an alien society, but the individual cannot leave this particular society without immediately placing himself in another sphere of solidarity and without becoming subjected to new influences."²⁴

Some writers have inferred from this that while Bakunin was hostile to the State he was quite happy to allow social pressure in the form of public opinion. Gray, for instance, writes that while Bakunin was delivering us from a visible tyranny (the State) he may be subjecting the human race to an even more "grievous tyranny"—public opinion.²⁵ On this issue Bakunin writes:

Social tyranny is often overwhelming and deadly, but it does not exhibit the character of imperative violence, of legalized, formal despotism, which distinguishes State authority . .. it exerts its domination by means of conventions, morals, and a multitude of sentiments, prejudices and habits, in the material as well as the mental sphere and constitutes what we call public opinion. It envelops man from the moment of his birth . . . hence the immense power which society exercises over men.

But Bakunin continues,

. . . this power may be just as much beneficial as harmful. It is beneficial when it contributes to the development of knowledge, material prosperity, liberty, equality and brotherly solidarity, harmful when it had opposite tendencies.²⁶

Bakunin all his life was concerned with an attempt to outline the kind of society that was conducive to human liberty and solidarity—a truly human society. It was one that was both socialist and libertarian and no one, as far as I am aware, has improved much on Bakunin's essential ideas. All contemporary societies are characterized—if liberals like Kelly removed their tinted glasses—by violence, poverty, repression, pollution and plunder, and the theoretical alternatives to social anarchism—orthodox communism, liberal democracy and fascism—are all morally and politically bankrupt.

Finally, something needs to be said on how Bakunin saw the relationship between the individual and society, for he has been accused both of being an "extreme individualist" and an extreme "collectivist," completely "submerging" the individual in the collectivity. Marxists tend to stress individualism—Marx accused Bakunin of merely translating "Proudhon's and Stirner's anarchy into the crude language of the tartars"²⁷ —while liberals stress his supposed collectivism. Both interpretations are grossly unjust to Bakunin—indeed wilful.

The extracts above should make it clear that Bakunin saw the human subject as an essentially social being, and found no justification for the society/individual opposition. His stress on rebellion, individuality, and liberty was always counterpoised with an equal stress on sociality and human social solidarity. One of the most perceptive of socialist historians, G. D. H. Cole, sums up well Bakunin's social philosophy:

Bakunin's social theory began, and almost ended, with liberty. Against the claims of liberty nothing else in his view was worth consideration at all. He attacked, remorselessly and without qualification, every institution that seem to him to be inconsistent with liberty . . . Yet he was very far from being an individualist, and he had the most utmost scorn for the kinds of liberty that were preached by the bourgeois advocates of laissez-faire. He was, or believed himself to be, a socialist as well as a libertarian, and no one has insisted more strongly than he on the evils of private property and of the competition of man with man. When he wrote about the nature of society he always laid emphasis on the immense impact of social environment on the individual, stressing fully as much as Durkheim the social origin . . . of men's ideas.²⁸

The "collectivist" orientation of Bakunin's thought had been proposed by Aileen Kelly, who, like Berlin and Carr, tends to see these ideas as having totalitarian implications. Bakunin, she argues, was centrally concerned with "wholeness," and with that "eschatological vision of a unified human community" in which the individual is "submerged." She writes:

For Bakunin, liberty was above all "wholeness": the dialectical overcoming of all duality, all conflict between subject and object, the part and the whole, in a unity with the Absolute which was at one and the same time the infinite self-assertion and the total dissolution of the individual ego.²⁹

Bakunin was thus a kind of mystic, but a romantic mystic who found his absolute in the popular masses—the people. Such a thesis makes nonsense even of Hegel whose dialectic was one of "unity-in-opposition," not of mystical "union"—the "identity" theory of religious mystics and Schelling which Hegel indeed derided. As he put it in the "Phenomenology" this to palm off the Absolute as the night in which all cows are black. Hegel was concerned with advancing a concrete metaphysics and overcoming dualisms—but not by collapsing or "dissolving" the oppositions. As an interpretation of Bakunin's social philosophy it is even more perverse, for unlike Kelly, Bakunin had a good understanding not only of Hegelian idealism, but of the emerging sciences of sociology and anthropology. The influence of Comte is evident in much of his work, and he was a close friend of two important early anthropologists/geographers, Eliseé and Elie Reclus, as Cole rightly points out.³⁰

Although one may find occasional thoughts about the need for a revolutionary to identify him or herself with the people, it is patently clear from Bakunin's writings that he saw the relationship between the individual and society as a "dialectical" one and being dialectic means that it is a unity-in-opposition, and also one of movement and change. Bakunin saw all relationships both in nature and society, as being in a state of flux. The relationship between the individual and the collective is neither collapsed nor equated, nor is it seen in rigid dualistic terms. Bakunin's whole project was to delineate a society in which both liberty and sociality were safeguarded. Kelly's assertion that Bakunin resolved the fundamental problem of ethics and political theory—the relationship between liberty and equality as a conflicting goal—with the "stroke of a pen," considering them as one and the same thing,³¹ indicates a woeful misunderstanding of Bakunin's argument. He did not—as we shall see—equate them or consider them as in inherent conflict; he argues that economic equality was a basic condition for liberty. Only supporters of capitalism see equality in conflict with liberty.

But Kelly does Bakunin a further injustice. Not only does she link Bakunin's theory to a misreading of Hegel's idealism, thus seeing him involved in "quasi-religious ecstasy" looking forward to "the dissolution of the personality in a collective,"³² she also follows Isaiah Berlin in unfairly foisting upon Bakunin a Jacobin conception of politics. She writes:

Given that the use of force is the only way yet devised of eliminating tension between the individual and the whole, the proponents of the ideal of the unity of civil and political society are constrained by their own logic to propose a dictatorship which submerges the first in the second as a means to the goal of the ideal society.³³

This may be an apt description of the kind of politics associated with Rousseau, Robespierre and Stalin, but to see it as characterizing Bakunin's conception of the revolution and of anarchy is either political naivety or indicates an astonishing aberration of scholarship.

In a more systematic liberal appraisal of Bakunin, E. Lampert has stressed that an emphasis on the autonomy and freedom of the individual subject co-exists in Bakunin with a stress on human sociality. Bakunin, he writes, through emphasizing the primacy of society over the individual, never "professed the belief in an illusory, hypostatized collective consciousness" and consistently spurned any notion of attachment to something outside man. Even at his most collectivist, Bakunin always emphasizes the revolt of the human personality against all powers, collective or divine. But Bakunin could equally not be described as an "individualist," for all the operations in the life of an individual—liberty, consciousness, reason—had for Bakunin social meaning. And so Bakunin differed fundamentally from the other radical anarchist, Max Stirner.³⁴

. . . . .

Theory of Social Revolution

Bakunin has long been seen by both Marxist and liberal critics as an advocate of "pan-destructionism." He richly deserved, Eugène Pyziur writes, the epithet of "apostle of pan-destruction" for he elevated destruction to the rank of a programme.³⁵ Draper seems to see Bakunin as little more than a revolutionary brigand, and an advocate of elitist despotism involving pillage, theft and murder.³⁶ Bakunin has equally been portrayed as a millenarian visionary. While Marx was involved in the real revolution in establishing a "centralized organization," all that Bakunin had, Lichtheim writes, was a "chiliastic vision of an armed rising that would smash State and society"³⁷ —society, too, showing how little Lichtheim understood Bakunin's anarchism. Kelly as well writes of Bakunin's mystical anarchism and his millenarian vision of liberty and wholeness,³⁸ following the path of her mentor Isaiah Berlin who also wrote of Bakunin's apocalyptic vision.³⁹ The notion that Bakunin was some visionary Utopian idealist bent on mass destruction has gone hand-in-hand with the idea that Bakunin believed that a revolution could simply be achieved by a spontaneous act of "will." Uncritically accepting Marx's own estimate, Paul Thomas writes: "Bakunin's extreme voluntarism takes the form of what is surely an overestimation of the potency of the revolutionary will among society's lower depths and outcasts."⁴⁰

Yet, when one reads Bakunin it comes as a surprise that there is very little about destruction, in the sense of pillage, armed uprisings, assassination and the like; what he does offer is a sustained and reasoned critique of the three primary institutions of the contemporary world: the State, capitalism and religion, and the ideologies that support them, principally liberalism and Marxism. He advocated revolution, but he insists that this is a social revolution, and though he does speak of the destruction of the State and an end to economic serfdom through a revolutionary insurrection of the masses, he sees this process as less concerned with the advocacy of violence than in putting an end to violence. And the revolution for Bakunin is not only destructive of institutions, but also a creative process, allowing for the emergence and flourishing of preexisting social organizations. As he writes:

It is this old system of organization based upon force that the social revolution should put an end to by giving full liberty to the masses, groups, communes, associations, and likewise to individuals themselves, and by destroying once and for all the historic cause of all violence, the power and the very existence of the State.⁴¹

Bakunin's critics, Marxists and liberals alike, have almost apoplexy at his suggestion that brigands may have revolutionary potential, but the violence of the State seemingly disappears by a process of amnesia.

How did Bakunin envisage the social revolution? The first thing that must be said is that he saw this revolution as springing from deep within the human psyche, for the instinct to revolt, Bakunin postulated as an important human faculty. The history of mankind is the history of the negation of the past, for the origins of the human species and of culture he sees as linked to the act of rebellion. Throughout human history, therefore, human beings have rebelled against oppression and unsatisfactory conditions. To revolt, Bakunin writes, "is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushed it. In general the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt." And he continues:

I contend that there has never existed a people so depraved that they did not at some time, at least at the beginning of their history, revolt against the yoke of their slave drivers and their exploiters, and against the yoke of the State.⁴²

But the "negative passion" in itself did not make a social revolution, nor in themselves did suffering and oppression. He writes in Statism and Anarchy that when a man is driven to desperation,

he is then more likely to rebel. Despair is a bitter, passionate feeling capable of rousing men from their semi-conscious resignation if they have already an idea of a more desirable situation. But poverty and desperation are still not sufficient to generate a social revolution. They may be able to call forth intermittent local rebellions, but not great and widespread uprisings.⁴³

For this to happen people need to be inspired by a universal ideal.

Regarding the conditions and factors conducive to a social revolution, Bakunin makes a number of observations, particularly in examining the possibilities of revolution in Italy and Russia. We can consider each of these in turn.

Firstly, Bakunin stresses the importance of strikes in awakening the spirit of revolt among the workers. He writes:

Who does not know what every single strike means to the workers in terms of suffering and sacrifices? But strikes are necessary; indeed they are necessary to such an extent that without them it would be impossible to arouse the masses from social struggle, nor would it be possible to have them organized. Strikes awaken in the masses all the social revolutionary instincts which reside deeply in the heart of every worker . . . When those instincts, stimulated by economic struggle awaken . . . the propaganda of social-revolutionary ideas become easy. For these ideas are simply the purest and most faithful expression of the instincts of the people . . . Every strike is the more valuable in that it broadens and deepens to an ever greater extent the gulf now separating the bourgeois class from the masses . . . There is no better means of detaching the workers from the political influence of the bourgeoisie than a strike.⁴⁴

Bakunin therefore sees strikes as accentuating the struggle between labour and capital and as having enormous value in creating and organizing a form of workers' army. A general strike, he felt, in the conditions of that time, "now that the proletariat is deeply permeated with the ideas of emancipation, can only lead to a great cataclysm, which will regenerate society."⁴⁵ This great cataclysm necessarily implies, for Bakunin, a general insurrection by the people as a whole, for he never ceases to stress that the social revolution—a real and genuine revolution—is only that which is made by the people and not on behalf of the people.

Secondly, Bakunin denies that a social revolution could simply be made by the will of individuals, independent of social and economic circumstances. He was much less a voluntarist than his Marxist critics make out. Although like most nineteenth-century revolutionaries (Marx included), Bakunin had a feeling that the social revolution would be imminent—particularly in Italy—he was also aware that the social revolution would be a long process that may take many years for its realization. As he wrote in a letter to Nechaev (June 2, 1870):

Popular revolutions are born by the actual force of events or else by the stress of history which flows unseen underground .. . It is impossible to bring about such a revolution artificially . . . There are some periods in history when revolutions are quite simply impossible; there are other periods when they are inevitable. In which of these periods do we now find ourselves? I am deeply convinced that we are in a period of universal, inevitable popular revolution . . . Will it break out soon, and where will it break first—in Russia, or in France, or in some other part of the west? No one can foretell. Maybe it will break out within a year.. . or not for ten or twenty years.⁴⁶

Elsewhere he wrote:

Revolutions are not improvised. They are not made at will by individuals. They came about through the force of circumstances and are independent of any deliberate will or conspiracy.⁴⁷

Thirdly, Bakunin argued that a social revolution could never be genuine unless made by the people, and unless it went beyond a political revolution, using the term "political" as Bakunin used it, to mean coercive State institutions. Bakunin never denied the need for "organization," for the formation of workers' associations and trade unions, and he continually stressed the importance of class struggle against the bourgeoisie. It was necessary all over the world, he wrote, that "there should be pioneering groups or associations of advanced workers who were willing to initiate this great workers' movement of self-emancipation . . . the organization of the trade sections . . . bear in themselves the living seed of the new society which is to replace the old world. They are creating not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself."⁴⁸ The notion that Bakunin advocated simply "peasant socialism" or wished a return to some archaic past is simply untrue, and presents a travesty of his theory.

Bakunin therefore suggested that no political or nationalist revolution was sufficient in itself, and that a genuine revolution would be made by the people—peasants and urban workers in particular—who would destroy the bourgeois State thus allowing for the free federation of the workers and peasant associations and the local communities of the people. This did not imply the destruction of the whole "existing order," but essentially only of the institutions of property and the State. And the social revolution was not simply destructive but a creative act, a Hegelian negation, that allowed for the positive affirmation of existing social units, and the new forms of association that were coming into being. There are close affinities between the revolutionary perspectives of Marx and Bakunin, but whereas Marx saw the establishment of workers' associations and councils (soviets) as heralding and leading to the formation of a new workers' State (that would emerge as a counter-force to the bourgeoisie State), Bakunin saw the newly emerging workers' associations and the International itself, along with already pre-existing voluntary associations and "natural" social units, as forming the basis of an anarchist society. Some relevant extracts will illustrate Bakunin's essential thesis.

No political or national revolution can ever triumph unless it is transformed into a social revolution, and unless the national revolution, precisely because of its radically socialist character, which is destructive of the State, becomes a universal revolution.

Since the revolution must everywhere be achieved by the people, and since its supreme direction must always rest in the people, organized in a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations, the new revolutionary State, organized from the bottom up by revolutionary delegates . . . will have as its chief objective the administration of public services, not the governing of peoples.⁴⁹

These phrases are reminiscent of those of Saint-Simon, Weitling and of the Marxist notion of the "withering away" of the State, but Bakunin specifically repudiates any notion of State control, even during the period of revolutionary transition.

He also repudiates explicitly in this programme of the International Brotherhood (1869), from which this extract is taken, any idea of dictatorship or of a controlling or directing power within the revolution, or the idea that a secret society can make a revolution; the social revolution is made—indeed can only be made—by the people.

Elsewhere Bakunin writes:

The way of the anarchist social revolution, which will come from the people themselves, is an elemental force sweeping away all obstacles. Later, from the depths of the popular soul, there will spontaneously emerge the new creative forms of life.⁵⁰

But Bakunin was critical of those—whether socialists or disciples of Hegel—who created ideal schemes of a new socialist society. There were in fact two paths, he suggested, to revolution; one is that of the Utopian socialists who attempted to establish rural colonies based on socialist principles, thereby hoping in a gradual peaceful way, to initiate a radical transformation of society. But experiences over the last twenty years or so, in America and elsewhere, had proved that this was not a viable option. The other path is by a "general uprising of the people"—this Bakunin felt was the only way to achieve a social revolution. He envisaged both peasants and workers as the most important elements in this transformation. As Bakunin wrote in his circular to his Italian friends:

Organize the city proletariat in the name of revolutionary socialism and in doing this, unite it into one preparatory organization together with the peasants. An uprising by the proletariat alone would not be enough; with that we would have only a political revolution which would necessarily produce a natural and legitimate reaction on the part of the peasants . . . Only a wide-sweeping revolution embracing both the city workers and peasants would be sufficiently strong to overthrow and break the organized power of the State, backed as it is by all the resources of the possessing classes. But an all-embracing, that is, a social revolution, is a simultaneous revolution of the people of the cities and of the peasantry.⁵¹

In stressing the solidarity of the peasants and urban workers in overthrowing the State, and in suggesting the necessity of turning a bourgeois political revolution into a social revolution, Bakunin has often been seen as a precursor of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Although they did indeed follow a similar strategy, their aims were quite dissimilar to those of Bakunin, for Lenin followed the essence of Marx's theory, and established by the "seizure" of State power, a workers' State. But as Bakunin indeed predicted (so his arguments against Marxism have more than a purely theoretical significance), this only led to another despotism, and at the end of the social revolution.

Fourthly, in his discussion on the possibilities of revolution in Russia, Bakunin suggested that the "brigand" also has a part to play. In his letter to Nechaev he wrote that there were three facets of Russian peasant life that had potential for a revolution. One was the frequent uprisings among the peasantry. Another was the Russian commune, which though weakened by patriarchy and isolation, had a socialist basis. The third element was brigandage, which, he wrote, contained in itself a "protest both against the State and against the restrictions of a patriarchal society."⁵² In Statism and Anarchy, he wrote, "brigandage is an important historical phenomenon in Russia; the first rebels, the first revolutionists in Russia, Pugachev and Stenka Razin, were brigands."⁵³ Peasant rebellions were indeed common throughout the nineteenth century. There were around 1,200 peasant uprisings in Russia between 1825 and 1861, all put down punitively by the Tsarist authorities, and brigandage was still an important phenomenon. Bakunin thought of the peasant bandits as having a role in co-ordinating the separate communal uprisings, as acting as kind of "channels" or "forerunners" of the revolution. Bakunin undoubtedly idealized the peasant bandits, but whether this allows one to describe Bakunin as a classic example of a markedly "archaic and romantic" revolutionary is questionable.⁵⁴ There is more to Bakunin than an advocacy of banditry. But of course his defence of brigands has always proved good ammunition for his opponents. Kelly writes that Bakunin's presentation of the bandits as "the noble and heroic spearhead of a popular revolution was pure fantasy,"⁵⁵ and Draper implies that Bakunin thought of the brigand as the "only true revolutionary," and this entailed his advocacy of pillage and murder.⁵⁶ On this issue Bakunin wrote:

And which of us is not a robber or thief? Isn't that what the government is? And what about our government and private speculators and businessmen? Or our landowners and merchants. I personally cannot stand either robbery or violence, or in fact anything that constitutes an assault on humanity, but I admit that if I had to choose between the robbery and the violence that sits on a throne or makes use of every possible privilege, and the robbery and violence of the people, then I would not have the slightest hesitation in coming down on the side of the latter. I admit that from the point of view of real humanitarianism the world of popular brigands is far, far from beautiful. But what is beautiful in Russia? What can be more filthy than our respectable, hierarchical world of middle class civilization and cleanliness, with its smooth Western facade hiding the most awful debauchery?⁵⁷

In the repressive, awful conditions of Tsarist Russia, brigandage, Bakunin writes, is the only way out for the individual, and a mass uprising—the social revolution—for the people.⁵⁸ Going to the brigands doesn't mean sharing their aims and actions, which are frequently vile; it means instilling them with a new spirit and a new world outlook.⁵⁹ And it is worth noting that while Bakunin is often seen as having had an important influence on Russian populists, he never advocated, as did the populists, the assassination of people. But like other anarchists, he did not revile those, who, in the intolerable situation of nineteenth-century Russia, had made recourse to such methods.

Bakunin did not directly advocate violence, any more than did Marx, but he realized that any revolution would inevitably entail the destruction of life and property. "Revolutions are not child's play" he wrote. And a popular insurrection is, by its very nature, "instinctive, chaotic and destructive and always entails great personal sacrifice and an enormous loss of public and private property."⁶⁰ But although Bakunin stresses that a revolution will entail widespread destruction, it must be kept in mind that Bakunin was fundamentally a social thinker, and he was primarily concerned with the destruction of institutions—of the State and private property—rather than of people. "There can be no revolution," he wrote, "without a sweeping and passionate destruction . . . since by means of such destruction new worlds are born and come into existence."⁶¹ Such phrases make sense not in apocalyptic terms, although they do have an apocalyptic ring about them, but only in sociological terms, implying a radical social transformation.

A final aspect of Bakunin's theory of social revolution concerns his advocacy of a secret revolutionary society that would be a "collective, invisible dictatorship" within the revolution. His writings and the programmatic statements on "secret societies," especially his earlier ones, have given the impression to many scholars that although Bakunin preached a libertarian doctrine, anarchism, he was at heart, and also in theory, also an advocate of a revolutionary dictatorship, and thus "despotism." For this reason, Marxists have dismissed Bakunin as an irrelevant and dangerous romantic, while liberals have equated Bakunin with Robespierre and the Jacobins and considered him as a precursor of Bolshevism, or even Stalinism. I will quote a few typical examples.

Regarding anarchists as having a choice only between "impotent and meaningless rhetoric" and "elitist despotism"—thereby displaying an incredible ignorance of the real anarchist movement—Hal Draper uses Bakunin's writings on "secret societies" to argue that the crux of Bakunin's political philosophy was a belief in "the dictatorship of the intelligentsia." Bakunin's ideas, Draper contends, have their roots in "Jacobin-communist conspiratorialism" (on this he agrees with the liberals), and all Bakunin and his secret band of conspirators were concerned with was to "impose" their hidden control over the supposed social revolution. He also accepts that Bakunin was concerned both to "destroy" and to take over the control, "as dictator," of the International Working Men's Association. Draper comes to these conclusions by an incredible distortion of the substance of what Bakunin was trying to convey in his letters to Richard and Nechaev, and by accepting Engels and Lafargue's pamphlet on the "Alliance" (1873) as if it were the gospel truth.⁶²

Following Carr, Eugène Pyziur stresses that Bakunin's political philosophy contained completely contradictory elements: anarchism and a stress on liberty, and the advocacy of a secret society. The latter, with its exclusiveness and conspiratorial character, and in its emphasis on discipline, was the "mode," of the modern totalitarian party. Thus, Bakunin is seen by Pyziur as a precursor of Bolshevism. Bakunin's political philosophy, he concludes, combined anarchism with a struggle for unlimited power. He writes:

In any endeavour to put into practice Bakunin's anarchism, the Utopian elements, aimed at the securing of liberty, would not be realizable. The disciplinary elements, left unbalanced by other factors, would predominate incontestably. The culmination would be a total despotism.⁶³

What strange logic!

Aileen Kelly provides us with an identical thesis, suggesting that Bakunin combined both anarchist and Jacobin strands in his political thought. Like Pyziur, she argues that the anarchist strand is essentially a millenarian vision; it implies a belief in "absolute liberty," and in the "idealization of the peasants," as well as a "romantic cult of primitive spontaneity" which Bakunin accepted with enthusiasm. The Jacobin strand, on the other hand, is linked by Kelly to Bakunin's writings on secret societies and to his conflict with Marx over the control of the International. She contends that Bakunin, in reality, had established a "centralized hierarchical organization"—Bakunin's Secret Alliance—whose aim was to "direct" the International along lines laid down by Bakunin. His anarchism was simply a screen for Bakunin's lust for power, as Marx and Engels always alleged. And his writings on secret societies imply that Bakunin was concerned with establishing a dictatorship and to "impose" a revolution on the people from above—the people "would be liberated against their will."⁶⁴

Thus, following earlier scholars like Steklov and Carr, Kelly emphasizes a fundamental contradiction between Bakunin's anarchy, and his theory of dictatorship and links both to Bakunin's yearning to identify himself with some absolute—the people. She concludes that the Stalinist State is an apt description of Bakunin's conception of revolution.

All three writers—Draper, Pyziur and Kelly—tend to overemphasize the role of secret societies in Bakunin's conception of the social revolution, and to interpret the meaning of the words used by Bakunin to describe his conception of an "invisible dictatorship" (particularly as expressed in his letters to Richard and Nechaev), in the most negative and damaging way possible. Part of the problem is that the word "dictatorship" nowadays, after the fascist dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler, carries such a loaded meaning. But although the assessments of Bakunin are, I think, extremely biased and give a misleading interpretation of what Bakunin was trying to conceptualize, nevertheless, there is a sense in which his advocacy of a secret revolutionary society does not accord well with his anarchism. Clark is essentially correct in suggesting that Bakunin's belief in the importance of secret associations and small groups of advanced militants indicates a strong vanguardist undercurrent in his thought, "though it is neither so central to his outlook as his opponents allege, nor so trivial and innocuous as some of his defenders claim."⁶⁵

It has to be recognized that discussion of Bakunin's secret societies and the Alliance of Socialist Democracy relate to three distinct entities. First, there is the Alliance itself, which was not a secret society, but an open section within the International, made up largely, but not exclusively, of devotees of Bakunin's libertarian socialism. There were many, besides Bakunin, who wanted the International Working Men's Associations to be based on federal principles, and were critical of the idea of making the General Council into a executive directory. Bakunin drew a distinction between the International and the Alliance, and saw them as having different functions. As Bakunin put it:

The Alliance is the necessary complement to the International. But the International and the Alliance, while having the same ultimate aims, perform different functions. The International endeavours to unify the working masses . . . regardless of nationality or religious and political beliefs, into one compact body: the Alliance, on the other hand, tries to give these masses a really revolutionary direction.⁶⁶

The Marxist accusation that Bakunin wanted to destroy the International, become its dictator or replace the programme of International—which was vague to say the least—with that of the Alliance are all unfounded. And Bakunin's distinction between the International and the Alliance does not accord with the suggestion made by Carr that while Bakunin wanted the International to be an anarchist association (which is true in a sense), the Alliance was simply a select and secret revolutionary group exercising a "collective dictatorship" over the forces of the revolution.⁶⁷

Secondly, there are the various small groups of the devotees that gathered around Bakunin to form the Revolutionary Brotherhood, and which formed the nucleus of the Alliance. But this was little more than a loosely knit group of associates, all showing a commitment to anarchism. Given the need for secrecy and the fact that Bakunin certainly felt the need for a network of cadres who would form a vanguard association to support the revolution, this by no means implied the existence of a tightly-knit conspiratorial group under Bakunin's dictatorship. Bakunin had a dominant personality, but his temperament and life style made him a highly unlikely person to organize a functioning conspiratorial group on par with that of the Jesuits. Bakunin's supposed secret societies never functioned as organizations of any real consequence. Indeed, Bakunin's friend Guillaume, in his history of the International, writes of Bakunin painting "a picture of an organization which existed only theoretically in Bakunin's brain as a kind of dream indulged in with delight, a chimera formed in the clouds of his cigarette smoke."⁶⁸ The notion of a secret Alliance seems to have largely been a figment of Bakunin's—and Marx's—imagination.

Thirdly, there are the writings of Bakunin, his draft proposals of the principles and organization for the various International Brotherhoods that he concocted, and his letters to Richard and Nechaev, together which outline the aims and purposes of a secret society. The fact that these societies never in reality functioned is beside the point; the writings indicate Bakunin's thoughts on what he felt was a necessary factor to generate a social revolution.

For Bakunin, neither poverty nor despair, nor socioeconomic conditions, nor the capture of State power can in themselves lead to a social revolution—it can only be achieved by the organization of the masses which will "break down the power of the bourgeoisie and the State, and lay the ground for a new world."⁶⁹ Organizing the popular forces to carry out the revolution, such is the only task, he wrote, of those who sincerely aim at the emancipation of humanity. Bakunin therefore placed an important role on organization and the development of the revolutionary ideal. A revolution can take place, he wrote, "only when the people are stirred by a universal idea, are evolved historically from the depths of popular instincts . . . when this ideal and this popular faith meet poverty of the sort that drives man to desperation; then the social revolution is near and inevitable."⁷⁰

It is in the propagating of this ideal that Bakunin's conception of a secret society comes into play. In his letters to Richard and Nechaev, the function of this society and the kind of dictatorship it was to wield is clearly spelt out by Bakunin, and some relevant extracts seem appropriate, given the interpretation or rather misinterpretation they have been given.

Anarchy, the mutiny of all local passions and the awakening of spontaneous life at all points, must be well developed in order for the revolution to remain alive, real and powerful. Once the revolution has won its first victory (i.e. the overthrow of State power) we (unlike the political revolutionaries) must foment, awaken and unleash all the passions, we must produce anarchy and, like invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest, we must not steer it by any open power but by the collective dictatorship of all the allies—a dictatorship without insignia, titles or official rights, and all the stronger for having none of the paraphernalia of power. That is the only dictatorship I accept.⁷¹

This is in a letter addressed to Albert Richard, who was a French anarchist from Lyons and who collaborated with the provisional government in 1870. Bakunin clearly had in mind a post-revolutionary situation, akin to that which had occurred during the French revolution. And, he feared that in this context, those revolutionaries like Danton and Robespierre who insisted on setting up "Committees of Public Safety" would inevitably betray the revolution, and lead to reaction. His conception of a secret society therefore, which is to prepare and organize itself in advance of the revolution, is not to "impose" the revolution on the people, or liberate it against their will, still less to be a "dictatorship" (in the ordinary sense of this word), it is to continually agitate, "invisible" amongst the populace for anarchy—that is, for the self-management of the people. Nothing is further from the normal understanding of "dictatorship."

In his letter to Nechaev, Bakunin explicitly distinguishes his own ideas from Nechaev's conception of a revolution. You follow the Jesuitical teaching, he wrote to Nechaev, and systematically kill all individual, human feelings in the people and all their personal sense of justice. "You train them in lies, suspicion, espionage and denunciation, relying far more on the outward fetters with which you have chained them than on their inner virtue."⁷² My system, Bakunin stresses to his ex-friend, "refutes not only the value, but even the possibility, of any revolution that is not spontaneous or popular and socialist . . . and therefore the sole object of a secret society must not be to create an artificial force outside the people, but to arouse, unite and organize the spontaneous popular forces; in this way, the only possible, the only effective army of revolution, is not outside the people, but consists of the people themselves."

And Bakunin continues:

The organization (of the secret society) should only be the general headquarters of (the people's army) and the organizer not of its own, but of the people's forces, as a link between the people's instincts and revolutionary thought. But revolutionary thought is only revolutionary, alive, active and true in so far as it expresses, and only in so far as it formulates, popular instincts that have been worked out by history. Any effort to impose our ideas on the people which might be opposed to their instincts signifies a desire to enslave them to a new sovereignty . . . The organization must be sincerely impregnated with the idea that it is the servant and helper of the people, and by no means their ruler.⁷³

Even in the midst of the revolution, the secret society should not alter its chief purpose and aim: "to help people towards self-determination on the lines of the most complete equality and the fullest human freedom in every direction, without the least interference from any sort of domination." Members of the secret society should renounce all official power, only influencing the people by a force that is invisible, the "collective dictatorship" of the organization.⁷⁴

Only the most jaundiced scholar, or one blinded by extreme antipathy towards Bakunin or anarchism, could interpret these words as indicating that Bakunin's conception of a secret society implied a revolutionary dictatorship in the Jacobin sense, still less a "despotism" (which is a favourite word used by both liberals and Marxists to describe this aspect of Bakunin's philosophy). And it is clear too—with the experiences of the French revolution in mind—that Bakunin saw the secret society as less of a "vanguard" than a force which in the midst of the revolution would serve to safeguard the revolution from the forces of reaction, or from those radicals who might set themselves up as dictatorial "Committees of Public Safety." And this the secret society would do by "invisibly" and collectively supporting anarchy, the realization of the liberty of the people. Marxists have always stressed that a workers' State was necessary in the post-revolutionary period to counter the bourgeois reaction; Bakunin was also concerned to challenge this reaction, but he feared the Jacobin kind of government that would re-assert a new form of despotism. Kelly chided Bakunin's faith in the spontaneity and revolutionary potential of the masses. The Russian revolution essentially confirmed Bakunin's ideas of a social revolution, both in its origins and in the aftermath. As Sam Dolgoff writes:

Bakunin's warnings to the Bolsheviks of his day, the Jacobins and the Blanquists, as to where their policies could lead, read almost like a preview of the Russian revolution from its inception to the final seizure of power and the establishment of a totalitarian State.⁷⁵

Max Nomad's suggestion that Bolshevism was a "hybrid of Bakuninist activism and Marxist verbiage"⁷⁶ implying that Bakunin was a precursor of Lenin—a thesis strongly argued also by Pyziur—does Bakunin a gross and malicious injustice. Not Bakunin, but Robespierre, Blanqui and Tkachev, as Dolgoff suggests, are Lenin's real forebears. To what degree Lenin can be said to be true to the legacy of Marx has been disputed by some Marxists. But whatever the verdict, Blanqui, Marx and Lenin had much in common, and Bakunin in his advocacy of anarchism, libertarian socialism, was very different from all three revolutionaries.

The weakness of Bakunin's position regarding the social revolution is that, as Frank Harrison writes, he, like all anarchists appears to leave the door open for counter-revolution because of an unwillingness to accept the organizational measures necessary for combatting reaction.⁷⁷ It would seem that Bakunin's conception of a secret society was envisaged not only as a vanguard association to spread the revolutionary ideal through propaganda, but precisely as a measure to reserve and mobilize—as an invisible collective force—the anarchy of the post-revolutionary period.

Although Bakunin's writings on secret societies often seem to contradict his own anarchist principles, to stress this contradiction as the essence of Bakunin's thought, and to fail to contextualize what the real aims of these societies were, is to greatly distort Bakunin's message. Bakunin was no abstract Hegelian idealist playing around with words, and living in a fantasy world of his own making as Kelly portrays him. He was a sociologically informed revolutionary who had a sense of history and was trying to unravel the real problems of initiating and preserving a true and genuine social revolution. The revolution came in 1917, as spontaneously as Bakunin had anticipated—what happened in the aftermath certainly confirms the prescience of Bakunin's critique of Marxism.

But although the emphasis in Bakunin's writings is certainly on the destruction of the State and property relations, and this has been seen as a limitation of Bakunin's work (Emma Goldman certainly felt this), it is unfair to Bakunin to put too much stress on the "passion for destruction." For Bakunin saw this also as a "creative passion" and there is ample evidence that he had some very significant proposals to make on the nature of the social revolution and of the future anarchist society.

Notes

¹ Maximoff, G. P. 1953. ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism. Glencoe: Free Press, p. 84.

² Maximoff, op. cit., p. 146.

³ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 95.

⁴ Maximoff, op. cit., pp. 87-88.

⁵ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 84.

⁶ Lehning, A. 1973. Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings. London: Cape, p. 112.

⁷ Fromm, E. 1962. Beyond the Chains of Illusion, London: Sphere Books, p. 158.

⁸ Lehning, op. cit., pp. 136-37.

⁹ Lehning, op. cit., pp. 136-37.

¹⁰ Dolgoff, S. 1973. ed., trans, introd. Bakunin on Anarchy. New York: Knopf, p. 133.

¹¹ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 261.

¹² Lehning, op. cit., pp. 140-141.

¹³ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 157.

¹⁴ Lehning, op. cit., p. 145.

¹⁵ Lehning, op. cit., pp. 146-148.

¹⁶ Kelly, A. 1982. Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 198.

¹⁷ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 169.

¹⁸ Lehning, op. cit., p. 149.

¹⁹ Lehning, op. cit., p. 196.

²⁰ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 156.

²¹ Kelly, op. cit., p. 97.

²² Kelly, op. cit., p. 199.

²³ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 144.

²⁴ Maximoff, op. cit. pp. 168-69.

²⁵ Gray, A. 1946. The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin. London: Longmans, p. 362.

²⁶ Lenhing, op. cit., p. 150.

²⁷ Marx, K. et al. 1972 Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, p. 152.

²⁸ Cole, G.D.H., 1954. History of Socialist Thought, Vol. II, Marxism and Anarchism 1850-1890. London: Macmillan, p. 219.

²⁹ Kelly, op. cit., p. 194.

³⁰ Cole, op. cit., p. 222.

³¹ Kelly, op. cit., p. 197.

³² Kelly, op. cit., p. 255.

³³ Kelly, op. cit., p. 292.

³⁴ Lampert, E. 1957. Studies in Rebellion. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 160-61.

³⁵ Pyziur, E. 1955. The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael Bakunin, Milwaukee: Regnery, p. 3.

³⁶ Draper, H. 1978. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 292.

³⁷ Lichtheim, G. 1970. A Short History of Socialism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 128.

³⁸ Kelly, A. 1982. Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 22.

³⁹ Berlin, I. 1978. Russian Thinkers. Harmondsworth, Penguin, p. 103.

⁴⁰ Thomas, P. 1980. Karl Marx and the Anarchists. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 341.

⁴¹ Maximoff, G. P. 1953. ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism. Glencoe: Free Press, p. 373.

⁴² Dolgoff, S. 1973. ed., trans, introd., Bakunin on Anarchy, New York: Knopf, pp. 308-9.

⁴³ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 335.

⁴⁴ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 384.

⁴⁵ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 383.

⁴⁶ Lehning, A. 1973. Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings. London: Cape, p. 183.

⁴⁷ Pyziur, op. cit., p. 68.

⁴⁸ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 352-5.

⁴⁹ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 15.

⁵⁰ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 325.

⁵¹ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 378-9.

⁵² Lehning, op. cit., p. 185.

⁵³ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 347.

⁵⁴ cf. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1959. Primitive Rebels, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 165.

⁵⁵ Kelly, op. cit., p. 216.

⁵⁶ Draper, op. cit., p. 292.

⁵⁷ Lehning, op. cit., p. 186.

⁵⁸ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 347.

⁵⁹ Lehning, op. cit., p. 187.

⁶⁰ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 334.

⁶¹ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 381.

⁶² Draper, op. cit., pp. 564-569; Draper, H. 1986. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol. III, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 93-98.

⁶³ Pyziur, op. cit., p. 146.

⁶⁴ Kelly, op. cit., pp. 237-249.

⁶⁵ Clark, J. 1984. The Anarchist Moment. Montreal: Black Rose Books, p. 73.

⁶⁶ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 157.

⁶⁷ Carr, E. H. 1937. Michael Bakunin, New York: Knopf, p. 440.

⁶⁸ Carr, op. cit., p. 439.

⁶⁹ Maximoff, op. cit., p. 385.

⁷⁰ Pyziur op. cit., p. 69-70.

⁷¹ Lehning, op. cit., p. 180.

⁷² Lehning, op. cit., p. 190.

⁷³ Lehning, op. cit., p. 190-191.

⁷⁴ Lehning, op. cit., p. 182-92.

⁷⁵ Dolgoff, op. cit., p. 16.

⁷⁶ Nomad, M. 1933. Apostles of Revolution. New York: Collier, p. 213.

⁷⁷ Harrison, J. F. 1983. The Modern State: An Anarchist Analysis. Montreal: Black Rose Books, p. 113.