Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin was born on 30 May 1814 at Pryamukhino, in Tver province, into a family of the Russian gentry, and died in Bern on 1 July 1876. After a short military career he studied philosophy in Moscow and Berlin, where he joined the Young Hegelians; his 1842 essay 'The Reaction in Germany' ends with the line that 'the passion for destruction is a creative passion'. He took part in the revolutions of 1848–49, including the Dresden uprising, was sentenced to death in Saxony and Austria, and was handed over to Russia, where he spent years in the Peter and Paul and Shlisselburg fortresses before being sent to Siberia in 1857. He escaped in 1861 via Japan and the United States to London.

In the 1860s Bakunin moved from pan-Slav nationalism to anarchism. He joined the International Working Men's Association in 1868 and won strong support among workers in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. In 1870 he took part in a failed uprising in Lyon. His conflict with Marx culminated at the Hague Congress of 1872, where he was expelled for allegedly running a secret organisation within the International; his supporters formed an anti-authoritarian International. His association in 1869 with Sergey Nechayev, whose Catechism of a Revolutionary is now usually attributed mainly to Nechayev, damaged his reputation.

• Against the state. For Bakunin the state is inherently an instrument of domination: 'If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another.' Representative government does not change this, because representatives detached from their constituents form a governing class.
• Against a workers' state. In Statism and Anarchy (1873) he argued that Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat would be rule by a minority of former workers and educated socialists in the proletariat's name, who would soon represent only themselves — an early statement of the 'new class' critique.
• Federalism from below. Society should be reorganised as a free federation of autonomous communes, producers' associations and regions, built from the bottom up, with each level able to secede.
• Collectivism. Land and the means of production should be held collectively by associations of workers, with distribution according to labour; this distinguished his 'collectivist' anarchism from Kropotkin's later anarchist communism, which proposed distribution according to need.
• Against God and authority. God and the State argued that religious belief sanctifies earthly authority, while accepting the 'authority' of specialists, such as a bootmaker or an engineer, only as freely chosen advice.
• Revolution. Change would come through spontaneous mass revolt, especially of peasants and the urban poor, rather than through parliamentary parties.

Bakunin's followers formed the core of the anarchist movements of southern Europe and Latin America and shaped anarcho-syndicalism, which reached its peak in Spain's CNT and the collectives of 1936–39. His critique of a workers' state is often cited in light of the Soviet experience, and it fed into later theories of bureaucratic and managerial elites.

For governance designers, Bakunin's most durable contributions are the principle of federation from below with a right of secession, the insistence that delegates be bound to and revocable by their base, and the warning that institutions created to emancipate can produce new hierarchies. These themes recur in democratic confederalism, assembly-based municipalism and debates about the 'iron law of oligarchy' in movements and parties.

• Violence and conspiracy. Critics, including many anarchists, point to his enthusiasm for destruction, his secret societies and his association with Nechayev as contradicting his libertarian principles.
• Vagueness. He wrote no systematic account of how federated communes would coordinate production, settle disputes or provide defence, and much of his writing is fragmentary.
• Prejudice. His writings contain antisemitic and anti-German passages, especially in polemics against Marx.
• Feasibility. Marxists argued that a revolution without a transitional state would be crushed by organised counter-revolution; liberals argued that a federation with unlimited secession could not provide public goods or protect minorities within communes.

• The Reaction in Germany (1842)
• Statism and Anarchy (1873)
• God and the State (written 1871, published 1882) — Project Gutenberg
• Overview: 'Mikhail Bakunin', Wikipedia; Andrew Fiala, 'Anarchism', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy