Michaił Bakunin

Dzieła

• 1873Państwowość i anarchia

  Przeciw Marksowi i niemieckim socjaldemokratom: państwo robotnicze byłoby rządzone przez uprzywilejowaną mniejszość byłych robotników i uczonych.

• 1882Bóg i państwo

  Fragment opublikowany po jego śmierci: wiara w Boga oznacza zniewolenie człowieka – „gdyby Bóg naprawdę istniał, trzeba by go zlikwidować”.

Stanowisko

Bakunin began as a left Hegelian: his essay of 1842 ends with the line that “the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too”. From the 1860s he developed a collectivist anarchism. Freedom is not the property of the isolated individual; it grows in society and exists only when all are free. The state and the church are the two great powers that keep people under tutelage, and God and the State reverses Voltaire: “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” Against Marx he argued that the conquest of state power by a workers’ party would not abolish domination but hand it to a new minority of former workers and scientific experts; in Statism and Anarchy (1873) he warned against the rule of “scholars” in the name of the people. The quarrel with Marx was personal as well as theoretical, and in texts of 1869–1872 written during it, such as a reply to Moses Hess intended for the Paris paper Le Réveil, he depicted Jews as a nation of exploiters and tied Marx’s politics to his Jewish origin. Historians disagree about how central these views were to his thought. His collaboration with Sergei Nechayev in 1869–70 and the Catechism of a Revolutionary, whose authorship is disputed, have also coloured his reputation.

Życie i kontekst

Mikhail Bakunin was born in 1814 on his family’s estate at Pryamukhino in Tver province. He trained at the artillery school in St Petersburg, left the army in 1835 and in Moscow became one of the leading Russian readers of Fichte and Hegel. In 1840 he went to Berlin, and in 1842 published “The Reaction in Germany” under a pseudonym. In Paris in the 1840s he befriended Proudhon and met Marx. He fought in the uprisings of Prague in 1848 and Dresden in 1849, was twice sentenced to death, handed over to Russia and held in the Peter and Paul and Shlisselburg fortresses, where he wrote a Confession for the Tsar. Exiled to Siberia in 1857, he escaped in 1861 via Japan and the United States. He joined the First International in 1868, was expelled at the Hague Congress in 1872 and died in Bern in 1876.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Reaction in Germany (1842)
• Confession (1851, published 1921)
• Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism (1867)
• The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution (1870–71)
• Statism and Anarchy (1873)
• God and the State (published 1882)